To that extent, Higonnet rightly states, ‘the actions of the nobles had little to do
with their fate’. Rather, what mattered was the evolution of the attitude of the
bourgeoisie towards the nobility. This passed through various stages. Armed with
12 Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La Noblesse au XVIIIe siècle: De la féodalité aux lumières (1976).
13 See also Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 418. Of the
debate concerning the so-called ‘commercial nobility’ Roche writes: ‘The controversy reveals a society
in which the highest levels of the bourgeoisie and the highest levels of the aristocracy tended, in terms
of economic practice and social relations, to break the legal framework of orders and classes in such a
way as to form a single existential group that can be seen as the predecessor of the notables in
nineteenth-century bourgeois society. At the same time, however, a substantial segment of the
society was unwilling to give up existing privileges.’
14 William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford, 2009). See also Jay
M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2005).
15 Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford:
1981).
4
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
the ‘hopelessly unrealistic’ expectation that ‘the gift of citizenship would transform
potentially selfish individuals and make them good’, the view in 1789 was that, if the
nobility was to be abolished, then the nobles themselves could be transformed (as,
indeed, some of them set out to demonstrate). After 1791, in an atmosphere of what
Higonnet describes as ‘opportunistic anti-nobilism’, the nobility were increasingly
seen as being both corrupt and treacherous, and therefore to be excluded from the
nation. Next came the ‘ideological anti-nobilism’ of the Jacobins. It was at this point
that the physical eradication of the nobility through the Terror became ‘the symbolic
representation of social regeneration’. ‘Only in 1799’, Higonnet concludes, ‘did the
bourgeoisie finally understand that all property owners should make common cause’.
Again this argument receives support from Doyle. ‘The less threatening nobles
became’, he writes, ‘the more ferociously they were threatened.’16
To that extent the bourgeoisie, contrary to what for many years was the prevailing
Marxist account of the Revolution, actually acted against their own economic
interests, allying themselves with the urban poor and the peasantry in defence of
what Higonnet terms an ‘abhorrent economic and social levelling’. Why was this so?
As Furet pointed out, as early as August 1789 the leaders of the Revolution began to
believe that it was time to ‘stop’ the Revolution, but ‘each of these successive rallyings
took place only after its leaders had taken the Revolution a step further in order to
keep control of the mass movement and to discredit rival factions’. At each moment,
in other words, those who wished to bring the Revolution to a close found themselves
extending it in order to defeat their opponents. In consequence, the leaders of the
Revolution came to embrace ever more radical positions and, with each new phase,
the attachment to, first, constitutional monarchy and, then, constitutional govern-
ment itself became ever weaker.
Here we arrive at the heart of the drama of the Revolution. How could a series of
reforms which had set out to abolish privilege and to establish legal and civil liberty
lead to a decade of bloody turmoil and produce a new form of revolutionary
government?17 To find an answer to this conundrum we need to provide responses
to three questions.
To begin: what, if any, was the connection between 1789, the Revolution that
produced the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, and 1793, the
Revolution that produced the Reign of Terror? As summarized by Patrice Gueniffey,
there have been three answers to this question.18 The ‘counter-revolutionary’ answer,
articulated first during the Revolution itself, saw 1793 as the ‘necessary outcome’ of
1789, as the moment which revealed its awful and bloody truth. The ‘revolutionary’
answer, given its clearest expression in the mid-nineteenth century, saw 1793 as an
accident, as the product of civil war and foreign invasion, and therefore as having ‘no
connection whatsoever with the principles of the Revolution’. The third answer is of
more recent origin. This sees the Terror, 1793, as a ‘contingent’ product of ‘the
16 Doyle, Aristocracy, 309.
17 See Keith Michael Baker, ‘Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century
France’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), 32–53.
18 Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur (2000), 199.
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
5
culture of the Revolution’. It was there in embryo in 1789 but needed the circum-
stances of foreign invasion and civil war to bring to the fore ‘passions and ideas
which were not easily compatible with the establishment of political liberty’.19 ‘There
were no revolutionary circumstances’, Furet wrote, ‘there was a Revolution that fed
on circumstances’.20
Second, what was the Terror?21 This is not easily answered as even the revolu-
tionaries themselves were far from agreeing about what it was. At a minimum,
however, it took three different forms. There was, first of all, the spontaneous and
collective violence associated with the punitive (and usually savage) acts of the
people directed against their opponents. Prison massacres and mob lynchings were
two of its forms. This was violence with no particular aim but vengeance. It both
preceded and post-dated the Revolution and was not specific to it. Jean-Paul Marat,
from the moment he published the first issue of L’Ami du peuple on 12 September
1789, was its most tireless advocate. As Gueniffey indicates, Marat’s view was that
the enemies of the Revolution should be stoned to death, stabbed, shot, hanged,
burnt, impaled, or torn to pieces. Next there was Terror as the calculated, premed-
itated, rational, and strategic use of violence as an instrument and as a means
designed to develop what might be termed a logic of example. The execution
of Louis XVI would fall into this category. The aim was to terrorize the ‘enemies’
of the Revolution into silence. There was, next, Terror as extermination, the use of
violence to eradicate the enemies of people through their systematic execution. It
was not a question of punishment but of annihilation. The ultimate symbol of this
last stage was la Sainte Guillotine, an instrument of execution capable of beheading
the twenty-two leaders of the Girondin faction (one of whom was already dead) in
twenty-five minutes.22 In terms of chronology, the Revolution went from the first
form of Terror to the third, the definition of the Revolution’s enemies being
gradually extended to include ever greater numbers of people. The actual figures
involved were relatively small, with approximately 16,000 people being guillotined
in a nine-month period covering 1793–4. However, these increased
dramatically
with the war against the Revolution’s opponents in the Vendée and the Revolu-
tion’s felt need to come up with more inventive and thorough means to dispatch its
opponents.23
Let us look at two examples of how the Terror worked. The first is the famous
‘Law of Suspects’ passed on 17 September 1793, eleven days after the Convention
declared that Terror was ‘the order of the day’. This piece of legislation empowered
the State to arrest anyone who ‘either by their conduct, their contacts, their words
or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny, federalism or the
enemies of the people’. This included those who could have been said to have either
‘misled’ or ‘discouraged’ the people. Virtually anybody could have fallen foul of
19 Furet, quoted ibid. 200.
20 Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, 62.
21 See Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur.
22 See Daniel Arasse, La Guillotine et l’imaginaire de la Terreur (1987).
23 Amongst the many attempts to secure a speedier process of execution were plans to build a
guillotine capable of the simultaneous execution of several victims.
6
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
such a law, especially as the only evidence required to establish guilt was denuncia-
tion by a loyal patriot. The sole punishment for those found guilty was death.24
The second example illustrates how Terror operated against groups or regions
which opposed the Revolution. We will pass over the systematic massacre of the
people of the Vendée in western France by the so-called colonnes infernales in
January 1794 and mention only the fate of the city of Lyons after it had rallied
to the cause of counter-Revolution. When it finally surrendered, the Committee of
Public Safety decreed that the entire city was to be destroyed in an act of collective
punishment, its very name was to disappear and was to be replaced by that of Ville-
Affranchie. There was too much work for the guillotine to do, so condemned men
were blown into open graves by cannon and gunfire.
The truth is that the Terror developed a logic of its own, threatening or
punishing people not for what they did but for what they were or represented.
This is why the category of ‘suspect’ was at its heart. Moreover, it was a ‘system’ that
perpetuated itself. Its defenders liked to portray the Terror as a temporary measure
designed to meet exceptional circumstances. However, once installed, it operated
not just as a system of arbitrary and absolute power but as something that could not
be stopped or even slowed down. Rather the pace of its operation accelerated, in the
end engulfing most of the revolutionaries themselves, including Robespierre, his
own crime being the ‘suspicion’ or ‘rumour’ that he intended to marry the daughter
of Louis XVI and have himself crowned as king.
The third question is: who were the Jacobins? It would be a mistake to see the
Jacobins as a single homogeneous bloc or party. Initially they took the title of the
Société des Amis de la Constitution, later becoming the Société des Amis de la
Liberté et de l’Égalité. Members of this society were so called for the reason that
they originally met in a former convent of Dominican or ‘Jacobin’ monks. Whilst
its leadership was concentrated in Paris, with Robespierre and those who later
constituted the Committee of Public Safety at its heart, there also existed a network
of provincial clubs which, at their height, brought together between 100,000 and
200,000 activists who saw their task as that of supporting and implementing the
policies of the new regime. Initially the Jacobins were not clearly distinguishable
from the other groups that aspired to lead the Revolution, but by 1793 they had
distanced themselves from the moderates, such that the Terror of 1793–4 was very
much their affair. Not only did the Jacobins implement it but they also provided its
political and moral justification.
