In the more than two centuries since the Reign of Terror in France, historians and political theorists have identified a plethora of standard causes to explain why the French Revolution, launched in 1789 alongside the universal rights of man, descended in 1793 to an official government policy of terror, during which 17,000 people were officially executed and another estimated 10,000 perished in prison or without trial. These reasons have variously included the very real threat of counter-revolution, war with foreign armies enclosing France, a mounting culture of conspiracy, and, more generally, the political and economic chaos triggered by the Revolution itself. While all these factors played a role, none of them can be said to have precipitated or necessitated the Terror all by itself. Underlying each, however, is the one cause without which the Reign of Terror might have been avoided. That cause, the seeds of which are present from the start of the Revolution, and grow inexorably over the four years between 1789 and 1793, is the absence of a safe and viable political center within which the French people could argue passionately and democratically without the need to rhetorically set their opponents against the revolutionary movement— a process of dehumanization that would lead, eventually, to the guillotine.
The initial tragedy of this history is that by the time of the epochal tennis court oath, this missing center was already firmly in place, and the facts of its genesis would serve to retain it for the years to come. By the mid 1780s, the deadlock that had developed between the aristocratic parlements and the king, whose legislative interplay traditionally reinforced France’s unwritten constitution, had begun to muddle the nation’s political atmosphere. Since the conflict revolved around the taxation of the different estates, political victory required the support of public opinion, which, as research by Mona Ozou has shown, had recently become an autonomous force. But competition for its favor— with the monarchy distributing an Avertisement that enforced the sacrifice of privilege as a patriotic duty, and Nobles responding by portraying themselves as the true defenders of public liberty— resulted in a confusion of central authority. Anti-feudal disruptions in Dijon occurred alongside attacks on royal troops in Grenoble, and civil-war seemed a possibility. Therefore, the King’s highly visible summoning of the Estates-General to deliberate on a new constitution, with representatives to be voted by universal male-suffrage, effectively forestalled collapse by projecting public interest into the possibilities of a legislative rewrite. Due to the heterogeneous nature of this interest, this final weakening of France’s central powers had a crucial radicalizing effect on the eve of revolution. The refusal by many Nobles and Clergy to discard the old system forever cemented a perception of them as obstructionist and reactionary, with one group even publishing a letter boycotting the entire Estates-General. Meanwhile, the perceived fragility of the moment among representatives of the Third Estate— a non-force in politics after centuries of entrenched autocracy— seemed to necessitate a complete de-legitimization of noble and clerical input. Timothy Tackett’s history of the Bretton Club, who would lead the tennis court oath, demonstrates how they created crucial unity within The Third Estate around an intention to exclude the intransigent parties. The resulting Declaration of The Rights of Man, which claimed that “social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good,” was therefore secured by a process of factionalism. Despite this private exclusion, public support for the revolution— shown in the collapse of the Bastille— was nevertheless universal enough to officially transfer legislative authority from the Monarchy to the National Assembly. As Robespierre would declare, “it is the decree of the people that we are right.” Material gathered by Keith Baker, which shows how Jacobin texts subsequently phased out the term “public opinion” for the less subjective and more unifying “L’esprit public,” illustrates how this perception would change in the years to come.