To create a cohesion around the new society it tries to impose,the French Revolution must find enemies. To victimize herself and thus tip the opinion in her favor, she will make victims.

First, the representatives of the Ancien Régime, real servants of the monarchy, or those who can serve as valets of the Bourbons. But soon, Europe being united against France, the foreign armies being at the borders, terror seizes the revolutionaries. They will in turn impose the Terror. More than one hair should not exceed. Otherwise, it is the whole head that is passed under the guillotine. Then, it will no longer be only about the nobles or representatives of the past power.

Craftsmen, workers, soldiers, sometimes authentically patriotic, but having the bad habit of making known their discontent a little too strong, go to trial, which one would describe today as arbitrary (the accused have not the right to being represented by a lawyer for example) and are very often sentenced to death, the guillotine.

• National Archives

Nominative compilation of persons sentenced to the guillotine, nobles or commoners, during the French Revolution