In Defence of the Terror

by Sophie Wahnich

  As citizen, as magistrate of the people, I come to announce to you that tonight at midnight the tocsin will sound, the call to arms will be given. The people are tired of not being at all avenged. You should fear lest they make their own justice. I demand that you decree without hesitation the appointment of a citizen in each section to form a criminal tribunal.4

  The deputies Choudieu and Thuriot sought to challenge this representative’s legitimacy by maintaining that he did not know the ‘true principles and true laws’. In the event, the Assembly did not proclaim the decree demanded, while the tribunal established on 17 August, far from adopting this extraordinary form of popular tribunal, simply renewed the regular legal forms. The September massacres thus found the deputies marginalized, one could say ‘absent’, i.e. their presence no longer counted for the protagonists of the event. When representatives of the constituted authorities – whether those of the Assembly, the departmental directory or the municipality – appeared before the Septembrists using the language of the law, this language was no longer effective. Their speech had become unwelcome. Reference to the law had lost its sacred character.

  The emotional economy I have described, which is also that of the sacred, had thus broken down. The sacred voice of the people demanding vengeance – ‘vox populi, vox dei’5 – had not been listened to or translated into law by those whose function this was. The representatives had lost their position as necessary intercessors. From now on, the people expected nothing more from the Assembly, and the acts of the Septembrists would make a gap between this de facto delegitimized representation and the people. Reference to the law was no longer a demand from the people but an imposition by their representatives, whose legitimacy to proclaim the law or ‘make it speak’6 had been invalidated. In practice, then, they were no longer recognized as representatives. The transaction between sacred text and sacred body could no longer find expression, and a relation of body to body was now substituted for the symbolic operation that had become impossible.

  In the written records of representatives of the constituted authorities, the insurgents’ absence of animosity towards them is striking. For example, when Pétion appeared at the prison of La Force, he was neither turned away nor molested. We even get the impression that the Parisians would have liked to be able to please him by obeying his instructions, but that their duty had changed:

  I spoke to them in the austere language of the law, I spoke with the sentiment of deep indignation that I felt. I made them all come out before me. But I had hardly appeared myself before they went back inside.7

  This disavowal does not indicate the expression of a new aggressiveness, but rather that intermediaries who had not managed to elaborate the laws indispensable for public safety were declared useless and negligible. Nonetheless, certain arguments still resonated:

  When the mayor of Versailles requested pardon for the innocent, Blomquel, one of the protagonists of the events who was directing operations, replied by making them come out. The mayor, however, was unable to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty.8

  What was involved in the September massacres, then, was not an indifferent, disproportionate and blind vengeance, opposed all along the line to criminal justice. Nor was this vengeance a desire that the law could restrain. Far from being the expression of a vindictive passion, the vengeance carried out appears above all as the exercise of a difficult charge that was forced on people by duty. One of the difficulties in executing it was precisely to distinguish the innocent from the guilty, to trace this dividing line – a question that constantly appears in the major reports of the period of Terror. Robespierre put it like this on 5 Nivôse of year II:

  And so, if we regarded as criminals all those who, in the revolutionary movement, exceeded the precise line drawn by prudence, we would encompass in a common proscription along with bad citizens, all the natural friends of liberty, your own friends and all the supports of the Republic . . . What can then untangle all these distinctions? What can draw the dividing line between all the contrary excesses? Love of the patrie and of truth.9

  Vengeance maintains the distinction between social groups and constructs their respective identities – here that of the sovereign people towards those who refuse them this sovereignty or do not respect it, those who are responsible for the denial of justice and the guilty who remain unpunished. If the order of penalty assumes that offender and offended belong to one and the same group, the order of vengeance ‘is inscribed in an intermediary social space between that in which the proximity of partners prohibits it and that in which their distance substitutes war for vengeance’.10 An approach of this kind undermines a supposed evolutionary opposition between vengeance and justice: vengeance is not a more archaic form of justice than penal justice, but a form of justice corresponding to a different social configuration. It is more a question of understanding vengeance as a moment of constitutive justice of the specific identity of each of the social groups that confront one another within the same society. It is at one and the same time

  a system of exchange and social control of violence . . . As an integral part of the overall social system, the system of retribution is above all an ethic that deploys an ensemble of representations and values relating to life and death, to time and space . . . it is finally an instrument and site of power identifying and opposing social units and vindicatory groups.11

  This long definition casts a new light on the revolutionary call for vengeance. It shows how, far from being disqualifying, this exhortation appeals to an ethic in which the disturbing question of duty appears. The demand for vengeance implies a reaction designed to obtain respect for the identity of the victim’s group:

  In this sense, the debt of the offence can be defined as a debt of life, and life as a spiritual and social capital that the members of the group are charged with defending and making fruitful . . . This life-capital is depicted by two symbols: blood, symbol of the union and continuity of generations, and honour, symbol of the identity and difference that makes it possible both to recognize the other and to demand that he respects you.12

  When the spokesmen of the people called for vengeance for the crimes of 10 August, the ‘debt of life’ was that of the blood of the patriots, but also that of the honour of the people whose identity as conquering people was challenged. In revolutionary terms, re-establishing honour amounted to manifesting the identity of the sovereign people irrevocably by an act of vengeance. This is why the public vengeance demanded was not an a priori vengeance,13 not a preventive vengeance carried out by patriots before leaving for the battlefront, but rather a subsequent vengeance for an affront that was hard to repair.

