Reign of Terror
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The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794) or simply The Terror (French: la Terreur) is a phase in the French Revolution during which many rival factions struggled between themselves, leading to mutual radicalization and to massive executions by the means of the guillotine. It is generally associated with the figures of Robespierre and Georges Danton, and is popularly represented as an archetype of revolutionary violence.
The Terror itself started on 5 September 1793. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, a period named la Grande Terreur (The Great Terror) and lasted until the executions following the coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), in which several key leaders of the Reign of Terror were executed, including Saint-Just and Maximilien Robespierre. The Terror took the lives of between 18,500 to 40,000 people (estimates vary widely, due to the difference between historical records and statistical estimates). In the single month before it ended, 1,900 executions took place.
Often presented as a highly centralized government prefiguring 20th century totalitarian regimes, the state was actually riven by factions. French historian Jean-Clément Martin underscored the "absence of a strong state" from Spring 1793 to Summer 1794. According to Martin, the Committee of Public Safety (French: Comité de salut public), created in April 1793 and usually considered the executive power of the Terror, did not control much, at least until March 1794. It was opposed by rival state institutions, such as the Committee of General Security, which controlled the police, and the Commune insurrectionnelle de Paris, which held military power after August 10, 1792 and was linked to the sans-culottes (the poorer working classes of Paris — literally "without knee-breeches", the fashionable trousers of the upper classes), who themselves controlled the Ministry of War. Rather than the implementation of a strong state's policies, the Terror was the result of the struggle between these various competing powers who radicalized each other. [1]
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[edit] Background
In the summer of 1793, the French Revolution was threatened both by internal enemies and conspirators, and by foreign European monarchies fearing that the Revolution would spread. Almost all European governments in that era were based on royal sovereignty, rather than the popular sovereignty asserted by the revolutionary French. Foreign powers wanted to stifle the democratic and republican ideas, which they feared would pose a threat to their own respective countries’ stability. Their armies were pressing on the border of France, leading the new Republic into a series of wars against its monarchist neighbours.
Foreign powers had already threatened the French population with horrible retaliation if they did not free King Louis XVI and reinstate him as a monarch. The Prussian Duke of Brunswick threatened to "pilfer" Paris if the Parisians dared to touch the royal family, which only infuriated Paris. Louis XVI himself was suspected of conspiring with foreign powers who wished to invade France and restore absolute monarchy.
The former French nobility, having lost its inherited privileges, had a stake in the failure of the Revolution. The Church as well was generally against the Revolution, which (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) had turned the clergy into employees of the state and had required that they take an oath of loyalty to the nation. About half of the clergy, mainly in western France, refused the oath, making themselves known as refractory priests or non-jurors.
Members of the Catholic clergy and the former nobility entered into conspiracies, often invoking foreign military intervention. In the western region known as the Vendée, priests and former nobles led an insurrection, which began in spring 1793 and was supported by Great Britain. The extension of civil war and the advance of foreign armies on national territory produced a political crisis, and increased the rivalry between the Girondins and the more radical Jacobins; the latter were eventually grouped in the parliamentary faction called the Mountain, and had the support of the Parisian population.
[edit] The Terror
On 2 June, Paris sections — encouraged by the enragés ("enraged ones") Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert — took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they managed to convince the Convention to arrest 31 Girondin leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot. Following these arrests, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety on 10 June, installing the revolutionary dictatorship. On 13 July, the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat—a Jacobin leader and journalist known for his bloodthirsty rhetoric—by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin, resulted in further increase of Jacobin political influence. Georges Danton, the leader of the August 1792 uprising against the King, having the image of a man who enjoyed luxuries, was removed from the Committee and on 27 July, Maximilien Robespierre, "the Incorruptible", made his entrance, quickly becoming the most influential member of the Committee as it moved to take radical measures against the Revolution's domestic and foreign enemies.
Meanwhile, on 24 June, the Convention adopted the first republican constitution of France, variously referred to as the French Constitution of 1793 or Constitution of the Year I. It was ratified by public referendum, but never applied, because normal legal processes were suspended before it could take effect..
Facing local revolts and foreign invasions in both the East and West of the country, the most urgent government business was the war. On 17 August, the Convention voted for general conscription, the levée en masse, which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or suppliers in the war effort. On 5 September, the Convention, pressured by the people of Paris, institutionalized The Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.
On December 25, 1793, Robespierre stated:
The goal of the constitutional government is to conserve the Republic; the aim of the revolutionary government is to found it... The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death".. These notions would be enough to explain the origin and the nature of laws that we call revolutionary ... If the revolutionary government must be more active in its march and more free in his movements than an ordinary government, is it for that less fair and legitimate? No; it is supported by the most holy of all laws: Martin Guerre!(Martin Guerre; "safety/welfare/or salvation of the people"). [2]
He would later state, more succinctly:
La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible. ("Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.") — Robespierre (17 pluviôse an II / 5 February 1794)
The result was policy through which the state used violent repression to crush resistance to the government. Under control of the effectively dictatorial Committee, the Convention quickly enacted more legislation. On 9 September, the Convention established sans-culottes paramilitary forces, the revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On 17 September, the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined crimes against liberty. On 29 September, the Convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods, and also fixed wages.
