CHAPTER 4
Terror
THE PROBLEM of terror is even more complex and perplexing than that of violence. Since 1789 it has challenged and humbled social theorists and historians who strain to strike an equitable balance between engaged and distanced explanation. In the wake of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and Hiroshima, terror has become an even more disconcerting and controversial issue than it was during the century following the Furies of the French Revolution. Indeed, scholarly and popular debates about the reasons, functions, and effects of generic terror have been both enriched and complicated by the questions raised by students of the singularities of the Furies in the French and Russian revolutions respectively.
One can either muse about the tantalizing historical possibility of revolution without terror or declare the relationship of revolution and terror to be so inscrutable as to defy analysis. In the meantime there is no denying, however, that historically terror has been an essential property of revolution, and inherent to its dynamics. Terror, like violence, is interactive, and it is safe to say that following the revolts of 1789 and 1917 there would have been no terror had there been no tenacious and uncompromising domestic and foreign resistance. Besides, terror is not the exclusive preserve of revolutionary regimes, judging by its role in the life of a great variety of other autocratic authority systems, as explored by Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu.
The point at issue is not terror as such but its changing variety, scale, and intensity, notably its excesses, or “excessive excesses.”1 Infant and labile revolutionary regimes invariably are caught between the Scylla of becoming cold-blooded in order to win the life-and-death struggle of foundation and the Charybdis of exercising moderation at the risk of prematurely coming to a “lame and impotent conclusion.” As noted, although a broad range of sober if idealistic politicians and public intellectuals are reluctant to forfeit the benefits of founding violence, they do worry about its spiraling out of control. In January 1793, halfway between the prison massacres and the Great Terror, Thomas Jefferson articulated this position (of which he was later disabused): “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” He insisted that he “deplored … [and mourned] as much as anybody” and until “my death … the many guilty persons [who] fell without the forms of trial,” as well as the innocents. For Jefferson, although “blind to a certain degree, … the arm of the people … [was] a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs.” But at that moment he continued to judge its use to have been “necessary,” all the more so because “the liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.” Jefferson even wondered whether a “prize” of the magnitude of liberty “was ever … won with so little innocent blood.”2
Five years later Kant still took a similar position. To be sure, he wondered whether the costs of the revolution in France might be too horrible and high for “a right-thinking person” to “decide … to go through with the experiment … a second time.” Ultimately Kant concluded, however, that despite these costs “this revolution finds a wishful sympathy in the hearts of its spectators (who themselves are not involved in the game) which borders on enthusiasm, and whose open expression is fraught with danger—proof that this sympathy can have nothing less than a basic moral disposition in the human race as its cause.”3 Considering the terror a moral phenomenon driven by “the rage against evil [das Böse],”4 Hegel kept the faith in the “glorious dawn” with even less hesitation than Kant. He saw the reign of terror as a necessary price for the transition to a constitution “established in harmony with the concept of right” which would serve as the “foundation [for] all future legislation.”5
But Kant and Hegel were the exception. More commonly members of the intelligentsia who had cheered the fall of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man became disaffected. In the manner of Schiller and Goethe, they viewed the revolutionary Furies as a “return to barbarism” rather than a midwife for the birth of freedom and justice, all the more so since they saw the terror answering the “cries of the rabble,” whom they scorned and feared.6 Michelet also was troubled by the terror—the “crescendo of murders”—associated with the Revolution’s fight for survival. But with his benign view of le peuple, he wondered what the saviors of the French nation could have done “had the people answered: ‘we would rather perish than become unjust.’ ”7
This same concern was voiced concerning the revolution in Russia. Within a year of the Bolshevik takeover and shortly before being assassinated by proto-Fascists in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg considered that “it would be demanding something superhuman … [or] a miracle from Lenin and his comrades” to expect them to “conjure forth the finest democracy … as well as a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, [and] betrayed by the international proletariat.” She went on to forewarn, however, that even in these “devilishly hard conditions … the danger begins when [revolutionaries] make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances.”8 In a similar vein Boris Kagarlitsky, a non-Leninist Marxist Soviet dissident, pondering the fortunes of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1980s, conceded that “humane” revolutions which foreswear terror are either “crushed by counterrevolution [or] fall under the blows of reaction.” Even so, such abortive revolutions score “a moral victory,” in that future generations will be able to once more embrace their ideas and try again. Kagarlitsky contended that rather than accept the logic of “the stark choice of either-or,” the “Lefts” needed “to find a middle … [or] democratic way in order to be politically strong and morally pure.”9
Indeed, the issue of violence and terror has divided reformers and revolutionaries, as well as historians, ever since 1789. Almost instantly the polemical and scholarly battle lines were drawn, and they hold to this day: on the one hand, those who consider the terror as a necessary evil, if the revolution was to survive; on the other, those who ignore or, à la rigueur, approve the initial founding violence but hold the terror to have been needless, barbaric, and counterproductive. With time, especially in the twentieth century, the issue of the filiation and escalation from mere violence to full-scale terror has become intensely controversial. But otherwise, insofar as the basic terms of the debate are concerned, they remain essentially constant.
