the new Second Republic,181 but he quickly came to view the resurgence of neo-
Jacobinism with apprehension. The election of Louis Napoleon as president
diminished his hopes further and following the coup d’état of December 1851 he,
like many fellow republicans, was forced to flee the country. In his often lonely exile
his obsession now became that of reversing the dishonour inflicted upon his
country and of understanding the failure of democracy in France.182 This, for
example, was evident in such diverse works as his verse drama Les Esclaves (1853)
and his anti-Napoleonic Histoire de la campagne de 1815 (1862). However, it was
most clearly and controversially visible in La Révolution, first published in 1865.183
In contrast to the earlier Le Christianisme et la Révolution française, this was a full-
blown history of the Revolution, taking its reader from the collapse of the ancien
régime to the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte: but, in essence, it built upon the
themes of the earlier volume. The question posed was the following: why had so
many immense efforts and sacrifices produced such meagre results?184 The answer
again was that France, unlike England, had not preceded its political revolution
with a religious revolution.185 ‘With regard to the moral order’, Quinet wrote, ‘the
success of this Revolution was absolutely impossible, since its leaders, while
completely overturning the Middle Ages, preserved the ideal of the Middle Ages
with regard to ideas.’ ‘In the midst of massive upheaval’, he went on, ‘everything
changed except the mind of man, which was systematically left a captive of the
past.’186 From its very first step, therefore, the Revolution revealed that it had feet
of clay.
178 Quinet’s mother was a Protestant and he himself acknowledged the beneficial consequences of
the Reformation.
179 Ibid. 406.
180 Ibid. 385.
181 See the speech made by Quinet on 8 Mar. 1848 before the students of the Sorbonne: Hermione
Quinet, Cinquante Ans d’amitié, 158–60.
182 See e.g. Edgar Quinet, Le Réveil d’un grand peuple (1869).
183 Quinet, La Révolution (1865; references to the 1987 edn.).
184 Ibid. 65.
185 Ibid. 168.
186 Ibid. 186.
History, Revolution, and Terror
273
What followed was a very different account of the Revolution from anything that
had been penned before. Quinet’s view was that the people had risen up in
rebellion against what he termed the ‘byzantine and imperial’ traditions of the
absolutist monarchy but that these had been preserved by the Revolution. ‘The
classical, official, disciplined, literary republic of Robespierre’, Quinet wrote, ‘could
understand nothing of this popular movement, since no model for it could be
found in either Rousseau or Lycurgus.’187 So, Quinet disapproved of the Revolu-
tion’s destruction of provincial liberties, arguing that this had left the entire country
at the mercy of the capital.188 This led ineluctably to the central question explored
by Quinet: what was the nature of the Terror and how could it be explained? His
answer provoked the eruption of one of the most bitter controversies among
republicans during the nineteenth century.
Quinet’s political sympathies clearly lay with the Girondins.189 ‘Because they
wanted to arrive at liberty through liberty’, he wrote, ‘they rejected the heritage of
old France in its entirety.’190 With their arrest, he postulated, it was resolved that
henceforth the ‘regeneration of France’ would not be attained by a new route but
‘by the method of the ancien régime: tyranny’. ‘To abolish liberty under the pretext
that it would be established much later’, Quinet wrote, ‘is the guiding thread of
French history. It was also that of the Revolution.’191 The Jacobins, on this view,
set out to force the people to be free and, to that end, all opposition, all dissent, all
disagreement, became a crime punishable by death. They believed that there was
virtue in the spilling of an enemy’s blood and that a golden age would arise from the
scaffold. But only the goal pursued by the Jacobins was new. ‘As for the means of
constraint and authority’, Quinet argued, ‘it is what we have always had for
centuries.’192 So, circumstances did not explain the Terror, nor could success
legitimize it. The Terror was rooted in historical precedent and was but ‘the fatal
legacy’ of France’s absolutist tradition and, as such, was a product of the Revolution
itself. In no other revolution, Quinet contended, had leaders acted in a manner so
contrary to the goals they pursued.
According to Quinet, therefore, the Terror had its initial cause in the ‘irrecon-
cilable’ clash between old and new France. This sentiment of ‘absolute incompati-
bility’ pushed people towards a state of frenzy, leading both sides to intensify and
heighten their actions. Threatened and provoked, with each day the Revolution
gained in audacity, engendering ‘a state of exaltation’ among the French nation.
Robespierre and his colleagues simply changed what was a passing ‘accident’ into
‘a permanent state of affairs’. Coldly and impassively, they transformed a condition
of anger and despair into a principle and system of government and turned sponta-
neous fury into a cold and calculated instrument of salvation. The whole edifice
rested upon another ‘sad’ legacy of earlier oppression: contempt for the individual.193
Moreover, the exercise of absolute power during the Revolution had exactly the
187 Ibid. 475.
188 Ibid. 140.
189 Ibid. 426–8.
190 Ibid. 373.
191 Ibid. 389.
192 Ibid. 373.
193 Ibid. 497–501.
274
History, Revolution, and Terror
same impact as it had had under the monarchy. Fear corrupted and abased people.
