In Defence of the Terror

by Sophie Wahnich

  5 Ibid.

  6 Patrice Gueniffey, La politique de la Terreur. Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, Paris: Fayard, 2000, p. 10.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. J. Gregor, New York: Abaris Books, 1979, p. 153.

  9 Robespierre, Pour le Bonheur et pour la Liberté, Discours, ed. Yannick Bosc, Florence Gauthier and Sophie Wahnich, Paris: Éditions La Fabrique, 2000, p. 194.

  10 I have in mind here the works of Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des pouvoirs, Paris: Gallimard, 1995; and Ladan Boroumand, La Guerre des principes, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1999.

  11 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 10.

  12 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Beyond Human Rights’, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 20.

  13 Agamben, ‘What Is a People?’, in Means Without End, p. 33.

  14 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 3.

  15 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 2: 1954–88, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p. 719; cited by Agamben in Homo Sacer, p. 3.

  16 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 9.

  17 [At 1278b in the Politics, Aristotle uses the term euēmeria, literally ‘beautiful day’ but variously translated as ‘serenity’, ‘comfort’, and ‘well-being’ – D. F.]

  18 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, pp. 79–80.

  19 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11.

  20 I take this question from Adolphe Jensen, Mythes et coutumes des peuples primitifs, Paris: Payot, 1954, pp. 206–207.

  21 An expression that serves as the subject of Françoise Brunel’s article ‘Le jacobinisme, un “rigorisme de la vertu”?’, in Mélanges offerts à Michel Vovelle. Sur la Révolution, approches plurielles, Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1997, pp. 271–80, where she criticizes among other things the psychoanalytic approach of Jacques André in La Révolution fratricide. Essai de psychanalyse du lien social, Paris: PUF, 1993.

  22 The question is indeed to rediscover and give new legitimacy to the object that Colin Lucas particularly focused on in his intervention at the Stanford conference on terror, ‘Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror’, which can be found in K. M. Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Cultures, vol. 4: The Terror, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994, pp. 57–80.

  23 The article on ‘Terror’ in the Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, for example, states that ‘the Terror was initially an effort to limit and define the legal field conceded to the foundational violence of the revolution against the Ancien Régime . . . this violence proved its salvation’; article by Claude Mazauric, Paris: PUF, 1989, p. 1024.

  24 Cf. in particular Marc Abélès and Henri-Pierre Jeudy, Anthropologie du politique, Paris: Armand Colin, 1997. These authors maintain in their introduction: ‘Essentially, anthropology can completely dispense with the notion of modernity’ (p. 17).

  25 Brunel, ‘La jacobinisme, un “rigorisme de la vertu”?’

  26 Michel Vovelle, particularly in La Mentalité révolutionnaire. Société et mentalités sous la révolution française, Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1985.

  27 Mona Ozouf’s expression deserves also to be applied empirically: if there is a transfer of sacrality, what mechanisms does this involve?

  28 Bronislaw Baczko, in his contribution ‘The Terror Before the Terror?’, emphasized the fact that under Thermidor, as again in today’s historiography, ‘there is no consensus on a date or event that would symbolize the beginning of the terror’; in Baker (ed.), The Terror, p. 22.

  29 Cf. in particular, Patricia Paperman and Ruwen Ogien (eds) La couleur des pensées, sentiments, émotions, intentions, Paris: EHESS, 1995.

  30 Archives parlementaires, vol. 88, p. 615.

  31 What Jean-Pierre Faye called ‘the blow of discourse within a narrative economy’ in Langages totalitaires. Critique de la raison de l’économie narrative, Paris: Hermann, 1972.

  32 Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur, p. 230.

  33 For this definition of vengeance as a foundational institution, see Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard (eds), Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 1992, p. 738. As opposed to Arno Mayer in The Furies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), I do not disassociate analysis of vengeance and the sacred, and take seriously the idea of vengeance as a public institution rather than an individual passion. This notion of vengeance is therefore not analyzed as a vicious circle, but rather as the possibility of a virtuous institution. On Mayer’s book, see French Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 4 (2001), which was devoted to it, and where, among other contributions, there are interesting points of view from Tim Tackett and David Bell.

  34 A rigorous description of this declaratory turn has been conducted by Jacques Guilhaumou in his article ‘La terreur à l’ordre du jour (juillet 1793–mars 1794)’, Dictionnaire des usages sociopolitiques (1770–1815). Fascicule 2: Notions, concepts, Paris: Klincksieck Inalf, 1987, pp. 127–60.

