Hippolyte Carnot, son of Lazare Carnot: those who ruled France during the Terror respected law too much to pretend their measures were lawful.

#TwelveWhoRuled

The Law of Suspects of September 17 defined suspicion of counter-revolution so vaguely that almost anyone could find themselves compromised under its categories.

#TheFrenchRevolution
#RRPalmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

Thus, by the French Republic distributing real property among those who could afford to buy it, a large number of people were attached to the Revolution.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

Before the Revolution, wars had been fought between governments by small armies of professional soldiers. The French Republic introduced a new system: the people’s government made its wars the people’s wars, and their armies the armies of the nation.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

#Robespierre saw the peoples of other countries as groaning masses and their rulers as wicked men, and so could easily be brought, with a little impulsion, to favor a general ideological crusade.

#TwelveWhoRuled
#R.R.Palmer

In the summer of 1793, the Allies were waiting, for they imagined that France, remaining in revolutionary disorder, could easily be defeated, and in which useful territorial acquisitions might easily be made at some convenient moment in the future.

#TwelveWhoRuled
#R.R.Palmer

Once admitted to The Committee, those two pressed relentlessly for that “force for the law”, swiftly becoming breathers of fire and destruction.

Force for the law, in the circumstances, was a euphemism for terror.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled
#TheFrenchRevolution

After fifty years of the #AgeOfEnlightenment, old superstitions had lost their force – a fact of importance in producing the #FrenchRevolution.

This same day, September 5, was the first day of the #ReignOfTerror.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

Calling for order, authority, confidence, unity and efficiency, #Robespierre was ceasing to be revolutionary in the old sense of the word. In 1793, “Revolutionary” referred to the stabilizing of an accomplished fact, #TheRevolution.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

The old leaders of #TheMountain, having established themselves in power on #June2, were already beginning to use oddly conservative language, vaunt the merits of order, and look with suspicion and a pained surprise upon those who still were not contented.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

#Robespierre easily identified with foreign conspirators anyone who deviated from the program of the #Mountain.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled
#FrenchRevolution

In France of 1793, the provincial cities bourgeois’ objection to the influence of Paris and its mobs was called #federalism, a word meaning the opposite of what it meant in the United States at the same time. It signified the #decentralization and scattering of power.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled

There was no such thing as a professional #revolutionist before the nineteenth century—before #TheFrenchRevolution set the example. The old régime drifted to its Niagara without knowing it.

#RobertRoswellPalmer
#TwelveWhoRuled