In Defence of the Terror
Page 9
This is the moment at which the enemies of the public good have to be made to tremble, and all their plots stayed. This is the moment at which they must be forced to leave us free; but we must also renounce all particular vengeance in our operations.38
Vengeance as we come across it right through this period is public in the sense that it involves the common good of the Republic, public and not private safety. ‘Popular vengeance’, ‘the vengeance of the laws’, ‘just vengeance’, ‘national vengeance’, ‘vengeance of the people’ – all of these variations of the term attest to this. The nation, the people and the laws are figures of universality, of what is to be brought into being. The opposition between penal justice, which concerns both public and private interest, and revolutionary justice, was the theme of Couthon’s report on the law of 22 Prairial year II:
We have prided ourselves in being just towards individuals, without taking too much trouble to be just towards the Republic, as if the tribunals designed to punish its enemies had been established in the interest of conspirators and not for the safety of the patrie . . . Ordinary crimes directly injure individuals, and only indirectly the whole society . . . The crimes of the conspirators, on the other hand, directly threaten the existence of society or its liberty, which comes to one and the same thing. The lives of scoundrels are weighed here against that of the people.39
We might consider the entirety of revolutionary political work as aiming to consolidate the principles declared in 1789 and 1793, and to make these operate as unreflecting prejudices, in other words to take them out of the possible sphere of discussion. To bring the Revolution into manners was in a sense to make the violation of the declared principles painful to a revolutionary citizen, so that such a violation made him react emotionally, as something ‘insufferable’ to him. The construction of revolutionary values could thus merge with that of the emotional and moral wellsprings of the citizens as political actors. These wellsprings were no longer to be individual private virtue, but rather public virtue as socially manufactured for each person in a society finally constituted. This social fabric was to be constantly consolidated by the famous civil institutions of education and festivals, aiming always to re-imprint the founded principles. According to the letter of the report of 18 Floréal year II (7 May 1794), ‘these national and decadal40 festivals must create in man, as far as moral issues are concerned, a rapid instinct that will lead him to do good and avoid ill without the support of reasoning’. The impressive list of festivals proposed by this decree gives an idea of the place that moral principles were to hold, as republican principles, in revolutionary society. The civic religion aimed to establish virtue, i.e. love of equality, and to establish a representation of ‘humanity’ humanized according to the ideas of the revolutionaries of year II. This religion was not applied, so it is hard to know if it would actually have facilitated the diffusion of such a love; but it did immediately produce the hatred of its contemporary detractors, and of those historians who have commented upon it. Such a religion, indeed, touches a point that is fundamental for understanding what was at issue with the notion of a symbolic system founded on sacred and civic virtues: the articulation of recognized and shared principles, of their social and individual expression. In sum, a new symbolic system exists only if it becomes impossible or very difficult to avoid its practical imperatives, if it holds good for the whole of society and not just for one particular social group. The quest of the protagonists of the Revolution, especially in year II, was indeed to attain this point of irreversibility for a new representation of humanity, by way of a common sensibility that made laws of constraint unnecessary. But representations of humanity are never universally shared, and the sentiment of ‘humanity’ is never natural. To develop it, the values constructed may rest either on the primacy of political existence, or on that of life as such. I have tried to show how, for the revolutionaries, what came first was political existence. Hannah Arendt believed that a revolutionary period invents a sentiment of humanity that rests only on pity for mistreated bodies. To respond to this and propose a different vision of what she calls the social question, we must understand what the terms people and equality meant for these revolutionaries.
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4
THE PEOPLE AND THE POPULAR
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WHAT DID REVOLUTIONARY EQUALITY MEAN?
One of the objectives of the Terror was the unity of French patriots. Should we then consider that what was sought here was the creation of an undivided people, with the people as a whole being identified with the common people, the poor? Does it necessarily follow that the revolutionary conception of equality was the crazy equalizing idea that circulated in several playful little texts like the couplet: ‘The giants must be shortened and the small lengthened, true happiness lies in everyone being the same height’? Can we consider that, beneath this fantasy, in which the hierarchy of size refers to the hierarchy of power, the revolutionaries dreamed of a people with no one left out? There is more than one reason why I see this hypothesis as untenable.
