In my previous lectures I've been exploring the emergency measures that
the republican government took in 1793, 1794 to deal with the great military and
political, and economic crisis facing the new republic.
And I've been outlining the values, the ideology, the culture of the Jacobins and
Sans-culottes that underpinned that extraordinary year, but
which also caused divisions between militant republicans.
What I want to do in this lecture,
is to explore what is really the big question about this year of The Terror.
And that is, to what extent can we understand the repression the violence,
the actions of government in this year as
really emergency measures to deal with crisis.
Or, was there something particularly and unnecessarily violent about them?
Certainly in 1793, we know that the New Republic faced
an extraordinary challenge in terms of the invasion of Austrian, Prussian,
Spanish, and other forces across the boarders of France,
the English Naval blockade, massive counter revolution in the West of France.
Civil disobedience if you like by,
administrators in many of the big cities, in the south in particular.
And in response to that the national convention had established an emergency
wartime government, under the Committee of Public Safety, and
given it sweeping powers to deal with that crisis.
Powers which were manifested in the mass mobilization of the nation's resources and
its people in August, 1793.
A willingness to turn economic production in urban,
in urban factories towards production for the war effort.
Extraordinary, extraordinary mobilization for war.
But, the goals of the convention, of the Committee of Public Safety,
of the Jacobins, and their leadership, are always more than that.
Remember that great speech of Robespierre's in February 1794, where
he juxtaposed virtue and terror as the mainsprings of government.
In this situation, he said In this critical situation, the first maxim of
your policy ought to be to lead people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.