On-line Lecture #2

The French Revolution: The Reign of Terror and Virtue

guillotine

This guillotine was created by Ronald Giardina of Mountain View High School, Mountain View, California. It is used with his permission.

The Reign of Terror began in France sometime between March-July 1793 (most historians date it from March or April), and it lasted until the guillotining (gee-o-teening) of Robespierre (Robes-pee-air) on July 28, 1794. (July was called Thermidor on the Republican calendar; that is why Crane Brinton refers to this event as the beginning of the Thermidorian Reaction (a return to normalcy, an end of the Terror, and the replacement of the radicals by moderates).

The Terror is thought to have been caused by two emergencies that existed in France by the spring of 1793: much of the western part of France, called the Vendee (Von-day) was in revolt against the Republican government; and foreign armies were threatening France. Also heightening the feeling of an emergency was the assassination of the “Mountain” member of the Convention, Marat, by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer.

The “Mountain” representatives of the Convention sat high up in the Assembly; hence their name. They got their support from Paris, including the radical Parisian crowds. They were in favor of a strong central government. The Girondins (also called Brissotins) got their name from that Department (state) of the Gironde. They favored a federalist, decentralized form of government and feared the central power of Paris. During the trial of King Louis XVI, they wanted leniency.

Their response during the King’s trial, their federalist ideas, and the defection of the Girondin General Dumouriez (Do-more-ee-ay) to the Austrians caused them to be seen as counterrevolutionaries by the “Mountain.” The Girondin representatives of the Convention were arrested as counterrevolutionaries in June, 1793. They were later guillotined along with Marie Antoinette in October, 1793. In response to these crises, the Convention took several steps to protect the revolution.

In April, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety was created. This committee consisted of twelve members of the Mountain, and it took over the Executive power of the government. Danton helped to create this committee, and served as its president for a time. By July 1793, Robespierre became one of the twelve members. He was an ascetic individual with a religious-like zeal. He and others on the Committee of Public Safety, felt that in order to achieve a heaven on earth, a new virtuous society, Terror would need to be used against “enemies” of the revolution.

These revolutionaries could no longer accept lukewarm devotion to the revolution. By September, 1793, with the Law of Suspects, if two “virtuous citizens” pointed you out as “suspect” of counterrevolutionary sympathies, you could be imprisoned. (The conditions in the prisons were so deplorable that even if you were not executed, you might die from disease). Crimes such as prostitution, stealing, and drunkenness, were now often punished by death.

The Committee of General Security was created to supervise the rounding up of suspects who were initially sent on to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris for sentencing. (Later local extraordinary tribunals were sometimes created). Committees of Surveillance sprung up in the towns to catch “suspects” and “foreigners.” Representatives on mission were sent to many of the provinces to oversee the Terror. In the areas of civil war, military tribunals were also established.

In Angers (in the Vendee area), where I conducted research, these military tribunals would often shoot those accused of treason within twenty-four hours of capture. The military tribunal in Anger also went into the prisons to do “prison censuses.” They took a persons’ name and address, and often marked in the margin such words as “fanatic supports non constitutional clergy,” “prostitute,” or in some cases, “might be good for the Navy” (you can imagine what conditions must have been like in the Navy if male prisoners could escape execution by going there!) If these people were members of the lower class, they often would not be guillotined, since that was rather expensive and time consuming. Instead, they would be lined up clandestinely at dawn, marched out of town, and shot by a firing squad. The local officials called this “a final solution” to cut down costs and the time it took to guillotine people, and to prevent the spread of disease from the prisons to the city.

In other cities, different “final solutions” were reached. In Nantes, many prisoners were taken out in boats with weights attached to them and were drowned in the Loire River; while in Lyons, both the guillotine and the firing squads were seen as too slow, so people were lined up and shot with cannons.

For those persons who were guillotined, the guillotinings were advertised the day before in posters hung up around the town, and the guillotinings took place in the town or city square, with “good citizens” cheering “long live the Republic!” Those who were guillotined were often from those groups of people on which the government wanted to publically blame the counterrevolution, such as the clergy and the nobility.

With the Reign of Terror and Virtue came an attack on the Catholic Church. The Church had already been weakened early in the revolution with the confiscation of Church lands by the government . These properties and their sales were used as backing for the paper money of the revolutionary government. In addition, in 1790, clergy were required to take an oath of fidelity to the revolution. The Pope said those who took this oath would be excommunicated, so only about half of them did. By October of 1793, the government ordered the closing of all the churches.

They were later reopened as “Temples of Reason,” where busts of the French philosophes replaced the statues of the saints. Christian worship was banned. The Committee of Public Instruction led the decristianization and spread revolutionary propaganda. They oversaw the plantings of “trees of liberty” and the celebrations that went with these.

By December 1793, the federalist revolts had been crushed; and by June 1794, the war against the foreign armies was all but won. Nonetheless, the Terror continued until July 28, 1794, when Robespierre and other members of the Committee of Public Safety were guillotined. The Reign of Terror and Virtue claimed the lives of between 40,000- 140,000 people and annihilated the personal rights and freedoms of the French people (Connelly and Hembree 93).

Work Cited

Connelly, Owen and Fred Hembree. The French Revolution. Wheeling Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1993.

quimper

The above is a copy of Quimper china that was popular in France from 1793-July, 1794. This is an example of how the Terror permeated everyday life. The placard translates, “Live free or die.” There was no room for lukewarm supporters during the Reign of Terror.