Feeling ‘terror’ while facing justice and the exemplarity of punishment constitute a theme that appeared on a number of occasions, especially during the trial of the ousted king. The trial was conducted by the National Convention itself, with the deputies in their function as ‘representatives of the people’ to pass judgement on the erstwhile king on behalf of the people. In early December 1792, Robespierre channelled this idea by calling for the creation of a monument to the martyrs of liberty, killed in the assault on the Tuileries palace that resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792. This monument was intended to convey a double political meaning: ‘nourish in the heart of people the sentiment of their rights and the horror of tyrants, and in the heart of tyrants the salutary terror at the thought of the people’s justice.’36 Other members of the Convention approved of this meaning, as on 16 and 17 January 1793 when every member was given the floor to justify his vote on Louis XVI’s fate. The Montagnard Sergent expressed his support for capital punishment in dramatic terms: ‘A king’s head only falls with a crash, and his torment inspires a healthy terror [terreur salutaire].’37 Does this mean that the origins of the Terror lay in the fall of the monarchy and the execution of the king? This was undoubtedly true for the link between ‘terror’ and ‘justice’, but it was not the case for ‘terror’ as a ‘system’.
In the early days of the Convention, enmity between the two factions of the Convention, Girondins and Montagnards, went deep, their previous conflicts deepened to a chasm by the trauma of the September Massacres. Each side accused the other of employing ‘terror’ against them, though they took conflicting views of its meaning. In October 1792, Marat, the last person one would expect in this context, denounced the Girondin Rouyer for having made threats destined to ‘keep him away through terror.’38 Louvet, another Girondin, replied two weeks later in a violent speech against Robespierre, whom he accused of being accompanied everywhere with armed guards and of being, like Marat, the ringleader of a ‘dissenting faction, escorted by terror and preceded by the placards of the blood-thirsty man’ – the ‘faction’ being responsible for the September Massacres.39 Two weeks after this speech, Barère, who sat at the head of the Plain (unaligned deputies in the Convention) before later joining the ranks of the Montagnards, spoke for the first time of a ‘system of terror’ put in place by those who had ordered the massacres of prisoners and favoured what he called ‘anarchy’.40 Was the case settled when several Girondins denounced the ‘terror’ fuelled by the Montagnards and the Parisian sans-culotte movement? The Girondin Vergniaud used a moving phrase on 10 April 1793, when he stated: ‘People have sought to bring about the revolution through terror, I would have liked to bring it about through love’, only to return, moments later, to denouncing his political enemies, the Montagnards, once more.41 It would be a mistake to form any easy conclusions, especially since a number of Montagnards continued to use the word ‘terror’ against their opponents, like Marat or even Saint-Just.42 Saint-Just, in his report against the Girondin leaders, attributed policies of terror to them:
In the provinces it is said that there are slaughters in Paris; in Paris it is said that there are slaughters in the provinces … This was true in Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon, the North, and in Corsica, where Paoli spoke out against anarchy. In the midst of these upheavals, the Commission of Twelve was formed to seek out the conspirators, but its members were their supporters. It stripped Hébert of his functions, as the despot had done; it wished to impose terror on the citizens.43
The word ‘terror’ also took pride of place in speeches given upon the assassinations of two representatives of the people: firstly, when Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau was stabbed by a royalist, enraged by the execution of the king on 21 January 1793,44 and secondly, that of Marat.45 It was the assassination of Marat that triggered what historian Jacques Guilhaumou has called a ‘return to the terror of the other’.46 One might say that the situation changed from a ‘terror’ one suffered under to an active ‘terror’.
3. ‘Terror as the order of the day’: an unsaid, unofficial yet widespread order from the Convention
On 13 July 1793, a young woman from Normandy, Charlotte Corday, bluffed her way into the apartment of the Montagnard and incendiary journalist, Jean-Paul Marat, and stabbed him in his bath with a kitchen knife that she had earlier bought for that purpose. His assassination, along with that of Le Peletier, heightened the sense of fear amongst the deputies, by making evident their own susceptibility to physical attack, a vulnerability made more intense by the ideological conviction that a virtuous politician should be accessible to the public, and not hide away behind guards and palace walls.47 The assassination of Marat and his very public funeral heightened desire amongst Paris radicals to repress the adversaries of the Revolution. Numerous speeches to that effect were given in the clubs, especially the Cordeliers, and also in the Convention, reinforced by envoys from primary assemblies.48 Hailing from all over France, these envoys gathered in the capital to lend their massive support to the vote for the new constitution. Some Girondins in hiding in the provinces spread the vision of an Assembly reduced to a sort of ‘rump parliament’, not unlike the British parliament after the first British civil war.49 Yet the Montagnards intended to use the presence of these thousands of envoys to project another image of Paris. On 9 August 1793, on the eve of celebrations for the first anniversary of the attack on the Tuileries and the proclamation of a new constitution, Gossuin presented a report on behalf of the commission in charge of gathering the minutes of the validation process for the new constitution. The report showcases the two conflicting representations of the capital by using the word ‘terror’:
People’s envoys, when you are back in your homes, tell your co-citizens of what is happening in Paris. Have you seen an inhabitant of this great city with a dagger in his hand, meting out vengeful injustice or crying out for anarchy? But this is the picture that was painted to you, just so you would not meet the true Parisians: this amazing city, cradle of liberty, will always be a terror to evildoers.50
Two days after the holiday, an orator spoke in the name of the envoys of the primary assemblies to call for a mass citizen uprising and the arrest of counter-revolutionaries. Some members of the Convention, among them the Montagnards, Georges Danton and Robespierre, took up these proposals, seizing on the word ‘terror’ and linking it to justice. Danton even spoke of a ‘terror initiative’ from these envoys; his aim was to demand an even more severe justice and above all a mass call to arms – rather than a massive and anarchic arming of the people – as a way to reinforce the Republic’s armies:
The deputies of the primary assemblies have just launched a terror initiative against internal enemies. Let us respond to their wishes. No amnesty to any traitor. The just man does not pardon the wicked. Let us point to the popular vengeance by the sword of the law against internal conspirators – but let us know how to take advantage of this memorable day. You have been told that the people must rise as one. That is undoubtedly true, but it must be done in an orderly fashion.51
Robespierre, for his part, called for a reinforcing of the zeal of the Revolutionary Tribunal so that the guillotine would be able to strike the imaginations of not only opponents of the Revolution but even its partisans:
Let the scoundrels, by falling on the sword of the law, appease the spirits of so many innocent victims! May these great examples destroy sedition through the terror that they will inspire in all enemies of the nation. May patriots, seeing your energy, find their own, so that tyrants be defeated!52
Once again, the ‘terror’ one suffered under had been turned into an active ‘terror’ that one was prepared to inflict on others, but this active