What was the Terror?

A republic in danger

In the spring of 1793 the young French Republic seemed about to be destroyed. It had executed Louis XVI in January and was now at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain, the Dutch Republic and Spain. In March its best-known general, Dumouriez, was beaten at Neerwinden, and in April he went over to the Austrians. A levy of 300,000 men, decreed in February, set off a peasant rising in the West in March, and the rising became a civil war: the war of the Vendée.

In Paris prices were climbing, the paper money, the assignats, was losing its value, and bread was short. The city's militant working people, the sans-culottes — shopkeepers, artisans and journeymen, named for the long trousers they wore instead of the knee breeches of the rich — wanted prices fixed, hoarders and traitors punished, and a government that would act.

The Convention answered with emergency bodies. On 10 March 1793 it created a special criminal court in Paris, later called the Revolutionary Tribunal, to judge counter-revolutionaries without appeal. Danton, who pressed for it, had the prison massacres of September 1792 in mind: better that the state be pitiless by law than that crowds should kill.

Within weeks came representatives on mission with sweeping powers in the provinces, watch committees to keep an eye on foreigners and suspects in every commune and, on 6 April, the Committee of Public Safety.

Terror as the order of the day

The summer and autumn of 1793

The summer made everything worse. On 2 June 1793 armed sans-culottes surrounded the Convention and forced it to arrest the leading Girondin deputies. Several provincial cities rose against Paris in their name; on 13 July Charlotte Corday murdered the radical journalist Marat in his bath; at the end of August the royalists of Toulon handed the port and the fleet in its harbour to the British. On 27 July Robespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety, which by September had twelve members and had become, in effect, the government of France.

On 4 and 5 September crowds of sans-culottes demanding bread marched on the Hôtel de Ville and then into the Convention, where petitioners called for terror to be made “the order of the day”. The deputies gave way. They voted to raise a revolutionary army of sans-culottes to force grain out of the countryside, and in the weeks that followed they passed the Law of Suspects on 17 September and a general maximum on prices and wages on 29 September.

The Law of Suspects was the Terror's main instrument. It ordered the arrest of anyone who “by their conduct, their connections, their words or their writings” had shown themselves partisans of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty; of former nobles and relatives of émigrés who had not steadily shown their attachment to the Revolution; of dismissed officials; and of anyone refused a certificate of good citizenship. The local watch committees drew up the lists, and the prisons filled.

On 10 October the Convention declared the government “revolutionary until the peace”, setting aside the democratic constitution it had adopted in June. The Committee of Public Safety directed the war and the government, the Committee of General Security ran the police, and the Revolutionary Tribunal judged. That month the Tribunal sent Marie Antoinette to the guillotine on 16 October, and twenty-one Girondins on 31 October.

The Vendée and the provinces

Where most of the dead were

Most of the Terror's victims died far from Paris, in the regions that had taken up arms against the Republic. In the West, the peasant “Catholic and Royal Army” of the Vendée won a string of victories in the spring and summer of 1793, before it was beaten at Cholet on 17 October and destroyed at Savenay on 23 December. The repression that followed was worse than the war. From January 1794 General Turreau's “infernal columns” marched through the region burning villages and killing civilians as well as rebels. Estimates of the dead of the Vendée war, on both sides, run to around 200,000, though they vary widely; a few writers have called the repression a genocide, a charge most historians reject without denying the massacres.

At Nantes, where thousands of captured rebels crowded the prisons, the representative on mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier had prisoners, among them priests, women and children, packed into boats and sunk in the Loire. Estimates of the dead of these drownings, the noyades, run from under 2,000 to more than 4,000. Carrier was recalled in February 1794 and guillotined that December.

