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Discuss the advantages and the disadvantages of the Terror as an instrument of the French Revolution.

Historical setting: In the summer of 1793, the radical Jacobins purged their moderate rivals from the National Convention and took over the government of revolutionary France. The country was in disarray. To the north and the east the Prussian and Austrian troops were pushing back the armies of France and threatening to invade the infant republic. The British navy threatened the coasts of France. In western France a war of secession was underway backed by various social groups including the peasantry. In Lyon, another secessionist movement opposed the authority of the radical government in Paris, and there was agitation in several cities in the south and southwest. The country was also in economic crisis. In August and September, the Committee of Public Safety, which governed the Republic, instituted a series of sweeping reforms to deal with the emergency situation. A Revolutionary Tribunal (court) was enlarged, and a law of suspects was passed that legalized local revolutionary committees. Troops were sent to deal with the secessionist areas. When the Terror ended n July, 1794, 14,000 people out of a total population of 25 million had been guillotined, shot, or drowned.

Document 1: France 1793

Document 2: Deaths Resulting from the Terror by Social Group

Document 3: Geographical Incidence of the Principle Indictments Leading to Executions During the Terror

(4)

“Revolution is the war waged by liberty against its enemies; a constitution is that which crowns the edifice of freedom once victory has been won and the nation is at peace. The revolution­ary government has to summon extraordinary activity to its aid precisely because it is at war. It is subjected to less binding and less uniform regulations . . . because it is compelled to deploy, swiftly and incessantly, new resources to meet new and pressing dangers. Under a constitutional government little more is re­quired than to protect the individual against abuses by the state, whereas revolutionary government is obliged to defend the state itself against the factions that assail it from every quarter. To good citizens revolutionary govern­ment owes the full protection of the state; to the enemies of the people it owes only death. . It must adopt the general principles of ordinary government whenever these can be rigorously applied without endangering public liberty. Its force to repress must be commensurate with the audacity or treachery of those who conspire against it……”

Maximilien de Robespierre,
In a speech to the National
Convention, December 25, 1793

(5)

“Citizens, how could anyone delude himself that you are inhuman? . . . Since the month of May last, our history is a lesson about the terrible extremities to which indulgence leads. In that period . . . Custine had abandoned Mainz, the Palatinate, and the banks of the Rhine; Calvados was in revolt; the Vendée was victorious, Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Toulon were in arms against the French people; our armies were being beaten in the Pvrenees and around Mont Blanc, you were being betrayed by every­one. . . . Yet the greatest of our misfortunes was a certain fear of the concentration of authority necessary to save the state.”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, in a speech to the National
Convention, February 26, 1794

(6)

“You want to remove all your enemies by means of the guillotine? Has there ever been such great folly? Could you make a single man perish on the scaffold without making ten enemies for yourself from his family or his friends? Do you believe that these women, these old men, these weaklings, those egoists, these stragglers of the Revolution, whom you imprison, are really dangerous? Of your enemies there remain among you only the cowardly and the sick. The strong and the brave have emigrated. They have perished at Lyon or in the Vendée; the remainder (consisting of some renters and shopkeepers] do not merit your wrath.”

Camille Desmoulins, journalist and former ally of Robespierre, in le Vieux Cordelier, December 20, 1793

Documents 7-10 are excerpted from reports to the government on public opinion.

(7) “The majority of the citizens agreed in unani­mously [sic] saying that the tribunals act well, that they acquit the innocent and punish the guilty, although murmurs are heard among the public at their judgments.”

January 28, 1794

(8)

“Bitter complaints already expressed number­less times, were repeated today of the arrest and imprisonment of citizens who are good patriots and are victims of ambition, cupidity, jealousy, and, in short, every human passion.”

February 23, 1794

(9)

“On seeing peasants on the scaffold, people said, What, have these wretches allowed themselves to be corrupted? If they were nobles or rich people it would not be strange, their being counter-revolutionists, but in that class we should expect all to be patriots.
‘The law is just,’ people remarked, ‘it strikes rich and poor indiscriminately.’ The verdicts of the Revolutionary Tribunal are always applauded.”

March 2, 1794

(10) “The revolutionary committees are every day falling into discredit. You daily hear that they consist of a number of intriguers, who plunder the nation and oppress citizens, It is a fact that there is no section in Paris which is not dissatisfied with its revolutionary committee or does not seriously desire to have them abolished.”

March 30, 1794

Document 11: A Suspect Appearing Before a Revolutionary Committee

Contemporary French engraving of a revolutionary committee by an unknown artist, probably an opponent of the terror.

12) “The guillotine and the firing squad did justice to more than four hundred rebels. But a new revolutionary commission has just been established, and in a few days the grape shot, fired by our cannoneers will have delivered to us, in one single moment, more than four thousand conspirators. . . . The Republic has need of a great example . . . whilst the thunderbolt, which must exterminate them in an instant, will carry terror into the departments where the seed of rebellion was sown, it is necessary that the flames from their devastated dens proclaim tar and wide the punishment that is destined for those who try to imitate them.”

A letter from General Ronsin, a leader of the Revolutionary Army that subdued Lyon. December 17, 1793

(13)

“What a pity that a people [the French] capable of such Incredible energy, should he guilty or rather be governed by those who are guilty of such unheard of crimes and cruelties.”

Charles James Fox, reformist member of Parliament and sym­pathizer with the French Revo­lution, in a speech to Parliament, November 7, 1793

(14) “But it has been urged, that the French have distinguished themselves in the field; nor will it be denied that, independently of any other circumstance, the spirit of a people called forth by the impulse which acts so strongly in such a situation, may have the effect to make them brave in the moment of action. But their efforts are merely the result of a system of restraint and oppression, the most terrible and gigantic, that has, perhaps, ever existed. They are compelled into the field by the terror of the guillotine—they are supported there only by those resources which their desperate situa­tion affords; and, in these circumstances, what can be the dependence on the steadiness of their operations, or what rational prospect can there be of the permanence of their exertions?

William Pitt, British Prime Minister, in a speech to Parlia­ment, January 21, 1794