Why did the French Revolution Government follow such extreme policies during the terror?
The policies formed during the Reign of Terror were designed to prevent the collapse of the Revolution. France was as at war with most of the rest of Europe, and also suffering from attack from within, there were anti-revolutionary uprisings in particular in the west of France. In ‘The Cambridge Illustrated Histoyr of France’ Colin Jones writes: ‘If the republic in mid 1793 was to be saved “we must rally the people”. So spoke the deceptively mild-mannered lawyer from Arras, maximiliam Robespierre, darling of the sansculottes. The Jacobins prevailed, a sans-culotte purge rid the Convention of Girndin leaders and the Jacobins took over th eCommitte of Public Safety, the war cabinet directing the war effort. To enlist popular support in Paris and the provinces, they introduced a wide range of radical measures, incomes and price-fixing policies were established, the final vestiges of feudalism were removed, slavery was abolished both at home and abroad, radical divorce legislation was conf