Night descended upon their intellects.
Quinet’s conclusion was that in each of the barbarities of 1793 could be seen a
reappearance of the mentality of the Middle Ages. Salvation, according to this logic,
would be attained if only a few perfidious and malign individuals were eradicated
and this was as true for the Revolution as it had been when Louis XIV had sent out
troops against the Huguenots. Similarly, Quinet saw that, if it was easy to inaugu-
rate government by terror, it was immeasurably more difficult to bring it to an end.
Driven forward by the illusion of necessity it would march on until only the
executioners themselves remained. The circle would then be closed and we
would have returned to our point of departure: servitude.194
This, in Quinet’s view, was precisely what had occurred. In 1789, the French
had risen up against three forms of oppression: absolute power, Roman Catholi-
cism, and administrative centralization. Once the storm had passed, all three
reappeared: absolute power with Napoleon as First Consul; Roman Catholicism
with the signing of the Concordat in 1801; and administrative centralization in the
shape of the Napoleonic state. Rephrased by Quinet in the idiom of nineteenth-
century French historiography, this meant that, if the French Revolution h
ad freed
the nation from its original conquest by the Franks, the Gauls remained enslaved to
the Romans and to the Caesarean traditions of emperor and pope.195
What sense could be made of this ‘bloody labyrinth’? The Revolution, Quinet
concluded, had bequeathed a ‘disastrous heritage’ to France and to French democracy.
At its heart was a belief in ‘the necessity of dictatorship’ as the indispensable step
towards the establishment of liberty. The revolutionaries, he observed, were past
masters in the art of death. The result was that all that remained of the Revolution
was ‘an ideal, a flag and a few words about justice which float above the abyss’.196
Whoever wished to live freely therefore had to renounce the joys of exacting vengeance
and to dare to acknowledge that the proper response to tyranny was not more tyranny.
Yet, as Quinet sadly recognized, whether openly or in disguise, ‘this has not ceased to
reappear as the supreme expedient’.197
It was a mark of the originality and power of Quinet’s La Révolution that, not
only did its first edition sell out in six days, but that it was met by howls of protest
from those associated with the ‘democratic party’.198 The tone of these protests was
best captured in the series of articles written by Alphonse Peyrat, editor of L’Avenir
national. Quinet’s two volumes, Peyrat argued, were a ‘satire’ of the Revolution:
they were ‘anti-historical and anti-revolutionary’, a mixture of prejudice and
philosophical pretension, bizarre comparisons and surprising banalities. Taken as
a whole, they dishonoured the Revolution. More substantially, Peyrat unapologet-
ically reaffirmed the pro-Jacobin orthodoxy. The Jacobins had not sought to raise
terror into a system of government. Dictatorship had been imposed upon
the Revolution by necessity and circumstance. Through their prodigious efforts,
194 Quinet, La Révolution (1865; references to the 1987 edn.), 534.
195 Ibid. 729.
196 Ibid. 730.
197 Ibid. 599.
198 Key texts are republ. in Furet, La Gauche et la révolution au XIXe siècle, 134–383.
History, Revolution, and Terror
275
the Jacobins had saved the Revolution. For good measure, Peyrat condemned the
Girondins for being a bunch of unprincipled chancers and pointed out that
Quinet’s book had been taken up by royalists.199
The polemic rumbled on over the winter of 1865, with liberals and moderate
republicans, including Jules Ferry and Emile Ollivier, voicing their support for
Quinet. But it came to a head in February 1866 when the exiled Louis Blanc
published a long article in Le Temps effectively charging Quinet with giving succour
to the forces of counter-revolution.200 After ‘eighteen years of research, study and
meditation’,201 Blanc had finished his own twelve-volume history of the Revolu-
tion in 1862 and could not but take offence at what he saw as a summary dismissal
of all that he had long believed in and cherished. Above all, he took exception to
Quinet’s allegation that the Jacobins had raised terror into a system of government.
‘The Terror’, he responded, ‘was not a system; it was something very different, an
immense misfortune born out of extraordinary dangers.’202 Nor was it true that the
Terror had its origins in the minds of a few individuals. ‘Prepared by centuries of
oppression, provoked by frightful attacks and spurred on by the dangers of a titanic
struggle’, Blanc continued, ‘the Terror came out of the bowels of history.’203 No
one had wanted dictatorship less than Robespierre. Moreover, the killing had not
stopped with his fall. It had simply been replaced by the ‘white Terror’.