Lyon, which had risen against the Jacobins in May 1793, surrendered on 9 October after a two-month siege. The Convention decreed that “Lyon made war on liberty; Lyon is no more”, renamed it Ville-Affranchie, “Freed City”, and ordered the houses of the rich pulled down. Under the representatives Collot d'Herbois and Fouché nearly 1,900 people were executed there, some of them shot down with cannon on the plain of Les Brotteaux in December. At Toulon, retaken on 19 December with the help of a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, hundreds were shot. Marseille, Bordeaux and other cities that had defied the Convention had their own tribunals.

Counting the dead

The most careful count is still the one the American historian Donald Greer published in 1935. From the records of the courts he found 16,594 death sentences passed between March 1793 and August 1794, the figure behind the usual “about 17,000”. About 2,600 of them were passed in Paris; nearly three quarters came from the two regions of civil war, the West and the South-east.

The victims were not, as legend has it, mostly aristocrats. Nobles were about one in twelve of those condemned and clergy about one in fifteen; most were peasants, artisans and townspeople, and most were condemned for rebellion or treason rather than for who they were.

The sentences are only part of the toll. Perhaps 300,000 people were imprisoned as suspects at one time or another, and thousands died in crowded, fever-ridden prisons; thousands more were shot or drowned without trial. Greer's own estimate of all the Terror's dead, counting these, was 35,000 to 40,000. The dead of the war in the Vendée, far more numerous, are usually counted apart.

The Great Terror and Thermidor

Spring and summer 1794

By the spring of 1794 the revolts had been crushed and the armies were winning, but the Terror did not ease; it turned inward. The Committee struck first at the Hébertists, who wanted it harsher, guillotined on 24 March, then at Danton and the Indulgents, who wanted it to end, on 5 April. A decree in April brought most political cases from the provinces to Paris. Then on 10 June, 22 Prairial Year II in the revolutionary calendar, a law presented by Couthon and backed by Robespierre stripped the Revolutionary Tribunal of its last safeguards: no defence counsel, witnesses only if the court wished, and two possible verdicts, acquittal or death.

This was the Great Terror. The guillotine was moved to the eastern edge of the city, to the Place du Trône-Renversé, today's Place de la Nation, and the bodies of more than 1,300 people went into pits in the garden of a former convent at Picpus. In the seven weeks after the law, the Paris tribunal sent nearly 1,400 people to their deaths, more than in the fourteen months before. Yet on 26 June the victory at Fleurus opened Belgium to the French armies, and to many deputies the emergency that had justified the Terror seemed over.

On 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794, the Convention turned on Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon; the next evening Robespierre went to the guillotine with twenty-one of his followers. The men who brought him down had not set out to end the Terror, and several had been among its harshest agents in the provinces, but the country's relief carried them along. The Law of 22 Prairial was repealed within days and suspects were released by the thousand; the Jacobin Club was closed in November, and the Tribunal's public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, went to the guillotine in May 1795. In the South, royalist gangs took their own revenge on former Jacobins in the “White Terror” of 1795.

The historians' argument

The argument began at once. The Thermidorians laid the whole Terror at Robespierre's door and made popular a new word for his followers: terrorists. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians sympathetic to the Revolution, from Alphonse Aulard to Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, explained it by circumstances: a republic facing invasion, civil war and hunger took desperate measures and dropped them once the danger had passed.

From the 1970s François Furet and those who followed him turned the argument around. The Terror, they argued, grew out of the Revolution's own ideas — a single, undivided people whose will could not be opposed, and a constant hunt for its hidden enemies — and circumstances explained its timing rather than its existence. They pointed out that it reached its peak in the summer of 1794, when the danger was already receding.

More recent historians have looked elsewhere: at the fear, rumour and obsession with conspiracy that gripped revolutionaries of every camp, as Timothy Tackett does; at the civil wars in the provinces, as David Andress does; or at whether “the Terror” was ever a single system at all. Jean-Clément Martin argues that it was never proclaimed as such, and that the name was fixed on those months afterwards by the men who had ended them. Most historians now accept roughly the same numbers; they still disagree about what those numbers mean.