How Robespierre's High Ideals Led to the Reign of Terror (Part 2)

Approximately 17,000 people across France were officially executed as traitors during the Reign of Terror, a total that historians compare against military losses like the British army casualties on the first day of the Somme to contextualize the scale of revolutionary slaughter.

The high volume of executions using the guillotine in Paris caused so much blood to pool and flow into the local water supply that the water system became poisoned, forcing authorities to relocate the execution site.

Despite orchestrating the Reign of Terror, Robespierre consistently advocated for political positions aligned with modern democracies, including universal male suffrage, freedom of the press, human rights, the abolition of slavery, and progressive taxation to fund universal public education.

While fellow revolutionaries adopted threadbear clothing and trousers to signal solidarity with the working-class sans-culottes, Robespierre maintained elite old-regime fashions by consistently wearing powdered wigs, silk stockings, embroidered waistcoats, and knee-breeches.

Robespierre suffered early childhood trauma marked by an unstable, downwardly mobile father who abandoned the family after his mother died when Maximilien was only six years old, leaving him scarred by smallpox and raised by his maternal grandparents who were brewers.

Robespierre deeply internalized the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, adopting core convictions that the common people are the absolute embodiment of virtue and that the primary law of any state must be the well-being of the people.

On July 27, 1793, amidst military invasion, civil war, and economic collapse, Robespierre was elected to the Committee of Public Safety, a ten-man proto-dictatorial executive body tasked with protecting the republic from total disintegration.

On August 23, 1793, the National Convention enacted the levée en masse, establishing the first mass conscription of the modern age by mobilizing young men for combat, married men for arms production, women for hospitals, and children for lint-making to create an overwhelming manpower advantage.

Following a radical march on the National Convention led by Paris commune officer Gaspard Schémé on September 5, 1793, officials successfully pushed to make terror the order of the day, centralizing and bureaucratizing revolutionary violence to curb chaotic street lynchings.

Enacted on September 17, 1793, the Law of Suspects vastly broadened the categories of people liable for arrest, targeting nobles lacking revolutionary zeal, individuals without good-citizenship certificates, and anyone whose conduct or speech marked them as partisans of tyranny.

When the October 1793 trial of Girondin leaders proved difficult because the defendants delivered eloquent patriotic defenses, Robespierre pushed the tribunal to alter legal rules, asking jurors to judge guilt based on personal conscience and gut feeling rather than traditional evidence.