Reign of Terror

The Terror was the most violent phase of the French Revolution. Between 1793 and the summer of 1794, the revolutionary government of the new French First Republic, at war abroad and facing rebellion at home, arrested hundreds of thousands of suspects and sent many thousands to the guillotine. Its leading figure was Maximilien Robespierre, and it ended with his own execution in July 1794. Historians still debate when exactly it began, how far it was a deliberate system, and why it happened.

After the monarchy fell in 1792, France faced danger on every side. War with Austria and Prussia, begun in April 1792, went badly at first, and after the execution of Louis XVI and French advances into the Rhineland, a broad coalition of European powers attacked the republic. At home, a revolt broke out in the Vendée in March 1793 against mass conscription and grew into civil war. In June 1793 armed sans-culottes, the radical working people of Paris, surrounded the National Convention and forced it to arrest 29 leaders of the moderate Girondin faction, after which some 13 departments rose in the so-called Federalist revolts. The radical Montagnards, allied with the Jacobin club, took control.

The Convention set up a Revolutionary Tribunal on 10 March 1793 and, in April, a Committee of Public Safety, which became the effective war government; Robespierre joined it in July. The murder of the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat that month inflamed opinion. On 5 September, under pressure from the sans-culottes, the Convention created a revolutionary army in Paris to enforce its decrees and food supplies; the deputy Bertrand Barère's call to make "terror the order of the day" is often taken as the Terror's starting signal, although historians such as Jean-Clément Martin argue that no formal system of terror was ever adopted. The Law of Suspects of 17 September allowed the arrest of anyone vaguely suspected of hostility to the revolution, and prisons quickly overflowed. Price controls were imposed on food and other goods.

Marie Antoinette was guillotined on 16 October 1793, and leading Girondins at the end of the month. In the provinces, representatives sent by the Convention crushed resistance with great brutality: revolts in Lyon were put down, and at Nantes prisoners were drowned en masse on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier. A campaign of dechristianisation turned Notre-Dame into a "Temple of Reason", while a new revolutionary calendar replaced the Christian one.

By early 1794 the government faced rival factions: the Hébertists, who wanted even harsher measures, and the followers of Georges Danton, who called for clemency. The Committee struck at both. The Hébertist leaders were executed on 24 March, and Danton and Camille Desmoulins on 5 April. On 10 June the Law of 22 Prairial stripped defendants of most protections. In the following weeks, known as the Great Terror, another 1,366 people were executed, even as French victories such as Fleurus on 26 June made emergency rule harder to justify.

Fearing they would be next, members of the Convention and of the committees turned on Robespierre in late July 1794, in the month of Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar. He was arrested, wounded in the jaw by a gunshot whose origin is disputed, and guillotined on 28 July with Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Georges Couthon and others. Around seventy members of the Paris Commune followed them the next day.

Official records count 16,594 death sentences across France from June 1793, 2,639 of them in Paris, while an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 more people died without trial or in prison. Some 300,000 suspects were arrested. Historians remain divided over whether the Terror was mainly a response to war and civil war, as Albert Mathiez argued, or had deeper ideological roots in the revolutionaries' ideas of virtue, influenced by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Our 1800 map shows the French First Republic a few years after the Terror, its borders already pushed outwards by the Revolutionary Wars.