  A SOVEREIGN VENGEANCE

  In the Créole patriote for 2 September, the account begins by evoking 10 August: ‘The people, justly indignant at the crimes committed during the journée of 10 August, made for the prisons. They still feared plots and traitors . . . The news that Verdun had been taken . . . provoked their resentment and vengeance.’14 On 6 September, Mlle de Mareuil, daughter of a member of the Commune’s general council, wrote to her brother:

  I have to make the following remark: since the journée of 10 August, there have only been three people guillotined, and this has revolted the people. Finally people gathered from all sides . . . Oh my dear friend, we are all in a state of dreadful consternation.15

  The same day, La Sentinelle expressed very clearly how ‘the crowd, weary at the silence of the laws, delivered swift justice’.16 On 11 September, the tribunal of 17 August itself sent an address to the Assembly:

  The slow pace of the forms [of justice], healthy and just in time of calm, was deadly at a time when the prisons themselves had become centres of conspiracy and workshops of revolt, in which criminals already judged by their country were planning a deadly explosion. The national crowd struck the parricides; the people and heaven were avenged.17

  This failure on the part of
the legal institutions in the face of treason and unpunished crimes led to a foundation which was deprived of symbolic mediation. From 2 to 6 September, the sovereign power identified itself with a ‘making die’ that fused the various powers – legislative, executive and judicial – in a single movement.18 But those who killed were presented in the immediate commentaries as victims, as people who deserved sympathy. Thus Mme Julien from the Drôme, the partner of the deputy: ‘My friend, I cast a veil here with a trembling hand over the crimes that the people were forced to commit by all those whose sorry victim they have been for three years.’19 In the Chronique de Paris for 4th September, we can read: ‘The spilling of blood caused a wretched sensation . . . It is an unfortunate and terrible situation when the character of a people naturally good and generous is forced to deliver itself to such acts of vengeance.’20 Finally, Le Moniteur of the same date spoke of

  events that any decent man would wish to cover with a veil and withdraw from history. But the counter-revolutionaries are indeed far more guilty than [are] certain illegal avengers of their crimes. Humanity is in no wise consoled, but the mind is left less disturbed.21

  The scene of the September massacres could be interpreted as the sovereign scene described both by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. In his Critique of Violence, Benjamin maintained that

  all mythic, lawmaking violence, which we may call ‘executive’, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, ‘administrative’ violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign’ violence.22

  This ‘divine violence’ is the violence of vox populi, vox dei. To recognize the divine character of this violence, as of this voice, does not mean drawing support from established religion to legitimize a violence which is underway or a voice that takes bodily form. It is rather to maintain that the blood spilled is not that of mythical sacrifice – which, according to Benjamin, ‘demands it for its own sake against pure and simple life’ – but rather that of a divine violence that ‘accepts sacrifice for the sake of the living’. This is why

  those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment [‘Thou shalt not kill’] are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.23

  This solitude of decision is that of the sovereign power. For Giorgio Agamben, ‘the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice’; as for the lives of those massacred, they are the ‘sacred lives’ of homo sacer, exposed to murder and unsacrificable, captured in the ‘first properly political space of the West distinct from both the religious and the profane sphere, from both the natural order and the regular juridical order’.24 These theoretical illuminations help us understand how everyone has found the September massacres intolerable, despite the great majority of spectators finding them legitimate at the time.