First of all, in the imaginary of the most radical revolutionaries, such as Collot d’Herbois in his Instruction addressée aux autorités constituées au nom de la Commission temporaire de surveillance républicaine établie à Ville-Affranchie, ‘a perfect equality of happiness is unfortunately impossible among men’. The quest for equal happiness did not lie in destroying wealth, but rather in ‘making inhuman monstrosities disappear from the soil of France’, and in ‘reducing the intervals [since] those who have grasped the spirit of the Revolution have seen a terrifying disproportion between the works of the farmer and the artisan and the modest wage they receive’:
They have seen . . . alongside a work which should always be accompanied by comfort . . . the rags of misery and the pallor of hunger; they have heard the painful complaints of need, the sharp cries of sickness . . . On the other hand, they have seen idleness and vice in the houses of wealth, all the refinement of a barbarous luxury . . . [And] finally, as the summit of infamy, they have seen the contempt of these proud men pursue the poor in their cottages, they have seen these monsters, far from grieving over the evils that their very luxury has caused, aggravate them by their disdain.1
Twentieth-century commentators have maintained that the desire to reduce such intervals ends up abolishing them. But this was not the logic of the revolutionary statements. Among the festivals envisaged in the decree of 18 Floréal year II, and designed to bind men together, there was one intending to celebrate and honour Misfortune. The poor were not to disappear, they were to be honoured. What was intolerable was not poverty, frugality, misfortune, but rather the indignity that the poor experienced. The question was not to abolish division amongst the people but rather to oppose labour to idleness, virtue to vice, a civilized society that assured wellbeing to all provided that they worked and a barbarous society that despised the people as an ‘immense class of the poor’. As Collot put it, ‘the people are above all the immense class of the poor’. This ‘above all’ is susceptible of much comment, but let us hold here to the letter of the text: ‘above all’ does not mean ‘only’. The tension between the people as a whole and the common people was not abolished, but as in every political situation in which a democratic upsurge makes itself felt, the little people, the people so often left out of account, were supposed, not to become rich, but to put the rich back in their moral and political place, by asserting that wealth did not authorize them to claim more in the way of liberty and sovereignty than anyone else. If the rich were rich, this should no longer authorize them to be disdainful, oppressive and indifferent to the misfortunes of others. It was not a question of destroying the wealthy outright or even of sharing out their wealth, but rather of obliging them to become human again – in other words, solicitous of the humanity of the poor, respectful of ‘the immense class of the poor’. What was hateful was not wealth as such, but its moral and political effects on those who possessed it, and it
s moral, political and material effects on those who experienced oppression. This was why Robespierre, on 24 April 1793, rejected the idea of an agrarian law:
You know that this agrarian law that you have spoken so much about is simply a phantom created by rogues in order to frighten imbeciles; no revolution was needed to teach the world that the great disproportion of fortunes is the source of many evils and many crimes. But we are no less convinced that equality of goods is a chimera. The point is more to render poverty honourable than to proscribe opulence.2
On 17 June 1793, Robespierre opposed the idea that the people should be relieved of contributing to public expenditures, with these being borne solely by the rich:
I am enlightened by the good sense of the people, who feel that the kind of favour that would be done to them in this way is in fact no more than an injury. It would establish a class of proletarians, a class of helots, and equality as well as liberty would perish for all time.3
Liberty in this speech is not opposed to equality; it is its guarantee. Liberty is the property of the citizen who takes part in sovereignty, and the common people are ‘simply free like the rest’.4 This is not an equality of the market, in which profits and debts are redistributed, but rather a political equality that becomes at the same time a quality of the people as a whole and the sole quality of the free common people. The revolutionary configuration was that described by Jacques Rancière when he proposed a definition of democracy in which ‘the demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens’.5
That is the fundamental wrong . . . the people appropriate the common quality as their own . . . The qualification that they bring is a contentious property since it does not belong exclusively to the people, but this contentious property is strictly speaking only the setting-up of a contentious commonality. The mass of men without qualities identify with the community in the name of the wrong that is constantly being done to them by those whose position or qualities have the natural effect of propelling them into the nonexistence of those who have ‘no part in anything’.
Rancière maintains that a democratic politics exists when those with ‘no part’ have a part, i.e. ‘the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich . . . causes the poor to exist as an entity’.6 And further: ‘The people are not one class among others. They are the class of the wrong that harms the community and establishes it as a “community” of the just and the unjust.’7
Revolutionary equality does not conceal within it egalitarianism. Equality is rather the classical expression of a democratic upsurge, the principle that authorizes the demos to take power over the aristocrats and the rich. This is the sense in which we should understand Saint-Just’s famous sentence: ‘The poor are the powers of the earth, they have the right to speak as masters to governments that neglect them.’ The poor referred to here were not suffering bodies but beings of speech, they even disposed of what we can call a sovereign speech, they were those who disposed of the political logos even if they were not the executive power, the government that may always be negligent. This can be called rhetoric or poetry, but we need to take this proposition seriously in order to analyze the way in which the revolutionary dynamic made this power effective – a power transformed from unhappy and complaining bodies into a people disposing of powerful political logos.
