#onthisday: 28th July 1794

Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined

Hi all, and welcome back to rumblewrites. Hot on heels of my #onthisday post a couple of weeks ago comes another deep-dive into the French Revolution. This time, we’re talking about Maximilien Robespierre, for today marks the date his ‘Reign of Terror’ ended.

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How did we get here?

Let’s start this story with the September Massacres of 1792. The relationship between people and king had been deteriorating in the weeks prior, and there were ever-growing fears about anti-revolutionaries. This came to a head following rumours that Prussia had invaded France, with the help of a certain group of priests. The traditional structure and power of the clergy had been dismantled with the advent of revolution, and priests were now required to sign an oath of loyalty to the French state. This created a huge split in the church between those who were willing to sign, and those who viewed it as heretical against the Pope.

Of course, this did not help their case against being counter-revolutionaries. So, on 2nd September 1792, 19 priests were the first to be killed in what became known as the September Massacres. Despite being sentenced to prison, they were murdered en route, and it is this kind of popular violence which marked the months that followed. Violence and protest spread throughout Paris, then to the rest of France, and sans-culottes in particular became the perpetrators of violence against those they deemed to be against the Revolution.

Here’s a short timeline of the events that followed:

• 20 September 1792 - victory of a volunteer army over highly trained Prussian and Austrian troops. Fueled the notion that ideology trumped organisation, and that war was essential to the victory of Revolution

• 21 September 1792 - Declaration of the First French Republic

• War of the First Coalition begins

• December 1792 - trial of King Louis XVI

  • 21 January 1793 - Louis XVI guillotined

• 1793 - defeat of French armies by Austrian forces

  • Establishment of a new emergency government: the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Robespierre

• Arrest and execution of Girodins in a series of show trials

• Federalist revolts in areas like the Vendée, Lyon, and Toulon against the centralisation of power in Paris. Also heavily tied to royalist and religious motivations

  • Led to Bertrand Barère declaring that ‘Terror is the order of the day’

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Robespierre’s Reign of Terror

Personally, I think the Terror began with the September Massacres in 1792. However, most historians place it here, at the moment it is declared. From this point, the Terror took 2 forms:

• Popular - formation of armées révolutionnaires (largely sans-culottes in Paris) to forcibly restore authority in the provinces. Suppression of the revolt in Lyon was particularly brutal, with 1800 guillotined in a “cleansing” of the city

• Legal - new revolutionary laws were put in place of conventional ones. The most important one to mention is the Law of Suspects, which essentially allowed the Committee of Public Safety to arrest and kill anyone they deemed to be a counter-revolutionary. Estimates place 500,000 in prison and 300,000 arrested at home

The ideological thread which ran throughout all this was the regenerative power of violence. There was an idea that violence was necessary to cleanse France of its past, and of its would-be oppressors, and to imbibe it with new life. The old order was destroyed: a wave of iconoclasm saw traditional symbols destroyed, a new Revolutionary Calendar introduced, and the Cult of Supreme Being, with Robespierre at its head, overthrow Christianity.

Robespierre was relentless in his quest to rid France of counter-revolutionary sentiment. He had the support of the public, control of the press, and was a master of political rhetoric. He was at the top of his game. So, what went wrong?

• After the death of Jean-Paul Marat, many of the French people found a new journalist hero in Jacques Hébert but in March 1794, Robespierre had both Hébert and his followers executed

• Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton expressed a desire to show more clemency to those in prison. Robespierre saw this as an attack on his authority and had them executed too. Danton in particular was immensely popular among the people, so his death was a severe blow for Robespierre

• This trend of wiping out his political enemies made Robespierre look unsteady, and this was seemingly corroborated by his final speeches in the Convention which were paranoid, self-indulgent… and essentially a bit of a mental breakdown

• 24 June 1794 – immense French victory at the Battle of Fleurus. The turning tides of war removed the main drive for the Terror, and people were confused as to why the number of arrests kept climbing…

Then, on 10 Thermidor Year II (28th July 1794), Robespierre, alongside 21 of his closest collaborators, were guillotined. The Terror was over.

Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, Severed head, said to be that of Robespierre (1794)

Or was it?

Well, yes, it was. But why?

The idea that the Terror ended with the death of Robespierre implies that he was the reason for it. This is certainly one interpretation, but I’d like to argue differently.

The Terror was driven by real threats: war, civil unrest, and counter-revolutionary sentiment. This led to a fear that the Revolution would be reversed, and newly given rights would be stripped away. Historian Timothy Tackett argues that political leaders like Robespierre were subject to the same fear, and it was this emotional response which drove France, collectively, to violence. It was a necessary evil: the only way to purge France of the old way, and ultimately achieve complete liberty. The Terror was hardly the project of one man.

Neither was Robespierre’s execution intended to end the Terror. He was killed because he’d become too much of a risk. He was paranoid and volatile and increasingly absent from public politics. He returned to the Convention after months of absence on 26th July 1794 with a fiery speech, in which he claimed that he had decided on the conspirators he wished to have executed next. He waved a piece of paper in the air - this list, he claimed, had names of people who were sitting in that very room. So, what else could his political rivals, and even friends, do? Fearing for their lives, they decided that Robespierre had to go.

It wasn’t until afterwards, when they were trying to figure out how to wind down the Terror, that Robespierre’s death became a useful symbol. In an effort to distance themselves from the bloodshed and tyrannical governance of the preceding months, the surviving politicians made Robespierre their scapegoat.

This representation has stuck and helps fuel the wider trend of separating the Terror from the Revolution as a whole. But we’ll dive into that debate another day.

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Recommended reading

• Andress, David, ‘Living the Revolutionary Melodrama: Robespierre's Sensibility and the Construction of Political Commitment in the French Revolution’, Representations, 114 (2011)

• The ARTFL Project, Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre

• Cobban, Alfred, ‘The Fundamental Ideas of Robespierre’, English Historical Review, 63, 246 (1948)

• Greer, Donald, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution (1966)

• Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘A Note on the French Revolution and the Language of Violence’, Daedalus, 116, 2 (1987)

• Linton, Marisa, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

• Mathiez, Albert, ‘Robespierre: L’Historie et la Legende’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 49e Année, 227 (1977)

• McPhee, Peter, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

• Menin, Marco, ‘”Who Will Write the History of Tears?” History of Ideas and History of   Emotions from Eighteenth-Century France to the Present’, History of European Ideas,  40, 4 (2014)

• Tackett, Timothy, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Harvard: Belknap Press, 2017)

  • —— ‘Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792’, The American Historical Review, 105, 3, (2000)

  • —— ‘Interpreting the Terror’, French Historical Studies 24.4 (2001)

^ Tackett is the perfect place to start on the Terror

• Weber, Caroline, Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

My post from a couple of weeks ago lists some more introductory pieces to the French Revolution - here’s a link if you missed it!

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