In 1792,France had a Constitutional Monarchy and most Provinces had elected representatives. The political situation resembled very much that of England, so why the Terror later on that year?
That summer, France celebrated Federation Day and the whole population, from the lowly peasant to the sophisticated aristocrat, was happy. It’s probably the only time in all their history that the French were genuinely proud and happy as a people.
A little later that year, contrary to all common sense, the people working out of the Paris City Hall hired thugs to go and kill inmates in selected prisons, hospitals, and asylums of the Capital. The workers would go out in the morning, come back to get paid at night, and would repeat the process the next day. It’s obvious that someone wanted to stop the Constitutional Monarchy dead in its tracks. The blood kept flowing for a couple of years, and the great majority of those guillotined were ordinary folk, innocent of all crime. The only purpose of the Terror was to have blood flowing and scare the hell out of the aristocrats who for the most part fled the country. Their properties were then seized and sold at auction and the people who bought the properties with counterfeit assignats later sold them for real money and became insanely rich.
In 1794, a fellow called Barras, the ‘scumbag king’, came along and had all the mad dogs guillotined, and the Terror ended just as suddenly as it had started. The French Revolution wasn’t a popular movement; very powerful people had made it happen.
History of finance 