This article is part of a series on the Ideology of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. The revolutionary government, which aspired to establish a new utopia for mankind, shifted into a ‘democratic’ despotism during the Terror. The ideology that inspired democracy, civil rights, and emancipation in 1789 also gave justification for the totalitarian regime of the Terror in 1793-4. The Terror instead of contradicting revolutionary beliefs, was a manifestation of the ideology of the French Revolution.
- Interpretations of the Reign of Terror
- The Committee of Public Safety
- Violence of the Reign of Terror
- The French Revolution was a Religious Revolution
- The Enlightenment and the Cult of Rousseau
- The ‘General Will’ in Rousseau’s Contract Social
- Deism and de-Christianization
- Revolutionary Festivals; Space and Time
- The Cult of Reason and The Cult of the Supreme Being
- Thermidorian Reaction and Disillusionment of the Terror
Secondary Sources
- Aston, Nigel. Religion and Revolution in France. London: Macmillan Press, 2000.
- Aulard, A. Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de L’etre Supreme. Paris, 1892.
- Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition, 2002.
- Gough, Hugh. The Terror in the French Revolution, 2nd Ed. Palgrave: Macmillion, 2014.
- Lyttle, Charles. “Deistic Piety in the Cults of the French Revolution.” Church History 6, no. 1 (1933): 22-40. http://www.jstor.org /stable/3691955.
- McNeil, Gordon H. “The Cult of Rousseau and the French Revolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 6, no. 2 (1945): 197-212. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2707363.
- Ozouf, Mona. “Space and Time in the Festivals of the French Revolution.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 3 (1975): 372-384. http://www.jstor.org/stable/178030.
- Palmer, R.R. Twelve Who Ruled: A Year of Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941.
- Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966.
- Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution. Kindle Edition, 1856.
- Weisner-Hanks, Merry E. Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Primary Sources
- La Marseillaise, 1792.
- Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (p. 64).
- Republican Catechism, 1794.
- Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Social Contract.
- Robespierre, Speech on Public Morality, February 5, 1794.
- Robespierre, Speech on Enemies of the Nation. May 26, 1794.
- Robespierre, Speech for the Defense of the Committee of Public Safety, 1793.
- Robespierre, Speech at Festival of the Supreme Being, 1793.
