Not justified! the Reign of Terror was ill conceived and led to the predictable result of the undoing of the revolution. Through an examination of the French Revolution, Camus argues in his book The Rebel that most revolutions involved a fundamental denial of both history and transcendental values. revolutionaries aimed to kill God. In the French Revolution, for instance, this was achieved through the execution of Louis XVI and subsequent eradication of the divine right of kings. The subsequent rise of Utopian and materialist idealism sought "the end of history. Because the inevitable failure of attempts at human perfection" is unattainable, according to Camus, terror ensued as the revolutionaries attempted to coerce results.