Essay On What Happened To The Radical Revolution After The Terror

930 Words4 Pages

What happened to the radical revolution after the Terror? The great terror brought upon Revolutionary France a period of bloodshed, death, and fear unlike anything civilians had ever seen before, especially within the streets of Paris. During this time, the French Revolution veered sharply to the extreme; its leaders openly advocated the need for suffering, terror, and even dictatorship in order to achieve the perfect utopia that the French people had been striving for since the Revolution began. This could be seen as a sort of trial by fire or, ironically, an extreme period of personal sacrifice for the French people in preparation to their salvation in a manner similar to the Catholic practice of Lent before Easter. The downfall of the terror …show more content…

Its intriguing to note how many of the arguments used by members of the Convention against the pleas of the people of France were those used by their predecessors to justify why the Terror, the execution of the King, and the very revolution should not be done: those actions could lead to instability, they could exacerbate the problems faced by France, and they could cause France very dangerous and complex foreign policy problems in the long term. Another result of the aftermath of the Terror was the declawing of the reforms on divorce, inheritance, illegitimate children, and several other aspects of family life. There was a very large push by the population to return to a more traditional virtuous view on these subjects: make divorce harder to obtain, less rights of inheritance, etc. Although these reforms did not take place until much after the Terror ended, its end did bring with it a shift within the French population on values and family in terms of the