In October 1793 the National Convention, charged with implementing constitutional government, declared that this was impossible in the current state of war with European opponents and the ‘Terror’ was instigated. Lyons, a city who had been in open revolt against the Paris Commune, capitulated to government forces after two months of a siege and became one of the Terror’s most bloody sites with almost 1,900 people executed by April 1794.

See William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 253-54.

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