The emergence of this political logos did not wait for 1793; it was present already in the cahiers de doléances of 1789. At Le Mesnil Saint-Germain, we find the following statement: ‘The life of the poor must be more sacred than a part of the property of the rich.’ But it was in the debate of the Constituent Assembly over the right of petition that a cleavage emerged between a conception in which the people were sovereign and another conception in which they were simply the object of policy. The one side sought to separate the suffering body of the poor with their complaints from the political institution of the people. This was the position of Le Chapelier, who wanted to reserve the right of petition to active citizens, and make a radical distinction between this and the notion of complaint. The other side set out to politicize complaint by considering it as always having the value of a political address, and thus right from the start a political speech that must belong to all citizens. This was the position of Robespierre and of Abbé Grégoire. In the words of the latter:
I know in Paris citizens who are not active, who live in a sixth-floor attic and are for all that able to give enlightenment and useful opinion (applause from the benches). Would you reject these citizens? . . . They will address themselves to you in order to claim their rights when they have been slighted, as the Declaration of Rights is after all common to all men. Will you refuse to hear their demands? Will you then regard their sighs as acts of rebellion, their complaints as an attack against the laws? And whom would we prohibit non-active citizens from addressing? Administrators, municipal officials, those who should be the defenders of the people, the guardians and fathers of the poor. Is not complaint a natural right? And should a citizen not have, precisely because he is poor, the right of soliciting protection from the public authority? . . . If you deprive the poor citizen of the right to present petitions, you detach him from public affairs, you even make him their enemy. Unable to complain in legal ways, he will resort to tumultuous movements and replace reason by despair . . . The freedom to think and to express his thinking in any way whatsoever is the lever of political liberty.8
It is in the details of these debates that we can observe the manner in which the entrance of the poor onto the political stage was conceived. For the protagonists of the Constituent Assembly, there was not a politics of pity but two different modes of refusal. The first refusal lay simply in completely ignoring the poor, who were to be neither subjects nor objects of politics, but relegated as passive citizens unable to expect equality or to exercise their free judgement or speech. The second was to maintain that it was unacceptable to refuse the poor the right of petition, i.e. refuse their becoming political subjects in the full sense, subjects of liberty. If politics began at the point when the trembling of the living body could be converted into political logos, then to maintain a natural right of petition for all human beings amounted to refusing that being a citizen meant no more than enjoying the ‘fine day of life’. From grievance to petition, the revolutionary movement politicized the living.
Analysis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen offers a further argument against the hypothesis of a levelling egalitarianism. This ‘recognizes no other distinctions than that of talent and virtue’.9 This is why the project of an indivisible people was not the project of a people as one, in the sense that psychoanalysts speak of a fusion between people. Not only do gaps exist between human beings, but these are magnified in the quest for endless ascent onto the rock of the rights of man – which, despite being declared, are never definitively won. Being virtuous meant making a constant effort in this endless ascent: Chaumette spoke of the ‘Mount Sinai of the French people’.10 And if the people were to ‘identify themselves with their constitution’, it was in this political and moral effort, the effort of an ever precarious liberty that had to be hotly defended, and that shifted with the tides of history not only the intervals of happiness between men, but also the border between the left and right sides of political sensibility. We are far here from a conception in which the right of the wretched to existence transforms the people into a powerless and ultimately oppressed mass. In the revolutionary utterance, ‘the people’ exists only by reference to values that found it as subject of liberty and dignity. It is ultimately the name of people that concretizes the idea of a human race that regains its rights and its human nature, in a democratic action with universal value.
When Arendt talks of the language of passion in connection with revolutionary cruelty, she associates this with pity for the less fortunate and declares that such cruelty is as boundless as misfortune. Yet if there is a language of p
assion, this is not passion for a social question independent of politics, but rather passion for right, for the Declaration of Rights that was not only to put an end to the misfortunes of the poor, but also to the misfortunes of peoples – which, we recall, have as their cause ‘the ignorance, neglect or contempt of the natural rights of man’, which are ‘liberty, security, property and resistance to oppression’.11 Nor should we forget that, in the preamble to the same Declaration of 1789, it is asserted that the objective is to ensure that ‘the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all’.
This question of natural rights being declared for the protection of the people is a fundamental one, since those who betray these rights provoke the sovereign exception as divine violence, along with the cruelty that necessarily accompanies it – we understand today the limitations of the guillotine’s lack of cruelty, or indeed those of the lethal injection of American executions.
In this culture of inalienable and sacred natural right, the border between identity and alterity separates men in the wild state, who do not have access to right, from civilized men familiar with this. On this border there are two categories of man. The first is composed of those who learn or discover the rules of natural right, become citizens and expand the ranks of the sovereign. The second is composed of men who know right but do not apply it. These are traitors to the nation, and more generally traitors to humanity.
To betray humanity, in revolutionary logic, means knowing right but not respecting it, preferring to it the use of force. Betraying humanity means not defending right against those who attack it, or preventing ignorant men from discovering it.
Robespierre, in the constitutional debates of spring 1793, expressed a fundamental analogy between relations among states and relations among citizens: