Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution

by R.R. Palmer

There was long a tendency, especially in the English-speaking world, to feel that the significant and lasting changes brought about by the French Revolution were accomplished between 1789 and 1791, and that in the later years, 1793 and 1794, the revolutionists “went too far,” falling into wild spasms of distressing radicalism. Yet it was the “moderates” of 1789 who destroyed the institutions by which Frenchmen lived, and the “fanatics” of the Terror, especially the Committee of Public Safety, who triumphed over the ensuing chaos, creating what Bonaparte called the only serious government of the Revolutionary years. That the reforms projected in the early years, parliamentary rule, civil liberties, legal equality, capitalist economics, were more lasting is true. It is not so true that the ideas projected under the rule of the Committee of Public Safety were of inferior significance. Only in 1793 and 1794 was democracy, in the sense of universal suffrage and increased economic equality, part of the ideal of the men in power. Those years raised the most portentous of political questions: the relation between democracy in this sense and democracy in the other sense, the democracy of individual liberties and representative government.