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

Timothy Tackett confronts the question that continues to exert an irresistible pull for French Revolutionary historians: how did the Terror of 1793–1794 happen? His contribution to this classic debate is a thoughtful and engaging discussion of the revolutionary dynamic (in his words, the “moving reality” (3) of the period) that led France toward state-sponsored repression and violence, overlaid by a crisp politically-focused narrative of the first five turbulent years of Revolution in France. Tackett began the research for this book in 1996, the same year in which his Becoming a Revolutionary was published, and there are clear parallels with this earlier work. Where the former used the writings of contemporary politicians to examine how the process of Revolution in 1789 forged a revolutionary elite, this work presents the letters and diaries of around eighty individuals from a broader cross-section of (still largely urban, male, bourgeois) society as a new source base through which to try to understand how the Revolution made the French into terrorists. In so doing, Tackett paints a rich but dark picture of the French Revolution as a whole, one where violence, betrayal and paranoia are never far from the surface — even before the ink had dried on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. By 1791, a “climate of uncertainty” (123) prevailed across society, exacerbated by rumour, denunciation, and a fear of conspiracy, which had been fed by the growing menace of counter-revolution. Tackett repeatedly stresses the impact on the Revolutionary process of emotional responses linked to fear. He argues for a sympathetic reading of the exaggerated reactions of the political elites, who by this stage faced a pincer movement comprising the openly counter-revolutionary activity of émigrés, refractory priests and their supporters on the one hand, and an anarchic “spirit of democracy and decentralization” (96) on the other. Both sapped the strength of the national authorities even as Louis XVI’s “Flight to Varennes” destroyed the long-term viability of controlled constitutional reform. By autumn 1792, with the King deposed and the French army seemingly unable to defend the Nation, there was support from across the political spectrum among Tackett’s correspondents for a series of authoritarian security measures and the violent mob justice of the September Massacres (210–216). In a sense, therefore, the crisis of 1793 and the development of the Terror proper is here framed as simply another iteration of the revolutionary pattern of crisis followed by violent response, albeit on a much larger scale. Tackett is particularly convincing when stressing the broad political consensus that new institutions of policing and repression were necessary because the circumstances of the Revolution (and counter-revolution) demanded them.

By adding a longer-term psychological angle into the mix, Tackett offers an interesting variant on the traditional “circumstances” defence of the Terror. A “tragic inner logic” to the Revolution, whereby anxiety had grown alongside even the mass enthusiasm for its earliest reforming achievements and democratic demands undermined authority from the start, conditioned its leaders to react to the circumstances of foreign invasion and civil war in 1793 by enacting a Terrorist regime (346–348). Overall, this interpretation proffers a surprising amount of sympathy to the politicians who oversaw the Terror. Indeed, the Montagnards are depicted as reluctant Terrorists during the expansion of the bureaucracy of repression between June and September 1793. Much of the blame is laid elsewhere: on the unruly sans-culottes (270–276) and disloyal Girondins and federalists (285–293).

This book contains an elegant mix of brisk narrative and detailed thematic analysis. The source base means that colourful, fresh, contemporary perspectives on familiar events are abundant — for example, in a particularly strong chapter on the period covering the 10 August Revolution and the September Massacres. The methodology is not entirely unproblematic, however. In particular, the argument that Tackett’s collection of diaries and correspondence are a strong source for charting the process...