  35 Mona Ozouf, ‘Guerre et Terreur dans le discours révolutionnaire’, L’École de la France, Paris: Gallimard, 1984, pp. 109–27. We might very well just use the term used repeatedly by the revolutionaries of a terror-vengeance, since we know that vengeance often includes a demand for reparatory equality, adding however that this demand may also be more absolute when the question is to avenge the dead or the integrity and dignity of man as this is instituted by a particular culture.

  36 This is the expression found in the documentary record.

  1 Jacques Guilhaumou, La Mort de Marat, Brussels: Complexe, 1989.

  2 On aesthetics and politics, compare the works of Jacques Guilhaumou that relate Kantian aesthetics and the revolutionary process. For an analysis of the death of Marat in this light, see the very clear presentation ‘Fragment d’une esthétique de l’événement révolutionnaire’, in Gilles Suron, Andrej Turowski and Sophie Wahnich (eds), L’Art et le discours face à la Révolution, Dijon: EUD, 1997; as well as ‘Un changement du souveraineté et de sensibilité’, in L’avènement des porte-parole de la république, 1789–1792, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998, pp. 249–53. Also Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; and The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004.

  3 On this question of natural right, see Florence Gauthier, Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en Révolution, Paris: PUF, 1992.

  4 Arch. Nat., série C, carton 118, Creuse.

  5 L.A. de Saint-Just, ‘Esprit de la Révolution et de la Constitution, 1791’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Michèle Duval, Paris: Champ Libre, 1984, pp. 338–9.

  6 Archives parlementaires, vol. 45, p. 352 (19 June 1792).

  7 The emphasis is mine. On the function of this statement, see S. Wahnich, ‘De l’émotion souveraine à l’acte de discours souverain, la patrie en danger’, in Mélanges offerts à Michel Vovelle, Paris: Société des études Robespierristes, 1997. See also Jacques Comaille, Laurence Dumoulin and Cécile Robert, ‘Produire les normes en Révolution’, Droit et société 7: La juridicisation du politique, Paris: Maison des Science de l’Homme et Réseau Européen Droit et Société, 2000.

  8 Le Moniteur universel, vol. 17, pp. 387–8; reprinted Paris: Plon, 1947.

  9 This revolutionary army should not be confused with the regular armies: accompanied by a ‘holy’ guillotine, it was to give force to the law, struggle against embezzlers and supply the armies.

  10 Le Moniteur universel, vol. 17, p. 526.

  11 Guéniffey, La politique de l
a Terreur, p. 197.

  12 The description of this tendency is often taken from Hegel: ‘The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.’ See Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, para. 590.

  13 These were the decree on refractory priests, and the decree of the encampment of 20,000 men to defend Paris.

  14 Archives parlementaires, vol. 45, p. 417 (20 June 1792).

  15 This is indeed Hegel’s expression; see Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 589.

  16 Société des Jacobins, 19 June 1792. Alphonse Aulard (ed.), La Société des Jacobins. Receuil de documents pour l’étude de la Société des Jacobins, vol. 4, Paris: Librairie Jouaust, Librairie Noblet & Maison Quantin, 1892, p. 19.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Arch. Nat., série C150, L253, p. 2.

  19 Archives parlementaires, vol. 45, p. 397.

  20 Ibid., p. 417.

  21 Ibid., p. 397 (19 June 1792).

  22 Ibid., p. 417.

  23 Ibid., p. 435 (21 June 1792).

  24 Under the 1791 constitution, ‘passive’ citizens were those who paid less than three livres in tax, along with women and children. Putting an end to passive citizenship meant essentially ending any regime based on assets, and opening the National Guard to young people and the popular classes. Women and girls could still not join this new National Guard.

  25 Archives parlementaires, vol. 45, p. 707.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Le Moniteur universel, vol. 17, pp. 387–8 (12 August 1793).

  1 Jean de Bry. Archives parlementaires, vol. 45, p. 707.

  2 Petition from Le Havre. Archives parlementaires, vol. 46, p. 163 (6 July 1792).

  3 Robespierre. Archives parlementaires, vol. 48, p. 180 (15 August 1792).

  4 Le Moniteur universel, vol. 13, p. 443 (17 August 1792).

  5 For an analysis of this expression see Michel Poizat, Vox populi, vox dei. La voix en politique, Paris: Métaillié, 2000.

  6 According to the recorded expression, as Jacques Guilhaumou has shown in La langue politique et la Révolution française, Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989.

  7 Le Moniteur universel, vol. 14, p. 428.

  8 According to the charge sheet of 20 Vendémaire year III (AD Seine et Oise, 42 L 58), cited by Bernard Conein, Langage politique et mode d’affrontement. Le jacobinisme et les massacres de Septembre, PhD thesis, Paris: EHESS, 1978.

