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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 polemics than to historical research. For that reason, rather than begin our study with a hypothetical date that would mark the supposed beginnings of Terror, or with a wide-ranging and possibly nebulous account of its much-debated origins, we will start at a moment that is so often said to have ‘ended’ the Terror, but which, we will contend, saw the beginning of its invention as a unifying concept. That moment came immediately after the overthrow and execution without trial of the revolutionary leader, Maximilien Robespierre and many of his adherents over four days from 27 to 30 July 1794. This was the so-called ‘Thermidorian’ moment, named after Thermidor, the month in the revolutionary calendar in which it took place.

The men who joined forces to kill Robespierre would become known as the ‘Thermidorians’. They were, like him, members of the National Convention, the parliamentary body that had been responsible for the laws that enabled terror. Many of these men, like Robespierre himself, were Montagnards, that is, members of the Jacobin Club who sat in the Convention. Thus, they themselves had been, over many months, at the heart of a wider group (including many non-Montagnards), which had worked together to promote revolutionary policies, including those that enabled terror. They too, therefore, shared in collective responsibility for the violence and threats of violence of the previous months.

Through the ensuing weeks from late July to mid-September, the men who had killed Robespierre, began to systematically spread a vengeful prose intended to cast opprobrium on the ‘monster’ who had been slaughtered, but also to collectively exonerate the National Convention of its responsibility in the legislation that made it possible to crack down on its adversaries. They then created from scratch the idea of a ‘system’ or a ‘coherent policy’ that would have triggered and then implemented the ‘terror’, the whole blame resting posthumously on Robespierre and his supporters, an episode that was said to have been closed by his elimination in Thermidor. Ironically, many people in regions away from Paris, areas of civil war, federalist revolts, and the frontiers, were barely aware of terror, and learned about it retrospectively from Thermidorian texts, images, pamphlets and prison memoirs which informed them that they had been subjected to a ‘Reign of Terror’ led by Robespierre and his allies.⁷ Not content with self-amnesty, the ‘Thermidorians’ claimed that the ‘terror’ had ended, even as they continued to use the machinery of the extraordinary government that had been gradually put in place during 1793 and given the title of ‘revolutionary government’, encompassing the use of repressive methods and state violence.

This thesis of an end to the Terror in the aftermath of 9 and 10 Thermidor was to impose itself durably in historiography, both by minimizing the violence that continued to take place during the remainder of the existence of the Convention until October 1795 (before separating, the deputies voted themselves an amnesty for the actions in which they had taken part) and the succeeding regime, that of the Directory. By positing a neat and convenient date for the ‘end to the Terror’, this thesis had the effect of pushing historians to look for one or more dates likely to mark the ‘beginning of the Terror’, rather than to try to detect terror’s deeper, more problematic roots.

The most common date chosen by historians for the start of a system of terror is in September 1793, when it has often been stated that the Convention decreed that ‘terror’ should become an official policy (made ‘order of the day’). In fact, no such decree was passed, either then or at any other date. Should we then look for the beginnings of this ‘terror’ in legislation passed in response to the military crisis of spring 1793; or a little earlier, in January of that year with the execution of the king; or earlier still, in August 1792 with the overthrow of the monarchy; or even earlier in the Revolution, in line with Schama’s pronouncement that terror was already in place with the Rights of Man in 1789? In our judgement, trying to establish a birth date for ‘terror’ is a vain approach: ‘terror’ cannot be explained or understood as a chronological sequence limited by a beginning and an end. As Haim Burstin has pointed out, to persist in proposing a birth date of the Terror (‘one of the favourite exercises of historians’, he wrote) is to go down the wrong path in seeking to discover a kind of ‘original sin of the Revolution’, or even the moment when it ‘slipped’, to use the verb formerly proposed by revisionist historians, François Furet and Denis Richet.⁸

In order to grasp what terror really meant for the revolutionary generation, it is advisable not to limit our enquiries to its violent aspects alone, but to understand terror in a bigger context of crisis, and, even more, we need to situate the contemporary meaning of terror in the context of a political exception, the same one that brought about the revolutionary government in the autumn of 1793 and which developed out of its beginnings the previous spring. The growing weight of fears and emotions, the progressive aggravation of the confrontations and the parallel radicalization of repressive legislation, the accentuation of political struggles within the Convention, all of these factors contributed to the step-by-step development and maintenance of ‘terror’. Linked to exceptional institutions set up alongside the constitutional machinery of power, the phenomenon naturally had its own rhythms and logics, geography and balance sheets, all of which contribute to illustrating the impossibility of speaking of a ‘system’ that uniformly extended its hold over the entire national territory.

‘Terror’ is a watchword that has circulated exhaustively, a political concept that has been the object of much discourse and theoretical justification, a process, but also and above all, a phenomenon that has permeated both our understanding of the Revolution and of its revolutionaries. By covering the chronological period of the Revolution in an all-encompassing blanket on which is written ‘this was the time of the Terror’, anything that cannot be designated under that heading is obscured. Whether intentional or not, this can be misleading. We should not lose sight of the extent to which revolutionaries remained committed to liberty, equality and the rights of man, even during the crisis years of 1793 to 1794. The demons of terror should not blind us to this fact. To take just one example, it was revolutionary France that, before Britain and long before America, in February 1794, at the height of the chronological period traditionally designated as the Terror, decreed the freedom of all slaves in the French colonies. While this decree followed on from the slave uprising in the colony of Saint-Domingue (later the Republic of Haiti), and the question of rights for all remained deeply problematic in France, we need to acknowledge the achievements of the revolutionaries in all their complexity.⁹

We should also be aware that part of the reason why our minds picture the guillotine and the Revolutionary Tribunal as so powerful and so indelibly redolent of terror – literally terrifying – is that French revolutionaries made it that way. If we still, in the present day, think of the French Revolution as synonymous with the theatre of the guillotine, this is due in large part to the symbolism, rhetoric and imagery deployed by the revolutionaries as a deliberate strategy, presenting themselves as striking back hard at the Republic’s many enemies through this spectacular form of revolutionary justice. In this sense, the revolutionary terror was, as Carla Hesse concludes, ‘a weapon of the weak’.¹⁰

Finally, there is the problem that to label what happened in France as the Terror, encourages the misleading supposition that somehow ‘terror’ was specifically and uniquely French, attributable to some endemic characteristic of the French situation or political theory. If we state that only France in the late eighteenth century had the Terror, how then do we designate the violence of the American Revolution, or the brutal repression by English forces of the revolt in Ireland in 1798? To quote Hesse again: ‘The French Revolution was, it is now clear, quantitatively, a no more – and probably a significantly less – violent affair than its sister revolution across the Atlantic’.¹¹ The American and French Revolutions shared much common ancestry, though they developed in different ways. ‘Liberty or death’ was a rallying cry for both. It was a phrase that owed much to ideas about love of liberty and devotion to political virtue, drawn and adapted from the common culture of classical antiquity. Its literal meaning, in the words of the American revolutionary, Patrick Henry in 1775, was ‘give me liberty or give me death’.¹² For many of the French revolutionaries this would be their fate. They sought liberty, but ultimately the demons of terror brought death. This book is an attempt to explain how that happened.