Revolutions eat their children. Yes, it’s a cliché—one that, as it happens, also has its origin in the French Revolution: “Like Saturn, revolutions devour their children,” wrote moderate-turned-royalist Jacques Mallet du Pan from his exile in Switzerland in 1793. Even so, it’s nearly always true. (The American Revolution is one of the exceptions.) Even the nobles who perished in the Reign of Terror were, more often than not, liberal reformers rather than hardcore monarchists, if only because the latter were far more likely to emigrate before heads started falling. Other than the royal couple, the Terror’s most notable victims were revolutionaries themselves, from the Girondins—republicans who rapidly went from being the Revolution’s radicals to being its conservatives and then its “enemies of the nation”—to Georges Danton and finally to the Terror’s own leaders, including Maximilien Robespierre.
Twists of fate may shape history. The royal family’s disastrous attempt to escape France and join anti-revolutionary forces over the border (the so-called “Flight to Varennes”) ended in their capture, largely through a series of mistakes and accidents that slowed down the journey. This ill-fated venture not only doomed the efforts of moderates like Lafayette to preserve the constitutional monarchy, which existed on borrowed time from the moment the king and his family were brought back to Paris, but caused public confidence in the moderates to plummet while boosting the stock of radicals like Jean-Paul Marat (who called not only for the overthrow of the monarchy but for large-scale terror against enemies of the Revolution). It’s hard to say how the things might have changed if the royal family’s escape had succeeded—but if it had never been attempted, or if it had been nipped in the bud before it became public knowledge, it’s tempting to speculate that the Revolution might not have spun out of control.
The dangers of normalizing political violence. France had no mechanism for either the peaceful transfer of power or the reform of power, so in retrospect some level of violence seems inevitable. But from the beginning, the Revolution was also marked by grisly brutality against perceived evildoers. The most dramatic example of this was the lynching of finance minister Joseph Foullon de Doué and his son-in-law, the intendant of Paris Louis Bertier de Sauvigny, on July 22, 1789; both men, named as culprits in paranoid rumors about a “famine plot” to starve the population of Paris, were hanged from lampposts and then beheaded, their severed heads carried on pikes through city streets. After some Assembly members voiced dismay at the killings, others rose to excuse them as a justifiable expression of popular anger; one, Antoine Barnave, rebuked his “tender-hearted” colleagues and suggested that the victims deserved little pity because the spilled blood was not “pure” but tainted by their offenses. Predictably, Barnave himself later joined the ranks of such “impure” victims.
When the Republic was established in September 1792 and the mass of (male) French citizens acquired the ability to change their government at the ballot box, the habit of political violence persisted. On May 31, 1793, a Paris mob invaded the hall of the national legislature—the Convention—and demanded the expulsion and arrest of the Girondin deputies. The mob, supported by Robespierre’s radical Montagnard faction, prevailed. Long before the ascent of Napoleon, that was the end of France’s first experiment in liberty.