Reign of Terror the call for these radical, revolutionary aspirations, while at the same time trying to maintain tight control on the de-Christianization movement that was threatening to the clear majority of the still devoted Catholic population of France. The tension sparked by these conflicting objectives laid a foundation for the "justified" use of terror to achieve revolutionary ideals and rid France of the religiosity that revolutionaries believed was standing in the way. On 10 March 1793 the National Convention created the Revolutionary Tribunal. Among those charged by the tribunal, about a half were acquitted (though the number dropped to about a quarter
Political terror scale between 1976 and 1983. In 1984, Mark Gibney took over as manager of the database and expanded the list of countries coded to 180 and the range of years to the most recent years available (currently 2012).The Political Terror Scale uses three sources to code each country: The State Department's "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," the "Annual Report" from Amnesty International and most recently the "World Report" from Human Rights Watch.The database can be viewed and downloaded from its website. The Political Terror Scale is a five-point fixed scale. The scale is based on the assessment of violence along