the Revolutionaries chose to set aside the Rights of Man in the face of the perceived necessity of ‘violating the law to save the law’.
But the authors also take care to contextualize all such actions in terms of both circumstances and emotions. They are impatient with the utterly inaccurate putative links between the terror phase of the Revolution and the totalitarian regimes and ideologies of the twentieth century. They underline the substantial number of exonerations and case dismissals (non-lieux), often 50 percent or higher, among those individuals brought before the Revolutionary tribunals. And they note the widely varying impact of the repression from region to region, department to department. It is clear that the most intense repression was precisely in those areas that were the scene of major armed counter-revolution against the Convention.
In conclusion, we must express our gratitude for the publication of this enormously thoughtful and nuanced study and for the authors’ efforts to come to grips with the phenomenon of French Revolutionary ‘terror’ in all its complexities and contradictions.
Timothy Tackett
Introduction: The Demons of Terror
Terror … the word has become synonymous with the French Revolution. When we think of the French Revolution, it is perhaps inevitable that we also think of the demons that came to haunt it and to overshadow its humanitarian project – the demons of terror. In our modern world this association has been intensified by the huge importance that the words ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ have assumed for us, and the visceral fears and hatreds that these words invoke. The use of a capital letter for the Terror has reified the word, all the more so as it is accompanied by a definite article intended to reinforce it: it has become the Terror, sometimes The Reign of Terror. By making this word signify a unified phenomenon, we assume that we know what it meant, and what it encompassed. Yet when the women and men of the Revolution used the term ‘terror’, they almost never gave it a capital letter, or the definite article. However they experienced terror, it was not yet, for them, the Terror.
The term, the Terror (definite article, capital T) comes primarily from historians who wanted to impose a particular narrative on the past. This process began with nineteenth-century French historians, above all, Jules Michelet. In Michelet’s general introduction to his Histoire de la Révolution française (published from 1847 onwards) not only did he use this capital letter, but, with his fluent, impressionistic style, he practically personified Terror, making it almost another character in his narrative of the Revolution, and giving it the capacity to speak, like a monster lurking in wait to savage the achievements of the Revolution.1 From that time onwards the practice of using a capital letter for Terror was increasingly adopted.2 A search on the Internet using the Ngram Viewer linguistic application demonstrates a surge in the use of the term with its capitalization in the decades 1840–60, a peak in the 1880–1910 period (linked to the Centenary of 1789) and then a marked decrease. Another surge, still more spectacular, came with the Bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989, an anniversary that coincided with intense historiographical controversy from historians of both left and right over the meaning and nature of the Revolution.3 Thus, the Terror as a unified and reified entity is a creation of historians, a polemical construction based on antagonistic interpretations, a means for historians to obsessively denigrate this revolution, or, indeed, any revolution.
One of the most problematic features of the term, the Terror and, even more so, The Reign of Terror, is that these words have so often been depicted as synonymous with a chronological period, although historians do not necessarily agree on when that period began, or when it ended. Whilst the expression the Terror has often been used to designate the entirety of the most radical phase of the Revolution, during the years 1793 and 1794, some of it coinciding with the Year II in the new revolutionary calendar (22 September 1793–21 September 1794), there is little consensus on when in 1793 the Terror began. To confuse us further, some historians have dated its onset further back, to August 1792, with the overthrow of the monarchy; still others have contended that the Terror began even earlier, seeing it as intrinsic to the entire Revolution – a view epitomized by Simon Schama’s often-cited pronouncement that: ‘The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count’.4 This chronological definition of the Terror is particularly misleading because it carries the implication, whether intended or not, that everything within the designated dates (assuming we go along with September 1793 to the end of July 1794) was about the Terror, and that nothing outside those dates qualifies as terror. Of course, the years 1793 and 1794 were a time as unprecedented as they were exceptional, but they cannot be reduced to the repressive aspects that for 200 years have commonly been associated with the Terror.
In recent years a growing number of historians have been prepared to call into question traditional delineations of the Terror.5 This is not an easy task, not least because the term is such a familiar one, to be found in almost all the older history books, and throughout popular culture. We are faced with a practical question – if we do not call it the Terror, then what do we call it, how do we define and explain it? What words do we use that do not become impossibly involved and complicated? Recently, the eminent American historian of the Revolution, Timothy Tackett stated that he continued to use ‘the term “Terror” – with the initial capital letter and the definite article … simply because, like other terms such as “the Renaissance” or “the Industrial Revolution”, it has long been adopted by almost every historian.’6 As a pragmatic judgement, Tackett’s perspective has much to recommend it. Regardless of anything else, the term is a convenient shorthand, and for this reason, if no other, is likely to prove tenacious.
Nevertheless, in this book we shall put the case for changing how historians and the wider public speak of this subject, or at least to give them pause. Our intention is to call into question many of the assumptions that lie behind the easy recourse to speaking of the Terror, and to invite readers, as well as to challenge ourselves, to think anew. While this book is in part a synthesis of the most recent works on the question both in France and in English-speaking countries, it is also, of course, based very much on our own researches on a subject to which we have, between us, dedicated a daunting number of years.
We will make the case, therefore, for historians to speak henceforth of ‘terror’ and no longer only of the Terror. We emphasize that this does not in any way mean we desire to minimize the violence of the revolutionary period – as shall become clear, in some locations there was a great deal of violence, as well as widespread threats of violence. Nor are we trying to restate the classic thesis that the revolutionaries were forced by ‘circumstances’ to adopt ‘terror’ to ensure the survival of the Republic, making terror a regrettable necessity. One thing that becomes apparent is that, when revolutionaries resorted to terror to defend the moral gains of the Revolution, in an undeniable sense those moral gains were lost anyway. Yet neither do we endorse the thesis that the French revolutionary terror can be conceived as a matrix and model for twentieth-century totalitarianisms. The Jacobins were not the Bolsheviks. Robespierre was no Stalin.
The notion that terror was simply a logical result of circumstances, devised to stave off threats of military violence and the potential annihilation of the revolutionaries and the Revolution itself, by the foreign powers and opponents from the old social elite, is not in itself enough to explain the part played by emotions in revolutionary decision-making; nor why revolutionary leaders turned on one another with such catastrophic effects. The colossal impact of war and civil war accounts for some of this, but it is far from being able to explain everything. Nor can any study of the ideologies of 1789, of liberty, equality and the rights of man, of justice, the general will, or natural rights, do much to help us to understand why revolutionaries, terrified of conspiracy, turned on one another.
We wish, from the outset, to steer clear of historiographical visions that are more related to ideological