It is the question of what the Jacobins stood for (and, more generally, what was
their significance) that has generated the most controversy. As Patrice Gueniffey has
observed: ‘through their capacity to embody what was most radical in the French
Revolution, and consequently to embody the Revolution itself, the Jacobins passed
into the two centuries which followed as legend, history, tradition, heritage, theory
24 At first substantial numbers of suspects were acquitted but over time this number was
dramatically reduced as a percentage of those placed on trial. See Gérard Walter, Actes du Tribunal
Révolutionnaire (1986).
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
7
and practice’.25 As for Robespierre himself, 26 as Furet remarked, he had ‘the strange
privilege of becoming an embodiment’. ‘Robespierre’, he wrote, ‘is an immortal figure
not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because
he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.’27
Above all, this was a discourse that assigned a new goal to the Revolution: that of
attaining the reign of virtue and of bringing about a return to a natural, prelapsarian
order.28 ‘Considering’, Robespierre declared, ‘the extent to which the human race
has been degraded by the vice of our former social system, I am convinced of the
need to bring about a complete regeneration . . . to create a new people.’29 How did
the Jacobins envision their model of virtue? At its core was a quest for simplicity and
a rejection of what were seen as the imperfections, the shallowness, and false
appearances of the corrupt present. Robespierre, who gloried in his mythical status
as the ‘Incorruptible’, was its very incarnation. Immune from ordinary passions
(there is no evidence that Robespierre engaged in any sexual activity),30 he above all
others was best placed to denounce the failings and prejudices of ordinary mortals.
No one could better tear away the ‘masks’ behind which were hidden depravity,
avarice, and ambition.
This can be illustrated by citing one example of Robespierre’s rhetoric. Robe-
spierre detested the theatre. He did so because, of all the arts, it more than any other
was a world of appearance, and therefore was capable of corrupting an innocent
people. ‘The princesses of the theatre’, Robespierre announced, ‘are no better than
the princesses of Austria. Both are equally depraved and both should be treated with
equal severity.’31 Actors, and especially pretty actresses, were to be denied access
to the ranks of the people. Moreover, Robespierre extended this argument to
politics itself. In a remarkable tirade delivered before the Jacobins on 8 January
1794 Robespierre compared the opponents of the Revolution to actors, where
the politically and morally corrupt followed each other in a succession of different
‘masks’.32 ‘It is always’, Robespierre declared, ‘the same scene, the same theatrical
action’. Conversely, it was his sense of his own moral purity that provided the
Jacobins with the audacity first to denounce and then to physically destroy their
opponents, repeating with hypnotic regularity the denunciation of their moral
turpi
tude and crimes. ‘I sometimes fear’, Robespierre announced shortly before
25 Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Jacobinisme’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la
Révolution française: Idées (1992), 243. See also Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Robespierre’, ibid., Acteurs, 247–71.
26 See Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London, 2007).
27 Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, 56, 61. For a selection of Robespierre’s speeches in English: see
Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Robespierre: Virtue and Terror (London, 2007).
28 See Lucien Jaume, Le Discours Jacobin et la démocratie (1989) and Mona Ozouf, ‘“Jacobin”:
Fortune et infortunes d’un mot’, L’École de la France: Essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement
(1984), 74–90.
29 Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. Discours de 27 juillet 1793–27 juillet 1794 (1967), 12.
30 Scurr, Fatal Purity, 102, indicates that upon his arrival in Paris Robespierre acquired a mistress.
The evidence is not conclusive.
31 Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. 101.
32 See Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the French
Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2002).
8
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
his own fall from power, ‘that in the eyes of posterity I will be sullied by the impure
proximity of wicked men’.33
The second point of reference for the Jacobin model of virtue was the classical
world of Greece and Rome. Turning their backs on the Christian tradition, it was
Solon, Lycurgus, and Brutus who were their heroes, with a clear preference being
expressed for Sparta over Athens. As Robespierre’s most loyal supporter, Saint-Just,
was to remark, the world had been empty since the Romans. Here was fertile terrain
for the florid imaginations of the revolutionaries, as they dwelt upon a world where
there was no industry, no commerce, no luxury, no big cities, only the rustic
simplicity of peasant farmers and the sublime heroism of citizen-soldiers. It was also
an exclusively male world, public space being reserved only for the activities of men
and for supposedly male virtues.
Most of all, it was a world which saw public participation in the communal
affairs of the State as the source of moral worth. The good individual was the good
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