Wars by definition are violent. While this fact may make warfare unhelpful when identifying political violence in the civil order, wars nonetheless have always had a close correlation with some of the most significant moments of domestic political violence since the formation of the modern nation state. France’s Reign of Terror, conducted by the government in 1793–4, was carried out within the fearful framework of potential invasion by monarchical armies from almost any site around the entire border of the country. The first outbreak of political violence from below in the modern era was initiated by the Carbonari as a form of national resistance by Italians seeking to end the Napoleonic occupation of the peninsula. Russia’s entrance into the world of insurgent terror began with the Decembrists in the aftermath of the Napoleonic war. Later, in the 1860s and 1870s, radicalism and terrorism from below reappeared in the aftermath of the country’s demoralizing defeat in the Crimean War. The creation of the Paris Commune and the extreme violence utilized to crush it in the summer of 1871 were consequences of the French surrender in the Franco-Prussian War. Nowhere perhaps was this association of national war and civil terror more pronounced than in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, two newly proclaimed post-Great War republics which replaced monarchical regimes in territories where rulers had been at best only grudgingly responsive to competing political parties, representative assemblies of the people, and independent judiciaries. Although the specific characteristics in each situation differed enormously, both ultimately were transformed into authoritarian state formations in which political violence would play a prominent role.