Reign of Terror (1793-1794): Robespierre and the Guillotine

The Reign of Terror, or simply the Terror, was the most violent phase of the French Revolution, lasting from September 1793 until the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794. Facing foreign war, civil war and economic crisis, the revolutionary government suspended normal legal protections and used special courts, mass arrests and the guillotine against suspected enemies. Around 17,000 people were officially executed, and the Terror has shaped debates about revolution and political violence ever since.

Background: a Republic in danger

By the spring of 1793 the French Revolution was fighting for survival. After the execution of Louis XVI in January, France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain, the Dutch Republic and Spain. In March a major revolt broke out in the Vendée in western France, and the Republic’s leading general, Charles-François Dumouriez, defected to the Austrians in April.

The National Convention responded with emergency institutions. A Revolutionary Tribunal was created in Paris on 10 March 1793 to try political crimes, and on 6 April the Convention set up the Committee of Public Safety, a small executive committee of deputies. Representatives on mission, deputies with wide powers, were sent to the armies and the departments.

Political conflict also sharpened. On 2 June 1793 armed Parisian crowds and National Guards surrounded the Convention and forced the arrest of the leading Girondin deputies. In reaction, cities such as Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Toulon rose against Paris in what became known as the Federalist revolts. In July the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat was murdered by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathiser.

The Terror becomes policy

Historians differ on when the Terror began; some date it from the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1793. The conventional starting point is 5 September 1793, when sans-culottes, the militant artisans and workers of Paris, invaded the Convention demanding bread and action against traitors. The Convention agreed to make terror “the order of the day” and to raise a “revolutionary army” of civilians to enforce food requisitioning.

The key law followed on 17 September 1793. The Law of Suspects defined as suspect anyone who, by conduct, associations, words or writings, showed themselves to be a supporter of tyranny or an enemy of liberty, as well as former nobles and relatives of émigrés who had not shown constant attachment to the Revolution. Local surveillance committees could arrest them. Within months prisons across France held tens of thousands of people; estimates for the peak run to around 300,000 to 500,000 arrests over the whole period.

At the same time, the Convention imposed price controls with the General Maximum of 29 September 1793 and declared on 10 October that the government would be “revolutionary until the peace”. The Law of 14 Frimaire Year II (4 December 1793) centralised power in the Committee of Public Safety and its partner, the Committee of General Security, which ran the police.

How the Terror worked

The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, with Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville as public prosecutor, tried prominent cases. Defendants had limited rights, and verdicts were often decided by political considerations. Condemned prisoners were taken in carts, the charrettes, to the guillotine, which stood mostly on the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde.

In the provinces the Terror was harsher and more uneven. After Lyon was recaptured in October 1793, the deputies Joseph Fouché and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois oversaw the killing of around 1,900 people, some by mass shootings with cannon fire. In Nantes, the representative Jean-Baptiste Carrier ordered prisoners, including priests, to be drowned in the Loire in the noyades; estimates of the dead range from about 2,000 to more than 4,000. Repression in the War in the Vendée caused tens of thousands of further deaths outside the courts.

The Terror also had a cultural side. A campaign of dechristianisation closed churches, promoted a Cult of Reason and introduced the Revolutionary calendar, which began Year I on 22 September 1792. Robespierre, who disliked atheism, later sponsored the Cult of the Supreme Being, celebrated in a great festival in Paris on 8 June 1794.

The victims

Well-known victims in Paris included Marie Antoinette on 16 October 1793, twenty-one Girondin deputies on 31 October, the writer and salon leader Madame Roland on 8 November, and the former duc d’Orléans, Philippe Égalité, on 6 November. The chemist Antoine Lavoisier, a former tax farmer, was guillotined on 8 May 1794, and the poet André Chénier on 25 July 1794.

The Terror also consumed revolutionaries. In March 1794 the radical Jacques-René Hébert and his followers were executed, and on 5 April 1794 Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and others accused of corruption and of wanting to end the Terror went to the guillotine.

The Great Terror

In the spring of 1794 power was concentrated in Paris, and most provincial revolutionary courts were closed so that cases came to the capital. The Law of 22 Prairial Year II (10 June 1794), introduced by Georges Couthon, removed the right of the accused to defence counsel and to call witnesses, and allowed only two verdicts: acquittal or death.

The weeks that followed, known as the Great Terror, were the bloodiest in Paris. Between mid-June and late July 1794 the Revolutionary Tribunal sent more than 1,300 people to the guillotine, more than in the whole previous year. This happened even though the military danger was receding: the French victory at Fleurus on 26 June 1794 opened the way into Belgium.

Key people

• Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer from Arras, joined the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793 and became the Terror’s leading voice. In February 1794 he argued that a popular government in revolution needed both virtue and terror, each powerless or harmful without the other.
• Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Robespierre’s young ally, enforced discipline on the armies and wrote key reports against the factions.
• Georges Couthon completed the triumvirate with Robespierre and Saint-Just and drafted the Law of 22 Prairial.
• Lazare Carnot, also on the Committee, organised the armies that turned the war in France’s favour.
• Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, was himself guillotined in 1795.

Ending the Terror

Fear of the next purge eventually united Robespierre’s enemies. On 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) the Convention ordered the arrest of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon and others. After a night of confusion at the Paris Hôtel de Ville they were captured and guillotined on 28 July, with more of their supporters executed in the following days. The fall of Robespierre is traditionally taken as the end of the Terror.

The Thermidorian Convention released many suspects, repealed the Law of 22 Prairial, closed the Paris Jacobin Club in November 1794 and abolished the Revolutionary Tribunal in May 1795. A “White Terror” of reprisals against former Jacobins followed in parts of southern France.

By the numbers

Most executions took place in regions of revolt, especially the west and the south-east, rather than in Paris.

Myths and facts

• The Terror mainly killed aristocrats. Commoners were the large majority of victims; peasants and workers alone made up more than half of those officially executed.
• Robespierre ran the Terror alone. He was the most visible figure, but the Committee of Public Safety acted collectively, the Convention approved its laws and some of the worst killings were directed by other deputies.
• The guillotine was invented for the Terror. It was adopted in 1792 as a uniform and supposedly humane method of execution for all classes, and first used in April 1792, well before the Terror.

Legacy

The Terror gave the word “terrorism” to European languages, first used for the policy of the revolutionary government. For conservatives, who recalled Edmund Burke’s warnings of 1790, it proved that radical revolution led to bloodshed; for some on the left it was a tragic but necessary defence of the Republic under siege.

Modern historians tend to stress the combination of war, civil war and political ideology, and the way fear and factional rivalry pushed the violence forward. The Terror remains a central reference point in discussions of revolutionary justice, emergency powers and the limits of state violence.

Timeline

• 1793, 10 March: The Revolutionary Tribunal is created in Paris.
• 1793, 6 April: The Committee of Public Safety is established.
• 1793, 5 September: The Convention makes terror “the order of the day”.
• 1793, 17 September: The Law of Suspects is passed.
• 1793, 16 October: Marie Antoinette is guillotined.
• 1793, 4 December: The Law of 14 Frimaire centralises revolutionary government.
• 1794, 5 April: Danton and Desmoulins are executed.
• 1794, 10 June: The Law of 22 Prairial begins the Great Terror.
• 1794, 27–28 July: Robespierre is overthrown and executed.

Why it matters

The Reign of Terror showed how a revolution proclaiming rights and liberty could turn to mass arrests and executions in the name of defending itself. Its record, and the arguments about its causes, still inform how historians and citizens think about emergency government and political violence.