Why 17,000 Were Executed During the Reign of Terror

 July 28, 1794. At around 2 a.m. men storm into the Hôtelde Ville in Paris, France. Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, along with some of his most ardent followers, is arrested. As to what happens next has been a matter of debate, but an injured Robespierre is dragged out of the hotel. He and the rest of his followers are summarily found guilty and subsequently whisked off to the Place de la Revolutions'. 

As he’s brought up to the scaffold, his face a swollen mess, mobs in the street scream out their hatred for him. When the guillotine blade falls down on his neck those crowds cry out in jubilation, and they don’t stop cheering for almost a quarter of an hour. Had you been able to fast-forward in time from 1793 and watch this scene you would have rightly felt perplexed. 

This man who lost his head was hailed as the King of the French Revolution. He was called “The Incorruptible”, a selfless an that had fought for a people who’d been oppressed for centuries by the wicked tyranny of the rich and powerful. So, what had gone wrong? Well, the Reign Of Terror happened, a year of chaos in which blood spilled all over France. 

Why 17,000 Were Executed During the Reign of Terror

 In his moving speeches Robespierre called for virtue, but that, he admitted, came at a cost. Not everyone saw eye-to-eye with Robespierre. He and his allies accused many people of not adhering to the revolutionary vision, and a zero-tolerance policy was taken towards them. Many who were slaughtered during this reign of terror were innocent, which is why the great orator of the revolution was finally cut down himself. 

But let’s go back to the start, when the terror was just fomenting. The terror itself was something called the Committee of Public Safety, which was a provisional government formed around four years after the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, when the French Revolution got off its feet. In the years that followed, governing France was a complicated matter. 

The country was beset by war with other countries and internally there was so much strife Civil War was on the cards. So, in 1793, the Committee of Public Safety was set up and Robespierre soon became head. The committee promised to protect France from its many foreign enemies. It also said that any internal dissent would quickly be quashed. T

he committee had no qualms about admitting that to dissuade people from criticizing or going against their revolutionary ideals, folks would have to die. This message was explicit, not implicit. It’s a complex story, but you need to know that Robespierre and his allies supported a centralized republican state, something aligned with a movement called Jacobinism. 

The thing was, the Jacobin philosophy was if you’re not with us, you’re against the revolution and a threat to the “virtue” they wanted to install. There was little or no room for criticism, so left-wing politics and a progressive outlook became a kind of dictatorship. The committee told the people in no uncertain terms that it would rule by terror. 

That might sound strange to you viewers right now since the word has so many negative connotations, but for those Jacobins on the committee, if you wanted to make an omelet, a country where virtue flourished, a few bad eggs had to be broken. Robespierre didn’t just see bad eggs in the streets machinating against his revolutionary ideals, but he feared his own military commanders might defect. In time, he would also see bad eggs in his own government. Ok, so that sets the scene. 

There was lots of paranoia and a lot of disgruntled people in France, some of whom had little to eat. That didn’t bode well for harmony and solidarity. The beginning of the terror in France was arguably when the “Law of Suspects” came into effect. This would weed out “the enemies of there volution”, many of whom would take their last breath as the blade of the guillotine fell down on their neck. 

The members of the public who stood and listened to Robespierre talk about the enemies of the revolution were now encouraged to do a bit of weeding out themselves, so at times men and women were beaten to death in the streets by mobs.  Not only that, people snitched on others to get them out of the way. 

Why 17,000 Were Executed During the Reign of Terror

Meanwhile, Surveillance Committees were created to keep tabs on anyone who could be deemed a traitor. As happened later in totalitarian governments that popped up around the world, the public was also asked to carry around a card that certified they were not traitors or wrongdoers in the eyes of the revolution. This was called, the “Certificate of Civism.” Not having one on your person could lead to trouble. 

Ironically, the law decreed that anyone who had been found out as an “enemy of freedom” could be arrested and summarily executed, even if they were only critical of the revolutionary cause. Many others were killed because they were deemed to be nobles who had not committed enough time to support the revolution. It’s anyone’s guess just how many people were arrested under this law, but the number given by some scholars is 500,000. 

While the number of official executions was close to 17,000, that doesn’t count how many people were just killed in the street by the authorities or by mobs. Then there were those who perished in the prisons where food was scarce and disease was rife. The number of prisoners who died while incarcerated has been put at 10,000. 

As for demographics, it’s said 8 percent who died were aristocrats, 14 percent were middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants. A further 6 percent were clergy. The church was not welcome, which led to thousands of priests being exiled and hundreds executed. We now call this religious purge, dechristianization. 

