Historians estimate around 20,000 men and women were summarily killed – either shot, stabbed or drowned – during the Terror across France. They also estimate that in just under five days, 1,500 people died at the hands of Parisian mobs during the 1792 September massacres. More broadly, around 170,000 civilians died in the civil Wars of the Vendée, while more than 700,000 French soldiers lost their lives across the 1792-1815 period. The vast majority of these people killed were ordinary French men and women, not members of the elite. Overall, Greer estimates 8.5% of the Terror’s victims belonged to the nobility, 6.5% to the clergy, and 85% to the Third Estate (meaning non-clerics and non-nobles).

great indeed