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
Arthur Dillon (1750–1794) and executed by guillotine on 13 April 1794. In his final moments he mounted the scaffold shouting, "Vive le roi! (Long live the king)". Arthur Dillon (1750–1794) Arthur Dillon (3 September 1750 – 13 April 1794) was an Irish Catholic aristocrat born in England who inherited the leadership of a French army regiment, serving both the Ancien Régime during the American Revolutionary War and the French First Republic during the War of the First Coalition. After serving in political positions during the early years of the revolution, he was executed in Paris as a royalist during the Reign of Terror,