ABSTRACT
Contemporaries who lived through the revolution that followed the English civil wars found it hard to make sense of what they had experienced. Prior to 1789, the French had used the term in the plural when referring to major political turbulence and changes of regime. The slide into civil war in 1642 was triggered by distrust rather than fundamental constitutional or religious differences. French involvement in the American War of Independence, a brilliant diplomatic and military success, was a financial catastrophe. By spring 1793, war was going badly again. In the west, the department of the Vendee rose in open revolt against the Convention. Terror had three main facets. First of these was the centralization of power. Second, Terror involved the deliberate inculcation of fear as a weapon of government. Third, the government sought to mobilize popular support for revolutionary government by introducing egalitarian social policies.
