New Member Bearing Essay :D
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revolution_frYep, I'm new, and nearly imploding from joy at finding this community. =) I love the French Revolution, and hero-worship Robespierre, whom I've been drawn to more and more since I first studied him a year ago in my tenth grade history course. So, when in my recently passed Junior year, I was given the topic "Triumph and Tragedy" for my National History Day project I simply HAD to write about the Reign of Terror. I didn't make it passed regionals, which I think is because the judge of my paper didn't understand my points/the fact that I wrote it unlike how THEY would have, but I'm proud of this and put alot of effort into it and thought I'd share. I hope everyone enjoys it, even if they know almost everything in it, but I caution you that it is lengthy and my internal citations are left in due to sheer laziness on my part. :D
The Reign of Terror is one of the most well known events in the course of history, having wreaked havoc upon France from early 1793 through the summer of 1794. Led by Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobin government, it was the most radical stage of the French Revolution that led to thousands of deaths in the name of justice and stained the name of the revolution with blood. It is because of this that it is easy to see the tragedy in the entire situation, but the truth is that without it the French Revolution would never have been as influential as it was. The Reign of Terror removed the monarchy that had held France for so long, and though this would later be reversed due to the rise of Napoleon, this initial break with the past still showed many countries that they too deserved better and could succeed in their own revolutions. As such, the Reign of Terror paved the way for many ideas to spread to the rest of Europe and eventually led to other revolts that would shape the modern world (“An Idea that Changed…”) through its part in the French Revolution (Hooker).
To understand the Terror one must first understand the reasons for which the French Revolution began. King Louis XVI was a young, inexperienced leader faced with the challenge of fixing the national debt France had fallen into after funding the American Revolution. Reluctant to tax the upper class for fear of angering them, Louis XVI allowed his financial officers to tax the Third Estate, the poorest social class that constituted most of society, via private businessmen who could keep as much money as they wanted. These private tax collectors demanded taxes so high that the third estate could hardly afford it, with the prices of food and other essentials inflating drastically in a time where unemployment was high, and most of the money did not reach the government anyway. Finally deciding this was an inefficient way to raise funds for the government, King Louis XVI was forced to call the Estates General 5 May 1789 (a meeting between the three estates to discuss important matters) (“Louis XVI”). When it became clear that the impoverished Third Estate would continue to be outvoted by the First and Second, they realized how unfair this system was; and they drew upon ideas of the Enlightenment (a philosophical movement that stressed intellectual thought and action against oppression which had largely occurred in France) that the American Revolution had been based upon. These Enlightenment beliefs left in France promised natural rights (such as right to own property, equality under the law, and freedom of speech and assembly) to all people, and they used these as their reason to break away from the Estates General and form the National Assembly on June 10 of the same year, which brought many of the important ideas of the Revolution into play (“The Impact of…”).
The most important acts of National Assembly were to write a constitution for France, entitled the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” that held many Enlightenment ideals and of the American revolutionaries such as the idea of natural rights to liberty and life, the idea that government exists for the good of the people and to protect them, and full equality under the law (“Declaration of the Rights of…”), along with which came the “Decree Abolishing the Feudal System,” another way to create equality under the law (“The Decree Abolishing…”). These were the driving thoughts behind the Revolution, making the Revolution’s slogan Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity. These passionate words caused the people to act more and more radical through events such as the overrunning of the Bastille prison and the freeing of the prisoners within, the women’s march on the Palace of Versailles, the writing of the French Constitution in 1791 (“The First Revolution”), and eventually led to the Reign of Terror.
The Reign of Terror began as a way to protect the Revolution and its ideals from the sans-culottes, the upper estate counter-revolutionaries that had been plotting to restore the monarchy to keep their privileges. Maximilen Robespierre, a staunch follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that had worked his way up as a speaker in the Assembly (Linton), spoke out against the trial of the King, stating that a trial was to imply that Louis could be innocent, and added that the only way to save the Revolution was for the monarchy to end—which included the death of Louis XVI (“Robespierre (3 December...”). It was shortly after this short but effective speech on December 8, 1792 that the King of France was executed and the government once again changed, this time falling into the hands of the lowest class under the name of the National Convention (Cody).