The church itself had a long history of violence and corruption, so it had to go. It’s hard to imagine what times were like back then, but one thing for sure is you had to watch what you said. A loose word while drinking a beer in a tavern could mean someone listening at the other side of the tavern reporting you. Of course, people reported folks they just didn’t care for very much. 

This would often land the alleged transgress Orin one of those filthy prisons, and in terms of criminal justice, they didn’t have aleg to stand on. When the “loi de la Grande Terreur”, “the law of the Great Terror” was written up it stated that political crimes were much worse than common crimes that happened in households and in the streets. 

Why 17,000 Were Executed During the Reign of Terror

It focused on arresting people accused of“ slandering patriotism”, “seeking to inspire discouragement”, “spreading false news” and “depraving morals.” It was kind of like social media platforms’ terms of service rules now, except it was often one strike and you're dead. The law stated, “Every citizen is empowered to seize conspirators and counterrevolutionaries, and to bring them before the magistrates.” So, if someone accused a person of one of those crimes, that person would then be taken to stand in front of something called the Revolutionary Tribunal. 

Obviously, the person could deny what they’d said, but if the tribunal didn’t believe them, it was either off with their head, or an acquittal, and nothing in between. The accused were provided with no defense. No witnesses were allowed to come forward and support the accused. They could be killed for merely being accused of harboring a perceived thought. 

To understand this next bit of information, you need to know the revolutionaries created their own calendar, which was called the French Revolutionary calendar. At the start of Spring in the month named Germinal, 155 people were executed and 59 were acquitted after being accused of breaching the terror law. In the next month, Floréal, 354 people lost their heads and 159 were acquitted. 

In the month of Prairial, 509 were executed and 164 were acquitted. 796 people were executed in the month of Messidorand 208 were acquitted.Thousands more were waiting in prisons for a trial that wouldn’t ever come. We think you get the picture. As scholars have pointed out, these people could have been the washerwomen who lived down the lane. 

They could have been the butcher, the guy that delivered bread, or the person who once mentioned in passing to a guy in the street that he thought all the summary executions were perhaps just a smidgen on the harsh side. And to think some of these people on the committee were just young men, men whose brains if you believe neuroscientists hadn’t even fully developed. 

Take the case of Jean-Marie Collot d' Herbois, a man in his early twenties who was a member of the Committee of Public Safety and a person who played a big part in all the terror. He, with others, was sent to the city of Lyon to deal with a revolt there where moderates, but still republicans, didn’t agree with the government in Paris. 

Why 17,000 Were Executed During the Reign of Terror

“Lyon made war on liberty: Lyon is no more!” cried invading French Republican forces after they had laid waste to their enemies and destroyed homes and buildings. The orders had been given to “exterminate all that goes by the name of aristocrat, moderate, royalist.” After the victory, the “Extraordinary Commission” was set up to decide the fate of anyone in Lyon who was considered counter-revolutionary. 

At first, 100 rebels were shot in the streets and a further 79 people went to the guillotine. Later, accused rebels and moderates were forced together in a mass and fired on with cannons. Almost 300 died this way, although the grapeshot used by the cannons didn’t kill a lot of the people. The troops were then ordered to go in ands tab them all to death with their bayonets. This was so distressing that many of the soldiers refused to do it. Regular executions ensued. 

This was rightly called a massacre by some. Most of those people who were killed were not hardcore rebels, but commoners who worked in Lyon. They played no part in politics but were rightly upset over low wages and Paris’ reluctance to make things better. Others were merchants, some were priests. One guy was a surgeon. In all, 2,000 people in Lyon were executed. 

This was not the way to get people on your side, and much of France now was beginning to wonder if these guys running things in Paris, especially Robespierre, were possibly out of control. Robespierre understood such bloodshed might tarnish his name, but oh boy, was he convincing when he made his speeches. Still, in some darkened corridors men and women talked in hushed tones about a man that had once fought against tyranny but had now become a tyrant himself. 

One of those people was the revolutionary Jacques-Alexis Thuriot. He saw what Robespierre had become, daring to say while Robespierre was talking at a convention, “Look at the bugger; it’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.” Thuriot soon resigned from the committee, even though he’d been a hardcore radical in the past, calling even Robespierre too moderate.

He was a friend and supporter of Georges Danton, an important figure in the French Revolution. Danton became part of the Committee of Public Safety, but when it seemed to him that progressive politics had been replaced by brute oppression, he dared to say that perhaps rule by terror was not the order of the day. He wanted to see an end to the bloodshed. 

