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
In the Reign of Terror: The Adventures of a Westminster Boy – much of the St. Caux family are killed for the sake of their aristocratic status. Harry, himself a middle-class English boy, "sympathizes with the oppressed peasantry but tries to protect his adoptive noble French family from the terror." The theme of class divisions is threaded with nationalistic rhetoric: Harry’s father states that "the condition of the vast body of the French nation has been terrible," and that England, in contrast, has "long conquered our liberties." "In the Reign of Terror" was well received in its time and is one of Henty's more popular works. Contemporary reviews were positive: The