Most revolutions worldwide have involved mass meetings, full of people’s enthusiasm, fight for rights and dignity, and strong resistance to the current authority, which in most cases, were accompanied by blood and force. Violence was one of the most widespread political tools to stop the revolutionists. In the Second Revolution, during the French Revolution, quite many few government actions were inherent by violence, the main task of which was to scare people and make them more obedient.
Since any revolution refers not only to the spirit of rebellion and the fight for equality but also to arrests and corpses, it would be wrong to deny that during the French Revolution, violence was everywhere. Both revolutionists and representatives of the authority took violent actions. While the first rebelled to protect the average citizens from social and political terror, the second wanted to demonstrate their power and make people fear and kneel before them. Executions, groundless detentions, social oppression, bloody riots, and military actions belonged to the most widespread cases of use of violence. For the violence from the revolutionists, such a justification was offered that people could not live with the tiny amount of rights that the authority gave them. As for the government’s force, “the terror worked on designated groups, which could easily understand the actions they had to take (or refrain from taking) to escape the fear of violence” (O’Sullivan, 2019, p. 125). Thus, the violence was quite widespread: it can be measured by the number of corpses and can hardly be justified.
During the French Revolution, violence was one of the political tools used to intimidate the population. Scared people are less warlike and more obedient: the authority could more easily control them. Thus, the reason for the use of violence was to cause panic and fear among citizens. However, violence can hardly be justified: there are no excuses for thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of crippled destinies resulting from the French Revolution.
Reference
O’sullivan, N. (2019). Terrorism, ideology, and revolution: The origins of modern political violence. Routledge.