Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is a 2009 documentary broadcast on BBC Two in July 2009. In 1794, French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre produced the world's first defense of "state terror" - claiming that the road to virtue lay through political violence. This film combines drama, archive and documentary interviews to examine Robespierre's year in charge of the Committee of Public Safety - the powerful state machine at the heart of Revolutionary France. Contesting Robespierre's legacy are Slavoj Žižek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who
Élisabeth of France (1764–1794) "Of what should Elizabeth of France complain? Have we not to-day given her a court of aristocrats worthy of her? There will be nothing to prevent her fancying herself still in the salons of Versailles when she sees herself, surrounded by this faithful nobility, at the foot of the holy guillotine." After her trial, Élisabeth joined the prisoners condemned with her in the Hall of the Condemned, awaiting their execution. She asked for Marie Antoinette, upon which one of the female prisoners said to her, "Madame, your sister has suffered the same fate that we ourselves are about to undergo."