Michel Biard - Terror

People’s envoys, when you are back in your homes, tell your co-citizens of what is happening in Paris. Have you seen an inhabitant of this great city with a dagger in his hand, meting out vengeful injustice or crying out for anarchy? But this is the picture that was painted to you, just so you would not meet the true Parisians: this amazing city, cradle of liberty, will always be a terror to evildoers. 50

Two days after the holiday, an orator spoke in the name of the envoys of the primary assemblies to call for a mass citizen uprising and the arrest of counter-revolutionaries. Some members of the Convention, among them the Montagnards, Georges Danton and Robespierre, took up these proposals, seizing on the word ‘terror’ and linking it to justice. Danton even spoke of a ‘terror initiative’ from these envoys; his aim was to demand an even more severe justice and above all a mass call to arms – rather than a massive and anarchic arming of the people – as a way to reinforce the Republic’s armies:

The deputies of the primary assemblies have just launched a terror initiative against internal enemies. Let us respond to their wishes. No amnesty to any traitor. The just man does not pardon the wicked. Let us point to the popular vengeance by the sword of the law against internal conspirators – but let us know how to take advantage of this memorable day. You have been told that the people must rise as one. That is undoubtedly true, but it must be done in an orderly fashion. 51

Robespierre, for his part, called for a reinforcing of the zeal of the Revolutionary Tribunal so that the guillotine would be able to strike the imaginations of not only opponents of the Revolution but even its partisans:

Let the scoundrels, by falling on the sword of the law, appease the spirits of so many innocent victims! May these great examples destroy sedition through the terror that they will inspire in all enemies of the nation. May patriots, seeing your energy, find their own, so that tyrants be defeated! 52

Once again, the ‘terror’ one suffered under had been turned into an active ‘terror’ that one was prepared to inflict on others, but this active ‘terror’ was combined with an unflinching determination that all popular revenge and violence on the streets would be outlawed in favour of the formal legal apparatus controlled and administered by the Convention. It was also a tactic for the Convention to keep the upper hand at a time when the Paris Commune could have been tempted to use the presence of these envoys from the primary assemblies to reinforce its political role or heighten its demands. 53Moreover, the two Montagnards, Robespierre and Danton, did not say anything else during the two revolutionary days, 4 and 5 September 1793 – dates long considered by historians to be the key moment for ‘terror’ being decreed ‘the order of the day’, though recent studies have shown this to be a myth. 54When, on 5 September, a delegation of Parisian sections and Jacobins claimed in front of the Convention that it was ‘time to frighten all the conspirators’, they used the state of exception the Republic found itself in to justify making ‘terror’ the order of the day: ‘So be it! Legislators, make terror the order of the day. Let us be in revolution, because the counter-revolution is hatched everywhere by our enemies.’ 55‘Being in a revolution’ is reminiscent of the adjective ‘revolutionary’ as a synonym for ‘extraordinary’, a link that was to be theorized in the following weeks. The president of the Convention responded to the delegation by noting that the creation of an armée révolutionnaire (a militia composed of sans-culottes and charged with ensuring provisions for Paris) had recently been decided by the Assembly. He added that ‘courage and justice are at the order of the day’, but avoided using the word ‘terror’, despite popular pressure. 56If several of the demands made by the demonstrators of 4 and 5 September ended up being met and decreed into law by the Convention, the Convention nonetheless resisted the pressure of the sans-culottes led by the ‘ exagérés’ (or ‘ Hébertistes ’) and never voted for any decree or law that would make ‘terror’ into the ‘order of the day’. Moreover, in the days that followed, the word ‘terror’ continued to be used to denounce the fear that counter-revolutionaries were trying to instil in the people, thus as a term for the illicit behaviour of the Revolution’s opponents.

The phrase ‘ la terreur à l’ordre du jour ’ (terror enacted as official policy, literally ‘made the order of the day’) was, for its part, used in a good number of French departments through the intermediary of members of the Convention sent in missions to these departments or to the armies. 57The dispatches of these representatives of the people sent on missions, addressed to the Assembly or its committees, contained numerous references to how ‘terror’ was made the order of the day, a clear sign of how they contributed to spreading the phrase. Dartigoeyte, for example, wrote from Tarbes on 2 October 1793: ‘My colleague citizens, terror is the order of the day in the city of Tarbes and in the department of the Hautes-Pyrénées. This is having excellent effects.’ 58Similarly Laplanche, returning from his mission to the Cher and the Loiret, related his observations to the Convention on 19 September: ‘I believed that I had to conduct myself in a revolutionary manner; I made terror the order of the day everywhere.’ 59Another deputy, Milhaud, on a mission to the army of the Rhine, wrote from Strasbourg on 16 Brumaire Year II (6 November 1793): ‘Fellow citizens, on this border, terror is the order of the day.’ 60Many more examples could be taken from the many dispatches and letters coming from the countryside to Paris or published in newspaper and journal articles. 61The phrase was most likely used for rhetorical effect and was in no case an application of a decree decided upon by the Assembly. While there was no institutionalization of the ‘order of the day’, its legitimacy, as Jacques Guilhaumou has noted, was unquestioned, even in the Assembly itself. 62

Although no formal decree implementing ‘terror’ as the order of the day exists, it may still be possible to create a chronological framework to define this period. A major problem, though, is where to set the starting date. Several possibilities include: the summer of 1792, with the creation of the first extraordinary tribunal to judge those who had fought to defend the Tuileries palace, followed by the prison massacres in September 1792 when self-appointed groups entered prisons in Paris to kill people they judged to be enemies of the Revolution; or spring 1793, with the creation of several extraordinary institutions, including the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the passing of the decree of 19 March condemning to death anyone who took up arms against the Revolution; or 17 September 1793 when the decree known as the Law of Suspects was voted in. Or should we set the date much earlier, to July 1789, and the creation by the Constituent Assembly of a new crime of lèse-nation (a political crime against the nation)? The difficulty of assigning a fixed date for the start of the Terror shows us how nebulous a term it is. Similarly, when setting out the moment when the Terror ended, historians have long claimed, in line with the view promoted by the Thermidorians, that this can be pinpointed to the date of the elimination of Robespierre and his partisans.

Yet this interpretation does not hold up. That is, if ‘terror’ is what was happening before 9 Thermidor, then, by this definition, ‘terror’ in some form continued after that date. While it is true that the great majority of detainees were let out of prison in the weeks following 9 Thermidor, the use of repressive measures against political opponents did not cease, especially against returning émigrés (that is people who had left France out of opposition to the Revolution, but who later returned) who settled in French villages occupied by foreign troops. This was the case in Valenciennes, which fell to the Austrians on 28 July 1793 and was occupied until 15 Fructidor Year II (1 September 1794). A military commission was set up in the weeks after the city was reconquered. In three months this commission ordered the execution of 68 captives, among them 37 priests and 15 nuns, who were condemned as émigrés returning to France. The criminal tribunal of Douai was less severe as it judged the fate of 188 detainees, mainly local government employees under the Austrian occupation, and condemned only a single one to death. 63These figures show continuing harshness against émigrés and dissenters.