On September 5, 1793, a group of Parisian radicals petitioned the National Convention to place “terror on the order of the day.” Seizing that mandate, the Committee of Public Safety in Paris responded with ruthless efficiency to real and perceived threats to its rule. By the time the Reign of Terror reached its conclusion, in July 1794, some 17,000 people had been officially executed, and as many as 10,000 had died in prison or without trial. The French Revolutionary government had devoured its own in spectacular fashion. What led it to take such excessive and violent measures against its own people?
In early 1793 the two major factions in French politics were the Girondins and the Montagnards. The Girondins, who were the more moderate of the two factions, drew their strength from the provincial cities and the upper classes. The Montagnards were radicals largely composed of Parisian bourgeoisie and the sansculottes (militants initially drawn from the poorer classes of Paris) and were led by the Jacobin Club of Paris. The Girondins had advocated for war against Austria, but they were circumspect in domestic affairs, and their ties to the monarchy would prove a liability after the execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. When the war turned against the Revolutionary army in the spring of 1793 and the Girondins failed to adequately respond to economic conditions in the capital, they were swept from power by a popular uprising. The Jacobins and their Montagnard allies took advantage of the situation to establish a dictatorship, the gouvernement révolutionnaire. The Girondins would be among the first to meet Madame Guillotine during the Terror.
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Although the Jacobins dominated the Committee of Public Safety, the chief executive body in French politics in 1793, they saw enemies everywhere, both without and within. Foreign armies were at France’s frontiers, a civil war raged in western France, and armed rebellions (at least partially organized by Girondins who had fled Paris) gripped the southern cities of Lyon, Marseille, and Toulon. On the right, Jacobin leader Georges Danton was one of the prime movers in the overthrow of the ancien régime, but he was soon seen as too moderate. On the left, radical Jacques Hébert commanded the loyalty of the sansculottes with virulent anticlericalism and calls for a command economy. In the center was Maximilien Robespierre.
Robespierre, in the interest of saving the Revolution and carrying it forward with “une volonté une” (“one single will”), conducted a fratricidal campaign against both wings of his own movement as well as anyone else perceived as harboring anti-revolutionary sentiments. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, and, on June 10, 1794, the National Convention passed the Law of 22 Prairial, year II (the corresponding date on the French republican calendar), which suspended the right to a public trial and legal assistance. Juries were given two choices: acquittal or death. As a result, some 1,300 people were executed in June 1794 alone.
These violent excesses might have continued had Robespierre’s economic policies not spectacularly miscarried. The assignat, France’s revolutionary currency at the time, had depreciated sharply; the citizens of Paris were subjected to rationing as a result of food shortages; and the Maximum, a price-fixing scheme on consumer goods, proved unworkable. Robespierre, having been branded a failed dictator by the right and a moderate by the left, saw his popular support collapse. Ultimately, he was unable to kill his rivals faster than they could unite against him. The Thermidorian Reaction toppled and executed Robespierre, and the Reign of Terror died with him.