For a brief time, the Girondins, a moderate group favoring a decentralized government, ran the Convention—before being expelled by the radical Jacobins, Robespierre’s political party (“Maximilien Robespierre …”). Helping to reorganize the country in such times of turmoil and founding the Committee of Public Safety as a branch of the Convention, Robespierre assumed responsibility for the continuance of the Revolution and the protection of the people. Using Rousseau’s idea of a “Republic of Virtue” in which men would throw off the yoke of despotism, punish tyrants, and protect and respect the weak he declared it necessary for action against all those in opposition to the Revolution and the justice it would bring in his speech “Terror is the Order of the Day” (Robespierre): And thus the Reign of Terror had begun (“The French Revolution: The …”).
Although the Reign of Terror was begun with the best of intentions, it did not remain that way. The guillotine, suggested at the start of the Revolution as a method of execution to end the more torturous methods of times past (such as hanging, which could allow a person to strangle for several minutes if their neck did not break when they fell) (Fabricius), quickly became the way in which the Terror eradicated the “conspirators” against the Revolution, with revolutionary tribunals sending hundreds to their death every day for even the slightest suspicion of anti-revolutionary sentiments. These executions were public and also a popular form of entertainment; one German in the Revolutionary Army described the horrors of the Terror in a journal entry, saying that the victims’ blood ran in the streets freely and was left there indefinitely (Doyle 254).
Indeed the most tragic part of the Reign of Terror was that while it was intended to protect the justice, virtue, liberty on which the Revolution was based, it did the complete opposite. Those that spoke out about it during its peak of popularity near the end of 1793 and early 1794, such as Collot d’Herbois who questioned Robespierre’s motives behind this violent method of securing France’s “morality” and Desmoulins (friend of Danton and Robespierre) who said in his article “Revolution Devours Its Own” that the Committee of Public Safety was like the ancient Roman tyrants that had stripped all freedoms and liberties away (“Revolution Devours…”), were silenced by the guillotine, their actions only provoking the Committee’s lust for blood in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—an action that most definitely went against the equality and liberty the revolutionaries were aiming to achieve (Jovagues). Despite this, the Reign of Terror continued to intensify as Robespierre encouraged it with his speeches, such as “On Political Morality,” that glorified and justified the mass executions as the only way to keep the French republic virtuous (“Robespierre ‘On Political Morality’”).
But by summer of 1794 those in the Committee of Public Safety themselves came to fear losing their lives to Madame Guillotine; Robespierre had proven that he would not allow anyone to get in the way of his purification of France, not even his good friends Danton and Desmoulins whom he had allowed to be executed without lifting a finger to stop it. He knew many members of the Committee of Public Safety had been using their influence to intimidate people and to levee their positions of power, and went forward to the Committee saying that he would cleanse it. The disaster of the Cult of the Supreme Being that Robespierre had used in an attempt to unite the country under a deist religion (“Religion: The Cult…”) had caused him to fall out of favor with many people in France, and thus the Committee members that feared for their lives plotted against Robespierre (Linton). Finally, in July of 1794, the Convention voted unanimously to execute Robespierre (“9 Thermidor…”). His desperate pleadings as he scrambled around the Convention, begging for his life, went unheard, overshadowed by cries of “Down with the Tyrant!” and angry outbursts over his standing in areas that had been occupied by men he had helped sentence to beheading (Caroll); and on 9 Thermidor (July 27), 1794 he was executed, against the wishes of many who gathered to protest and to the cheers of others (“Execution of Robespierre”). With his death, the Terror had ceased; and in the months following his death the Committee began to realize that the Revolution had reached its end, allowing Parliamentarianism to return once more (“Dismantling the Terror:…”).
