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

by R.R. Palmer

The Committee was also the first dictatorship whose stated aim was the complete regeneration of society. In this aim it failed. It did not found that democratic republic or republic of virtue (the same thing in the political philosophy of the time) to which military successes, in the eyes of the Committee, were but a necessary and preliminary means. It did not succeed in making permanent any republic at all. The politics of the Committee went far beyond French public opinion. The members of the Committee, and of the Mountain, were a residue of the original Revolutionists, a minority for whose ideas most Frenchmen were not prepared. Their being a minority was one reason for their resort to Terror. The Terror, in turn, though it protected the Revolution, injured the Republic which it was supposed to found. To the average Frenchman, for almost a hundred years, the Republic suggested violence and discord, repression of civil liberties, denial of parliamentary freedom, persecution of religion, government by politicians. These ideas, which made difficult the establishment of the Third Republic, contributed indirectly to its end. After the Terror France was more divided than ever.