July 28, 1794.
At around 2 a.m. men storm into the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, France.
Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, along with some of his most ardent followers,
is arrested.
As to what happens next has been a matter of debate, but an injured Robespierre is dragged
out of the hotel.
He and the rest of his followers are summarily found guilty and subsequently whisked off
to the Place de la Révolution.
As he’s brought up to the scaffold, his face a swollen mess, mobs in the street scream
out their hatred for him.
When the guillotine blade falls down on his neck those crowds cry out in jubilation, and
they don’t stop cheering for almost a quarter of an hour.
Had you been able to fast-forward in time from 1793 and watch this scene you would have
rightly felt perplexed.
This man who lost his head was hailed as the King of the French Revolution.
He was called “The Incorruptible”, a selfless man that had fought for a people who’d been
oppressed for centuries by the wicked tyranny of the rich and powerful.
So, what had gone wrong?
Well, the Reign Of Terror happened, a year of chaos in which blood spilled all over France.
In his moving speeches Robespierre called for virtue, but that, he admitted, came at
a cost.
Not everyone saw eye-to-eye with Robespierre.
He and his allies accused many people of not adhering to the revolutionary vision, and
a zero-tolerance policy was taken towards them.
As you’ll see in this video, many who were slaughtered during this reign of terror were
innocent, which is why the great orator of the revolution was finally cut down himself.
But let’s go back to the start, when the terror was just fomenting.
The terror itself was something called the Committee of Public Safety, which was a provisional
government formed around four years after the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789,
when the French Revolution got off its feet.
In the years that followed, governing France was a complicated matter.
The country was beset by war with other countries and internally there was so much strife Civil
War was on the cards.
So, in 1793, the Committee of Public Safety was set up and Robespierre soon became head.
The committee promised to protect France from its many foreign enemies.
It also said that any internal dissent would quickly be quashed.
The committee had no qualms about admitting that to dissuade people from criticizing or
going against their revolutionary ideals, folks would have to die.
This message was explicit, not implicit.
It’s a complex story, but you need to know that Robespierre and his allies supported
a centralized republican state, something aligned with a movement called Jacobinism.
The thing was, the Jacobin philosophy was if you’re not with us, you’re against
the revolution and a threat to the “virtue” they wanted to install.
There was little or no room for criticism, so left-wing politics and a progressive outlook
became a kind of dictatorship.
The committee told the people in no uncertain terms that it would rule by terror.
That might sound strange to you viewers right now since the word has so many negative connotations,
but for those Jacobins on the committee, if you wanted to make an omelet, a country where
virtue flourished, a few bad eggs had to be broken.
Robespierre didn’t just see bad eggs in the streets machinating against his revolutionary
ideals, but he feared his own military commanders might defect.
In time, he would also see bad eggs in his own government.
Ok, so that sets the scene.
There was lots of paranoia and a lot of disgruntled people in France, some of whom had little
to eat.
That didn’t bode well for harmony and solidarity.
The beginning of the terror in France was arguably when the “Law of Suspects” came
into effect.
This would weed out “the enemies of the revolution”, many of whom would take their
last breath as the blade of the guillotine fell down on their neck.
The members of the public who stood and listened to Robespierre talk about the enemies of the
revolution were now encouraged to do a bit of weeding out themselves, so at times men
and women were beaten to death in the streets by mobs.
Not only that, people snitched on others to get them out of the way.
Meanwhile, Surveillance Committees were created to keep tabs on anyone who could be deemed
a traitor.
As happened later in totalitarian governments that popped up around the world, the public
was also asked to carry around a card that certified they were not traitors or wrongdoers
in the eyes of the revolution.
This was called, the “Certificate of Civism.”
Not having one on your person could lead to trouble.
Ironically, the law decreed that anyone who had been found out as an “enemy of freedom”
could be arrested and summarily executed, even if they were only critical of the revolutionary
cause.
Many others were killed because they were deemed to be nobles who had not committed
enough time to support the revolution.
It’s anyone’s guess just how many people were arrested under this law, but the number
given by some scholars is 500,000.
While the number of official executions was close to 17,000, that doesn’t count how
many people were just killed in the street by the authorities or by mobs.
Then there were those who perished in the prisons where food was scarce and disease
was rife.
The number of prisoners who died while incarcerated has been put at 10,000.
As for demographics, it’s said 8 percent who died were aristocrats, 14 percent were
middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants.
A further 6 percent were clergy.
The church was not welcome, which led to thousands of priests being exiled and hundreds executed.
We now call this religious purge, dechristianization.