He wanted to end the widespread famine. He was even brazen enough to ask for peace with foreign powers, which was certainly not what the National Convention had in mind. Robespierre saw Danton as a threat, and so without further ado, he set a plan in action to accuse him of various corruptions. This was a pretext to take him out, and supporters of Danton knew it, but no one dared speak up, knowing what would befall them. 

The night before Danton was executed, he said,“ It was just a year ago that I was the means of instituting the Revolutionary Tribunal; may God and man forgive me for what I did then; but it was not that it might become the scourge of humanity.” On the day he and 14 other alleged conspirators were led to the guillotine, he said something else, something that would become true, “Nota man of them has an idea of government. 

Robespierre will follow me. ” He meant to scaffold, of course. After Robespierre was arrested, when his mouth was filled with blood, it’s alleged someone shouted, “The blood of Danton chokes him!He replied with a broken tooth: “Are you sorry for Danton? ... Cowards! Why didn't you defend him?” It was more than Danton. 

It was a year of blood being spilled and often the accused were no more than the victims of paranoia. Camille Desmoulins had defended Danton and he had also criticized his old friend Robespierre for the mass executions of the public, as well as the hundreds who were in prison and no doubt innocent of any crime. He spoke his mind in a journal he published called Le Vieux Cordelier. He wrote, “My dear Robespierre, my old schoolfriend. 

Remember the lessons of history and philosophy: love is stronger, more lasting than fear...The Committee of Public Safety can elevate themselves to the sky; they can never reach it through paths of blood.” This was a dangerous thing to do, and Robespierre was told that by his more obsequious allies. Don’t worry he told them, Desmoulins is just “an unthinking child who has fallen into bad company.” He then ordered the journal to be publicly burned. 

He also doubled down on his terror campaign. He wrote that anyone not in support of it was a conspirator and their fate must be death and only death. He then wrote the “Report on the Principles of Political Morality” defending his reasoning. Part of it reads like this: “If the wellspring of the people's government in peacetime is virtue, the wellspring of the people's government in revolution is both virtue and terror. 

Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but justice: fast, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue, a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.” Then came the executions of people that had once been on his side. 

He did try at least to protect his old school buddy, Desmoulins, who died on the same day as Danton. Desmoulins’ wife was also later executed for conspiring to free her husband and “ruin the Republic.” Before his death, Desmoulins wrote, “I have dreamed of a Republic such as all the world would have adored. I never believed that men could be so vicious and unfair.” 

Why 17,000 Were Executed During the Reign of Terror

He apparently had to be restrained by a group of men after being told on the scaffold that his wife was soon going to meet the same fate. She did. A man named Jacques Hébert was among others that lost his head. He’d been outspoken about food shortages among the poorest of the poor, and after calling for an uprising, he and 17 of his followers went to the scaffold. 

These executions we just mentioned were the final straw for some, although Robespierre was unequivocal when he said there needed to be even more purges if his plan to bring virtue to France was to come to fruition. In his final speech he began, “THE ENEMIES of the Republic call me tyrant!” He went on in a quite moving oration to explain how he wasn’t the enemy, but the conspirators were. 

He said, “The good and the bad disappear a like from the earth; but in very different conditions. Oh Frenchmen! Oh my countrymen! Don't let your enemies, with their destructive doctrines, debase your souls, and weaken your virtues!“ While the crowd shouted displeasure at this speech,‘ la guillotine ’for the men Robespierre spoke to, those same men were destined to remove the speaking master. 

The next day was the historical Coup d'étatof 9 Thermidor. Those men, who surely would have been executed themselves, managed to convince the Convention to arrest Robespierre. He and his allies were rounded up, 21 of the min all with an average age of 34. 

Like those that had gone to the guillotine before them, they received no trial. The Reign of Terror was well and truly over, but the violence didn’t stop. After all, there were still living people who’d supported Robespierre and his terror tactics. Now they had to go, and in time many were butchered for what they had believed in. 

On top of that, the harvest of 1795 wasn’t a good one, and yet again, people starved. This led to uprisings against the convention and people taking their anger out on other members of the public. To steal what a famous writer once said about the worst times of the revolution, it was the season of darkness in France, one very long winter of despair. But on the upside, new ideas settled on the world, ideas centered around those two precious things we call liberty and freedom. 

Now you need to hear more about totalitarian rule in, “Terrifying Story Of Joseph Stalin's Rise to Power.” Or, have a look at this despot, “Why Mao Zedong Was The Most Brutal Tyrant.”