Reign of Terror
The Terror was declared the order of the day in September 1793 and killed some 17,000 people by sentence in eleven months. The republic in that summer was in a genuine emergency. Foreign armies were across three frontiers, the Vendée was in open revolt, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Toulon had risen against the Convention, Toulon had handed the fleet to the British, the currency was collapsing and bread was short. The Committee of Public Safety, twelve men re-elected monthly, took effective executive power and used every instrument available. The law of suspects made it an offence to be someone about whom suspicion could be entertained; the revolutionary tribunal tried in batches; representatives on mission carried unlimited authority into the provinces; and the levée en masse conscripted the population and the economy together. By the spring of 1794 the armies were winning everywhere and the internal revolts were finished, and the executions accelerated rather than stopping. The Great Terror of June and July 1794 followed the law of 22 Prairial, which abolished defence counsel and the examination of witnesses and left the tribunal a choice between acquittal and death; about 1,400 people were guillotined in Paris in seven weeks. Robespierre then made a speech threatening unnamed conspirators, and the men who suspected they were on the list arrested him the next day. The provincial repression was worse than the capital's: the Vendée columns and the drownings at Nantes killed a far larger number than the guillotine. The most cited number is misleading in both directions. Around 17,000 were formally sentenced and executed, perhaps 10,000 more died in prison without trial, and the war in the Vendée killed something between 170,000 and 200,000 people, which is where the great majority of the deaths of the period actually lie.
- Year: 1793 CE
- Category: Political
