Episode 28: Terror is the Order of the Day

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

With Robespierre as president, in 1793 the primary concern of the Sans-culottes (see French Revolution: Foreign Invasion Triggers Insurrection and Abolition of the Monarchy) who dominated France’s National Convention was grain-hoarding counterrevolutionaries who were driving up the price of grain. The solution they found  was to enact repressive laws resulting in a chaotic ten-month period which came to be  known as “The Reign of Terror.”

• In April 1793, the Convention suspended democratic politics in the authority of a war cabinet known as the Committee of Public Safety. They went on to grant the Committee power to arrest, try and execute so-called traitors and enemies of “the Revolution.”
• In September 1793, the Committee passed the Law of Suspects, requiring every commune in France to set up a surveillance committee to identify and arrest subjects.
• In October 1793, the Convention suspended the constitution (for the duration of the war), granted the Committee the authority to oversee the French army, supervise the economy (it would set price controls on 39 commodities) mobilize manpower and supplies for the army and appoint national agents to influence provincial politics.

Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Public Safety Committee (and for many months at its helm) served as the public face of the decision to save the Revolution by terrorizing the French population.

Over the next ten months, he oversaw

• the execution of 300 Marseilles citizens after French troops crushed the rebellion there.
• the trial and execution of Marie Antoinette.
• the trial and execution of 22 Girondins (revolutionaries who supported a constitutional monarchy)

Most of the terror victims were in the provinces. At the end of ten months, 16.594 total had been guillotined, 2600 of them Parisians.

31 departments had fewer than 10 executions, 10 had none at all.

The Committee of Public Safety made an example of rebellious Federalists in Lyons, putting 1900 to death (some by guillotine and some by cannon).

The worst was in Nantes, where 2000 prisoners from the Vendée uprising were drowned in the Loire River.*

*The official responsible was eventually guillotined himself for cruelty.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/149323/149377