The Reign of Terror
September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794
Ever since the execution of Louis XVI and the murder of journalist Jean-Paul Marat in 1793, revolutionaries had feared their enemies, the counterrevolutionaries. This panic led to the extreme measures of trying to eliminate anyone who was a threat. Wanting to investigate this further, I set the time machine to June of 1794 and went to visit the “waiting room of the guillotine,” also known as the Conciergerie where the Revolutionary Tribunal held trials. Once a royal palace, it was modified to be a courthouse and prison.
I was not prepared for what I was about to witness. I saw shackled and collared males and females of all ages and from all parts of the country being dragged in. A few of the women fainted, and some of them were pregnant. Others were too scared to speak. The rowdy and drunken jailers and jury had no pity for them and laughed at their distress. The main categories of crime were hoarding grain, harboring suspects, evading the draft, possessing subversive documents, or criticizing the revolution. The trials were done in such haste that sometimes the name on a death warrant was simply erased and replaced with a new victim’s name. The stunned and convicted “traitors” were abruptly sent off to prison cells. Some were imprisoned in the Conciergerie while others were loaded onto carts like animals and hauled off to other prisons.
I bribed a young prison guard to let me accompany him inside the prison for an hour. I saw several prisoners crammed in at a time to each tiny, dark cell with only dirty hay on the floor. There was a terrible, overpowering smell of feces, urine, body odor, and death. You could also smell fear. In the middle of the night, the jailers went from cell to cell announcing who had received death warrants for the next day. While only 80 people were selected for immediate death, hundreds were terrified.
The next morning, I returned early in the morning to see the stricken 80 loaded onto carts and taken a little less than two miles to the Place de la Révolution near the Tuileries Garden and Hôtel de Crillon where Marie Antionette once took piano lessons. An angry mob had gathered to watch the executions like it was entertainment. As the victims walked to their deaths on the scaffold, they were shouted at, cursed at, and insulted. Even the most virtuous women were called names. One at a time, they lay their heads down and the Guillotine blade dropped—swoosh—onto their necks, making a sickening thud as each head fell off. It was even bloodier than I had imagined, and I soon realized that the blood had been planned for. Workers had built an enormous drain system near the Place St. Antoine to carry away the blood. Four men carried buckets back and forth to this dreadful aqueduct. I was so sickened by the sight that, later, I couldn’t stomach my meager dinner of soup and bread.
For days, I witnessed these dreadful events occurring again and again and again. I watched as 45 magistrates from the Parliament of Paris and 33 magistrates from Toulouse were executed. Another time I saw 30 farmers. There were also generals, clergymen, nobles, and peasants. One poor 80-year-old man named Malesherbes was hanged with his whole family, including his sister, daughter, son-in-law, as well as his granddaughter and her husband.
As shocked as I was about these events, I could not speak out against them, for fear of being accused of being counterrevolutionary.
Bibliography:
The Reign of Terror; a Collection of Authentic Narratives of the Horrors Committed by the Revolutionary Government of France Under Marat and Robespierre.Written by Eye-Witnesses of the Scenes, Translated from the French, Illustrative of a Period Without Its Parallel in History. Vol. 1. London, Knight and Lacey, 1826. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044011894987&seq=9.
Thompson, Steve, and Jennifer Llewllyn. The Reign of Terror. Alpha History. November 2023. alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/reign-of-terror/.
Turek, Aidan. The Architecture of Violence: the Reign of Terror and the Character of Bloodshed. JSTOR. Trinity College. April 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.34031398?seq=10.