The origin of terror in France: the search for truth and legal alternatives

This article is devoted to the study of the emergence of terror in France in the late eighteenth century, to the definition of its political and legal nature. Appearing in the late eighteenth century as the primary means of resolving political problems, French terror very quickly took shape as a sustainable phenomenon and found its supporters in many countries. Special attention is paid to the organizational issues of the \ legal status of the terrorist regime and the characteristics of its implementation. Terror first received a regulatory consolidation in France in several legal sources. These include the decree of February 26, 1794, the decree of March 3, 1794, the law of June 10, 1794. It is noteworthy that in the formation of the terrorist regime, the French revolutionaries rather actively used covert methods to identify the socio-political moods in the society. The French model of criminalization of terrorism and normative legal acts establishing special procedures for the application of methods of terror against certain categories of citizens are analyzed. An attempt to determine the legal alternatives to a terrorist regime and level its negative consequences is made. In the post-revolutionary period, terror was not a means of achieving political interests, but a source of danger for the authorities. In the period of the revolutionary transformation, the problem of terrorist methods troubled the French revolutionaries. The end of terror, which was a lengthy process of acquiring a qualitatively new, previously unknown knowledge, identified a number of complex political and legal issues which had to be resolved. Chief among them was the legal, institutional and structural heritage requiring, on the one hand, to identify and subsequently to liquidate the so-called "terrorist" laws and structures, on the other hand, to preserve the characteristic elements of the revolutionary justice. In the beginning, the main justification of the use of terror was the ethical aspects of regulation of relations in French society. Paradoxically, political views that existed in French revolutionary environment were based on the ideas of civil and legal equality, which through the use of terror were to establish a state authority able to implement the interests of the people, to be created and controlled by the people. The problem of normalization of terrorism in terms of achieving similar goals was one of the most difficult: the declaration of the rights and freedoms of the individual as the ultimate values was not correlated with the direct application of terror to achieve those values. In addition, the coincidence of the social and the political in a single "body" of the revolution in the transition from idea to practice led to the emergence of a unique phenomenon successfully combined with terror: remarkable indifference to and sometimes hatred of the rights of the individual.

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