The justifiability of the Reign of Terror

As a consequence, the Jacobins resorted to terror with the aim of preserving the revolution and winning the war against foreign aggressors and bringing to an end the civil conflicts that ranged in the same period especially in the West. The debate has raged on whether the institutionalized terror that was meted to thousands of both prominent and ordinary French citizens was justified. As presented in this paper, the reign of terror actually contrasted the values of liberty, equality, and democracy that the Revolution had espoused, and therefore, not justifiable even under the challenging circumstances that faced the nascent Republic. One of the reasons the reign of terror cannot be considered to have been justified is because it went against the values that the recently established republic was supposed to protect, in particular, liberty.

Notably, the Revolution was founded on the concepts of Enlightenment that included treatment of all citizens as equals (Malcom 1). The regime increasingly censored free speech and expression resulting in the punishment of thousands of people. Similarly, the newspapers were also severely regulated. Walton (4) explains that policing of public opinion took different forms ranging from illegalizing of such remarks that were considered defamatory to the authorities or undermining the Revolution, or unpatriotic. In fact, people could be sentenced to death merely on suspicion of speaking ill of the Revolution. Moreover, disparaging the republic was illegalized through such laws as the Law of Suspects of 1793 (Walton 4). According to Robespierre, to accomplish the perfect republic, every enemy of the cause had to be destroyed as everyone had to submit to the general will.