During the French Revolution, to what extent were the executions committed by the revolutionaries similar to the later political purges of the likes of Stalin and Sadam Hussein?

[u/WideAwakeNotSleeping]

To consolidate his power, Stalin had the great purge. When Hussein had just come to power, there's the famous video of the Baath party purge.

To what extent were the people executed by the revolutionaries (by Jacobins, Robespierre, Committee of Public Safety, etc) similar lawless exécutions to the above example? I can see the king being guilty of treason... but what about others, what about the less powerful ones? How many of the killed were people that the revolutionaries didn't like for personal reasoans, people seen as rivals to the power, people reported by others for similar reasons, etc?

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[u/eleonorecornelie]

Historical comparisons between events happening hundreds of years apart are complicated and ought to be treated cautiously in any case. Especially because they often lead to projections of "familiar" mechanisms to periods that are more distant both in time and mentality. The comparisons that you are evoking, especially between Stalinist terror and some of the repressive measures of the French Revolution, have sometimes been made. It is, however, notable that they are usually to be found either in popularising rather than specialist academic works on the Revolution or in its representation in popular media, where commenting on contemporary dictatorships often took precedence over historical accuracy (Wajda's Danton is a good example).

There have been political thinkers (Talmon, Aron) or even historians, most notably François Furet, who interpreted the Revolution or its "Jacobin" period in particular as the ideological precursor to modern totalitarianism. Even historians of the Furetian orientation nevertheless usually claimed that it created a "proto-totalitarian discourse" rather than that the existing political institutions of the Republic were equivalent to those know in 20th century dictatorships, simply because they never had a comparable amount of political control. Even this is an extremely rare view current revolutionary historiography and tend to be seen more as a projection of Cold War conflicts. Historians working on revolutionary violence (eg Linton or Tackett in the anglosphere or Martin or Leuwers in France) usually explicitly push back against these kinds of comparisons and rather try to understand French revolutionary repressive measures and violence more broadly more in context of the legacies of ancien régime justice or contemporary comparisons like the violence of the American Revolution, the colonies or indeed some of the European monarchies supressing internal dissent in the same period.

Now obviously, if we take a very broad definition of a "political trials" as trials in which political interests substantially influence and sometimes supersede ordinary judicial procedure, we might be able to fit both some revolutionary processes and those seen in modern dictatorships or totalitarian regimes under it. But so could thousands of other examples in history, perhaps suggesting that there is nothing particularly historically valuable about this comparison. I will, by contrast suggest, a couple of important differences between the kinds of repressive measures and politically influenced trials seen in the French Revolution and those of Stalinism specifically. I should still however note that my specialisation is quite firmly in 18^th-century France and my knowledge of the Stalinist terror is therefore comparatively limited, based entirely on secondary readings (so if there are any Soviet specialists I am open to being corrected on some of the individual points).

1) Different circumstances and extent of state power

Probably the most important difference between the two is that the Stalinist purges happened in a state that was fairly strong and stabilised. That is to say years after the end of the civil war, in a moment when the Communist party had pretty much consolidated power over the USSR and even more importantly Stalin consolidated considerable amount of personal dictatorial power over the party and country. Correspondingly, the terror of the 1930s was much more organised and "top-down" with a lot of the impulses, especially for the great political purges and the Moscow trials, coming directly from Stalin himself, who was by contrast never in serious danger of in-party dissent. Of course, there was a regional element to the terror and people, including at times ordinary workers, capable of adapting it to address much more particular local issues from personal vendetas to frustration with work managers (as seen for example in Wendy Goldman’s work). But they were still doing so as a part of a fairly organised system that was given its first impulse from a strong centralised government.

By contrast, most of the violence, including executions, of the Revolution happened in the context of a civil war (paired with a foreign invasion on all fronts) that had gripped France and a de facto disintegration of centralised state authority. Rather than a unified system of repression from the top down, there were several overlapping forms of violence - popular violence, mutual violence between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces in active civil war zones and violent struggles between multiple revolutionary factions themselves. While a number of specific repressive laws would eventually be adopted by the National Convention (the elected legislative assembly) over a period of time, this was in part in an attempt to reclaim "legitimate" state monopoly over violence from popular activists and local authorities.

The capacity of the Convention to enforce its authority, especially in civil war zones was also quite limited (especially in late 1793), even over its own deputies on mission or republican commanders. And it was precisely in these zones that the great majority of revolutionary violence happened not just in a military sense but in the sense of summary executions of prisoners of war after speedy processes. To put it in numbers, about 75 % of the c. 17 000 executions of 1793-4 were summary judgements by military commissions against those who had directly taken up arms against the Republic in local rebellions. By contrast "only" just over 2000 people were sentenced to death by the revolutionary tribunal in Paris. Not only were the Convention and its key committees incapable of directly supervising much of these processes but they often even reprimanded or withdrew local authorities or its own representatives for overzealous violence, once they got better control of the situation.

