That is why, in Engels’ view, he was justified in having them summarily killed. Neither is it surprising that Wahnick’s notion of collective responsibility is of a piece with her antihumanist sentiment that defines the human condition as limited to the possession of civic and political virtue. Of course, my defense of this particular tactic does not address the more general and important question of the substitutionism of the Cuban revolutionary leadership before and after it took power in 1959. Likewise, the shades help us understand the Reign of Terror (or simply the Terror, as the French call it) and the role … Marat may have been killed, but many French citizens were still forwarding his ideas, chiefly that only the extreme use of the guillotine against traitors, suspects, and counter-revolutionaries would solve the country's problems. In the early days of the revolution, many people still sided with the monarchy which brought on accusations of treason against the new republic. The chief target of the Terror was the counterrevolution, which referred to a series of distinct movements that sought to resist the revolutionary government's authority within France. In Paris a wave of executions followed. Similar issues arose during the Red Terror in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Accounts of terrorism, which locate the emergence of the concept in the French Revolution, tend to accept two premises. These were normally recruited from the local area they were to operate in and were usually comprised of artisans from the cities. This alternative term emphasizes the notion of what is necessary, that is, it emphasizes the politics of the proportionate and rational response to threats and acts of aggression instead of the callousness that sometimes smuggles itself into the defense of revolutionary violence. In Toulon, which was recaptured on December 17th thanks to one Captain Bonaparte and his artillery, 800 were shot and nearly 300 guillotined. This film combines drama, archive and documentary interviews to examine Robespierre's year in charge of the Committee Of Public Safety - the powerful state machine at the heart of Revolutionary France. The serious economic difficulties, the threat of foreign invasions and the social structure of the French government are some of the causes that led to the fall of the monarchy in August 1792. The legitimacy of their particular kind of violence must be questioned in light of the sectarian violence and atrocities they have perpetrated against women, gays, and “nonbelievers,” aside from the oppressive regimes they have forced on the people of the lands they have occupied. Unfortunately, however, his foreword does little to clarify and actually muddies up the issues at hand.10 He claims, for example, that “for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it is always a matter of strategic consideration to use violence against the enemy or not)” (XXI). While many of the Federalist revolts were collapsing under both local pressures—food shortages, fear of reprisals, reluctant to march far—and the actions of Convention Deputies sent on mission, on August 27th, 1793 Toulon accepted an offer of protection from a British fleet which had been sailing offshore, declaring themselves in favor of the infant Louis VII and welcoming the British to port. T he words "terrorism" and "terrorists" were coined in the wake of the French revolution to describe the "men of blood" who established and exercised the mechanisms of fearsome repression – … Since the 1990s, and especially after September 2001, terrorism has replaced Communism as a major world political media headline. By the spring and summer of 1794, Robespierre, who had argued against dechristianization, had tried to save Marie Antoinette from the guillotine and who had vacillated over the future began to form a vision of how the republic should be run. The ideas of Enlightenment thinkers were used in good and bad parts of the Revolution, but there is no doubt that the enlightenment had an influence in the period of the Terror. The Convention agreed, and in addition voted to finally organize the revolutionary armies people had agitated for over previous months to march against the hoarders and unpatriotic members of the countryside, although they turned down Chaumette’s request for the armies to be accompanied by guillotines on wheels for even swifter justice. Parisian jails soon filled with suspects and the process was speeded up to cope, partly by scrapping witnesses and defense. Dechristianization was reversed as Robespierre, still convinced that faith was important, introduced the Cult of the Supreme Being on May 7th, 1794. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/french-revolution-the-terror-1793-94-1221883. On October 7th, in Rheims, the sacred oil of Clovis which was used to anoint French kings was smashed. This stands against the notion that being human is in itself a unique attribute with a vital sentient, moral, and rational content and potentially independent of any specific political views or behavior. Cited by Hal Draper in Ibid., 362 (Marx’s emphasis). The Committee of Public Safety's counter-offensive took the terror deep into the heart of the Vendée. Parisians were worried that Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, was only one of the thousands of provincial rebels operating in the capital ready to strike down the leaders of the revolution in droves. However, people are unaware of where the foundations of modern terrorism lie. They had typically been carried out with various goals in mind, such as helping to create a sense of instability and unrest, to demonstrate that the government was vulnerable, and were generally placed in locations where civilians were unlikely to be harmed. This expanded definition of terrorism has ignored a more frequent and consequential form of terrorism: state terrorism. It is a danger that has grown exponentially over the past few years. It is argued that study of the shades enables us to see the French Revolution in a new light. LIberty or Death in the French Revolution, Anthony Arnove, Dave Zirin and Howard Zinn, John Bellamy Foster and Lance Newman review. The Committee was now the supreme executive and nobody further down the chain was supposed to alter the decrees in any way, including the deputies on a mission who became increasingly sidelined as local district and commune bodies took over the job of applying the law. He spoke out and even got the Convention to restate their commitment to religious freedom, but it was too late. Since David Fernbach is an excellent translator and Marxist scholar in his own right, I can only assume that he did the best he could with a text that was probably even worse in the original French. Once the revolution was in full force, a period of great instability occurred. This is why Hal Draper, in his discussion of the Terror of 1793, introduced the distinction between the “Terror” proper and ‘the final degeneration of the Terror into a bloody caricature of itself.”9. These were the 'noyades' and they killed at least 1800 people. Wilde, Robert. Similar considerations apply to other methods of state repression such as torture, as in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where the US government, under the legal claim that armed Islamic militants do not belong to “regular” constituted armies and are thus not entitled to the protection of international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war, felt free to torture prisoners.12 It is not only that systematic torture “doesn’t work” in terms of producing reliable information as both liberals and conservatives have argued, probably correctly, but that these methods, like nuclear weapons, are not neutral and cannot be used by progressive and revolutionary forces. The same could apply, under certain circumstances, to other individual acts of violence involving, for example, the assassination of despots and dictators. He is the author of the History in an Afternoon textbook series. Furthermore, the only punishment it could give out was death. On September 4th, 1793, a demonstration for more wages and bread was quickly turned to the advantage of those calling for terror, and they returned on the 5th to march to the Convention. Explanation: King Louis XVI faced these three serious problems in the 1780s: It must be noted, however, that Robespierre’s Terror was a different phenomenon, and involved very different considerations than those included in the peasant war in Germany. The term “Terror,” means the terrorism carried out by a revolutionary state, and hails back to the French Revolution; it emerged as an ideologically laden term used in the conservative backlash to that revolution during the Thermidorean reaction of the 1790s in France, and was disseminated abroad by conservative figures like Edmund Burke, and by reform-minded literary figures such as Charles Dickens. Reign of Terror, period of the French Revolution from September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794, during which the Revolutionary government decided to take harsh measures against those suspected of being enemies of the Revolution (nobles, priests, and hoarders). The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of … This is an application of the concept of collective responsibility that Wahnick explicitly endorses, and which ignores the very real distinctions between different degrees of responsibility and guilt. The Convention deputies increasingly heeded these calls. Robert Wilde is a historian who writes about European history. La terreur is in large part useless cruelties committed by people who are in fear themselves, for their own self-assurance. So, for example, during the struggle against the Batista dictatorship in the Cuba of the 1950s, the militant opposition detonated hundreds of bombs in towns and cities all over the island. . The more one sided...the political mind is, the more does it believe in the omnipotence of the will, the more it is blind to the natural and spiritual limits of the will, and the more incapable it is therefore of discovering the source of social ills.”4. Moreover, it is far more likely than not that violence will occur given the long-standing historical record of the classes in power to recur to violence to fight off any real threat to their power, which makes violence a necessary response to those involved in the struggle to improve their lives and to liberate themselves from oppression. In Lyons, which surrendered at the end of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety decided to set an example and there were so many to be guillotined that on December 4th-8th, 1793 people were executed en masse by cannon fire. It is in this sense that the systematic use of torture violates democratic principles as well as the humanist tenets that Wahnich, following Robespierre, dismisses so