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.

This development was precisely the reverse of what the Committee of Public Safety intended. The great aim of the Committee was to create a nation, a community with a single faith, where men of all localities, all religions, all dialects, all degrees of education, all stations in society, all variety of private interests, should cooperate in supreme loyalty to a common country.

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.