Appendix 10- The Revolution Devours Its Children

What It Covers

Revolutionary violence takes two forms: radical reigns of terror and moderate bloody weeks. Both involve state-sanctioned mass arrests and executions to consolidate power, though they target different groups and use different justifications for political purges.

Key Questions Answered

• •Terror Justifications: Radical regimes justify terror through five mechanisms: winning wars against foreign and domestic enemies, economic mobilization and resource confiscation, eliminating rival political factions, establishing sovereign preponderance of force, and ideologically liquidating old society to enable revolutionary transformation.
• •Victim Demographics: Most terror victims are anonymous commoners, peasants, and workers, not aristocrats who fled into exile. Revolutionary tribunals execute pickpockets and thieves alongside political rivals. Half of September Massacre victims were ordinary criminals, not enemies of the revolution or aristocratic targets.
• •Moderate Violence Patterns: Bloody weeks target radical revolutionaries exclusively from lower and lower-middle classes through martial law and summary street executions. Moderates reconcile with ancien regime conservatives while using firing squads against their own revolutionary coalition's left wing to prevent social revolution.
• •Bidirectional Purges: Revolutionary terror attacks both right and left simultaneously from a new center. Robespierre targeted left-wing enragés before Cordeliers. Bolsheviks purged anarchists and SR maximalists alongside liberals. Radicals create their own middle ground and eliminate extremes on both sides.