Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were lost in the Reign of Terror. Three thousand Parisians and 14,000 people in the provinces were guillotined by the end of 1793. [Furtado: 1001 Days] "By March 1793 France was at war with most of Europe, and had begun foreign annexations (legitimized by the newly-invented doctrine of France's right to her 'natural frontiers'). But the expansion of the war, all the more as it went badly, only strengthened the hands of the left . . . For such men, as indeed for the majority of the National Convention which at bottom retained control throughout this heroic period, the choice was simple: either The Terror with all its defects from the middle class point of view, or the destruction of the Revolution, the disintegration of the national state . . ." [Hobsbawm :Revolution, p. 67, 69]