The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28
July 1794), also known simply as The Terror (French: la Terreur), was a period
of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by
conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and
marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution". The death
toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris ),
and another 25,000 in
summary executions across France
The guillotine (called the "National
Razor") became the symbol of the revolutionary cause, strengthened by a
string of executions: King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe
Égalité (Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans), and Madame Roland, and others
such as pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade.
During 1794, revolutionary France France First French
Republic
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 they had the support of the Parisian population. The French
government established the Committee of Public Safety, which took its final
form on 6 September 1793 in
order to suppress internal counter-revolutionary activities and raise
additional French military forces.
Through the Revolutionary Tribunal, the
Terror's leaders exercised broad powers and used them to eliminate the internal
and external enemies of the Republic. The repression accelerated in June and
July 1794, a
period called la Grande Terreur (the Great Terror), and ended in the coup of 9
Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), leading to the Thermidorian Reaction, in
which several instigators of the Reign of Terror were executed, including
Saint-Just and Robespierre.
After the resolution of the foreign wars
during 1791–93, the violence associated with the Reign of Terror increased
significantly: only roughly 4 percent of executions had occurred before
November 1793 (Brumaire, Year I), thus signalling to many that the Reign of
Terror might have had additional causes. These could have included inherent
issues with revolutionary ideology, and/or the need of a weapon for political
repression in a time of significant foreign and civil upheaval,leading to many
different interpretations by historians.
Many historians have debated the reasons
why the French Revolution took such a radical turn during the Reign of Terror
of 1793–94. The public was frustrated that the social equality and anti-poverty
measures that the Revolution originally promised were not materializing.
Jacques Roux's Manifesto of the Enraged in 25 June 1793 describes the extent to
which, four years into the Revolution, these goals were largely unattained by
the common people. The foundation of the Terror is centered on the April 1793
creation of the Committee of Public Safety and its militant Jacobin delegates.
The National Convention believed that the Committee needed to rule with
"near dictatorial power" and the Committee was delegated new and expansive
political powers to quickly respond to popular demands.
Those in power believed the Committee of
Public Safety was an unfortunate, but necessary and temporary reaction to the
pressures of foreign and civil war. Historian Albert Mathiez argues that the
authority of the Committee of Public Safety was based on the necessities of
war, as those in power realized that deviating from the will of the people was
a temporary emergency response measure in order to secure the ideals of the
Republic. According to Mathiez, they "touched only with trepidation and
reluctance the regime established by the Constituent Assembly" so as not
to interfere with the early accomplishments of the Revolution.
Similar to Mathiez, Richard Cobb introduced
competing circumstances of revolt and re-education within France
Terror was used in these rebellions both to
execute inciters and to provide a very visible example to those who might be
considering rebellion. Cobb agrees with Mathiez that the Terror was simply a
response to circumstances, a necessary evil and natural defence, rather than a
manifestation of violent temperaments or excessive fervour. At the same time,
Cobb rejects Mathiez's Marxist interpretation that elites controlled the Reign
of Terror to the significant benefit to the bourgeoisie. Instead, Cobb argues
that "social struggles" between the classes were seldom the reason
for revolutionary actions and sentiments.
Francois Furet, however, argues that
circumstances could not have been the sole cause of the Reign of Terror because
"the risks for the Revolution were greatest" in the middle of 1793
but at that time "the activity of the Revolutionary Tribunal was
relatively minimal."Widespread terror and a consequent rise in executions
came after external and internal threats were vastly reduced. Therefore Furet
suggests that ideology played the crucial role in the rise of the Reign of
Terror because "man's regeneration" became a central theme for the
Committee of Public Safety as they were trying to instill ideals of free will
and enlightened government in the public. As this ideology became more and more
pervasive, violence became a significant method for dealing with
counter-revolutionaries and the opposition because, for fear of being labelled
a counter-revolutionary themselves, "the moderate men would have to
accept, endorse and even glorify the acts of the more violent."
On 2 June 1793, Paris
Maximilien Robespierre had others executed
via his role on the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety
Georges Danton, the leader of the August
1792 uprising against the King, was removed from the Committee. On 27 July
Maximilien Robespierre, known in Republican circles as "the
Incorruptible" for his ascetic dedication to his ideals, 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.
The result of this 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; Marie-Antoinette,
the Girondists, Philippe Égalité, 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.
Among people who were condemned by the
revolutionary tribunals, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14
percent middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of
hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion.[21] Maximilien Robespierre,
"frustrated with the progress of the revolution," saw politics in a
rather tyrannical way because "any institution which does not suppose the
people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil."
Another anti-clerical uprising was made
possible by the instalment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October.
Hébert's and Chaumette's atheist movement initiated an anti-religious campaign
in order to dechristianise society. The program of dechristianisation waged
against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included
the deportation or execution of clergy; the closing of churches; the rise of
cults and the institution of a civic religion; the large scale destruction of
religious monuments; the outlawing of public and private worship and religious
education; the forced abjurement of priests of their vows and forced marriages
of the clergy; the word "saint" being removed from street names; and
the War in the Vendée.
Fatal Purity
By Marisa Linton | Published in History
Today 2006 /
http://www.historytoday.com/marisa-linton/fatal-purity
Marisa Linton examines a work on one of the
main characters in the French Revolution.
Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
Ruth Scurr
Chatto and Windus 369 pp
£20 ISBN 0701176008
The two leading figures of the French
Revolution who remain best known today are at opposite ends of the spectrum,
Marie Antoinette and Robespierre. Robespierre’s character is by far the more
complex and compelling. Marie-Antoinette found herself at the centre of the
Revolution only through the chance that made her an empress’s daughter and a
king’s wife. Fate had destined Robespierre for obscurity and a respectable life
as a small-town lawyer. However, once the Revolution broke out, he threw
himself into it wholeheartedly and
forged himself a unique place at its very heart.
He became synonymous with all that was best
about the Revolution: he was a tireless defender of liberty, equality and the
rights of the poor and dispossessed. But he is also indelibly associated with
the most hideous aspect of the Revolution: the use of Terror. His enigmatic
personality still commands our attention: to understand Robespierre is to begin
to understand the Revolution.
In 1789 Robespierre was a shy, unknown
deputy in the Estates General, notable mostly for the awkwardness of his public
speaking. He learned quickly: Mirabeau saw immediately what made Robespierre
special: ‘That man will go far. He believes what he says.’ Robespierre was a
politician by conviction and his ascetic personal life reflected this. Even at
the height of his power he lived as a lodger in the house of a master
carpenter. Politically astute, stubborn, infuriatingly convinced of his own
rectitude, he was that most remarkable of mortals – an incorruptible
politician.
No French revolutionary has attracted more
biographies than Robespierre. Most have been either passionately for or
passionately against him. He has that effect on people. His earnest sincerity
commands respect; his conviction appals us. Indeed, it is the very integrity of
his principles that makes his adoption of violent tactics so horrifying: a fact
recognized by his two greatest English biographers, J.M. Thompson and Norman
Hampson.
And now we have the latest biography of
Robespierre, the first book by a relatively unknown author. The publisher makes
great claims for it, stating that it is: ‘The highly-anticipated debut of a
major new historian’, and asserting that the book ‘sheds a dazzling new light’
on the puzzle that is Robespierre. Well, does it? Far from it. This book is not
likely to be of interest to anyone with specialist knowledge of the Revolution.
There is no new material, no original interpretation, no use made of the
burgeoning new studies of political culture and language in this period that
could throw fresh light upon the subject. But that should not trouble the
general reader. The story of Robespierre is itself an extraordinary one. And
Scurr does a very competent job, giving her account in a clear and evocative
style. At times, particularly as the narrative reaches its climax, her language
approaches the almost poetic quality this tale can inspire in even the most
prosaic historians. Political biographies, however, straddle an awkward
position between addressing the role of the individual, and the events that
shaped the time. The most notable shortcoming of this book is the downplaying
of the politics of the Revolution itself. Thompson said it was misleading to
think of the Revolution as having leaders at all, for they were ‘swept off
their feet, and carried along by a movement which they were powerless to
control.’ This does not always come across in Scurr’s account. She attributes
much of the hostility between the two revolutionary groups, the Jacobins and
the Girondins, to the personal enmity of their respective leaders, Robespierre and
Brissot. She states: ‘Robespierre had made an implicit pact with street
violence in order to destroy his Girondin enemies in the Convention.’ This is
misleading: personal rancour there was in plenty, but that was not why the
Girondins were overthrown. The overwhelming reasons were the war and war
policy, the fate of the King, and the question of how far the Parisian lower
classes, the sans-culottes, the practitioners of street violence, should
control the Revolution. Eventually, the sans-culottes took matters into their own hands to put the
Jacobins in power. Robespierre and the Jacobins chose to ride the tiger of
direct popular democracy in allying themselves with the sans-culottes. But to
ride a tiger is a dangerous business and the Jacobin leaders wielded the Terror
partly to stop the sans-culottes doing it on their own account. ‘Let us be
terrible,’ said Danton, ‘to save the people from being so.’ Was Robespierre the
hero or the villain of the tragedy that
was the Revolution? This book is a good place to begin the search for an
answer.
Marisa Linton is the author of The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment
France (Palgrave, 2001).
VIOLENCE MADE IT HAPPEN
Date: March 19, 1989, Sunday, Late City
Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk
Byline: By EUGEN WEBER; Eugen Weber, a
professor of history at the University
of California at Los Angeles
Lead: LEAD: CITIZENS A Chronicle of the
French Revolution. By Simon Schama. Illustrated. 948 pp. New York
Text:
CITIZENS A Chronicle of the French
Revolution. By Simon Schama. Illustrated. 948 pp. New York
Recumbent
readers beware. Those who like to do their poring lying down will scarcely rush
to take up this book. It is monumental. Once hefted, however, and well balanced
on lap, knee or chest, ''Citizens'' will prove hard to put down. Provocative
and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great
Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful,
informed and profoundly revisionist. Mr. Schama, who teaches history at Harvard University
The French Revolution, according to Mr.
Schama, was no bourgeois thrust against stodgy despotism or anachronistic
aristocracy. The old regime was not old, nor did it act anachronistic, fusty or
decrepit. Neither stagnant nor reactionary, the French nobility, at least its
most audible and visible members, were more open to new blood, ideas and
ventures than they had ever been. Two-thirds of noble families had become
ennobled during the 17th and 18th centuries: a nobleman was no more than a
successful bourgeois; and capitalist enterprise among nobles was as vigorous as
among their bourgeois counterparts. Far from offering an obstacle to progress,
the greatest modernizers in metallurgy, mines, shipbuilding or street lighting
were nobly born. Far from rejecting the social and intellectual lessons of the
Enlightenment, nobles echoed them: not least the gentleman Mr. Schama says was
known in America
Like the elite, government was less
interested in tradition than in novelty and greater efficiency. The
bureaucratic personnel of the 1780's would be recalled to office by Napoleon in
the late 1790's, to mend the mess the Revolution left behind. Queen Marie
Antoinette was lampooned as Madame Deficit, but expenditure on all Court items,
6 or 7 percent of the total budget, was about half what the British spent on
their monarchy.
There were serious problems, similar to
those faced by other contemporary regimes: venality of office (51,000 public
offices held as private property) facilitated cash flow but blocked reform; tax
exemptions at the top encouraged tax evasion at the bottom. But the root of the
fiscal problems was the cost of armaments, coupled with resistance to new
taxes. By 1788, debt service accounted for almost half of current revenues. But
in 18th-century perspective, even this huge debt was neither exceptional nor
unmanageable. And those who sought to manage it on the King's behalf were more
than empty heads presiding over empty purses. Nevertheless, aggressive,
reforming managers in high office did not manage to reform; and the money
crisis turned into the political crisis that led the monarchy to its end.
