Base your answer to the question below using the following passage and on your knowledge of social studies.
This is an excerpt from a speech given on September 25, 1793 by Maximilien Robespierre to the National Convention justifying measures taken by the Committee of Public Safety.
"… Individuals are not at issue here; we are concerned with the homeland and principles. I tell you plainly: it is impossible, in this state of affairs, for the Committee to save the state; and if anyone disagrees, I will remind you just how treacherous and extensive is the scheme for bringing us down and dissolving us; how the foreigners and internal enemies have agents paid to execute it; I will remind you that faction is not dead; that it is conspiring from the depths of its dungeons; that the serpents of the Marais [a section of Paris] have not yet all been crushed.…
I know we cannot flatter ourselves that we have attained perfection; but holding up a Republic surrounded by enemies, fortifying reason in favour of liberty, destroying prejudice and nullifying individual efforts against the public interest, demand moral and physical strengths that nature has perhaps denied to those who denounce us and those we are fighting…"
Source: Maximilien Robespierre, “Extracts from ‘In Defence of the Committee of Public Safety and Against Briez,’” September 25, 1793, in Virtue and Terror, Verso (adapted) from the NYS Global History and Geography Regents Exam, January 2015.
From Robespierre’s perspective, what was one threat the government of France faced in 1793?
Debt from wars with other countries
Division within France and invaders from other countries
Control by the corrupt King of France
The reason and liberty of the people of France
Other:
