Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror (September 1793 – July 1794) was the period of the French Revolution during which the Committee of Public Safety, led effectively by Robespierre, executed approximately 17,000 people by guillotine and imprisoned 300,000 more in the name of defending the Revolution, representing both the logical endpoint of Robespierre's conviction that virtue required the elimination of vice, and the template for every subsequent revolutionary terror: the moment when a movement to liberate the people becomes a machine for eliminating enemies of the people.
The Terror had a specific political origin: France in 1793 was losing the war against the European coalition, counter-revolutionary revolts were spreading in the Vendée (where peasants resisted conscription and defended Catholicism against the Revolution's dechristianization campaign), and federalist revolts in Lyon, Bordeaux, and Marseille threatened to fragment the Republic. The Committee of Public Safety, created as an emergency executive, responded with total mobilization and the systematic elimination of internal enemies.
Robespierre's contribution was ideological: the concept of the enemy of the people. In his speech on Revolutionary Government (December 1793), he argued that the Terror was not arbitrary violence but the application of virtue, that the Republic could survive only if it was composed of virtuous citizens, that the function of revolutionary government was to accelerate this purification, and that those who obstructed the Revolution were not political opponents but moral traitors who deserved death. This argument, that political violence is a moral act of purification, not a pragmatic act of suppression, is the ideological innovation that makes Robespierre the ancestor of every 20th-century revolutionary terror.
The mechanism: the Law of Suspects (September 1793) made it a crime to behave in a manner inconsistent with revolutionary civic virtue, so broad a definition that almost anyone could be accused. The Revolutionary Tribunal became a conviction machine: in the six weeks before Thermidor (when Robespierre was overthrown), it convicted and executed 1,376 people. The Terror ended not because France became more humane but because the Revolutionary leadership, fearing they were next, preemptively arrested and guillotined Robespierre on 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794).
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What was the Reign of Terror? ＋
The period (September 1793 – July 1794) when Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety executed ~17,000 by guillotine and imprisoned 300,000 in the name of defending the Revolution. Robespierre's ideology: political violence is moral purification, not mere suppression, enemies of the Revolution are moral traitors who deserve death. Ended when the Revolutionary leadership, fearing they were next, arrested and guillotined Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).