First White Terror

4 Key excerpts on "First White Terror"

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  Red Terror and White Terror

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 4 White Terror White Terror is the violence carried out by reactionary (usually monarchist or conservative) groups as part of a counter-revolution. In particular, during the 20th century, in several countries the term White Terror was applied to acts of violence against real or suspected socialists and communists. Historical origin: the French Revolution The name derives from the traditional use of the colour white as a symbol of the Bourbon monarchy, as opposed to the red used by revolutionaries/republicans as in their Phrygian caps and red flag. The original White Terror took place in 1794, during the turbulent times surrounding the French Revolution. It was organized by reactionary Chouan royalist forces in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror, and was targeted at the radical Jacobins and anyone suspected of supporting them. Throughout France, both real and suspected Jacobins were attacked and often murdered. Just like during the Reign of Terror, trials were held with little regard for due process. In other cases, gangs of youths who had aristocratic connections roamed the streets beating known Jacobins. These bands of Jesus dragged suspected terrorists from prisons and murdered them much as alleged royalists had been murdered during the September Massacres of 1792. Again, in 1815, following the return of King Louis XVIII of France to power, people suspected of having ties with the governments of the French Revolution or of Napoleon suffered arrest and execution. Marshal Brune was killed in Avignon, and General Jean-Pierre Ramel was assassinated in Toulouse. These actions struck fear in the population, dissuading Jacobin and Bonapartist electors (48,000 on 72,000 total permitted by the census suffrage) to vote for the ultras.

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  The Total Enemy

  Six Chapters of a Violent Idea

  • Thorup(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  It is hereafter increasingly reserved for the kind of fear coming from political violence rather than from any of the other possible sources of fear and horror and even more pointedly, from illegitimate violence wielded by despots (dictatorships or totalitarian states) or by individuals (terrorists). It is only through this conceptual change that terror as violence can come to mean a systematic and premeditated violence against society. Terror comes to mean violence not from the state against individuals but violence from despots or terrorists against state and society. One mustn’t of course expect a complete reversal of meaning and there is a significant amount of different temporalities in conceptual usage but the transformation of terror in its political sense from a state practice to an illegitimate non-state or illegitimate state practice is quite clear. Even though Thuriot a few days after Robespierre’s execution speaks about terror as “the blade of law” 40 the general transformation from neutrality before Robespierre, to legitimacy during Robespierre, and to illegitimacy after is easily documented. The word “terrorism” was itself first used in the French National Assembly in August 1794 by Jean-Lambert Tallien who himself had overseen the reign of terror in the provinces but met a suspected attack for being corrupt and excessively violent from Robespierre by attacking first (he had used the term “system of terror” the day after Robespierre’s execution). 41 He was the first to describe the reign of terror as a “system of power” put in place by Robespierre (in 1791, however, Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man had described a “government by terror.”). 42 What we see is a man culpable of corruption and terror engineering the later prevailing conception of the reign of terror and its intimate relation to Robespierre’s name. What Tallien does is to name ‘the terror’ the same as its supposed adversary, despotism

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  Chronologies of Modern Terrorism

  • Barry Rubin, Judith Colp Rubin(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Modern terrorism had significant forerunners long before the French Revolution, especially in struggles involving religion. For example, in 1572 high-ranking Catholic noblemen in France began a large-scale massacre of French Protestants with the aim of wiping them out. An estimated 10,000 people were killed. Spain acted as a state sponsor of revolution in Britain, using British Catholic surrogates in plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and place a Catholic on the throne. Yet these actions were to a large extent the product of state activities and dynastic quarrels, closer to traditional uses of political violence.

  Thus, the French Revolution is the best point at which to commence the history of terrorism. There, for the first time ever, terrorism was at the core of a comprehensive political philosophy and strategy to gain and retain power. Many of the critical elements of terrorism are clearly expressed and implemented during the French Revolution: the deliberate instilling of fear, the elimination of entire social groups (first the aristocracy, then the Girondin moderates, then rivals among the radicals themselves), the use of terror against others as a way of mobilizing one’s own supporters, and incitement to murder as a means of political expression and to achieve utopian goals.

  It was no accident that the very word “terrorist” was coined in 1793 by the revolutionary activist journalist Gracchus Babeuf. It was the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat who proposed to “place terror as the lord of the day,” a strategy that, his colleague Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard explained, was “the only way to arouse the people and force them to save themselves.” In denying that terrorism was the act of a despotic government, the radical leader Maximilien Robespierre claimed that it was essential for establishing a virtuous regime. But the tendency of terrorism to spread and to poison the movement using it is illustrated by the fact that Babeuf and Robespierre themselves were guillotined, victims of the terror regime they instituted and justified.

  The French Revolution produced a lasting legacy of both democratic potentiality and revolutionary romanticism. Yet it is easy to forget that the movement itself was an abject political failure. In less than a decade it had collapsed, due less to foreign intervention than to internal disorder, and terrorism greatly contributed to those problems. An emperor, Napoléon, took power, established his own noble class, and led the country into 15 years of bloody and wasteful wars. France’s political turmoil was not resolved and democracy firmly established until more than 80 years after the revolution.

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  Terrorism

  Origins and Evolution

  • J. Lutz(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The major revolution in this era that was not colonial in nature was the French Revolution that resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy and included the Reign of Terror.Violence, including terrorism, was a part and parcel of this revolution.Terror was used by the political groups competing for power and then by the state itself. The lines of people awaiting the guillotine were more of an example of state repression by the government or by a series of governments.There was still an element of terror, however, because citizens could not avoid death by obeying the law since so many executions lacked justification or cause. Further, not all the violence that occurred in the early days of the revolution was undertaken by the government or even with the complicity of members of the government. Much of the violence was designed as a part of larger efforts to try to gain control of the government, and different political groups sought to intimidate and terrorize their opponents or to influence or change government policies. Terrorism in the Age of Revolutions 39 The violence that surrounded the revolution had many sources, including the political struggles for the control of the National Assembly, the Convention, and other government bodies. The executions that occurred during the Reign of Terror actually became a form of political combat between competing factions in the revolutionary government. 19 One early struggle, with many permutations, was between the radical Montagnards and the moderate, but much less well organized,Girondins— a struggle that the radicals eventually won.The Montagnards were very effective in organizing the lower middle classes, the sans-culottes. The sans-culottes took to the streets when it was necessary to support the radicals in their struggles for political control. Street riots were often used to pressure the different legislative bodies or their committees, as well as government ministries throughout the period of the early revo- lution.

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