When the French Revolution approached in its fourth year in the spring of 1792, the war was with Austria . At that time, "The Battle Song of the Army of the Rhine " was composed that had proven to raise spirits and rouse troops. Soon re-titled in honor of the southern soldiers who made it popular, "La Marseillaise" promised a glorious day when France 's new citizens would rise up to tear down tyranny's "bloodstained banner." Marching on in closed ranks, they would destroy foes out to "slaughter our sons, wives, and kin"; they would drench the fields of the fatherland with the enem y's "foul blood." (Cobban, 1965)

More Gallic Blood than Foreign

And so they did. But in those years before Napoleon drove the Revolution across Europe , the blood was more Gallic than foreign, and the enemies lurked within. Less than six months after Rouget de Lisle penned his battle hymn, Paris crowds stormed city prisons and massacred more than one thousand countrymen, including priests, women, children, common criminals, and loosely defined bands of counter-revolutionary suspects. They mutilated corpses and paraded heads on pikes, in an orgy of bloodletting that had a precedent in technique if not in scope. On July 14, 1789 , the Bastille's governor had been hacked apart, as had a city magistrate, and the following fall, when market women forced the king and queen back to Paris from Versailles , the severed heads of royal bodyguards punctuated the procession. But the massacres of September 1792 were far bloodier than anything that had come before, and the deaths gave birth to a new term, which, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, carries a chilling ring: any person "capable of terrorist action," Eli Sagan (2001) reminds us, became known as a Septembriseur.

Virus of a New and Unknown Kind

The slaughter was also the first symptom of what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call a "virus of a new and unknown kind." Ideological terror marked the Revolution's next and most radical phase, with the provincial lawyer and Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre seizing the revolution from the people in the people's name. At the helm of the Committee of Public Safety, "the great Incorruptible," in concert with the likes of Louis de Saint-Just ("the archangel of death"), expanded the list of internal enemies to include "not only traitors, but even those who are indifferent." The terror's machinery would punish "whoever is passive in the republic," Saint-Just warned, "and who does nothing for it." That "annihilation of the private," in Sagan's (2001) apposite phrase, like the call to sacrifice two hundred thousand heads in order to save one million, was a key ingredient in the recipe of ideological terror, and a legacy left to the totalitarian regimes of the modern world. (Furet, 1992)

Dr. Guillotine’s Invention

France 's Reign of Terror, like its later counterparts purged enemies with the most sophisticated technology of the time. Dr. Guillotine's enlightened and equitable invention promised a comparatively painless death, and delivered it to at least thousands of counterrevolutionaries, real and imagined. (see footnote) By the summer of 1794, as the Terror reached its final act, nearly five hundred thousand arrests had led to the execution (by various methods) of more than thirty-five thousand men and women, humble and grand: Chrétien de Malesherbes, royalist reformer and defender of French Protestants, went to the guillotine with his daughter and granddaughter in the winter of 1793; Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, met the same fate, alongside his father-in-law, the following spring. Robespierre's head finally fell in its turn, when former comrades had had enough; and the crowd, once his constituency, cheered his execution. The Revolution, like Saturn, had begun to devour its own children, Sagan (2001) tells us. The French gods of terror, one witness reported, could not slake their thirst. (Furet, 1970)

Imagination of a Golden Sunrise

How had it all come to pass in that roseate epoch of liberal dreams and natural, inalienable, and sacred rights? Edmund Burke may have seen savagery on the horizon of 1789, but most observers, in and out of France , sensed the opposite. The relatively peaceful gathering of the Estates-General, followed by the establishment of the National Assembly and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, prompted poets to imagine a golden sunrise, not a crimson nightmare. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," Wordsworth recalled, "But to be young was very heaven." From England a Liberal leader called the Revolution's first phase "much the greatest event ... that ever happened in the world and how much the best." Benighted aristocrats and hidebound priests may have resisted reform, but for most of those who bothered with politics, the early quest for liberty and fraternity came with high hopes. (Hampson, 1963)

Different Views of the Terror Aspect of the French Revolution

Sagan’s (2001) View

It did not come, however, with a consensus on the thorny question of equality, and that is Sagan's (2001) provocative point. "A basic mistrust of democratic equality," even among those who preached its virtues, ran like "a menacing fault line in this solid rock fundament" of liberal Revolution. To probe that paradox, to understand how a standard-bearer of equality like Robespierre could become a "cannibalistic terrorist," Sagan (2001) proposes the notion of "radical splitting." Racked by paranoia and in high anxiety over the modern world they had helped create, ideological terrorists suffered, as they would suffer across the centuries, a "severe psychopathology" characteristic of borderline personalities. The "struggle for Modernity," which the author links to the struggle to establish a "Stable Democratic Society" (he has a weakness for capitals throughout), carries with it an array of "psychological traps." That Robespierre was sick we may always have guessed; that he labored under a "Modernity Psychosis" we owe to Citizens and Cannibals.