In my view, Mr. Schama underestimates
structural problems that no 18th-century regime effectively coped with. But he
is right to shift blame for failure from structural dysfunctions to
''circumstances and policies'' - that is, to men and, above all, to a
well-meaning but indecisive King, who was addicted to changing ministers in
midstream. In Louis XVI, royal irresolution produced political incoherence.
With no two ministers following the same strategy, fiscal policies especially
were inconsistent and ineffective. Meanwhile, it became clear that true fiscal
reforms could be achieved only with the support of representative bodies. But
the re-creation of an assembly representative enough to save France Britain
This is where circumstances altered cases.
For two years before the Estates General assembled at Versailles Versailles
On July 12, the wall surrounding Paris
Here lay the source of that relation
between blood and freedom, or blood and bread, that was established not by the
Terror of 1793, but by the patriotic stirrings of 1789. As Mr. Schama says, the
Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count. There would have been no
Revolution, no source of revolutionary energy, without violence. It was
violence, Mr. Schama says, that ''made the Revolution revolutionary.'' He might
have added: violence expanded from its normal place among ordinary people to
those social groups hitherto protected from its more discomforting aspects.
Nor, Mr. Schama reminds us, would
revolutionary transformations have taken place without the intervention of
those whom they most affected. The mass abandonment of feudal privileges on
Aug. 4, 1789, was accomplished by dukes and bishops.
Despite sporadic violence, the early
Revolution was a bit like the hot-air balloons that trailed tricolor ribbons
over the Champs-Elysees to celebrate a new Constitution. But to get that
Constitution, crowds had been brought into the streets. It would be hard to
drive them off when constitutional government provided less bread than
absolutism had done, when patriotism delivered no provender. There is no more
reason to associate food and freedom than there is to believe liberty
compatible with equality. But, in Mr. Schama's words, asking for the impossible
is one good definition of a revolution.
A lot of impossible things were asked for
in the name of reason or patriotism, liberty or equality. In 1790 the clergy
were declared civil servants and asked to swear a loyalty oath to the state
that paid them. Most declined. Church property, nationalized and sold to pay
state debts, did not solve the economic crisis. But by creating a cleavage
between those who followed the state and those who followed the Pope, the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy insured that differences over fundamental social and
political reforms would spiral into a civil war that was also, as Mr. Schama
calls it, a holy war.
Then, in 1792, patriotism culminated in
foreign wars; and the pressures of conflict, internal and external, pushed
terrorism to new lengths. Because they were reminiscent of aristocratic ways,
elegance, manners, wit were denounced as treason. The King was deposed, and a
new calendar opened with ''Year One of French Liberty.'' In revolutionary
newspeak, liberty, of course, meant its opposite: a police state, in which
spying, denunciation, indictment, humiliation and death threatened all. The
sententious religion of universal brotherhood gave way to the polemics of
paranoia: Rousseau with a hoarse voice, as Mr. Schama puts it. Personal scores
became political causes. Nuts came out of the woodwork. Marat was one, but a
nuttier enthusiast, the Marquis de Bry, gauging the mood of the hour, offered
to found an organization of tyrannicides - 1,200 freedom fighters dedicated to
the murder of kings, generals and assorted foes of freedom.
Thus was the joy of living replaced by the
joy of seeing others die. Mr. Schama is at his most powerful when denouncing
the central truth of the Revolution: its dependence on organized (and
disorganized) killing to attain political ends. However virtuous were the
principles of the revolutionaries, he reminds us that their power depended on intimidation:
the spectacle of death. Violence was no aberration, no unexpected skid off the
highway of revolution: it was the Revolution - its motor and, for a while, its
end.
