Terror in Lyon

Abstract

BEFORE 1793, LYON, THE SECOND LARGEST CITY IN FRANCE, had been a flourishing urban center-until the Revolution struck. The city owed its prosperity to the silk industry. Of its 120,000 inhabitants, 50,000 worked in silk production. This is why the city was so deeply affected by the economic disarray of revolutionary France. Lyon was particularly hostile to the war politics of the Convention: "The day war was declared against England [1 February], foreign banks closed in France. Our great commercial cities, Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, already attacked from within, were now walled off from the external world, more or less buried in Europe's financial excommunication" (Michelet 2:332). What has been called the Terror in the South (which Gerard Walter distinguishes from the so-called Little Terror in his Histoire de la Terreur, that is, the Terror in isolated villages which rebelled against the governmental authority of the Terror without producing any general movement1) had a decidedly economic basis, as the following verse from a song by the rebels entitled Rfveil du peuple indicates in its own way: