404 Chapter 21
ex-slave who had risen to the powerful position of
steward on a large plantation before joining the rebel-
lion. His abilities were so highly regarded that when
the Convention abolished slavery (February 1794), the
deputies offered Toussaint the rank of general to join
them; he accepted because the British and the Spanish
kept slavery.
The context of the Reign of Terror, therefore, was a
desperate fight to save the republic and the revolution.
The men of the Convention, who had executed Louis
XVI, were also fighting for their lives, and they chose
harsh measures. The revolution had already turned to-
ward authoritarianism under the Legislative Assembly.
The Convention went much further, reducing newly
won liberties to a Jacobin dictatorship. Enactment of
the constitution was postponed and severe laws
adopted. Advocacy of a monarchical restoration and
economic crimes such as hoarding were made capital
crimes, to be tried before a special Revolutionary Tri-
bunal. The freedom of the press to criticize the revolu-
tion was curtailed. A Law of Suspects expanded police
powers, allowing the arrest of anyone “who by their
conduct, their connections, their remarks, or their writ-
ings show themselves the partisans of tyranny or...
the enemies of liberty.” And a twelve- person executive
committee with ill-defined powers, called the Commit-
tee of Public Safety, was created.
The Committee of Public Safety defended the rev-
olution ferociously. In June 1793 the Convention was
purged of moderate deputies, chiefly Girondins. A
Reign of Terror, directed against spies, traitors, counter-
revolutionaries, profiteers, hoarders, and corrupt
officials had begun. Leaders of the Convention spoke
with extraordinary candor. Danton called for them to
“drink the blood of the enemies of humanity.” Louis
Saint-Just, an uncompromising twenty-six-year-old ter-
rorist, was even more chilling: “Punish not only traitors,
but even the indifferent.” Maximilien Robespierre soon
dominated the Committee of Public Safety (see docu-
ment 21.3). The puritanical provincial lawyer who had
built his career as an opponent of capital punishment
and a defender of human rights led a terror that he de-
fined as “nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice.”
The instrument of this severe justice was the guillotine,
a machine for human decapitation. The guillotine be-
came a gruesome symbol of the terror, crudely called
“the republican razor” or “the widow” (because it made
so many). It had been introduced, however, by a physi-
cian, Dr. Joseph Guillotin, as a humanitarian form of
swift execution, in contrast to the horrible tortures em-
ployed by the Old Regime such as being broken on the
wheel or drawn and quartered.
The Reign of Terror lasted for thirteen months,
from June 1793 until July 1794. During those months,DOCUMENT 21.3
Robespierre: The Revolution and Its Ideals, 1794
It is time to define clearly the goal of the Revolution and
the end which we wish to reach.... What is the goal to-
ward which we strive? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty
and equality...
We wish an order of things where all the base and
cruel passions are chained, all generous and beneficient
passions aroused by the laws... where distinctions are
born only of equality itself; where the citizen is obedient
to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the
people to justice; where the country assures the well-
being of each individual...
What kind of government can realize these wonders?
Only a democratic or republican government: these two
words are synonymous, in spite of the abuses of popular
usage....
[W]hat is the fundamental principle of democratic or
popular government...? It is virtue; I speak of the public
virtue which produced so many marvels in Greece and
Rome, and which ought to produce even more astonish-
ing ones in republican France; of that virtue which is
nothing else but love of the country and its laws....
If the force of popular government in peace is virtue,
that of popular government in revolution is both virtue and
terror;virtue, without which terror is deadly; terror, with-
out which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but
prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is then an emanation
of virtue.
Robespierre, Maximilien. “Discours et rapports a la convention” (Paris:
1965). In Wallace Adams, ed., The Western World,vol. 2. New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1970.