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MarkMurphy
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Le Précepte de La
Terreur
“... the basis of popular government during a revolution
is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful;
terror, without which virtue is powerless.”
-
Maximilien Robespierre
‘Let’s storm the Bastille for all we are worth,’
came the cry from the
sans-culottes
,
living as many did, among the sewerage
on the outskirts of Paris,
persevering on starvation rations.
Hardly surprising that seventeen thousand
‘counter-revolutionaries’
including Desmoulin and Danton
lost their heads
at the mercy of
Madame Guillotine
during Robespierre’s ‘Reign of Terror,’
1
not forgetting Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette,
who had dared to say:
Qu’ils mangent de le brioche.
1 During the French Revolution, upto a quarter of a million insurgents were killed in the
Guerre
de Vendée,
a royalist rebellion and counter-revolution
.