The church itself had a long history of violence and corruption, so it had to go.
It’s hard to imagine what times were like back then, but one thing for sure is you had
to watch what you said.
A loose word while drinking a beer in a tavern could mean someone listening at the other
side of the tavern reporting you.
Of course, people reported folks they just didn’t care for very much.
This would often land the alleged transgressor in one of those filthy prisons, and in terms
of criminal justice, they didn’t have a leg to stand on.
When the “loi de la Grande Terreur”, “the law of the Great Terror” was written up
it stated that political crimes were much worse than common crimes that happened in
households and in the streets.
It focused on arresting people accused of “slandering patriotism”, “seeking to
inspire discouragement”, “spreading false news” and “depraving morals.”
It was kind of like social media platforms’ terms of service rules now, except it was
often one strike and you're dead.
The law stated, “Every citizen is empowered to seize conspirators and counterrevolutionaries,
and to bring them before the magistrates.”
So, if someone accused a person of one of those crimes, that person would then be taken
to stand in front of something called the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Obviously, the person could deny what they’d said, but if the tribunal didn’t believe
them, it was either off with their head, or an acquittal, and nothing in between.
The accused were provided with no defense.
No witnesses were allowed to come forward and support the accused.
They could be killed for merely being accused of harboring a perceived thought.
To understand this next bit of information, you need to know the revolutionaries created
their own calendar, which was called the French Revolutionary calendar.
At the start of Spring in the month named Germinal, 155 people were executed and 59
were acquitted after being accused of breaching the terror law.
In the next month, Floréal, 354 people lost their heads and 159 were acquitted.
In the month of Prairial, 509 were executed and 164 were acquitted.
796 people were executed in the month of Messidor and 208 were acquitted.
Thousands more were waiting in prisons for a trial that wouldn’t ever come.
We think you get the picture.
As scholars have pointed out, these people could have been the washerwomen who lived
down the lane.
They could have been the butcher, the guy that delivered bread, or the person who once
mentioned in passing to a guy in the street that he thought all the summary executions
were perhaps just a smidgen on the harsh side.
And to think some of these people on the committee were just young men, men whose brains if you
believe neuroscientists hadn’t even fully developed.
Take the case of Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois, a man in his early twenties who was a member
of the Committee of Public Safety and a person who played a big part in all the terror.
He, with others, was sent to the city of Lyon to deal with a revolt there where moderates,
but still republicans, didn’t agree with the government in Paris.
“Lyon made war on liberty: Lyon is no more!” cried invading French Republican forces after
they had laid waste to their enemies and destroyed homes and buildings.
The orders had been given to “exterminate all that goes by the name of aristocrat, moderate,
royalist.”
After the victory, the “Extraordinary Commission” was set up to decide the fate of anyone in
Lyon who was considered counter-revolutionary.
At first, 100 rebels were shot in the streets and a further 79 people went to the guillotine.
Later, accused rebels and moderates were forced together in a mass and fired on with cannons.
Almost 300 died this way, although the grapeshot used by the cannons didn’t kill a lot of
the people.
The troops were then ordered to go in and stab them all to death with their bayonets.
This was so distressing that many of the soldiers refused to do it.
Regular executions ensued.
This was rightly called a massacre by some.
Most of those people who were killed were not hardcore rebels, but commoners who worked
in Lyon.
They played no part in politics but were rightly upset over low wages and Paris’ reluctance
to make things better.
Others were merchants, some were priests.
One guy was a surgeon.
In all, 2,000 people in Lyon were executed.
This was not the way to get people on your side, and much of France now was beginning
to wonder if these guys running things in Paris, especially Robespierre, were possibly
out of control.
Robespierre understood such bloodshed might tarnish his name, but oh boy, was he convincing
when he made his speeches.
Still, in some darkened corridors men and women talked in hushed tones about a man that
had once fought against tyranny but had now become a tyrant himself.
One of those people was the revolutionary Jacques-Alexis Thuriot.
He saw what Robespierre had become, daring to say while Robespierre was talking at a
convention, “Look at the bugger; it’s not enough for him to be master, he has to
be God.”
Thuriot soon resigned from the committee, even though he’d been a hardcore radical
in the past, calling even Robespierre too moderate.
He was a friend and supporter of Georges Danton, an important figure in the French Revolution.
Danton became part of the Committee of Public Safety, but when it seemed to him that progressive
politics had been replaced by brute oppression, he dared to say that perhaps rule by terror
was not the order of the day.
He wanted to see an end to the bloodshed.
He wanted to end the widespread famine.