  The commentaries of radical revolutionaries on the September massacres use the notions of justice and vengeance indifferently – a proof that the lapse of ordinary institutions leads to the vengeance of the laws, or of the people, since for the revolutionaries avenging the people meant avenging the laws. These commentators insist on the necessity of recognizing that it was indeed the people that acted. For Marat: ‘The people have the right to take up the sword of justice when the judges are concerned only to protect the guilty and oppress the innocent.’25 Such statements find their place in registering the failure of legal institutions, the National Assembly and the tribunals, which no longer championed the respect due to the people as a group. Robespierre spoke of ‘the justice of the people thus expiated, by the punishment of several counter-revolutionary aristocrats who dishonoured the French name, the eternal impunity of all the oppressors of humanity’.26 The people, a social group inscribed in the longue durée of history as against the social group of the ‘oppressors of humanity’, defended the honour of its name. On 13 Ventôse of year II (3 March 1794), before maintaining that happiness was a new idea in Europe, Saint-Just encouraged the people to preserve this honour: ‘Make yourselves respected by pronouncing with pride the destiny of the French people. Avenge the people for twelve hundred years of offences against their fathers.’27 On 26 Germinal of year II (16 April 1794), he accused history of ‘several centuries of folly’ as against ‘five years of resistance to oppression’, emphasizing the values borne by the name of Frenchman as the name of the people in the revolutionary project. ‘What is a king as opposed to a Frenchman?’ The name of Frenchman made it possible both to say what was to come, and to define the present conflictual division between oppressors and oppressed. It was on this basis that the name of the people was really constituted. In his reply to Jean-Baptiste Louvet, who accused him in November 1792 of having failed to prevent the massacres and perhaps even having encouraged them, Robespierre could argue that it was necessary to read in the September massacres an act of popular sovereignty:

  Can magistrates stop the people? It was indeed a popular movement, not the partial sedition of a few wretches to murder their kind . . . What could magistrates do against the determined will of an indignant people, who opposed to their speeches both the memory of a victory won over tyranny and the devotion with which they were about to hurl themselves against the Prussians, and who reproached the very laws for the long impunity of the traitors who tore the breast of their patrie?28

  The appropriation of sovereignty by the people did not in the end indicate a transfer of sacrality, but rather the application of a sacrality, a mode of action specific to the political. ‘“Sacred insurrection”, “sacred duty” were commonplace phrases in the language of the sections in August 1792 and May 1793’, and this vengeance was likewise defined as sacred by a number of patriots: ‘National vengeance is every bit as just, as sacred, and perhaps more indispensable than insurrection itself.’29

  It is possible to regret that the foundation of sovereign power should rest on the exercise of the sovereign exception, just as it is to deplore that the representatives of the people refused to translate the voice of the people and thus brought them to this replay of sovereign foundation, to vengeance effected without symbolic mediation. As early as 20 June 1792, the popular spokesmen feared a breach in the sacred bonds of law that united the people with the Assembly. Santerre reminded the representatives of the people that they had ‘sworn before heaven not to abandon our cause [i.e. the cause of popular sovereignty], to die to defend it’, and addressed them in the following terms: ‘Remember, gentlemen, this sacred oath, and suffer the people, afflicted in their turn, not to ask if you have abandoned them.’30

  Despite this defection, the Septembrists founded popular sovereignty in an irreversible manner, by assuming the sovereign exception as popular vengeance. Those who maintain that there was no crime, but rather an exercise of sovereignty, are faithful to this way of seeing things: like the Septembrists, they take a political decision on which they refuse to concede. This was true at the moment of the trial of the king, when what was at issue was not only the fate to be meted out to the royal traitor, but also and indissociably, the reinterpretation of 10 August 1792 and the September massacres. It was true again in the journées of 31 May to 2 June 1793, with the exclusion of those representatives who refused to understand what they had witnessed on 20 June, 10 August and 2–3 September 1792 – namely, the founding appropriation of popular sovereignty. A triad of events in 1792 and a series of interpretations of these events in 1793 thus led up to the same decision, that of founding popular sovereignty by assuming what was then called the Terror – or said differently, the employment of sovereign vengeance by the people.

  THE SENTIMENTS OF NATURAL HUMANITY

  AND POLITICAL HUMANITY
/>   How could the agents of a public vengeance that led to the spilling of blood claim the sentiment of humanity? Those revolutionaries who refused to incriminate the Septembrists maintained that a human society, full of humanity, had to envisage not only the principle of sovereign exception, but also the necessity of transforming that principle into action. A democratic republic had to succeed in holding the sovereign exception to the margins of political life, had to manage to avoid spilling blood by way of the power of symbolic mediations suited to translating the voice of the people into political logos. The sentiment of humanity dictated a greater responsibility on the part of the representatives, who had to assume violence so as not to let it thoughtlessly spread. The September massacres, insufferable but justifiable, paradoxically offer an initial angle of analysis for understanding the revolutionary use of the notion of ‘humanity’ and the sentiment of humanity.

  Replying to Jean-Baptiste Louvet, Robespierre, while acknowledging the value of a sentiment of natural humanity, maintained that, in a context of avenging the laws, no one could allow themselves to lament what happened to the body of the enemy. Robespierre thereby redrew the camp of friends to be avenged, against the lack of differentiation produced by the sentiment of natural humanity and a concern for all victims outside any political consideration. Paraphrasing the Marseillaise, he pleaded for a sentiment of revolutionary humanity: