Reign Of Terror Dbq Analysis

Aside from giving the guillotine a purpose, the Reign of Terror stands as a necessity in the story of French independence. It might not have been the proudest of times, but the Reign began on a strong premise; holding together a new government by purging the bad apples for the betterment of the whole cart. While the Reign of Terror developed into an overly excessive bloodshed, it was justified by the war stricken circumstances and necessity for the support of the ongoing revolution.

Despite the extreme heights the Reign of Terror reached, it was necessary to maintain the fragile presence of the government and preserved the new liberty a majority of the population had been denied before. In a 1793 letter from Vendée —a major counterrevolutionary

Marching an 80,000-man army into France, Prussia and Austria moved to attack and capture the providences of Longwy and Verdun. Along with the pressing overseas forces, and additional “10,000 French army officers…formed armies and allied themselves with France’s foreign enemies” (Document B). To match the amassing legion that was shaping against them, the French government had to inforce regulations (in example: The Tribune) to divert the internal forces they were spending calming riots back to their needed place on the front lines. Similarly, without Committee of Public Safety “employing a …network of informers and spies” (Document E) it’s impossible to say how the French would have suffered if infantile government had lost information to enemies, especially considering many of their own countrymen had abandoned their patriotism and fled to the Austrian-Netherlands. For the entirety of the war, the French suffered most during 1792 when the war first began and there were no standards set in place to order the population. Victory was only achieved when the French pushed cracked down on counterrevolutionaries and were able to put more attention towards the