The guillotine became the symbol of a string of executions: Louis XVI had already been guillotined before the start of the terror; Queen Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité despite his vote for the death of the King, Madame Roland and many others lost their lives under its blade. The Revolutionary Tribunal summarily condemned thousands of people to death by the guillotine, while mobs beat other victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little reason beyond mere suspicion, or because some others had a stake in getting rid of them. Most of the victims received an unceremonious trip to the guillotine in an open wooden cart (the tumbrel). Loaded onto these carts, the victims would proceed through throngs of jeering men and women.
Another anti-clerical uprising was made possible by the installment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October. Against Robespierre's concepts of Deism and Virtue, Hébert's (and Chaumette's) atheist movement initiated a religious campaign in order to dechristianize society. The climax was reached with the celebration of the Goddess "Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November. Because dissent was now regarded as counterrevolutionary, extremist enragés such as Hébert and moderate Montagnard indulgents such as Danton were guillotined in the spring of 1794. On June 7 Robespierre, who had previously condemned the Cult of Reason, advocated a new state religion and recommended that the Convention acknowledge the existence of God. On the next day, the worship of the deistic Supreme Being was inaugurated as an official aspect of the Revolution. Compared with Hébert's popular festivals, this austere new religion of Virtue was received with signs of hostility by an amazed Parisian public.
[edit] The End
The repression also brought thousands of victims before the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, whose work was expedited by the draconian Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) which had led to the Terror. As a result of Robespierre's insistence on associating Terror with Virtue, his efforts to make the republic a morally united patriotic community became equated with the endless bloodshed. Finally, after 26 June's decisive military victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Fleurus, Robespierre was overthrown by a conspiracy of certain members of the Convention on 9 Thermidor (27 July). Following their failed attempt to raze Paris, the Robespierrists and most members of the Commune were guillotined on 28 July. This led to the Thermidorian reaction, which was characterized by a much lesser known White Terror. This reaction killed hundreds of Jacobins. This continued intermittently for some years afterward in the form of unchecked violence by gangs of Muscadins as well as rigged trials by the authorities.
[edit] Treatment in fiction
- Georg Büchner, Danton's Death
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- Neil Gaiman, "Thermidor" (story in the Sandman comic book series)
- Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize
- Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
- Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel and sequels
- Stanislawa Przybyszewska, The Danton Case and Thermidor
- David Weber, On Basilisk Station and other Honorverse novels
- G.A. Henty, "In the reign of terror"
- Alexandre Dumas, père, The Chevalier Of Maison Rouge
- Anatole France, "Les dieux ont soif" (The Gods are A-thirst)
- Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche, The Trampling of the Lilies, The Marquis of Carabas
- Honoré de Balzac, An Episode Under the Terror
[edit] Treatment in film
- Andrzej Wajda, Danton (1983)
- Robert Enrico and Richard T. Heffron, La Révolution française , part 2 (1989)
[edit] Treatment in television
- Doctor Who: "The Reign of Terror" (1964)
- BBC series 1999-2000 The Scarlet Pimpernel, based on novels and play by Baroness Orczy
[edit] Treatment in music
- Voltaire, "The Headless Waltz", from Almost Human
Poulenc, "Dialogues of the Carmelites"
[edit] References
- ^ Jean-Clément Martin, historian and professor at Paris-I, "France was cut in half by the Revolution", in L'Histoire n°311, July–August 2006
- ^ Robespierre: «Le but du gouvernement constitutionnel est de conserver la République; celui du gouvernement révolutionnaire est de la fonder. [...] Le gouvernement révolutionnaire doit au bon citoyen toute la protection nationale; il ne doit aux Ennemis du Peuple que la mort. Ces notions suffisent pour expliquer l'origine et la nature des lois que nous appelons révolutionnaires [...]. Si le gouvernement révolutionnaire doit être plus actif dans sa marche et plus libre dans ses mouvements que le gouvernement ordinaire, en est-il moins juste et moins légitime ? Non ; il est appuyé sur la plus sainte de toutes les lois : le salut du Peuple.»
[edit] Further reading
- Andress, David. The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0-374-27341-3; paperback, ISBN 0-374-53073-4).
- Beik, William. "The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration: Review Article", Past and Present, no. 188 (Aug. 2005), pp. 195–224.
- Kerr, Wilfred Brenton. Reign of Terror, 1793–1794. London: Porcupine Press, 1985 (hardcover, ISBN 0-87991-631-1).
- Moore, Lucy. Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. London: HarperCollins, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0007206011).
- Reviewed by Adam Thorpe in The Guardian, December 23, 2006.
- Palmer, R.R. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 (paperback, ISBN 0-691-12187-7).
