The Reign Of Terror

Forty-thousand people. That’s about the size of a city or even a small country, and it’s around the number of people that were brutally executed during the Reign of Terror. The Reign of Terror was a brutish period of violence that transpired after the onset of the French Revolution, stimulated by dissension between two rival political factions, the Girondins and Jacobins, it was distinguished by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution". The Reign of Terror took place between 1793 to 1794, in the second phase of the French Revolution, or as many historians like to call, the second revolution. It was by no means justifiable and in no form necessary to preserve the ideals and progress of the French Revolution because it defied

It encompassed Enlightenment principles such as equal opportunity, equal rights, and popular sovereignty, and along with that it called upon revolutionary ideals that guaranteed individual freedom, equality before the law, and representative government for a sovereign people. This document was written on August 26, 1789 and just four years later Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, the people who initiated the Reign of Terror to preserve the French Revolution ideals and transition France into a Republic, choose to not abide by this document (that put revolutionary ideals into practice) during the Reign of Terror. Articles 1, 4, 9, 10, and 11 are a few examples of Revolutionary ideals that were disregarded during the Reign of Terror. Article 1 states “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” but this is overlooked when people are being accused and then sentenced to death. Article 4 states “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else...each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.” No one was being hurt if someone spoke out against the Revolution ideals and the

National assembly wanted to make a constitutional monarchy and that the king was necessary for a functioning state. Only the radical jacobins (with Robespierre as the leader) wanted a republic. France had become more of a tyranny than a republic. With Maximilien Robespierre ruling just as Joseph Stalin had. Both ruling under dictatorship and with terror. Under both these brutal rulings, many (thousands in France, millions in Russia) had died. Robespierre primarily directed his power as a means of terrorizing the opponents of the radical movement 's attempts toward instilling dictatorial control. Forty-thousand people were put to death. It ended with the death of its leader Maximilien Robespierre