what does "less critical of the reign of terror" mean?

they kind of went bonkers in the end, clearly.

but, given the reality of the ancien regime, and it's interrelationship with the papacy going back to fucking charlemagne, i don't see what else they could have done. i don't exactly want to justify the barbarity of the reign of terror, so much as i want to realize it as a necessary evil. in the end, i'd rather cite voltaire than robespierre. but, these priests probably needed to die - there probably wasn't any other way to end this.

it didn't take long to collapse, though. and, i'm hardly going to defend the ending stages. but, i'm more likely going to criticize the process in terms of it undoing itself, that is by comparing the cult of reason to a religious group, than in criticizing the actions that were taken. in the end, the fundamental problem with the reign of terror was that it became the ancien regime and continued it's crimes, not how it treated it as it dismantled it. this is the same fundamental critique as ought to apply to stalinism, as a type of neo-czarism, or maoism's current perversion into reconstituted confucianism (even if i think the peasantry lacks true revolutionary potential).

i'm not writing this essay just right now.