Terror Consists Mostly Of Useless Cruelties

Written in a letter to Karl Marx on September 4, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, as the new French government was dealing with internal unrest following the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew Napoleon III. Engels was commenting on the Jacobin-style political violence that had accompanied earlier French revolutionary moments. The observation — that state terror is mostly the product of fear rather than calculation — anticipates later political psychology and cuts against the idea that revolutionary violence is ever strategically coherent. Engels and Marx were both skeptical of conspiratorial or terroristic methods as political tools.