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Hello, on Monday, September 10, 1792, the Times of London carried a story covering events in revolutionary France.

Quote, the streets of Paris, strewn with the carcasses of the mangled victims,

are become so familiar to the site that they are passed by and trot on without any particular notice.

The mob think no more of killing a fellow creature who is not even an object of suspicion than wanton boys would of killing a cat or a dog.

These were the September massacres when Parisian mobs killed thousands of suspected royalists.

They were fortest for the terror and set the scene for the events to come soon afterwards, when the guillotine took centre stage and the terror ruled in France.

But how did the French Revolution descend into such extremes of violence? Who or what drove the terror?

And was it really an aberration of the revolution recalls or the moment when it truly expressed itself?

With me to discuss the French Revolutionary Terror, is Mike Bros. lecture in modern history at the University of Oxford and fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Rebecca Spang, reader in European history at the University of London and Tim Blanning, professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge.

Mike Bros. let's just start in 1789, sorry, 1789, and we've had the French Revolution who got the Estates General and then what?

Yeah well I think you've got to see the terror between 1792 and 1794 as a revolution within the revolution because it really does start in 1789.

And that's when Louis XVI decides to step outside the established institutions of the French monarchy and call this thing the Estates General.

This big amorphous anarchic body really that divided into the three old feudal orders of France, the church, the nobles, the commons, the commons being everybody else, that hasn't actually met since 1614.

And the problem is I think where you really see the revolution taking off is that he has an agenda, he's faced with a massive financial crisis, he has a reform agenda to streamline the administration of the country, to cut out noble and ecclesiastical privilege, provincial privilege, to ensure a better and more equitable and more profitable taxation system for France.

That's a very much a reforming king, very much a king who is prepared to take on the nobility, to take on the great vested interests of France, the whole privatized system of tax gathering, the problem is that's his agenda.

And when he calls the Estates General what he finds out to his surprise is that particularly the third estate, the commons have their own agenda and it isn't his.

He wants to talk about administrative and fiscal reform, they want to talk about giving France a whole new form of government, a constitution.

So effectively they break off and they take what's called the tennis courtes that they formed themselves into the national assembly and they take the tennis courtes that the tennis courtes say they will not split up at all and they will form the constitution.

Can you tell us what constitution they form?

Well they have an awful lot of rouse about that and I think a lot of historians rightly have seen some of the origins of the terror in this argument.

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