Histoire de la Révolution française, Paris, Chamerot, 1847, vol. I, p. XI. The definite article and the capital T then reappear many times in his writings, above all in volumes VI and VII, devoted to the years 1793 and 1794, even if there is nothing systematic about their employment. In 1841, a capital letter also features in the Souvenirs de la Terreur, but only in the title of the work, which is something else (Souvenirs de la Terreur de 1788 à 1793, par M. Georges Duval; précé-dés d’une introduction historique par M. Charles Nodier, Paris, Werdet, 1841). Moreover, the author himself distinguishes between the use or non-use of capital letters, especially since he systematically underlines the term in italics: ‘Now a word about the title of my book. I entitle it Souvenirs de la Terreur, although my account begins in the year 1788. It’s my opinion that the terror began at the same time as the revolution […] up until 9 thermidor of the year 2 of the republic, Paris and the whole of France were under the yoke of the terror’ (ibid., pp. ix–x). Precedents also exist for the use of capital letters in the title of a work but not in its text (thus Des Effets de la Terreur by Benjamin Constant in the Year V, and again the capitalization does not appear clearly until the ‘printer’s notice’ that opens the edition. The title itself is composed entirely in capital letters). On the other hand, in their original editions, the first histories of the French Revolution, by Thiers (1823–1827), Mignet (1824), Buchez and Roux (1834–1838), Blanc (1847–1862) and Lamartine (1847) do not use the word with a capital T. Lamartine sometimes emphasized the word using italics, but not in a systematic way, and without using capitalization. Cabet, for his part, sometimes used it in his own account of the Revolution, but this is hardly significant, because this author multiplies his use of capitals erroneously and indiscriminately, for example to write: ‘People’, ‘Virtue’, ‘Morality’, ‘Deputy’, etc. (Etienne Cabet, Histoire populaire de la Révolution française de 1789 à 1830, Paris, Pagnerre, 1839–1840).2 2. Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution française, Paris, Furnes, Pagnerre, second edition, 1869. Louis Blanc had previously critiqued Quinet’s use of the term: ‘I would not be one of those whom Edgar Quinet’s book has deeply grieved, if the author had not distorted […] the nature of what he condemns […] if, by making the Terror a system, he had not made the most intelligent and devoted revolutionaries responsible for the fatality they had to endure and the very excesses they fought against […] No, no, whatever Mr. Quinet says, the Terror was not a system; it was, quite otherwise, an immense misfortune, born of prodigious peril’ (ibid., vol. I, pp. xvii–xviii. The italicizations are those of Louis Blanc). The work of Edgar Quinet had appeared in 1865 under the title La Révolution, Paris, Lacroix, Verboeckhoven.
3 3. The politics behind this controversy featured in a polemical study by Steven Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France, 1789–1989, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1996 (French edition, 1993).
4 4. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, London, Penguin, 1989.
5 5. For recent approaches to these debates, see the contributions by Michel Biard, Mette Harder, Carla Hesse and Ronen Steinberg, edited and introduced by Marisa Linton, to ‘Rethinking the French Revolutionary Terror’, part of the H-France Salon, ‘230 Years After: What does the French Revolution Mean Today?’, H-France Salon, vol. 11, nos 16–21 (2019), at: https://h-france.net/h-france-salon-volume-11-2019/
6 6. Timothy Tackett, Anatomie de la Terreur. Le processus révolutionnaire 1787–1793, Paris, Le Seuil, 2018 (the English-language edition appeared under the title: The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2015). As an indication of a shift in Tackett’s own thinking, this sentence does not appear in the original edition, but in a note in the foreword to the French edition (p. 379).
7 7. See Howard G. Brown, ‘The Thermidorians’ Terror: Atrocities, Tragedies, Trauma’, in David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker (eds), Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth of the Modern World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 193–235. Brown states that, ‘The “Terror” as a distinct period of the French Revolution was largely a construct of lawmakers who took the reins of government after the defeat of Robespierre and his closest allies’.
8 8. Haim Burstin, Révolutionnaires. Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française, Paris, Vendémiaire, 2013. François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution, Paris, Hachette, 1965–1966.
9 9. It was Napoleon Bonaparte, some years after the time designated as the Terror, who forcibly reinstated slavery in those colonies that remained to France. Saint-Domingue remained at liberty, though at a terrible cost in lives. The complex issue of slavery in the colonies and within France has generated a formidable historiography, including Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010; and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005. For recent thinking on the problematic nature of ‘rights’, see the contributions by Mita Choudhury, Pernille Røge and Pierre Serna, edited and introduced by Ian Coller to ‘Whose Revolution?’, part of the H-France Salon, ‘230 Years After’.
10 10. Carla Hesse, ‘Terror and the Revolutionary Tribunals’, in ‘Rethinking the French Revolutionary Terror’.
11 11. Ibid. On violence in the American Revolution, see Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, New York, Crown, 2017. See too, Annie Jourdan, La Révolution, une exception française?, Paris, Flammarion, 2006; and the contributions by Rafe Blaufarb, Paolo Conte, Anna Karla and Matthijs Lok, edited and introduced by Annie Jourdan to ‘The French Revolution Abroad’, part of the H-France Salon, ‘230 Years After’.
12 12. Henry and other founding fathers of the American Revolution were familiar with this political phrase which appeared in Joseph Addison’s play, Cato, a Tragedy, written in 1712.
Chapter 1 The Terror – a Concept Imposed by the Thermidorians
One of the first texts openly attacking the French Revolution, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, was published in 1790. This work by the Anglo-Irish author and Member of Parliament was quickly translated into French and other languages.1 For some it was seen as a prophetic vision announcing the Terror, as it denounced the violence of 1789, especially the killing of two royal guards during the revolutionary days of 5 and 6 October, when a crowd broke into the palace of Versailles, and under the threat of popular violence, the king agreed to move to Paris, to be under the watchful eyes of the populace. Burke not only uses the word ‘terror’ but also describes the Constituent Assembly as a meeting of deputies trembling before popular violence: ‘It is beyond doubt, that, under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations.’2
A very different view was taken by another British author, Thomas Paine, already known for having politically engaged several years earlier with the independence movement in the American colonies with his seminal pro-revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense. Paine strongly objected to Burke’s exaggeration of the extent of the violence of 1789, as well as his comparisons with the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the late seventeenth century, which Burke depicted in glowing, Manichean terms. Paine sharply responded to Burke in Rights of Man, a work published in early 1791 and translated into French that May. Whilst Paine also used the word ‘terror’, he saw its purpose and the reasons behind it very differently. For Paine, if the ignorant populace resorted to inflicting ‘terror’, this was the consequence of them having learned such tactics from the autocratic government under which they had lived. Paine stressed that the violence of 1789 could only be understood if viewed in relation to the
