Liberty or Death The Terror: ideology or circumstance

1
Liberty or Death! The Terror ideology or
circumstance?
2
The Crisis of 1793

• The crowd violence of August-September 92
• Girondins v Jacobins
• Expansion of the war
• Conscription rebellion in the Vendée
• Assignat inflation sans-culotte militancy

3
The Coup of 2 June 1793

• Girondins purged by the Jacobins with
  sans-culotte support
• Provokes civil war in France the Federalist
  uprisings (Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulon, Marseille and
  Caen)

4
The machinery of Terror

• Revolutionary Tribunal
• Committee of Public Safety and Committee of
  General Security
• Revolutionary Committees
• Law of Suspects, 17 September 1793

5
The machinery of Terror

• Representatives on Mission - to suppress
  counter-revolution and to mobilize the war effort
• Collot dHerbois and Fouché in Lyon
• Carrier in Nantes
• Saint-Just in Alsace

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Ideology or Circumstance?

• Traditional view the Terror as a response to
  circumstances (the war)
• Albert Mathiez
• George Lefebvre
• Albert Soboul

• Revisionist view the Terror as a logical outcome
  of revolutionary ideology and rhetoric
• François Furet
• Lynn Hunt

7
Three faces of Terror

• The anarchic Terror
• Carried out in the provinces by the
  representatives on mission - e.g. mass executions
  to crush the Federalist uprising and the royalist
  insurrection
• Dechristianisation
• Peaks in the autumn and early winter of 1793

8
Three faces of Terror

• The popular Terror
• driven by the sans-culottes in Paris
• Revolutionary armies
• Economic measures (death penalty for hoarders,
  the Maximum)
• Dechristianisation
• Hébert

9
Three faces of Terror

• The judicial Terror
• Revolutionary Tribunal
• Centralized control by the ruling Committees
• Law of 14 Frimaire
• Tries to tread a middle path between the
  extremists and the Indulgents Hébert, then
  Danton, executed

10
The Great Terror

• Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794)
• March 1793-August 1794 2,639 people guillotined
  in Paris.
• Of those, 1,515 were killed in June and July 1794

11
The Thermidorian Reaction

• 9 Thermidor Year 2 (27 July 1794)
• Robespierre and his colleagues overthrown
• The Thermidorians dismantle the Terror