Reign of Terror, the name given to the bloody consummation of the fiery French Revolution, including a period which lasted 420 days, from the fall of the Girondists on the 31st May 1793 to the overthrow of Robespierre and his accomplices on 27th July 1794, the actors in which at length, seeing nothing but “Terror” ahead, had in their despair said to themselves, “Be it so. Que la Terreur soit à l'ordre du jour (having sown the wind, come let us reap the whirlwind). One of the frightfulest things ever born of Time. So many as four thousand guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death, of whom nine hundred were women.”
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Reign of a Hundred Days * Reimarus