What were the root causes of the Terror in France?

The root cause of the Terror was the fact that Revolutionary France was in the midst of a war for its survival in the summer of 1793. This state of emergency led to the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, which, under the control of first Georges Danton and then Maximilien Robespierre, governed France with dictatorial powers for more than a year. With France's existence threatened by counterrevolutionary armies and a massive revolt in the countryside, the Committee set out to preserve the Revolution by eliminating those deemed to be its domestic enemies. Thus the Terror was begun, and it did not stop until it had consumed over 15,000 victims in Paris and the surrounding regions alone. It only ended with the execution of Robespierre himself, a classic example of how revolutions have a way of consuming their own. But the motives for the Terror cannot be understood apart from their context--a crisis brought on by war and revolution.