Blanc’s argument was that the ‘idea of dictatorship’ was ‘directly opposed to the
spirit of the Revolution’. ‘Let us not say’, he concluded, ‘that the results were
disproportionate to the sacrifices made when the results were the intellectual conquests
that have made us what we are and a France saved.’204 At first Quinet did not respond.
Then, for the fifth edition of La Révolution published in 1867, he wrote a lengthy
new preface, lambasting his detractors for presuming to dictate what could be
said about the Revolution and contrasting this with his own ‘scientific’ method.205
On the substantive point of disagreement he was not prepared to compromise. It
was not necessity that had produced ‘the system’ of the Terror but ‘false ideas’.206
Furthermore, critics such as Blanc failed to appreciate what was distinctive about
the violence of the Terror. ‘Do you not see’, he asked, ‘that one of the special
characteristics of the French Revolution is that the revolutionaries were put to death
by revolutionaries, the Jacobins by Jacobins, the Montagnards by Montagnards?’207
To accept the logic of the Terror was to accept the logic of ‘eradication’ and such
a logic, Quinet affirmed, was ‘illogical, illusory and necessarily sterile’. From this,
he wrote, ‘I have been able to conclude that there was a complete incompatibility
between the means of 93 and the end pursued, between the barbarities of the Jacobins
and the philosophy of the eighteenth century, between theory and practice.’208
One casualty of the publication of Quinet’s La Révolution was his close friend-
ship with Michelet. This might appear odd, given that Michelet had shown little
199 Ibid. 139–230. These essays were subsequently republ. in Peyrat, La Révolution et le livre de
M. Quinet (1866).
200 Furet, La Gauche et la révolution, 289–305.
201 Ibid. 289.
202 Ibid. 291.
203 Ibid. 293.
204 Ibid. 305.
205 Ibid. 308–37.
206 Ibid. 332.
207 Ibid. 327.
208 Ibid. 321.
276
History, Revolution, and Terror
sympathy for the priestly Robespierre and even less liking for the Jacobin ‘machine’.
Indeed, for the 1869 edition of his Histoire de la Révolution française he added a new
preface to volume v entitled simply ‘The Tyrant’.209 Similarly, in his preface to the
1868 edition he directed his fire primarily at Louis Blanc, referring to him as ‘half-
Christian in the manner of Rousseau and Robespierre’.210 Yet Michelet had
counselled against mistaking the Terror for the Revolution, never quite stating
the dichotomy between 1789 and 1793 in such stark terms, and he had no respect
whatsoever for the Girondins. Importantly, Michelet and Quinet differed funda-
mentally about the place and role of religion in the Revolution. Hurt pride and
professional jealousy also played a part. If only briefly, everyone was reading Quinet
and Michelet was out of the limelight. Whatever the cause, the two men were never
to regain the intellectual intimacy they had shared in the past.
I V
In 1862 Quinet took up his copy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la
Révolution for a second time and began to annotate it line by line.211 Despite their
political and personal differences, the two men shared one central intellectual
preoccupation. Both believed passionately in liberty and both understood that
the durability of French traditions of despotism worked against it
s realization. If
this meant that each of them was resolute in his opposition to the Second Empire, it
likewise demanded an explanation of the causes of what was indubitably the failure
of the Revolution to effect a real break with the past. Tocqueville’s answer to this
conundrum might have had less rhetorical force than that provided by Quinet but
it was no less compelling and many have subsequently found it to be extremely
convincing. When published in 1856 L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution proved to be
at least as successful with the reading public as De la Démocratie en Amérique had
been and, to Tocqueville’s evident delight, quickly went through several editions. It
was however a text suffused with pessimism.
The precise moment at which Tocqueville resolved to write a study of the
Revolution can be dated to December 1850 when he was in Sorrento recuperating
from a bout of illness, but it took him several more years before he decided upon
the form and content of his inquiry.212 As his correspondence with Gustave de
Beaumont reveals, it was only at the point of publication and after much discussion
209 Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, ii. 349–65.
210 Ibid. i. 47.
211 See Furet, La Gauche et la révolution, 41–58.
212 On the writing of L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution see Gannett, Tocqueville Unveiled. Among
the other texts that might be consulted see François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, ‘Introduction’, to
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, i. The Complete Text (Chicago: 1998), 1–79;
André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (Baltimore, Md., 1998), 481–507; Robert T. Gannett, jun.,
‘The Shifting Puzzles of Tocqueville’s the Old Regime and the Revolution’, in Cheryl Welch (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (Cambridge, 2006), 188–215; Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville
(2006), 525–84.
History, Revolution, and Terror
277
that an appropriate title was decided upon.213 These hesitations are easy to
understand. Unlike Michelet and Quinet, Tocqueville was a man who had spent
most of his adult life as a politician and journalist. If he had attended the famous
lectures on European civilization given by Guizot in the 1820s and now counted
François Mignet among his personal acquaintances, he was not an academic
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