Abstract
No part of the Revolution calls as much pictures to mind as the "Terror". The endless lines of people waiting to be guillotined, the Committee of Public Safety with the heartless figure of Maximilien Robespierre, Marat's corpse lying in his bath... more and more bloody pictures until Robespierre's fall. This is the popular image of "The Terror", popularized by several movies, especially Eric Rohmer's L'Anglaise et le duc, and many books, such as Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize. It is always compared with the generous laws and declarations of 1789, in particular the Declaration of the rights of man and tends to be blamed, or at least ignored. Thus the of the Terror period was overlooked in 1989 in the celebrations of the bicentenary of the French Revolution. But what is actually this so-called "Terror"? Here we enter the field of historiographical debates, which are particularly vivid on this subject.
