Where would you have stood in the French Revolution?

[Xithras]

50. I'm sympathetic to Robespierre's initial views, but the later actions in the Terror....

The real problem with using terror as a tool of revolution is that it's hard to STOP using it once it's become normalized. The mass executions of the aristocracy who supported the overthrow of the republic and the return of the monarchy? I don't have much of a problem with that. Marching nuns to the guillotine because they refused to swear off their gods? Executing fellow revolutionaries by the thousands simply because they wanted to moderate the bloodshed? You're entering ISIS territory now...

The monarchy and aristocracy had held the French peasantry hostage for centuries under a system that allowed the upper classes to order the execution of the lower classes for essentially any crime. Robespierre's initial declaration with the Terror was that he was making the system "fair" by extending it to the aristocracy itself. He was using the aristocracy's own weapon against them. The Jacobin failure laid in the the fact that they forgot that the true crime of the aristocracy was not simply the fact that it executed people, but that it did so arbitrarily and unjustly. When the revolutionaries began executing people over trivial "crimes" that had little or nothing to do with oppression, they essentially became the same unjust aristocracy that they'd fought to overthrow.