ABSTRACT
The Terror is probably the best-known period of the French Revolution and at the same time the revolutionary event that remains the most obscure. The entire French Revolution may be rethought as a fictional mechanism. To do so requires shifting the perspective from that of political or economic history to that of the law and its production of social norms. Even today the law in France is either monarchic or Napoleonic. The law of the Revolutionary age is qualified as intermediary' and thought of as a mere transitional link between those two periods. Finally, the Terror as a legal fiction raises a worrying question, one that is different in nature to that concerning the potential totalitarianism of the French Revolution. This may in turn explain why it is so difficult to unearth the general principles of French Republican law, and without these, the state of law in the Republic is set to remain forever ill-assured.
