Katia N’s Reviews > Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution > Status Update

The condition in Europe 1794 was disturbingly similar to 1938. There was a general feeling that law and civilization must be saved from brutality and violence. But the European governments, beneath all their protestations, had no real sense of running a danger in common. They would not rally their utmost forces, or even realize the vastness of the upheaval before them. (Continued in the comment)

‘Practical Frenchmen argued over their past with sectarian fervor incomprehensible in the United States’.

Well, I think nowadays the opposite would be closer to reality. It reads almost ironically.

Barreré, one of the rulers in 1794 of 🇫🇷 Terror: ‘Are we not yet weary of being tributaries to a foreign industry? So long as we buy English manufactures or use English shipping we live by the suffrance of the English government, we put our vital reserves in the keeping of a foreign people. We must produce everything ourselves that we can.’

More than 200 years since, but sounds painfully familiar:-(

The new organizing law was an instrument of Terror because the government which it strengthened was the creation of a minority, the triumphant leaders of the Mountain, itself a party among republicans, who in turn were only a party among the original revolutionists, who in their turn did not include all the people in France. in the name of liberty France now possessed the most dictatorial government it had ever known

There is a deep truth in the observation of Hippolyte Carnot, son of Lazare Carnot, that the men who ruled France during the Terror had too great respect for the law to attribute to the law the course of action which they took.

For the first time the world saw a nation in arms. War became the struggle of a whole people—or at least was carried through on that principle, for in sober fact the whole people was hardly more eager to go to war in the France of 1793 than in the Europe of 1914 or 1939. (Cont. in the comment)