But while it is undeniably clear just how tragic this entire event was—what with the death toll in the thousands and with how horribly the quest for freedom and a better way of life was perverted—especially considering that with the rise of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna the accomplishments of the Revolution in France were reversed (Hunt). If one looks beyond this, one will see that without the Reign of Terror many of the ideals of the Revolution would not have been able to triumph over the monarchy and find their way into the world now and then. The single most important act of the entire Revolution was to rid the country of a monarchy that had gone from bad to worse (“A Royal History”), one that was ultimately the spark that began the Reign of Terror (Baker 301). Even Thomas Jefferson, in a letter from France while he was working there, explained that it was essential that the King be killed for the French Revolution’s ideas to become reality (Jefferson): And this they would do, in their unprecedented influence over philosophy, politics, society, and literature that they would have as a result of the Terror’s victory over the monarchy.
The ideas of the Revolution had an outstanding effect on the entire world thanks to Napoleon. While Napoleon ruined the Republic the Terror had tried so hard to protect, his rise to emperor of France also allowed for him to stabilize the country after years of mismanagement, something that would not have happened had the monarchy still have been around. Also, the Napoleonic Code, which embodied many of the important Revolutionary ideas (Holmberg), was taken with him throughout the world as he worked towards creating his empire (Banfield 188), and the result of his conquests was exponential. The Revolutionary ideas spread like wildfire, adapted to many different cultures and countries; and while many monarchs ignored this, the influence it had upon philosophers throughout Europe was intense (McCreadie): And in this way were many successful revolutions sparked throughout Europe (“Legacies of the Revolution”).
The Russian Revolution was directly affected by the birth of French Socialism created during the French Revolution (Slavin). The way the Revolution (particularly the Terror) struggled for equality among the people gave birth to the socialist idea (“2: Birth of the Socialist Idea”) made from combining existing socialism with Locke’s theory of natural rights (Kreis); the very idea that Karl Marx drew upon when he created Marxist Communism (“The French Revolution and the…”), although Engels described Marx’s idea as being more “scientific” than “utopic” (Engels). Germany too was affected through the writings of Hegel and Heine, who grew up under Napoleon’s rule over the country and hoped for Revolution to occur (“Hegel, Heine, and…”). Germany, having suffered from the despotism of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, found the Napoleonic ideas to be liberating, and nationalism quickly followed—leading to the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the birth of modern Germany occurred (Rempel). Even an area as small as Estonia was eventually able to break free of Russian control thanks to the Revolutionary ideas that dripped to them through the cracks in the control of European monarchies (“The Baltic Landesstaat”). It also gave philosophers, such as Le Bon, insight into how groups could become out of control but also succeed due to the exaggeration of thoughts that would occur between them (Le Bon), which explains why history will often repeat itself when groups latch onto other ideas (Marx).
Besides creating Revolutions that would ultimately end European monarchies, the Revolution’s ideals triumphed by creating other important ideas that would influence the modern world. Even though the guillotine did not really achieve its goal of a humane death (Moore), it planted the idea that carried over to modern times through the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which was renamed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN after WWII and slightly reworded to suit their needs (“Enlightenment and Human Rights”). The revolution also gave birth to determinism (the belief that one can chose their own fate), which most definitely would not have happened had the Terror not have been occurred and hence proven that yes, monarchies could be thrown off from upon the same continent (Hooker), which is the most triumphant result of all.
While many people both now and in the years directly following the Revolution debate the reasons for which the French Revolution failed in France itself (Adkins) (Carrol 190), there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the significance of its ideology throughout the world (Brinton 289). It created the modern political world by passing down ideas that unleashed Revolutions throughout Europe; it gave hope to people under tyrannical rule so they too could throw off the yoke of despotism for a better way of life; it created the modern ideas such as voluntarism, totalitarianism, democracy, and human rights that effect us still today (Burke); and all because of the Reign of Terror’s break from the past through the execution of the monarchy. If it were not for the Terror and the work of Maximilien Robespierre, there would never have been a successful break with the past, the break that was necessary for the survival of the Revolution’s ideas that would revolutionize the world. And it is for this reason that the Reign of Terror was not only horribly tragic due to the deaths of so many, but triumphant for breaking away from the Old Regime which would have held Europe back: It is for this reason that the Reign of Terror was both a triumph and a tragedy.
