Reign of Terror
The Terror (September 1793 – July 1794) was the radical phase of the French Revolution in which the Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, mobilised the Republic against enemies real and imagined while France faced foreign invasion on multiple fronts and royalist counter-revolution in the Vendée. The Law of Suspects (September 1793) empowered arrests of anyone deemed insufficiently republican; the Revolutionary Tribunal processed cases rapidly; the guillotine worked daily. King Louis XVI had been executed in January 1793, Marie Antoinette in October. Robespierre's chief rivals — the indulgent Danton and the ultra-radical Hébertists — were both guillotined in spring 1794. The Law of 22 Prairial (June 1794) removed defence counsel from trials and accelerated executions dramatically; approximately 1,400 were guillotined in Paris in six weeks. Robespierre's ambition to extend the purge to other Committee members triggered a conspiracy: on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) he was arrested in the Convention and guillotined the next day. The Thermidorian reaction that followed dismantled the Terror's machinery, released surviving prisoners, and installed the more conservative Directory in 1795 — leaving France exhausted, republican, and searching for stable authority.
- Year: 1793 CE
- Category: Political
