The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tackett (review)

The Terror is the terrible stain on the record of the French Revolution, the uncomfortable presence that defies scholarly explanation even as it invites it. Timothy Tackett is the latest historian to make the attempt. Much might be hoped for from the author of the authoritative assessment of the response to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (September 1790)—Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1986)—and an expert on the work of the National Assembly, 1789–91, Becoming a Revolutionary (Princeton, 1996). Tackett does not disappoint; insisting that violence emerged out of the Revolutionary process itself, he makes a major contribution to historians’ understanding of the Terror and his judgment will be an essential marker for those that will surely follow him. His judgment and his scholarship are sound, for this text is based on an exhaustive survey of those writing about events as they happened, especially the correspondence (much of it unpublished) of deputies and Parisians that he has read and collected from across France.

Tackett’s work is chronologically driven, not confining the Terror to the period between the fall of the Girondins in June 1793 and the overthrow of Robespierre in July 1794, but regarding those thirteen months as the culmination of a phenomenon that was already in train. He attempts to be even-handed, admitting the “darker side” (p. 69) of 1789 and noting the periodic explosions of popular violence across the country that year. Public expectations of the reforming work to be undertaken by the Estates-General were so fervent that any obstacles to its progress—the Crown, the aristocracy, and the clergy—soon became emblems of obstructionist self-interest that invited retribution. These identifications only intensified over time once the War of the First Coalition began, a republic was declared, and the Revolution turned into a cult of itself. Part of the problem was the speedy collapse of royal authority in Paris and the provinces in 1789–90, which allowed for all sorts of experiments in civic freedoms at a juncture when, Tackett argues, the limits of liberty were “fundamentally untested” (p. 77). Outbreaks of violence did not occur in isolation. In rural areas, inhabitants freed from tithe payments and manorial dues saw tax payments as a logical next step, and trying to rebuild among them a spirit of subordination to property owners and the government only invited resistance.

Perceptions of treachery and conspiracy became universal from 1791, and events like the king and queen’s botched Flight to Varennes intensified pressures to the point of generating an “everyday terror” (p. 135). Tackett does not mince his words. There arose a “metastasis of fear and suspicion” (p. 154) among all political classes, and it would not be dispelled as long as the Revolution lasted. Readily persuaded by a public rhetoric freighted with exhortations to seek out traitors (often those deemed to be using “patriotism” as a mask), young men who were used to casual violence became more prevalent. The September Massacres of 1792 were, as Tackett shows, generally presented as a necessary evil; so was the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, a major precipitant of Terror intensification. Rationalization of Revolutionary action was easily to hand, for had not Marat himself said: “To shed a few drops of impure blood so as to avoid spilling buckets of pure blood is to be humane and just”? With exterminate growing in popularity in patriotic vocabulary in 1793–94, Tackett’s account moves forward to take in the Federalist and Vendée Revolts; the vicious in-fighting among Jacobins that saw both Enragés and Dantonistes sent to the guillotine; and the coming of the Great Terror following the Law of Prairial, when whole categories of men and women were executed on the basis of their public status before 1789. It was a time when, as the bookseller Nicolas Ruault...