Feel free to add anything to this you'd like-- I enjoy learning more, and it is sort of sketchy due to word limit. :)
The Reign of Terror is one of the most well known events in the course of history, having wreaked havoc upon France from early 1793 through the summer of 1794. Led by Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobin government, it was the most radical stage of the French Revolution that led to thousands of deaths in the name of justice and stained the name of the revolution with blood. It is because of this that it is easy to see the tragedy in the entire situation, but the truth is that without it the French Revolution would never have been as influential as it was. The Reign of Terror removed the monarchy that had held France for so long, and though this would later be reversed due to the rise of Napoleon, this initial break with the past still showed many countries that they too deserved better and could succeed in their own revolutions. As such, the Reign of Terror paved the way for many ideas to spread to the rest of Europe and eventually led to other revolts that would shape the modern world (“An Idea that Changed…”) through its part in the French Revolution (Hooker).
To understand the Terror one must first understand the reasons for which the French Revolution began. King Louis XVI was a young, inexperienced leader faced with the challenge of fixing the national debt France had fallen into after funding the American Revolution. Reluctant to tax the upper class for fear of angering them, Louis XVI allowed his financial officers to tax the Third Estate, the poorest social class that constituted most of society, via private businessmen who could keep as much money as they wanted. These private tax collectors demanded taxes so high that the third estate could hardly afford it, with the prices of food and other essentials inflating drastically in a time where unemployment was high, and most of the money did not reach the government anyway. Finally deciding this was an inefficient way to raise funds for the government, King Louis XVI was forced to call the Estates General 5 May 1789 (a meeting between the three estates to discuss important matters) (“Louis XVI”). When it became clear that the impoverished Third Estate would continue to be outvoted by the First and Second, they realized how unfair this system was; and they drew upon ideas of the Enlightenment (a philosophical movement that stressed intellectual thought and action against oppression which had largely occurred in France) that the American Revolution had been based upon. These Enlightenment beliefs left in France promised natural rights (such as right to own property, equality under the law, and freedom of speech and assembly) to all people, and they used these as their reason to break away from the Estates General and form the National Assembly on June 10 of the same year, which brought many of the important ideas of the Revolution into play (“The Impact of…”).
The most important acts of National Assembly were to write a constitution for France, entitled the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” that held many Enlightenment ideals and of the American revolutionaries such as the idea of natural rights to liberty and life, the idea that government exists for the good of the people and to protect them, and full equality under the law (“Declaration of the Rights of…”), along with which came the “Decree Abolishing the Feudal System,” another way to create equality under the law (“The Decree Abolishing…”). These were the driving thoughts behind the Revolution, making the Revolution’s slogan Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity. These passionate words caused the people to act more and more radical through events such as the overrunning of the Bastille prison and the freeing of the prisoners within, the women’s march on the Palace of Versailles, the writing of the French Constitution in 1791 (“The First Revolution”), and eventually led to the Reign of Terror.
The Reign of Terror began as a way to protect the Revolution and its ideals from the sans-culottes, the upper estate counter-revolutionaries that had been plotting to restore the monarchy to keep their privileges. Maximilen Robespierre, a staunch follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that had worked his way up as a speaker in the Assembly (Linton), spoke out against the trial of the King, stating that a trial was to imply that Louis could be innocent, and added that the only way to save the Revolution was for the monarchy to end—which included the death of Louis XVI (“Robespierre (3 December...”). It was shortly after this short but effective speech on December 8, 1792 that the King of France was executed and the government once again changed, this time falling into the hands of the lowest class under the name of the National Convention (Cody).
