ABSTRACT
Since Niccolò Machiavelli’s political treatise The Prince fear belongs to a set of tools necessary in order to obtain the people’s allegiance and obedience. Hence, terror bore a positive aspect in politics and warfare if we consider expressions such as "dread majesty" or being the "terror of one’s enemies". If in the middle of the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke considered terror a sublime feeling of divine nature, the French Revolution practiced it by cleansing the nation of its "inner enemies". Now terror scrutinised and pervaded society to learn how well citizens were attached to the revolution. As an "emotional regime" (W. Reddy), it became a blueprint for the emotional control of subjects. Decades later, references to the French Grande Terreur (1793/94) were used to understand and explain the political violence in the Republic of Paraguay under Dr Francia or the repression of General Rosas’ political enemies in the Province of Buenos Aires. Political cartoons depicted the governor literally as a bloodthirsty monster and a tireless killing machine standing on a pyramid of skulls. Yet the brutal repression was often a reflection of the dictator’s fears to be killed in a plot, sometimes resulting in political trials as in the case of the duke d’Enghien.