The modern conception of terror understood as a systematic use of fear in revolutionary circumstances to consolidate a revolutionary government derives from the French Revolution. The period between the summer of 1793 and the autumn of 1794 in France , when terror was proclaimed “the order of the day,” was characterized by the centralization of government in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety and by systematic political repression. It was set by a small group of politicians claiming that they had acted on behalf of the “people” and in the cause of democracy. Since that time, terror has been used in the cause of democracy many times prompting a debate about legitimacy of revolution as a tool for social and political change. (Palmer, 1964)

The traditional conservative position holds that revolution is a disaster and terror inseparable from it. Left-oriented historians, on the other hand, view revolution as an important step in the growth of liberal democracy and terror as a tactic used to achieve this end. Systematic terror, their arguments go, as opposed to isolated acts of violence, appears only when the revolution is threatened — from the inside (counter- revolution) or from the outside (war) or both — and disappears when these threats disappear. A “revisionist” school that has emerged in recent years, rooted in western intellectuals' disillusion with communism, locates itself between these two classic positions, maintaining that although revolution may be an important step on the way to modern democracy, terror is its integral part from the beginning: terror has nothing to do with the circumstances — counter- revolution or war — but with political culture and ideology. For both conservatives and revisionists, revolutionary violence cannot be blamed on the revolution's opponents — counter- revolution and war; revolutionaries themselves bear responsibility as well. At the end of the millennium, revolution is viewed skeptically, its legacy considered ambiguous, and its terror often, as a precursor of modern totalitarianism. Roberts, 1978)

Mayer’s (2000) View

It is at this historical moment that Arno J. Mayer (2000) undertook the task of analyzing violence and terror in the French revolution with the purpose to challenge the perception, rooted in liberal and conservative values, of “ revolution as unnecessary and its human and material costs morally and historically indefensible” (p. 3). The author takes it for granted that revolution represents progress and, thus, that the end justifies the means. And there is no revolution without violence and terror — he argues — because revolution implies opposition.

Mayer (2000) believes that in the French revolution it was necessary to uproot the established religious institutions and beliefs as well as the age-old conflict between urban and peasant populations. The revolution provoked hostile responses from abroad and forced its leader to use terror in the face of the threat of foreign intervention. Thus, violence and terror stemmed from the ideas and forces hostile to it. “The concept of ideology,” argues the author, “is at once too vague, charged, and mechanical to provide an explanatory frame” (p. 9).

But the scale and scope of terror cannot always be explained in terms of a reaction to a counter-revolutionary threat. For example, the Terror in France in the spring and summer of 1794 intensified at the moment when political opposition no longer existed and there were no foreign armies on French soil. Further, there is hardly an analogy in the length of the terror in the aftermath of the French revolution. The White Terror in France was a reaction to the excesses of the Great Terror of 1793–1794. Neither can be explained by an internal opposition to danger from the outside.

Pre-revolutionary France had no effective secret police and the practice of lettre de cachet — locking people up in the Bastille on the basis of an arbitrary decision of the king — had practically fallen into disuse before the building was stormed in 1789. The use of terror was not only a strategy in the class war; it was also a weapon in the economic restructuring of society.

Gueniffey’s (2000) View

In his La politique de la Terreur, Patrice Gueniffey (2000) undertakes the issue of revolutionary violence and terror from a radically different perspective. Although he, too, believes that violence and terror were inherent in the French Revolution, in: contrast to Mayer, he has little patience for the circumstantial argument and downplays the significance and the scale of counter- revolution and war in escalating revolutionary violence and terror.

Gueniffey (2000) focuses on the French Revolution and claims that its radicalization was neither a product of ideology nor was it a reaction to circumstances. It was, he writes, a product of revolutionary dynamics (p. 14). The Terror coincided with the Revolution, it began and ended with it, it was inherent in it — it was the Revolution (p. 17). The development from the beginning of the Revolution in 1789 until the fall of Robespierre in 1794 was an unfolding of one Utopian revolutionary project, rather than a response to a national emergency.

An instrument of revolutionary politics from 1789, terror burst into discourses as well as practices. It can be identified in the punitive passion of the crowd early in the Revolution, in the belief in the enemy's omnipresence, in plot obsession, in the fanatic nature of revolutionary society's discourse on power, in Utopian visions of politics, and finally, in revolutionary struggles for power in the absence of a legal basis. The death of Robespierre dealt a fatal blow to the Utopian illusions and dreams of 1789 and with them the revolutionary terror, and politics in its modern sense began.

Alien’s (1999) View

In the Threshold of Terror, Rodney Alien (1999) probes the dark side of the French Revolution by focusing on the insurrection of 10 August 1792 , viewed sometimes as the beginning of the “first terror” which culminated in the September Massacres of 1792. The author believes that the events of 10 August 1792 were a turning point of the French Revolution which betrayed the high hopes with which the Revolution of 1789 began and “opened the door for totalitarian dictatorship” (p. v).

Physician involvement in the origins of the guillotine is only one such ironic episode in the history of capital punishment. The Hippocratic oath, with its bias in favor of life, ensures that any time doctors play a role in the administration of death, it will be seen as anomalous, even scandalous.