Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"By the end of the year, some 3,000 had been guillotined in Paris, and a further 14,000 in the French provinces. But soon after, the Revolution began to devour its own children. In the outbreak of mass sadism, the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity had been irretrievably lost. As Madame Roland remarked, "The time has come which was foretold when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses.' At her execution, she uttered her most famous words, 'Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!'" [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 . . . "