The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution

Greer, Donald

doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674282445

Cited by 61 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…The 24 One is reminded of the opening of de Tocqueville's classic account of the French Revolution: 'there have never been greater events, more clearly the products of a prolonged movement; events better prepared yet less foreseen' (de Tocqueville, 1949, p. 3). 25 A classic study of the incidence of the Terror is Greer (1935).…”

Section: The French Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Cascades and Revolutionary Regime Transitions

Ellis¹,

Fender

2010

The Economic Journal

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We combine Acemoglu and Robinson's model of the economic origins of democracy with Lohmann's model of political mass protest. This allows us to analyse the economic causes of political regime change based on the microfoundations of revolution. We are able to derive conditions under which democracy arises peacefully, when it occurs only after a revolution and when oligarchy persists. We model these possibilities in a world of asymmetric information, where information cascades are possible, and where these cascades may involve errors in the sense that they make everyone worse off.Why are some countries democratic and others not? Why do some countries have stable political institutions and others seem to be in a constant state of flux? And what role do economic factors play in determining a country's political institutions and their stability? These are difficult and important questions on which until comparatively recently economic theory was relatively mute. The current literature on the topic, like this article, is concerned primarily with the questions of whether and how societies will move from oligarchy to democracy.Two main themes pervade this literature; the first as in Acemoglu and Robinson (2000a, 2001, Conley and Temimi (2001), Overland et al. (2005) and Fender (2008, 2009) examines political and economic decisions when a ruling elite face a threat of revolution. Franchise extensions then arise as a means of removing this threat, by, for example, providing a credible commitment to redistribution. In this approach, the elite is homogeneous. In a second strand of literature, it is crucial that the elite is heterogeneous. Lizzeri and Persico (2004) and Llavador and Oxoby (2005) are examples of this genre; in Lizzeri and Persico, an elite may extend the franchise so as to avoid Pareto-inferior redistributive policies arising from internal political competition. In these split-elite setups, regime change does not require a threat of revolution.In both the split-elite and pre-existing revolutionary threat explanations of a transition to democracy, the transition itself is peaceful. Clearly, there are examples of such (relatively) peaceful democratic transitions, such as Britain in the nineteenth century, but there are numerous other examples where changes in the franchise only arose after bloody conflict; the French Revolution and its aftermath springs to mind as an obvious example. Indeed, why did Louis XVI not foresee the shadow of Madame Guillotine and behave accordingly? Although it is clearly implausible to hypothesise that all the events

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Section: The French Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Cascades and Revolutionary Regime Transitions

Ellis¹,

Fender

2010

The Economic Journal

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“…During this "Reign of Terror", 41,594 people were executed, many merely for their political views or associations [26]. See The word "Terrorism" comes from the French word "terrorisme", referring specifically to state-terrorism in the form of violence practiced by the French government against its own people [28] [29] [30]. This "terrorism" was used as a "weapon for political repression in a time of ... civil upheaval" during the "Reign of Terror" ("la Terreur") [28] [29].…”

Section: B Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Its agents enforced the policies of the government's "Reign of Terror" and the government employees of the CoPS were referred to as "Terrorists". [28] [29] [26] The word "terrorism" entered the English language by way of the London Times in January 30, 1795, and was first recorded in English-language dictionaries in the 1790s as meaning "systematic use of terror as a policy", by a government against its own people, to, for example, suppress civil unrest. [28] [29] [26] [30] This original usage of the word is somewhat different from its modern meaning that includes acts perpetrated by individuals or by non-government organizations.…”

Section: B Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Veilance and reciprocal transparency: Surveillance versus sousveillance, AR glass, lifeglogging, and wearable computing

Mann¹

2013

2013 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS): Social Implications of Wearable Computing and Augmediated

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This paper explores the interplay between surveillance cameras (cameras affixed to large-entities such as buildings) and sousveillance cameras (cameras affixed to small entities such as individual people), laying contextual groundwork for the social implications of Augmented/Augmediated Reality, Digital Eye Glass, and the wearable camera as a vision and visual memory aid in everyday life.We now live in a society in which we have both "the few watching the many" (surveillance), AND "the many watching the few" (sousveillance). Widespread sousveillance will cause a transition from our one-sided surveillance society back to a situation akin to olden times when the sheriff could see what everyone was doing AND everyone could see what the sheriff was doing. We name this neutral form of watching "veillance" -from the French word "veiller" which means "to watch". Veillance is a broad concept that includes both surveillance (oversight) and sousveillance (undersight), as well as dataveillance, uberveillance, etc.. It follows that: (1) sousveillance (undersight) is necessary to a healthy, fair, and balanced society whenever surveillance (oversight) is already being used; and (2) sousveillance has numerous moral, ethical, socioeconomic, humanistic/humanitarian, and practical justifications that will guarantee its widespread adoption, despite opposing sociopolitical forces.

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“…16 If we include the Vendée-the region in the west of France roughly overlapping parts of Brittany and Normandy and which was the scene of violent clashes between royalist and revolutionary forces-we can add anywhere between 159,000 to 250,000 deaths, that is, anywhere between two and five per cent of the local population. 17 We think then that, in total, the period known as the Terror cost the lives of between 200,000 and 300,000 people, out of a population of twenty-eight million.…”

Section: Setting the Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: massacre, conquest and the imperial enterprise

Dwyer¹

2013

Journal of Genocide Research

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The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution

Cited by 61 publications

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Information Cascades and Revolutionary Regime Transitions

Information Cascades and Revolutionary Regime Transitions

Veilance and reciprocal transparency: Surveillance versus sousveillance, AR glass, lifeglogging, and wearable computing

Violence and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: massacre, conquest and the imperial enterprise

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