For a brief time, the Girondins, a moderate group favoring a decentralized government, ran the Convention—before being expelled by the radical Jacobins, Robespierre’s political party (“Maximilien Robespierre …”). Helping to reorganize the country in such times of turmoil and founding the Committee of Public Safety as a branch of the Convention, Robespierre assumed responsibility for the continuance of the Revolution and the protection of the people. Using Rousseau’s idea of a “Republic of Virtue” in which men would throw off the yoke of despotism, punish tyrants, and protect and respect the weak he declared it necessary for action against all those in opposition to the Revolution and the justice it would bring in his speech “Terror is the Order of the Day” (Robespierre): And thus the Reign of Terror had begun (“The French Revolution: The …”).
Although the Reign of Terror was begun with the best of intentions, it did not remain that way. The guillotine, suggested at the start of the Revolution as a method of execution to end the more torturous methods of times past (such as hanging, which could allow a person to strangle for several minutes if their neck did not break when they fell) (Fabricius), quickly became the way in which the Terror eradicated the “conspirators” against the Revolution, with revolutionary tribunals sending hundreds to their death every day for even the slightest suspicion of anti-revolutionary sentiments. These executions were public and also a popular form of entertainment; one German in the Revolutionary Army described the horrors of the Terror in a journal entry, saying that the victims’ blood ran in the streets freely and was left there indefinitely (Doyle 254).
Indeed the most tragic part of the Reign of Terror was that while it was intended to protect the justice, virtue, liberty on which the Revolution was based, it did the complete opposite. Those that spoke out about it during its peak of popularity near the end of 1793 and early 1794, such as Collot d’Herbois who questioned Robespierre’s motives behind this violent method of securing France’s “morality” and Desmoulins (friend of Danton and Robespierre) who said in his article “Revolution Devours Its Own” that the Committee of Public Safety was like the ancient Roman tyrants that had stripped all freedoms and liberties away (“Revolution Devours…”), were silenced by the guillotine, their actions only provoking the Committee’s lust for blood in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—an action that most definitely went against the equality and liberty the revolutionaries were aiming to achieve (Jovagues). Despite this, the Reign of Terror continued to intensify as Robespierre encouraged it with his speeches, such as “On Political Morality,” that glorified and justified the mass executions as the only way to keep the French republic virtuous (“Robespierre ‘On Political Morality’”).
But by summer of 1794 those in the Committee of Public Safety themselves came to fear losing their lives to Madame Guillotine; Robespierre had proven that he would not allow anyone to get in the way of his purification of France, not even his good friends Danton and Desmoulins whom he had allowed to be executed without lifting a finger to stop it. He knew many members of the Committee of Public Safety had been using their influence to intimidate people and to levee their positions of power, and went forward to the Committee saying that he would cleanse it. The disaster of the Cult of the Supreme Being that Robespierre had used in an attempt to unite the country under a deist religion (“Religion: The Cult…”) had caused him to fall out of favor with many people in France, and thus the Committee members that feared for their lives plotted against Robespierre (Linton). Finally, in July of 1794, the Convention voted unanimously to execute Robespierre (“9 Thermidor…”). His desperate pleadings as he scrambled around the Convention, begging for his life, went unheard, overshadowed by cries of “Down with the Tyrant!” and angry outbursts over his standing in areas that had been occupied by men he had helped sentence to beheading (Caroll); and on 9 Thermidor (July 27), 1794 he was executed, against the wishes of many who gathered to protest and to the cheers of others (“Execution of Robespierre”). With his death, the Terror had ceased; and in the months following his death the Committee began to realize that the Revolution had reached its end, allowing Parliamentarianism to return once more (“Dismantling the Terror:…”).
But while it is undeniably clear just how tragic this entire event was—what with the death toll in the thousands and with how horribly the quest for freedom and a better way of life was perverted—especially considering that with the rise of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna the accomplishments of the Revolution in France were reversed (Hunt). If one looks beyond this, one will see that without the Reign of Terror many of the ideals of the Revolution would not have been able to triumph over the monarchy and find their way into the world now and then. The single most important act of the entire Revolution was to rid the country of a monarchy that had gone from bad to worse (“A Royal History”), one that was ultimately the spark that began the Reign of Terror (Baker 301). Even Thomas Jefferson, in a letter from France while he was working there, explained that it was essential that the King be killed for the French Revolution’s ideas to become reality (Jefferson): And this they would do, in their unprecedented influence over philosophy, politics, society, and literature that they would have as a result of the Terror’s victory over the monarchy.