In the National Assembly Mirabeau had
argued that a few must perish so that the mass of people might be saved. It
turned out that more than a few would perish. Politicians who graduated from
rhetoric to government found that rhetoric made government impossible. If
patriotism was to triumph, politics had to end; liberty had to be suppressed in
the name of Liberty
With the likes of Saint-Just and
Robespierre (a state scholarship boy, typical of old regime meritocracy),
doublespeak was in the saddle. Murderously weepy, sadistically moralistic,
fanatically denouncing as fanatics those who did not share their fanaticism,
men like Robespierre stood for the will of the people as long as the people's
will matched their own visions. Ever offering to die for their beliefs, they
got the sour satisfaction of undergoing the martyrdom they professed to seek:
murderers murdering murderers before being murdered in their turn, until the
last days of July 1794 brought an end to the Terror, though not to continuing terrorism.
This is where Mr. Schama's chronicle of the
Revolution ends, before successive regimes - Directory, Consulate, Empire -
tried to pick up its pieces. But not before its author presents the bill for
access to French citizenship: a quarter-century of warfare, with its fallout of
militarism, nationalism and xenophobia; the disaster of the Vendee, where civil
war wiped out one-third of the population; the ruin of port cities and textile
towns that had been the growth areas of 18th-century France; the losses to French
trade, which, by 1815, was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1789.
One could add that, by enforcing and thus discrediting paper money, the
Revolution set back its popular acceptance by a century and accentuated
national problems of credit and cash flow.
Mr. Schama reacts against intellectual
cowardice, against self-delusion, against ascribing greatness to great horrors
and painting brutish acts in brilliant colors. Above all, he reacts against
violence, against the way violence as means was allowed to become violence as
end, against the way politicians, historians and simple-minded nincompoops
rationalize violence as pathological, or sanitizing, or necessary, or whatever.
Because they are forcefully expressed and
buttressed by illuminating anecdotes, the selectiveness of his views is not
immediately evident. One can be so swept along by Mr. Schama's brio that his
biases seem irrelevant. They are not, because they are as exaggerated as
current exaggerations in the opposite direction, and because they conceal
aspects of events that receive no notice. For the positive side of the
Revolution, readers will have to turn elsewhere. Mr. Schama has given us a
grand argument for the prosecution. Lively descriptions of major events,
colorful cameos of leading characters (and obscure ones too) bring them to life
here as no other general work has done. Baroque eloquence and rococo sparkle
make the book long but never long-winded. All in all, it is an intelligent book
for intelligent readers that is also a delight to read. THE SEAT OF THE BEAST
DESPOTISM
The first number of the Revolutions de
Paris, published on the seventeenth of July, was devoted to a lengthy - and
rather muddled - account of the insurrection. . . . ''The cells were thrown
open to set free innocent victims and venerable old men who were amazed to
behold the light of day.'' The reality was less dramatic. Of the seven
prisoners, four were forgers who had been tried by regular process of law. The
Comte de Solanges, like de Sade, had been incarcerated at the request of his
family for libertinism. . . . The remaining two prisoners were lunatics. . . .
One of them, however, ''Major Whyte'' (described in French sources as English
and in English sources as Irish), was perfect for revolutionary propaganda,
bearing as he did a waist-length beard. With his carpet of silvery whiskers and
shrunken, bony form he seemed . . . the incarnation of suffering and endurance.
So Whyte was called the major de l'immensite and was borne around in triumph through
the streets of Paris
Such was the symbolic power of the Bastille
to gather to itself all the miseries for which ''despotism'' was now held
accountable, that reality was enhanced by Gothic fantasies. . . . Ancient
pieces of armor were declared to be fiendish ''iron corsets'' applied to
constrict the victim and a toothed machine that was part of a printing press
was said to be a wheel of torture. Countless prints . . . supplied suitably
horrible imagery, featuring standing skeletons, instruments of torture and men
in iron masks. . . . The Bastille, then, was much more important in its
''afterlife'' than it ever had been as a working institution. . . .
Transfigured from a nearly empty, thinly manned anachronism into the seat of
the Beast Despotism, it incorporated all those rejoicing at its capture as
members of the new community of the Nation. From ''Citizens.''