easily. Then, when the foreign threat seemed to have come to a complete end, the Terror became untenable; Robespierre fell, and the bourgeois orgy of reprisals began.6 Writing to Marx in September of 1870, Engels reflected on the nature of the “Reign of Terror” in 1793: We take this to mean the reign [or rule] of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it is the reign of people who are terror stricken. They do not explain the specific politics of that revolution that led specific actors to take specific decisions in response to existing conditions. Wilde, Robert. That is probably one of the reasons that, for example, the organization that sponsors this journal is the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and not the International Communist Organization (ICO). Second, they regard Robespierre as the first practitioner of terrorism, thus suggesting an understanding of the term as state violence. Robespierre and his Jacobins took advantage of a real counterrevolutionary threat to justify their own “surplus repression” (the conscious use of repression that went over and beyond the threat they confronted) in pursuit of their factional interests, and to impose their own class perspective and political point of view on other revolutionary groups with different political perspectives. Government forces also began winning battles, forcing a retreat which killed around 10,000 and 'the whites' began to melt away. It was … Baker, Keith Michael, ed. As with the Law of Suspects, almost anyone could be found guilty for anything under these new criteria. 2. For their part, intent on taking advantage of the fear that terrorism has generated, the ruling classes and the forces for law and order have ignored or kept silent about the considerable extent to which terrorism—however mistaken and often reactionary—is a response to the very real dispossession and oppression of imperialism and local rulers. Taking this notion to its logical conclusion, a confused, fearful, or apathetic citizen is as responsible for political misdeeds or crimes as a war criminal. This included closing all provincial courts for conspiracy and counter-revolutionary charges, which were to be held at the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris instead. Most executions occurred in Federalist areas after the army had regained control and some loyal areas escaped largely unscathed. But this tenet might have to be qualified when looking at the concrete circumstances of the case, as for example, the violence of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) against their undoubted oppressors—the Iraqi and Syrian states. It also presided over the bloodiest period of the revolution: The Terror. Wilde, Robert. In the west, republican forces confronted peasant armies in the Vendée (discussed above) and later another group of peasant insurgents known as the Chouans. In 1794, French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre produced the world’s first defense of “state terror” – claiming that the road to virtue lay through political violence. It shows how the apparent achievements of the first two years of the Revolution produced deadlock, which politicians tried to break by war; how war … I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror in ’93 lies almost exclusively on the shoulders of the terribly frightened bourgeois behaving like patriots, and on the little philistines who are shitting in their pants, and on the lumpen-mob making a profit out of the terreur.7. What were three serious problems that faced Louis XVI in the 1780s? All unofficial bodies were shut down, including provincial revolutionary armies. There has been some confusion on this matter in the Marxist literature; the dominant interpretation of the French Revolution and the Terror has been much influenced by pro-Robespierre historians like Mathiez and by the historic “line” adopted by the French Communist Party.2 In fact, Marx and Engels were politically hostile to Robespierre and to the main faction of the Jacobins, and favored instead the Hébertist and the “Enragé” factions” that criticized the Jacobins for their neglect of the social question.3 Wahnich recognizes this as a feature of Robespierre’s politics, and points out that he rejected the idea of an agrarian law involving land distribution even though he acknowledged that inequality was the source of many evils and crimes. The Terror was the period of the French Revolution marked by the implementation of violence and oppression as political policy. Left without a constitution for almost three years and at … Nationality: French. Racists and nativists, particularly in Europe and the United States, have seized on this development to recruit large numbers of supporters primarily on the basis of Islamophobia. "A History of the French Revolution: the Reign of Terror." The Implementation of the Terror. The French Revolution began in 1789 as a Lockean revolution patterned on the Glorious and American Revolutions. This stance avoids Wahnich’s understandable but ultimately sterile effort to insist that “revolutionary terror is not terrorism,” (102) although she is correct that there is no moral equivalence between the French revolutionary Terror and contemporary terrorist acts such as those carried out on September 11, 2001. https://www.thoughtco.com/french-revolution-the-terror-1793-94-1221883 (accessed May 15, 2021). 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