of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practise.3
To this idea of a passive ‘terror’ (which one suffers under) ripening into an active, vengeful ‘terror’ (which is directed at one’s enemies), Paine added that governments need to be taught about the notion of humanity before asking it of ‘the people’. To prove his point, Paine recalled the punishment of Damiens, who had been convicted in 1757 of having attempted regicide against Louis XV. Damiens was subjected to extensive ritualized torture, climaxing in his being ‘drawn and quartered’; the sentence carried out as a public spectacle to terrify the populace. Paine concluded that governments make a mistake in ‘governing men by terror, instead of reason’.4 One year later, in late July 1792, just before the fall of the constitutional monarchy, Robespierre took up the link between ‘terror’ and bad government, assimilating ‘terror’ with despotism: ‘Montesquieu said that virtue was the principle of republican government, honour that of a monarchy, and terror that of despotism. We need to imagine a new principle for the new framework of things that we are in.’5 Montesquieu was again a source for Robespierre in early 1794 when he attempted to bring together ‘terror’ and ‘virtue’ in his speech on 5 February 1794 (17 Pluviôse Year II). Without virtue, terror was disastrous, but virtue was powerless without ‘terror’.6 The despotism of liberty, to take up the bold oxymoron coined by Robespierre, the union between ‘terror’ and ‘virtue’, between ‘terror’ and justice, would be linked to a state of exceptional or crisis government that was by essence transitional – the condition of France in 1793 and in the Year II – and not to a preconceived political project as the ultimate goal in itself. For Robespierre, ‘terror’ was closely linked to justice – a harsh and improvised justice for a time of crisis, but still justice. After the fall of Robespierre, the meaning of ‘terror’ would quickly evolve into something rather different, when the victorious Thermidorians started to retrospectively invent the idea of a unified ‘system’ of terror.
1. How the ‘system of terror’ and the black legend of Robespierre were retrospectively invented
On the morning of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, member of the Committee of Public Safety (the most important of the Committees of the National Convention), rose to make a speech in the Convention in which he intended to support his colleague and friend on the Committee, Maximilien Robespierre. As Saint-Just began to speak, he was interrupted by a fellow Montagnard, Jean-Lambert Tallien, who pushed his way to the rostrum, supported by a concerted group of revolutionaries, many of them also Montagnards, to denounce Robespierre. Tumult ensued. Over several hours accusations spiralled, culminating with the arrest of five deputies: Robespierre, his younger brother, Augustin, Saint-Just, Georges Couthon (also on the Committee of Public Safety), and Philippe Le Bas, of the Committee of General Security. Both Augustin Robespierre and Le Bas had actually asked to be arrested, rather than become party to arresting the others. By nightfall of the following day, 10 Thermidor, all five were dead. This moment, the Thermidorian moment, marked the onset of a sea-change in revolutionary politics, whereby the immediate past would be rewritten and reinvented, in order to blacken the reputations of Robespierre, Saint-Just and their adherents as having been personally responsible for creating a ‘system of terror’, whilst exculpating many surviving revolutionaries, who had been equally involved in revolutionary government and the recourse to ‘terror’ policies, but who had chosen the winning side in the conflict of Thermidor.
Bertrand Barère, who had been a close colleague of Robespierre and Saint-Just on the Committee of Public Safety, took an early lead in the frantic rush to distance himself from the fallen deputies. In his speech on 14 Thermidor, Barère separated ‘terror’ from ‘justice’, two terms that Robespierre had often tied together. Arguing that ‘terror was always the arm of despotism [whereas] justice was the weapon of liberty’, he urged the Convention to ‘substitute inflexible justice for terror’.7 Barère knew very well – none better – how the repressive legislation against the opponents of the Revolution, real or imagined, had been conceived and implemented, for he had been at the heart of it. Now, in a remarkable political volte-face, Barère removed any responsibility from the Convention, in particular from members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security (the Committee of General Security had responsibility for policing, security and prisons). Barère denounced the ‘usurpation of national authority’ that Robespierre and his followers had committed when they had imposed decrees in response to ‘circumstances forced and prepared by themselves’.8
Less than three weeks later, on 2 Fructidor (9 August), an exchange between three other Montagnard deputies illustrated the divide within the Convention. Louchet, the Montagnard deputy who had been the first to demand the vote authorizing the arrest order against Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, now took to the floor to defend policies of terror. He underlined the seriousness of the dangers threatening the Republic and the need to combat them, stating that he was ‘convinced that there is no other way to do so than to maintain terror as the order of the day everywhere’.9 With the hall resounding with cries of ‘justice, justice!’, Louchet clarified his position by associating the two words: ‘I understand by the word “terror” the most severe justice’. This position was immediately supported by Charlier: ‘Justice for patriots, terror for aristocrats’.10 A third Montagnard, Tallien, who had led the attack on Robespierre and his fellow Montagnard deputies, Saint-Just, Couthon, Le Bas and Augustin Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, defined ‘terror’ as a weapon of tyranny, even while supporting the idea that justice must remain severe against ‘the enemies of the nation’. According to Tallien: ‘Robespierre too constantly repeated that terror needed to be made the order of the day, and while with such language he imprisoned patriots and led them to the scaffold, he protected the rascals that served him’.11 This was another political sleight-of-hand. In Robespierre’s speeches and writings he had always linked the terms ‘terror’, ‘justice’ and ‘virtue’; whilst the expression ‘terreur à l’ordre du jour’ (‘terror made the order of the day’) was not his doing. Robespierre had mentioned these two words together only four times. In the summer of 1794, he used them to refer not to the repressive measures put in place by the Convention and its committees but to a ‘system of terror and slander’ targeted towards him, depicting him as a dictator, and attempting to destroy the revolutionary government.12 It was Tallien, rather than Robespierre, who would develop the political concept of the ‘system of terror’ just a few days later.
It was on 11 Fructidor (28 August), that Tallien elaborated the concept of a ‘system of terror’. While he was not the first to use the term, previously deputies had mentioned it almost in passing, and directing it at different political rivals.13 In his momentous speech Tallien developed and defined a new theory of a ‘system of terror’. In speaking of this system, he coined a new term, one which would haunt our modern world: that of ‘terrorism’. He also called it a ‘government of terror’ and a ‘terror agency’. He took great pains to exclude the new – post-Robespierre – revolutionary government of which he was himself a member (he had been rewarded for his part in the fall of Robespierre by a seat on the Committee of Public Safety) from this supposed system. Thus he could better denounce terror as an illegitimate system of the immediate past, whilst safeguarding the legitimacy of the current revolutionary government, which was to serve the Thermidorians’ new political agenda. In defining the ‘system of terror’ he gave a vivid picture of the feelings of fear it engendered: terror took place in the mind’s imagination, as well as in reality:
There are two ways that a government can make itself feared: it can police bad actions, threaten and punish them with proportionate punishment, or it can threaten people, threaten them at all times and for all things, threaten them with whatever the imagination can conceive as most cruel. The impressions that these two methods produce are different: one is a potential fear, the other a ceaseless torment;
