Second White Terror

Historian John B. Wolf argues that Ultra-royalists — many of whom had just returned from exile — were staging a counter-revolution against the French Revolution and also against Napoleon's revolution.

Throughout the Midi — in Provence, Avignon, Languedoc, and many other places — the White Terror raged with unrelenting ferocity. The royalists found in the willingness of the French to desert the king fresh proof of their theory that the nation was honeycombed with traitors, and used every means to seek out and destroy their enemies. The government was powerless or unwilling to intervene.

The period is named after the First White Terror that occurred during the Thermidorian Reaction in 1794–1795, when people identified as being associated with Robespierre's Reign of Terror (by means of distinction, also known as the "Red Terror") were harassed and killed.

Bourbon reprisals

After the Hundred Days, Napoleon's brief return to power in 1815, the second White Terror focused mainly on the purging of a civilian administration which had almost completely turned against the Bourbon monarchy. About 70,000 officials were dismissed from their positions. The remnants of the Napoleonic army were disbanded after the Battle of Waterloo and its senior officers cashiered. Marshal Michel Ney was executed for treason, Marshal Guillaume Brune was murdered by a royalist mob in Avignon, and General Jean-Pierre Ramel was assassinated in Toulouse. Approximately 6,000 individuals who had rallied to Napoleon were brought to trial. There were about 300 mob lynchings in the south of France, notably in Marseille, where at least eighteen of his Mamelukes were massacred in their barracks.