I'd prefer not to be ruled by the angry mob mentality or another narcissistic dictator at the helm.
I'd prefer not to be ruled by the angry mob mentality or another narcissistic dictator at the helm.
The Reign of Terror (9/05/1793 – 7/28/1794) was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution . It was incited by conflict between 2 rival political factions within the Jacobins (the Society of the Friends of the Constitution) - the moderate Girondins and the radical Mountain. The Mountain prevailed 8 months after King Louis XVI was publically beheaded by guillotine on 1/21/1793. The revolutionary national government, the French National Convention, now dominated by the radical Jacobins, established the Committee of Public Safety in order to suppress internal counter-revolutionary activities and raise additional French military forces. It established the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris which was composed of a jury, a public prosecutor, and 2 substitutes, all nominated by the National Convention; and from its judgments there was no appeal. Through the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror's leaders exercised broad powers and used them to eliminate the internal and external enemies of the republic. It was not only the nobility who died in the Reign of Terror. Any one who broke the Jacobin’s laws or was even suspected of breaking their laws or working against them could be arrested and sent to the guillotine, most without a trial. Even powerful people who had been involved in the Jacobin coup were executed. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, a period called la Grande Terreur (the Great Terror), and ended in a coup on 7/27/1794 leading to the Thermidorian Reaction in which several instigators of the Reign of Terror were executed by guillotine, including Maxmilien Robespierre, its prime instigator. The Terror was marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution". The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris = 8.1/day on average over 326 continuous days) and another 25,000 in summary executions across France (over 326 continuous days all over France, 127.6 people on average were executed each day). Many of the U.S.'s founding fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson (who had served as the U.S. Minister to France during 1785-1789), supported the French Revolution but were horrified at how it degenerated out of control into the Reign of Terror.
After the Reign of Terror, Napoleon Bonaparte rose from an obscure lowly artillery officer to become general of the army, then to dictator in 1799 and went on to become the emperor of France in 1804. For a decade and a half Napoleon wrecked Europe. He hijacked the platitudes of the French Revolution to mask his own dictatorship at home and imperialism abroad. Napoleon’s own political agenda was a mishmash of conservative authoritarianism and populist social justice. So effective was the strange brew that even to this day scholars fight over whether Napoleon was a proto-Hitler whose unhinged ambitions led to millions of innocent European, Russian, Caribbean and North Africa dead, or a loyal defender of the French Revolution, whose 11th-hour iron hand alone kept alive the threatened ideals of fraternity and egalitarianism. For a while at least, Napoleon really did “make France great again,†at least in terms of territory and power.