He was even brazen enough to ask for peace with foreign powers, which was certainly not
what the National Convention had in mind.
Robespierre saw Danton as a threat, and so without further ado, he set a plan in action
to accuse him of various corruptions.
This was a pretext to take him out, and supporters of Danton knew it, but no one dared speak
up, knowing what would befall them.
The night before Danton was executed, he said, “It was just a year ago that I was the means
of instituting the Revolutionary Tribunal; may God and man forgive me for what I did
then; but it was not that it might become the scourge of humanity.”
On the day he and 14 other alleged conspirators were led to the guillotine, he said something
else, something that would become true, “Not a man of them has an idea of government.
Robespierre will follow me.”
He meant to scaffold, of course.
After Robespierre was arrested, when his mouth was filled with blood, it’s alleged someone
shouted, “The blood of Danton chokes him!”
The reply he made through broken teeth was, “Is it Danton you regret?
... Cowards!
Why didn't you defend him?”
It was more than Danton.
It was a year of blood being spilled and often the accused were no more than the victims
of paranoia.
Camille Desmoulins had defended Danton and he had also criticized his old friend Robespierre
for the mass executions of the public, as well as the hundreds who were in prison and
no doubt innocent of any crime.
He spoke his mind in a journal he published called Le Vieux Cordelier.
He wrote, “My dear Robespierre, my old school friend.
Remember the lessons of history and philosophy: love is stronger, more lasting than fear...The
Committee of Public Safety can elevate themselves to the sky; they can never reach it through
paths of blood.”
This was a dangerous thing to do, and Robespierre was told that by his more obsequious allies.
Don’t worry he told them, Desmoulins is just “an unthinking child who has fallen
into bad company.”
He then ordered the journal to be publicly burned.
He also doubled down on his terror campaign.
He wrote that anyone not in support of it was a conspirator and their fate must be death
and only death.
He then wrote the “Report on the Principles of Political Morality” defending his reasoning.
Part of it went like this: “If the spring of popular government in
time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue
and terror.
Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless.
Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible.
It is therefore an emanation of virtue, a consequence of the general principle of democracy
applied to our country’s most urgent needs.”
Then came the executions of people that had once been on his side.
He did try at least to protect his old school buddy, Desmoulins, who died on the same day
as Danton.
Desmoulins’ wife was also later executed for conspiring to free her husband and “ruin
the Republic.”
Before his death, Desmoulins wrote, “I have dreamed of a Republic such as all the world
would have adored.
I could never have believed that men could be so ferocious and so unjust.”
He apparently had to be held down by a group of men after being told on the scaffold that
his wife was soon going to meet the same fate.
She did.
A man named Jacques Hébert was among others that lost his head.
He’d been outspoken about food shortages among the poorest of the poor, and after calling
for an uprising, he and 17 of his followers went to the scaffold.
These executions we just mentioned were the final straw for some, although Robespierre
was unequivocal when he said there needed to be even more purges if his plan to bring
virtue to France was to come to fruition.
In his final speech he began, “THE ENEMIES of the Republic call me tyrant!”
He went on in a quite moving oration to explain how he wasn’t the enemy, but the conspirators
were.
He said, “The good and the bad disappear alike from the earth; but in very different
conditions.
Oh Frenchmen!
Oh my countrymen!
Let not your enemies, with their desolating doctrines, degrade your souls, and enervate
your virtues!”
As the madding crowd who adored this speech shouted, “la guillotine” for the men who
Robespierre was talking about, those same men were planning to get rid of the master
orator.
The next day was the historical Coup d'état of 9 Thermidor.
Those men, who surely would have been executed themselves, managed to convince the Convention
to arrest Robespierre.
He and his allies were rounded up, 21 of them in all with an average age of 34.
Like those that had gone to the guillotine before them, they received no trial.
The Reign of Terror was well and truly over, but the violence didn’t stop.
After all, there were still living people who’d supported Robespierre and his terror
tactics.
Now they had to go, and in time many were butchered for what they had believed in.
On top of that, the harvest of 1795 wasn’t a good one, and yet again, people starved.
This led to uprisings against the convention and people taking their anger out on other
members of the public.
To steal what a famous writer once said about the worst times of the revolution, it was
the season of darkness in France, one very long winter of despair.
But on the upside, new ideas settled on the world, ideas centered around those two precious
things we call liberty and freedom.
Now you need to hear more about totalitarian rule in, “Terrifying Story Of Joseph Stalin's
Rise to Power.”
Or, have a look at this despot, “Why Mao Zedong Was The Most Brutal Tyrant.”