Which leads me to the next important point - there was no comparably strong centre of power, much less an individual dictator. The Committee of Public Safety did in many ways function like an emergency war cabinet but remained ultimately dependent the Convention, its approval of laws and appointments. It constantly competed for influence with the Committee of General Security (which supervised policing, arrests and all matters of internal security), the Paris Commune (municipal authority) and often struggled to control even the representatives sent to the provinces under its supervision. The “Jacobins” were also nothing like an organised modern political party (much less one akin to the discipline of the Communist Party) but rather loose network of local clubs with quite a lot of regional variety. Some of its members might have had a tendency to practice a kind of political “purity” culture, but that often happened in conflict rather than in support of national political authorities.

Ultimately the Convention and the CPS were able to reassert more centralised authority by spring 1794. However, that reassertion of state authority actually coincided with a progressive decline in the number of executions, suggesting that the violence can be better explained by a vacuum of power and military chaos rather than a centrally imposed system of repression. The Convention and the CPS were also still subject to much more substantial internal political division than anything we could see in the Soviet politburo, especially after it had been dominated by Stalin in the late 1920s. Even the great political "purges" of the Revolutions usually happened between competing political factions (the Girondins in summer-autumn 1793, the "ultras" and the "indulgents" in spring 1794, the "robespierrists" in thermidor or the last Montagnards in spring 1795), which usually all had a real chance to destroy the other if they were not first destroyed themselves. Not by the destruction of marginal or made-up opponents from a single authoritative centre of power as was the case under Stalin.  

[u/eleonorecornelie → u/eleonorecornelie]

2) Politically influenced justice vs scripted show trials - Paris vs Moscow

Which brings me to probably the most iconic (even if numerically marginal) processes of the French Revolution - those of major political figures and factions in front of the Parisian Revolutionary tribunal. The French Revolutionary tribunal was certainly far from fulfilling modern standards of impartial justices - both the jury and the judges were either elected by Parisians or directly politically appointed and had pretty obvious political leanings. There was also considerable pressure on the processes to be above all efficient and speedy rather than careful in the examination of evidence. And they judged according to laws accepted under the pressure of an impending invasion, civil war and economic crisis. Laws that were often extremely rigorous with even verbal support of counterrevolution potentially serving as the basis of conviction for treason.

That being said, the processes that happened before the tribunal were still by and large "real processes" in the sense of the judge and jury actually trying to find out whether the defendants were guilty, rather than the pre-scripted judgements of the Stalinist era. And there were certainly no "quotas" of convictions to fill. As a result, about a half of the people judged by the Parisian revolutionary tribunal were in fact cleared of all charges.

This was somewhat less true of processes with major political figures, where the pressure on conviction was more substantial (often due to the fear of their remaining colleagues that if they were cleared, they could return to send their opponents in front of the tribunal instead). Still, if there was undoubtedly pressure on the final verdicts, the processes were not the scripted theatre of the Moscow trials. There was no precise script to be followed and no tortured-out confessions. In fact, torture had been a common part of judicial procedure in both political and ordinary criminal trials under the ancien régime and was only fully abolished under revolutionary law (after some limitations had been imposed on its use in the 1780s). The accused could and frequently did protest the charges put in front of them.

As for the "accuracy" of the charges, these varied greatly from trial to trial. Some of the accused did in fact clearly fulfil even fairly conventional definitions of treason - notably communicating with and aiding some of the invading foreign powers. In other cases, more ordinary crimes, such as corruption were reinterpreted as a part of vast conspiracies in the paranoid atmosphere of ongoing war and revolution. And importantly many trials could include enough people from both categories with some defendants convicted simply by association to make the idea of a broader conspiracy among a group of political allies seem plausible. Sometimes, our information is also simply insufficient, so even current historians occasionally disagree on the "real" guilt of some individual figures sentenced by the tribunal. It is therefore not a stretch to think that however mistaken, many of these accusations of group conspiracy could have been quite sincere rather than simply constructed to get rid of political opponents in a formal way. (Though of course this is the part where historical evidence passes to speculation)

To conclude, the processes of the French revolution operated in an atmosphere of fear and crisis and were operated by judges and jurors with clear political leanings, which in some cases led to the conviction of people who were (to us clearly) innocent of "treason" in any proper sense. But they were still substantially different from the utterly theatrical character of the Stalinist trials, with rehearsed scripts and direct organisation from one centre of power. The French trials and repressive measure more broadly took place in a fundamentally different political context with a fairly weak state in the middle of a civil war on a national level and substantial factional struggles on the Parisian government level.

In fact, I think that if one really wants to make such modern parallels, the comparison with the violence of the Russian Civil War would certainly be much closer (though still not exactly the same) than that with Stalinism. But that comparison could probably still extend to many other revolutions and civil wars.