The ideas of the Revolution had an outstanding effect on the entire world thanks to Napoleon. While Napoleon ruined the Republic the Terror had tried so hard to protect, his rise to emperor of France also allowed for him to stabilize the country after years of mismanagement, something that would not have happened had the monarchy still have been around. Also, the Napoleonic Code, which embodied many of the important Revolutionary ideas (Holmberg), was taken with him throughout the world as he worked towards creating his empire (Banfield 188), and the result of his conquests was exponential. The Revolutionary ideas spread like wildfire, adapted to many different cultures and countries; and while many monarchs ignored this, the influence it had upon philosophers throughout Europe was intense (McCreadie): And in this way were many successful revolutions sparked throughout Europe (“Legacies of the Revolution”).
The Russian Revolution was directly affected by the birth of French Socialism created during the French Revolution (Slavin). The way the Revolution (particularly the Terror) struggled for equality among the people gave birth to the socialist idea (“2: Birth of the Socialist Idea”) made from combining existing socialism with Locke’s theory of natural rights (Kreis); the very idea that Karl Marx drew upon when he created Marxist Communism (“The French Revolution and the…”), although Engels described Marx’s idea as being more “scientific” than “utopic” (Engels). Germany too was affected through the writings of Hegel and Heine, who grew up under Napoleon’s rule over the country and hoped for Revolution to occur (“Hegel, Heine, and…”). Germany, having suffered from the despotism of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, found the Napoleonic ideas to be liberating, and nationalism quickly followed—leading to the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the birth of modern Germany occurred (Rempel). Even an area as small as Estonia was eventually able to break free of Russian control thanks to the Revolutionary ideas that dripped to them through the cracks in the control of European monarchies (“The Baltic Landesstaat”). It also gave philosophers, such as Le Bon, insight into how groups could become out of control but also succeed due to the exaggeration of thoughts that would occur between them (Le Bon), which explains why history will often repeat itself when groups latch onto other ideas (Marx).
Besides creating Revolutions that would ultimately end European monarchies, the Revolution’s ideals triumphed by creating other important ideas that would influence the modern world. Even though the guillotine did not really achieve its goal of a humane death (Moore), it planted the idea that carried over to modern times through the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which was renamed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN after WWII and slightly reworded to suit their needs (“Enlightenment and Human Rights”). The revolution also gave birth to determinism (the belief that one can chose their own fate), which most definitely would not have happened had the Terror not have been occurred and hence proven that yes, monarchies could be thrown off from upon the same continent (Hooker), which is the most triumphant result of all.
While many people both now and in the years directly following the Revolution debate the reasons for which the French Revolution failed in France itself (Adkins) (Carrol 190), there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the significance of its ideology throughout the world (Brinton 289). It created the modern political world by passing down ideas that unleashed Revolutions throughout Europe; it gave hope to people under tyrannical rule so they too could throw off the yoke of despotism for a better way of life; it created the modern ideas such as voluntarism, totalitarianism, democracy, and human rights that effect us still today (Burke); and all because of the Reign of Terror’s break from the past through the execution of the monarchy. If it were not for the Terror and the work of Maximilien Robespierre, there would never have been a successful break with the past, the break that was necessary for the survival of the Revolution’s ideas that would revolutionize the world. And it is for this reason that the Reign of Terror was not only horribly tragic due to the deaths of so many, but triumphant for breaking away from the Old Regime which would have held Europe back: It is for this reason that the Reign of Terror was both a triumph and a tragedy.
Feel free to add anything to this you'd like-- I enjoy learning more, and it is sort of sketchy due to word limit. :)
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