Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

It's often been said that revolutions devour their own children.

And in the early 1790s,

it seemed as though the French Revolution

was making good on that promise.

But what lay behind the bloodthirsty spiral

of state violence and mass hysteria

that became known to history as the terror?

In today's episode of our Everything You Wanted to Know series,

Danny Bird puts your questions to David Andrus, covering everything from the word's surprising

meaning to the long shadow cast by the terror on popular culture. David, thank you for joining me

for this episode of everything you want to know. We'll be looking at the phase of the French Revolution known as the Terror. So to start us off, a big but I think a central question. What was the terror? Well, that is everything, isn't it? Useful, I think, to say, beginning, that the idea of calling it the terror is

essentially retrospective. It's a label that people come up with very, very gradually

to explain a series of events which have been essentially traumatic for the people that have

survived them. And there are two dimensions of this. One is to think of it as a sort of storm, as a kind of political tempest that sweeps up the whole country. Some people opt for that kind of view.

Another one is the view that it's a system, it's organized by a particular faction, which we associated very overtly with Maximilian Robsbier, to have a sort of essentially conspiratorial view of something

called the terror being inflicted on people. And it won't surprise you to learn that neither of those

views are really accurate, but they're useful to the people who survived it to try and explain

to themselves what's going on. But if we wanted to talk about what does actually happen, then the what's going on in this period is France after several years of revolutionary turbulence, in which repeatedly the hopes and aspirations of good patriots have been betrayed, you know, quite literal episodes of real individual betrayal at the top of politics,

massive evidence of real counter-revolutionary conspiracy.

And this has gone on for years in which they've tried to construct a state, and it hasn't worked.

They've ended up having to overthrow the monarchy. They've ended up at war with all

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