Reign of Terror June 1793 and the end of July 1794, there were 16,594 official death sentences in France, of which 2,639 were in Paris. There was a sense of emergency among leading politicians in France in the summer of 1793 between the widespread civil war and counter-revolution. Bertrand Barère exclaimed on 5 September 1793 in the Convention: "Let's make terror the order of the day!" They were determined to avoid street violence such as the September Massacres of 1792 by taking violence into their own hands as an instrument of government. Robespierre in February 1794 in a speech explained the necessity of
Revolutionary terror Purge refers collectively to several related campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the 1930s, which removed all of his remaining opposition from power. It involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, both occurring within a period characterized by omnipresent police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment and killings. In the Western World, this was referred to as "the Great Terror". Revolutionary terror Revolutionary terror (also referred to as revolutionary terrorism, or a reign of terror) refers to the institutionalized application of