The Coming of the Reign of Terror

Part 1: “Hiding behind the mask of patriotism”

Art by Elliot Skow

1. The French Revolution proclaimed freedom and the rights of man. Within a few years, the new state was a sponsor and perpetrator of terror. Death sentences were handed down by tribunals with no due process. Opposing the state’s policies, even the suspicion of it, was ground for conviction. How did revolutionaries become terrorists? That’s the topic of Timothy Tackett’s book, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution.

2. In 1789 France was bankrupt—partly, in one of history’s ironies, from bankrolling the American Revolution. And it was starving: a bad winter had ruined the harvest. Economic and political reforms were needed. In theory an absolute monarch, the king discovered that even his God-given authority sometimes needed shoring-up by the will of the people. The Estates General had not been called in almost 200 years. The closest thing France had to a representative institution, it was called now, but, as feared, had its own ideas about how it should run and what it should do. On June 17, 1789, representatives from the “third estate” (the “common people,” the non-nobles and non-clergy) declared themselves the National Assembly, and the new bearer of French sovereign authority. Shut out of their meeting hall, its members met elsewhere and vowed not to disband until they’d given France a new constitution. As if scripted by a chatbot trained on clichéd Hollywood films about the French, this meeting happened on a tennis court.

The National Assembly declared all existing taxes illegal, and voted its members parliamentary immunity from prosecution. On August 4th it abolished feudal privileges, and swept aside many Old Regime privileges and institutions. Commoners no longer owed dues to their lord. Before the Estates General met, the government, following tradition, had solicited statements of grievances from the people, for the Estates to consult. But “The declarations of the National Assembly went far beyond the demands of the great majority of the French population.”

3. October: rioters demanding bread break into the Palace. Afterward, the king, unharmed but “terrified for the safety of his family,” accepted the Assembly’s decrees, and promised to move from Versailles to Paris. In the aftermath one radical