Well, last episode I tried to summarize the French Revolution, and I realized that there is no way to cover it in just one podcast episode, so here we are in part 2. So in this episode, we’re going to look at the part of the French Revolution that is known as the Reign of Terror, and how that will eventually lead to rise of a new emperor.
Now, this is kind of obvious, but the American revolution didn’t have a period known as the reign of terror. Like I said last episode, the two revolutions happened in very different environments, and they had very different enemies. The enemy of the American revolution was the British government, and the British army and navy. But the enemy of the French Revolution was, well, whichever Frenchman was against you, whether in policy or class or the type of pants you wore. So one of the reasons that the French Revolution has a reign of terror, is that different groups who held power were pretty ruthless about eliminating their enemies.