  9 Robespierre, Pour le Bonheur et pour la Liberté, p. 277.

  10 Raymond Verdier (ed.), La vengeance. Études d’ethnologie, d’histoire et de philosophie, vol. 1, Paris: Éditions Cujas, 1980, p. 24.

  11 Ibid., p. 16.

  12 Ibid., p. 19.

  13 As against the standpoint initially developed by Jules Michelet, and reprised under this concept of ‘a priori vengeance’ by Antoine de Baecque, La gloire et l’effroi. Sept morts sous la terreur, Paris: Grasset, 1997, p. 86.

  14 Cited after Pierre Caron, Les Massacres de Septembre, Paris, 1935.

  15 Ibid., p. 131.

  16 Ibid., p. 132.

  17 Cited after Caron, Les Massacres de Septembre, p. 132.

  18 According to Pierre Serna, there cannot be just the exercise of executive power, even an ‘executive power of execution’. Serna maintains that ‘the representatives were afraid of popular violence. The executive power of execution, if this expression is permissible, was seized by the population of Paris, and demanded that the men of Versailles should restore public order’; in Joël Cornette (ed.), La monarchie entre renaissance et révolution, 1515–1792, Paris: Seuil, 2000, p. 400. When the three powers are fused, the notion of executive power is no longer apposite; what we have here is indeed a sovereign power, in this case that of popular sovereignty.

  19 Cited after Caron, Les Massacres de Septembre, p. 124.

  20 Ibid., p. 127.

  21 Le Moniteur universel, vol. 14.

  22 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, trans. E. Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–26, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996, p. 86.

  23 Ibid., p. 87.

  24 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 83-4.

  25 Journal de la République française, 25 October 1792.

  26 Le Défenseur de la Constitution, 20 September 1792.

  27 Saint-Just, Œuvres complètes, p. 714.

  28 National Convention, 5 November 1792, in reply to the accusation of Jean-Baptiste Louvet. Archives parlementaires, vol. 52, p. 162.

  29 Cited from Lucas, ‘Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror’, pp. 69, 73.

  30 Archives parlementaires, vol. 45, p. 417 (20 June 1792).

  31 Robespierre. Archives parlementaires, vol. 3, p. 62 (28 September 1792).

  32 D. Vidal, ‘Vengeance’, in Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie, p. 738.

  33 Robespierre. Archives parlementaires, vol. 56, p. 16 (28 December 1792).

  34 Albert Soboul, Le procès de Louis XVI, Paris: Archives Juillard, 1966, pp. 139, 148.

  35 I have drawn here from my L’Impossible citoyen. L’étranger dans le discours de la revolution française, Paris: Albin Michel, 1997; and especially from the third section, ‘Fraternité et exclusion’.

  36 A. Aulard, La société des Jacobins, vol. 5, p. 633.

  37 Claude Lefort, ‘La Terreur révolutionnaire’, Passé/Présent 2 (1983), p. 25.

  38 Sarah Maza, Vies privées, affaires publiques, Paris: Fayard, 1997.

  39 Le Vieux Cordelier, Paris: Belin, 1989, p. 90.

  40 Ibid., p. 75.

  41 This expression, coined by the Physiocrats, was commonly used by Sieyès, and is analyzed by Jacques Guilhaumou in Sieyès et l’ordre de la langue? L’invention de la politique moderne, Paris: Kimé, 2002.

  1 On the question of a periodization of the Terror, see Bronislaw Baczko, ‘The Terror Before the Terror’.

  2 Verdier, La vengeance, p. 16.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Bentabole, Archives parlementaires, vol. 60, p. 2.

  5 Jean Bon Saint-André and Jacques-Louis David. Archives parlementaires, vol. 60, p. 3.

  6 Saint-Just, 26 Germinal year II. Archives parlementaires, vol. 88, p. 615.

  7 Archives parlementaires, vol. 60, p. 62.

  8 Ibid, p. 59.

  9 Ibid, p. 61.

  10 Ibid, p. 62.

  11 Vidal, ‘Vengeance’, p. 738.

  12 I have used here the distinction proposed by Paolo Viola between political violence and irrational violence, which maintains that the points of extreme violence in a revolution are those ‘of an irrational, not a political violence, which the revolution does not require, which are not beneficial to it, which it is horrified by, which it ends up repressing as far as possible, but which it has itself triggered because it has touched the unconscious and fragile equilibriums that govern the relationship to the sacred’. See Paolo Viola, ‘Violence révolutionnaire ou violence du peuple en révolution’, Recherches sur la Révolution, Paris: La Découverte/IHRF, 1991, pp. 95–102; and on vengeance as a punitive practice, see also his Il trono vuoto. La transizione della sovranità nella rivoluzione francese, Turin: Einaudi, 1989.

  13 Archives parlementaires, vol. 60, p. 17.