Terror invites interpretations that are variously overdetermined, monocausal, demonizing, and didactic. Perhaps no other subject makes it quite so difficult to resist the temptation to read first beginnings in terms of subsequent developments and outcomes, usually with a view to giving lessons for the present and future.
Three major hypotheses frame the discussion of revolutionary terror. The first thesis posits contingent circumstances to be its primary cause and engine. In this interpretation, terror is driven at least as much by real and practical concerns as by ideological prepossessions or utopian professions. At bottom terror is an instrument designed to deal with circumstances perceived to endanger the survival of the fledgling revolution or revolutionary regime. It is forged in the heat of refractory domestic and international problems and pressures. These are all the more difficult to master because of the breakdown of the state apparatus and judicial system. According to this thèse des circonstances, the would-be revolutionary rulers face civil war fueled by not only pressing material problems but also sharp political, social, and cultural discords. Most of the leaders are inexperienced in national politics, and all of them are confounded by the “pathos of novelty.” In addition to an intractable domestic situation, they face a hostile world environment which they aggravate with their own politically driven foreign policy, diplomacy, and warfare.
The second thesis postulates ideology as the essential prerequisite as well as the necessary (if not altogether sufficient) cause and engine of terror. It presumes the actions and decisions of revolutionary actors to be moved by ideas and beliefs which instantly freeze into dogma. Driven by preconceived and unchanging intentions, these actors become the chief agents for the realization of the ideological imperative to exorcise the ancien régime and destroy the counterrevolutionary resistances, with the ultimate objective of radically regenerating man and society. In this construct there is a tight coupling between ideological preconceptions and policy effects and outcomes.
The third thesis assigns a central, not to say exclusive place to the mind-set and psychological drives of supreme revolutionary actors who embrace a categorical ideological creed to further their arrogation of power. This interpretation presumes that the mental structures of key actor-agents predispose them not only to vastly exaggerate, if not wholly invent the counterrevolutionary resistances facing them, but also and above all to conceive that these resistances are orchestrated by the masterminds of an all-embracing and cunning plot. For such actors, obsessed by conspiracy and prone to scapegoating, terror ceases to be instrumental to become essential, or an end in and for itself.
Needless to say, in practice neither of these three interpretive frameworks is ironbound. The open-minded proponents of each of them adjust their explanatory paradigms to accommodate elements of the other two. For the champions of the first two positions it is never, really, a matter of all contingency or all ideology, but a mixture of the two, with a decisive weighting in favor of either the one or the other. Moreover, elements of the third thesis—the personality-mentality thesis, which subsumes the “great-man” logic—surface in both the first and the second, especially when these deal with the “excessive excesses” of terror and with the adoption and operation of terror as a governing instrument. Ultimately neither the thesis of “environmental circumstances” nor that of “genetic ideas” can do without “conceptual individuals” who are assigned a pivotal role in the establishment and direction of the reign of terror which they come to embody.10
The underlying issue may be said to be that of genetic versus environmental factors in the inception and escalation of revolutionary terror. The notorious difficulty of determining the respective weight of these two sets of factors in biogenetics is surpassed only by that of fixing their respective weight in “social inheritance.” In any case, historians and social theorists will forever debate the proportion of the “environment” of historical circumstances and the “genes” of ideology in the terrors of the French and Russian revolutions.11
By and large “environmentalists” consider revolutionary terror to be a legitimate child born of extreme necessity. They are far more attentive to historical contingency than to ideology, which they presume plays an instrumental and subordinate role. Besides slighting ideology, environmentalists have difficulties establishing, with precision, the connections between, on the one hand, particular contingent events and, on the other, the application of specific terrorist policies. In addition, they face the impossible challenge of ranking the disparate factors in some reasoned order of importance and to explore their interactions.
Whereas the environmentalists are inclined to approach terror with sympathetic if critical understanding, which is often disvalued as apologia, the “geneticists” tend to do so with a turn of mind predisposed to unqualified condemnation. Paying scant attention to the flux and reflux of events, they wrench the terror out of the complex historical environment, apart from which it is reduced to a fragmented and isolated phenomenon. Moreover, rather than problematize and explore the postulated primacy of ideology paired with a congruent mind-set, they simply keep reaffirming it, with little if any regard for the tangled correlation of ideas and circumstances. For the geneticists, terror is the unwanted and illegitimate offspring of a revolution that runs amuck for not being terminated in good time—for not being, in Robespierre’s phrase, “a revolution without a revolution.”
Critical engagement with and between these two theses—circumstantial primacy and ideological determinism—both qualified by the axiom of the emergence of conceptual personae, ought not to preclude taking account of other mainsprings of terror: the spiraling stress between city and country; between the profane and the sacred; between innovation and tradition. As Marx and Engels suggested, in 1793 as in 1871, when political developments outstripped the social and economic readiness for radical change, the exercise of political will and terror with a view to forcing history was less a function of the strength and self-confidence of the bourgeoisie and its supporters than of their weakness and fright.12 These disparities precondition the terror that surfaces in a revolutionary moment characterized by multiple sovereignty, defaulting institutions, and conceptual aporia. Such a conjunction is like a reversion to a political state of nature, which fosters what Schmitt defines as the friend-enemy dissociation and invites what Arendt considers the crime or violence of new foundation. In this indeterminate swirl of events, both friend and enemy are tempted by metapolitics, the one dizzy with hope for a fresh start, the other consumed by fear of an untimely end. Terror may be said to break in upon politics when politics becomes quasi-religious or when a utopia beckons or demands to be realized. Undaunted by the perplexities of radical novelty and the wages of violence, bewildered revolutionaries accelerate their lunge into an imperative but uncontrollable and hazardous future. But anti- and counterrevolutionaries are no less fiery in pursuit of their millennium, which is to reclaim an idealized but imperiled past and present.
Not unlike the concept of revolution, the concept of political terror has a history. Machiavelli considered terror the essential stratagem for rulers seeking to establish a new political regime.13 Not only the would-be despot of an embryonic tyranny but also the would-be rulers of a nascent republic must resort to terror in order to secure the survival of the new form of government. If need be, they have to physically annihilate their internal political enemies, particularly those tied to the old regime. Not to do so is to sign the death warrant of a nascent political foundation. Besides, the primal terror leaves a residue of latent fear which is an essential principle and instrument of everyday rule. Of course, for Machiavelli terrorizing violence is essentially a pragmatic agency: its success is measured by criteria of political efficiency, informed by virtù, and not by ideological standards.
Jean Bodin, following Machiavelli, set out to call in question the divine or religious foundations of state power, insisting that not even the sacre of the king could affect the secular essence of sovereignty.14 Though rooted in profane history, the state is based on “force and violence.” As a contemporary of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Bodin was much concerned with removing religion as a source of civil discord. His argument for royal absolutism was framed in response to Huguenots who advanced constitutional arguments for resistance. At any rate, Bodin conceives terror as the chosen tool not of ruling and governing elites bent on founding or defending a regime, but of disfavored strata seeking to challenge them. The stratagem of violence belongs to the estat populaire—the masses—looking to supplant the noble and the wealthy—the classes. In other words, in Bodin’s conception terror is used by the underclass of the poor and the weak—les méchants et vicieux—to “preserve or restore the equality of all citizens,” not by incumbent elites—les plus vertueux—to protect or foster their own liberties and positions.
Machiavelli and Bodin considered political violence an instrument for the repression, even extermination, of political enemies, without specifically calling or defining it as terror. Also, in their scheme of things this as yet unnamed variant of political violence was not regime-specific. Montesquieu changed the terms of the discussion by “introducing the term terror into the political vocabulary and giving it a precise meaning”: he made terror, which for him is a synonym for fear, “the defining characteristic of the governing principle of despotism.”15 To be sure, the aristocratic and republican forms of government, informed, respectively, by the principles of honor and virtue, resort to limited and exemplary violence or force against threatening domestic foes. But precisely because they stop short of terror, or rule by fear, both are chronically in danger of degenerating into despotism. In Montesquieu’s analysis this deteriorated form of government, which he abhors, is said to be ruled by active terror, all the more so in a time of troubles when rising disquiet about real and imagined perils yields to fear, with individuals “frightened and tormented” by the prospect of being overwhelmed by these perils.16
While Montesquieu is troubled by the political costs of the degeneration of both monarchy and republic, he is particularly alert to the hazards attending the fight for survival of failing and embattled republics. To be sure, he condones their right to “destroy” those seeking to “subvert” them. But in so doing he does not lose sight of the danger that “there is no inflicting great punishment nor, for that matter, carrying through great political changes, without putting exorbitant powers in the hands of a few citizens.” Indeed, there is the danger of the “avengers establishing a tyranny under the pretext of avenging the republic.”17
The idée maîtresse, or defining idea, that terror is the essential armature of despotism made its way among the philosophes, who brought it to bear on the rule of the Bourbon dynasty. They applied it to France’s Catholic Church as well: “the imposture prevails by way of terror, which is how papalism maintains itself and keeps its hold on a frightened people.”18 It was only a short step from conceiving of terror as an autocratic ruling instrument to envisaging it as a tool of opposition, or counter-terror, to be wielded by either a rebel faction of the governing class or the estat populaire, as implicitly presaged by Montesquieu and dreaded by Bodin.
This oppositional conception of terror began to take shape early in the French Revolution and kept being changed in the rush of events. There was, to begin with, a phase of spontaneous and wild terror from below. It started, as noted, in July 1789, with the original explosion of popular violence in Paris and the grande peur in the countryside, and it continued through the prison massacres of September 1792. In fact, these massacres were at once the culmination of this first phase of a bottom-up terror and the embryo and precipitant of a would-be legitimate and quasi-legal terror from above, which was formally adopted and proclaimed in September 1793. Until Thermidor this top-down terror, which was conceptualized by revolutionary leaders, functioned as a principle, system, and instrument of government designed to punish, avenge, and educate as part of a quest to reestablish a single political and legal sovereignty. It is worth stressing, following Michelet and Quinet, that this enforcement terror, though a radically new departure, had certain traditional overtones by virtue of its quasi-religious ardor and righteousness reminiscent of the religious terrors of the past. Both in the old days and the new, the powers that be instrumentalized a fear that was both real and imagined, holy and profane.
Marat and Robespierre were the emblematic figures of the terror, the former for the first phase, the latter for the second. Marat was among the first and chief logicians and champions of violence-charged popular furies. By early fall 1789 he declared that it was these furies that had “bent the aristocratic faction of the Estates-General … by using terror to remind them of their duty.” Before long Marat commended this “salutary terror” for being “indispensable for the consummation of the great purpose of the constitution.” By late 1792, though discomfited by the brutality of the September massacres, Marat maintained that ever so many “enemies of the revolution” would refuse to take the right path “unless pushed by fear of popular vengeance … and [then] kept on it by terror.”19
Although Robespierre eventually became one of the principal advocates and agents of terror from the summit of power, such was not his initial position. At the start he seriously doubted that “liberty could be secured by using the same means despotism had used to destroy it,” and he held to this belief for over two years.20 Though he meanwhile supported political terror against the enemies of the revolution, Robespierre did not shift from a “negative” to a “positive” construction of revolutionary terror until the trial of Louis XVI in December 1792. Thereafter he, unlike Marat, conceived and projected it as a governing principle and policy directed from the top down and intended to further a broad range of domestic and foreign objectives.21
With Thermidor this official terror was discredited and denounced, and some of its chief directors and operatives were executed or jailed. But other forms of terror persisted, in particular the unofficial and retributive White terror of resurgent and rehabilitated anti- and counterrevolutionaries, which went essentially unpunished. During the civil war of the French Revolution the various resistances condoned or encouraged spontaneous terror and exercised enforcement terror on a scale and with an intensity commensurate with their engagement. Indeed, overall the terror practiced by all sides in this civil strife, not unlike that practiced during the civil wars of the Russian Revolution, took many more lives and was far more savage than the more dramatic political terror of the guillotine and the Cheka.
Edgar Quinet deserves a special place in the history of the history of the French Revolution. He intended his unconventional La Révolution, first published in 1865, to be not merely what he himself called “a critical history of the French Revolution” but “a political and philosophical reflection on the revolutionary phenomenon in Europe’s past.”22 Significantly, Quinet presented the core of his discussion of the terror in a seminal chapter which, uncharacteristically for a historian of his generation, he titled a “theory of the terror.”23 Though appalled by the Terror of 1793–94, he made every effort to “penetrate its spirit and system,”24 even to the point of speculating why, unlike past terrors, this one had “failed.”
Quinet judged the mainsprings and dynamics of the terror to “spring from the inexorable shock of the old and the new France” which generated “opposing electric currents making for perpetual thunder and lightning.” With neither side about “to capitulate,” the confrontation turned into a vicious circle of “terrible reprisals” freighted with the “spirit of extermination,” but “with the old France almost always provoking the new.” According to Quinet, beginning with the royal session in the Estates-General of June 23, 1789, and through the Brunswick Manifesto of July 1792 and beyond, “each attack by the court incited a new attack by the people, [and] each reaction a new counteraction.” In his view, ineluctably a succession and accumulation of provocations and threats called forth retaliations that only with time were perceived and shaped “to constitute a system.”25
Quinet was among the first inveterate republicans to criticize historians for invoking the imperilment of the fledgling regime to justify the establishment of the Terror. For one thing, just as he stresses that usually the counterrevolution was on the offensive, he maintains that “nearly everywhere … most of the [Jacobin] terror was perpetrated not before but after victory.” He notes, in particular, that Jean-Baptiste Carrier’s notorious drowning of prisoners in the Loire river reached a peak fully five months after the successful republican defense of Nantes against the Vendeans; and that it was only after the recapture of Lyons that the Committee of Public Safety ordered France’s second city to be leveled and politically cleansed. Clearly, notwithstanding his pioneering turn to conceptually informed thematic history, Quinet continued to pay close attention to chronology. No doubt his approach to time was overly narrow: he overlooked that the civil war left a legacy of raw mutual hatred, suspicion, and fear; and he neglected that when the Vendée and southern cities were finally overpowered, Paris was still fighting a difficult foreign war. Be that as it may, the chronology of the Furies in Nantes and Lyons bolsters Quinet’s thesis that ultimately the savage enforcement terror was gratuitous rather than “necessary.”26
In addition Quinet underscores that by virtue of being increasingly consumed by a spirit of “suspicion,” the Jacobins failed to realize that “as a rule what they considered a conspiracy was merely a concatenation of circumstances.” Sworn to the Rousseauist view that man was fundamentally good and craving to break his chains, when they met with widespread resistance Robespierre and Saint-Just attributed it to “deception and betrayal, … even by their own friends.”27 But rather than emphasize the blinding effect of Jacobin ideas on emblematic revolutionary leaders, Quinet stressed that an unchanging logic and instrumentalization of the complot was ingrained in French history. Characteristically, only yesterday the country’s rulers had invoked the specter of conspiracy to justify the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Indeed, judging by the frequent recourse to this “ancient fable,” conspiratorial thinking ran deep among both the classes and masses. Admittedly, Quinet considered it “absurd” but hardly surprising that in mid-1792 Paris should have been swept by the rumor that “a few thousand priests and courtiers were about to break out of their jails, seize control of the capital, and decimate its inhabitants.”28 Even so, he wondered about the extent to which the ensuing prison massacres were due to a mixture of “genuine popular fear and [political] calculation”29 by champions of revolutionary terror who exploited the conspiratorial fever for their own ends.30
Just as the fear-inspiring arguments of the pseudo-syllogism of the complot were not invented by the revolutionaries, neither was the Great Terror. Quinet saw it as a “time-honored weapon” inherited from yesteryear, not unlike Tocqueville, who also considered it “very typically French.”31 According to Quinet, the new men of power reshaped this tested weapon for their purposes with elements taken from an “arsenal” comprising “the iron cages and bravos of Louis XI, the scaffolds of Richelieu, and the mass proscriptions of Louis XIV,”32 as well as from the fiery rhetoric of the seventeenth century.33 There was no denying that revolutionary France was heir to a past heavy-laden with “blind furor and fanaticism” for which, to boot, no one ever spoke words of “remorse.”34
Although he dwelled on the long reach and heavy hand of the fear and violence of times past, Quinet was careful not to conflate them with those of the French Revolution. As if to dramatize the break between the old and the new, he counterposed, in particular, “the terrorists of the Middle Ages to those of 93.” The former “were driven exclusively by a barbarian temperament,” untouched by any “theory.” By contrast, rather than driven by “natural impulses,” the men of ‘93 were animated by a “cruel idea” and held to a “system,” which for them was all important.35
As mentioned above, Quinet considered this system to have grown out of the upward spiral of reciprocal violence between the new and the old France. It was only with time that Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Jean Nicolas Billaud-Varenne converted what initially were “outbursts” of frenzied anger, indignation, and fear “into a principle and instrument of ruthless government … and salvation.” By freezing and disciplining the spontaneous “furies of the people … [and] passions of the crowds” they choked off all sources of “pity and repentance.”36
Once the Jacobins carried this old-new terror into execution, why did it misfire? At first sight the terrorists of 1793–94 should have succeeded in crushing the “old spiritual order,” much as militant Christians and Muslems, using “similar methods,” had done in the distant past. As we shall see, Quinet was neither the first nor the last historian and social theorist to ponder the quasi-religious sides of revolution.37 Moreover, as a student of the history of Christianity, including its reigns of terror, he challenged the view that violence is ineffective against allegedly invincible ideas and religious beliefs. To support his case, Quinet claimed that quite easily “the Moslems had converted or reduced the Christians of the East; Count of Montfort the Albigensians; Sigismund and the [papal] legate the Taborites and the Calixtines; and the Duke of Alba the Protestants of the [Spanish Netherlands].”38
Although the Jacobins had ways and means of coercion comparable to those of their precursors, they lacked the coherence and intemperance of their convictions. The Jacobins were “terrified by new ideas” and scared of “making innovations in the moral order.” To be sure, they introduced new republican holidays and reined in the clergy. But they flinched at abrogating the holy days and rites of the Catholic religion and church. In Quinet’s judgment, to “tyrannize priests without deconsecrating their cult was like striking the body without touching the soul.”39
The new terror was, above all, incoherent. At the same time that Robespierre and Saint-Just “put new life into the ancient principle of terror,” they espoused political liberty and religious freedom. Quinet claimed that they could not have it both ways: “if they wanted terror, they should have forsworn toleration; but if they wanted toleration, they should have renounced terror.”40 There was the additional difficulty that the Jacobin executive thundered forth its terror and “set limits” to its field agents, unlike the old rulers who, with their “iron temperament,” were discreet and gave a free hand to their deputies, who were never “disavowed … or punished” for letting their “passions and hatreds” run wild.41
Indeed, a well-founded terror has “neither breaks nor limits” and needs to impress one and all that it is “everlasting, inconstant, and unseen.” In almost every respect the Terror of 1793–94 was deficient, above all because its champions, by speech and tract, kept proclaiming and justifying it urbi et orbi. Since the world abhors “lurid killings and permanent new-wrought scaffolds” and is sickened by the sight of “blood spilled in broad daylight,” a steady terror calls for victims to perish “in the dark of night, far from the living, anonymous, forgotten, without echo, without witness, and without a last will.”42
In one respect the ways of punishing and killing were significantly different in 1793 than in 1685. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and until past the mid-eighteenth century, physical and psychological torture was normal. The assault on the Protestants had witnessed unspeakable horrors which, though out of the ordinary, were of a piece with the existing penal culture. The Great Terror of 1793–94, on the other hand, “neither practiced torture, nor dismembered or burned its victims, nor broke the bones of the condemned before throwing them into the flames” for their ultimate agony.43
The old penal system died away very slowly. This was driven home by the interminable and glaring torment of Damiens in 1757, which came straight out of the conventional theater of hell, intended to instill fear and reinforce subservience, among the masses rather than classes.44 But starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, a growing number of public intellectuals joined an abolition campaign against “the publicity and the conscious infliction of physical suffering,”45 which contributed to the abrogation of torture along with the decline of “somber … and primitive festivals and spectacles” of punishment.46 No doubt Quinet agreed with Michelet that whereas the Church of the Middle Ages “had exhausted itself inventing ways to intensify the suffering” of the damned, the Revolution proposed to “alleviate” it by resorting to the guillotine, designed to kill “rapidly and discreetly.”47 Firmly planted in the Enlightenment and democratic-republican tradition, Quinet was insensitive to “the simultaneity of the unsimultaneous” in the world of the terror. He was blind to the ways in which the Revolution invested the guillotine with a theatrical ritual of its own, which suggests that the break with the past was anything but total.48 Not only the prison massacres of September 1792 and the atrocities of the opposing sides in the Vendée but also the Thermidorean counter-terror marked an even greater resurgence of the old sacrificial ways of punishment than the hastily improvised rites around the new-wrought scaffold. Evidently the common people were less touched by the new sobriety than the elites—a fact that Quinet likewise passed over.
While Quinet reimagined and reconstructed the resurgent archetypal mental and behavioral traits of the elites and counter-elites, he all but ignored those of the common people of town and country, whom he tended to consider objects rather than subjects and agents of history. From his top-down vantage point, he saw little if anything of the spontaneous violence of the conspiratorially minded lower orders in Paris, the cities of the Midi, and the Vendée. Probably Quinet did not deepen his vision because he considered the social question to have been of distinctly secondary importance in the confrontation between the new and the old France.49 He was convinced that “alone religious and political questions, notably the question of liberty, set off the thunderstorms” of the Revolution, and that it was for “them, and them alone, that men spilled blood and endured more than flesh and blood can bear.”50
There remains the question whether by reason of the immanence of the friend-enemy disjunction in revolution a stratagem of fear other than cold-blooded terror was available. Quinet thought so, and sympathetically weighed Bertrand Barère’s tentative proposal that the Committee of Public Safety “substitute exile for the guillotine.” In Quinet’s judgment—colored, no doubt, by his own exile under the Second Empire—deportation abroad “produces the same effects as death.”51 Or, in the words of Burckhardt, who had read Quinet, in France an exile is “deader” than a victim of the guillotine: whereas the latter’s family “seeks his vengeance,” the former is abandoned and “not remembered until after his death.”52 Quinet conjectured that although the Girondins “could have avoided the scaffold by taking refuge abroad,” they decided against exile for “fear of being mistaken for émigrés … and leaving the impression … that they had become untrue to themselves.”53 But for Quinet the fate of Louis XVI is particularly instructive. He credits Billaud-Varenne, “this genius of the terror,” with having urged, during the king’s trial, that instead of executing him the police should simply “escort him to the border.” Quinet presumed that Louis would have been “infinitely less dangerous” had he been allowed or forced “to wander about Europe, under an assumed name, … without court, estates, and army, and subsidized by an indulgent Convention.”54 Denied martyrdom, he might never have returned to be (re)consecrated in the guise of his brothers.
During the French Revolution legal torture was ended, and the public spectacle of the last gasp was phased out as well.55 But this abolition of the rack and its attendant dramatics, which were among the most hateful symbols of the ancien régime, did not spell the end of collective punishment. To be sure, the novel ways of disciplining and punishing were less brutal and were practiced hidden from view. This is not to say, however, that collective violence was on the wane in the public realm. Rather, the transformation of the penal system was perfectly compatible with a transformation in the venue of massacre: facing allegedly ever more dangerous city crowds, the French state reconceived the popular and largely spontaneous massacre of revolt from below, making it into an instrument of terrifying law and order from above.
Just as the torture of Damiens in 1757 was prototypical of the domineering genius of the waning ancien régime, so the crushing of urban rebels in Paris during the June Days of 1848 and the Commune of March–May 1871 was emblematic of the rising new order. Both times the repression took the form of mass killings and summary executions which were contingent on the adaptation of the military order of battle for policing purposes. Although these massacres were not impulsive, gratuitously brutal, and religiously fired, they were anything but rational and restrained. In June 1848 between 1,700 and 3,000 insurgents were killed in the capital, and the number of seriously wounded was of the same order of magnitude. In addition, several thousand were captured during the showdown and several thousand suspects were arrested following the repression, and many of them were transported to Algeria for imprisonment there.56 The government’s iron-handed fury was even fiercer at the time of the Commune, notably during the “bloody week” of May 21–28, 1871, when some 10,000 people were killed and some 40,000 were arrested. Many of these prisoners were summarily executed by way of reprisal after the fighting was over. Of the many thousands tried by emergency tribunals about 5,000, presumably the most threatening among them, were banished to New Caledonia.57
Both outsized repressions were meant to restore order, to exorcise the elite’s unholy fear of the dangerous underclasses, and to serve as a warning to would-be rebels in years to come. To be sure, the communards of 1871 in particular were not innocents, having seized and lynched some 50 prisoners, including several clerics, among them one of the capital’s archbishops. Still, their violence, including their scorching and sacking of several public and religious buildings, in what was largely a defensive move, paled in comparison to the avenging fury unleashed by the Versaillais in accord with the anti-communard Assembly. Indeed, the military overkill and the inordinate retribution in Paris took more lives than any previous massacre in French history and stands out as the harshest conservative top-down enforcement terror in Europe between 1815 and 1917.
Even if one of the prime objectives of this avenging rage was to dash hope and instill fear, it was neither celebrated nor memorialized as the founding violence of the contested Third Republic. No great avenue or public square in the French capital was named for Adolphe Thiers, the spiritus rector of the head-on assault by the so-called “honest people,” and while the radical left defiantly turned the mur des Fédérés into a sectarian counter-monument, the far right sought to have the Sacré-Coeur incarnate the righteousness of the anti-republican cause. Although most makers of democratic France did not hesitate to call in the army to advance their project, they felt uncomfortable about periodically renewing their founding blood sacrifice, a sacrifice which they at once justified and denied, not to say repressed. In any case, it was not until the epoch of the Russian Revolution that, in the Soviet Union and the Third German Reich, terror and counter-terror bent toward the invisibility which Quinet postulated as one of the defining characteristics of absolute terror.
Merleau-Ponty stands out for having made one of the first and most searching efforts to think and theorize the revolutionary terror of the epoch of the Russian Revolution. He wrote Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem in 1946, when, as mentioned, he felt betrayed by the Liberation and apprehensive about the looming Cold War. In this disquieting twilight of postwar Europe Merleau-Ponty, not unlike Sartre, fearlessly contended that it was as “impossible to be an anti-Communist as it was to be a Communist and to sacrifice liberty to Soviet society.” He meant to translate his “freedom of thought into the freedom to understand,” the essential precondition for responsible political action.58
Two critical postulates upheld Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of violence and terror. First, that Communist dogma at once fostered and disguised the degradation of Marxism and the Soviet regime, which not only managed but deserved to survive. This premise was rooted in his rejection of polemical anti-Communism, with its disregard for the multiple contingencies which weighed heavily on the Russian Revolution from the start. Second, that by unequivocally condemning the violence of the Soviet regime, the liberal humanism of the Western countries at least implicitly denies the founding violence of their own beginnings. In sum, Merleau-Ponty was equally skeptical of the Communist profession of faith and the liberal “mystification.”59
These, then, are the heterodox assumptions underlying Merleau-Ponty’s forceful postulate that the “Terror of History culminates in Revolution, and History is Terror because there is contingency.” Following Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin forged policies, including terrorist ones, “as a function of the circumstances peculiar to our time: socialism in one country, fascism, and the stabilization of Western capitalism.” Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin all were agreed that to “repudiate,” in principle, terrorist measures designed to suppress and intimidate “determined and armed counterrevolution” was to “repudiate the Socialist revolution.” Of course it was “difficult to delimit permissible terror.” Although there are “all kinds of gradations between a Trotskyist and Stalinist dictatorship, and between Lenin’s and Stalin’s line,” according to Merleau-Ponty there “is no difference that is an absolute difference” and there is no saying, with precision, where “Marxist politics ends and counterrevolution begins.” In the 1930s Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin were at one in rejecting “the liberal ethics because it presupposed a given humanity, whereas their aim was to make humanity.” Having abandoned “the principle of unconditional respect for others” it was “difficult to mark the limits of legitimate violence,” and concerning violence there were no fundamental differences “between the various Marxist policies.”60
Sensitized to the “ambiguity and contingency” of history by the resistance in wartime France, Merleau-Ponty claimed “history to be terror” precisely because rather than move into the future “along a straight line,” human actors do so by “taking their bearings, at every turn, in a general situation which is changing” and indeterminate.61 Indeed, men “are actors in an open, not closed history” of a world which is “not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed.” This unfinished and unclosed condition is all the more tempting for revolutionaries whose “dictatorship of the truth” can do no more than embrace and foster a future that “will only be a probabilistic calculation and not absolute knowledge.” Such being the case, “a revolution, even when founded on a philosophy of history, is a forced revolution and it is violence; correlatively, opposition in the name of humanism can be counterrevolutionary.”62
In the 1920s and 1930s the debates by Soviet decision makers over generally problematic policy alternatives were not informed by the perspective or hindsight of an “end of history” which might have provided them with an “absolute truth” with which to evaluate rival options and protagonists.63 Merleau-Ponty posited that they shared the “assumption that the contingency of the future and the role of human decisions in history makes political divergencies irreducible and cunning, deceit and violence inevitable.” As if following in Quinet’s footsteps, he made every effort to penetrate “the unfinished world of the revolutionaries” who, though locked in internecine struggles, had “no differences in principle” concerning terror. In Merleau-Ponty’s reading, while “neither Bukharin, nor Trotsky, nor Stalin, as Marxists, regarded Terror as intrinsically valuable, [they] imagined … using it to realize a genuinely human history which had not yet started,” thereby justifying “revolutionary violence.” Marxism propounds neither a dogmatic philosophy and vision of the “future of mankind [to be imposed] by fire and sword [nor] a terrorism lacking all perspective.” Rather, to the extent that Marxism “is a theory of violence and a justification of terror, it brings reason out of unreason, and the violence it legitimates should bear a sign distinguishing it from regressive forms of violence.” But ultimately Merleau-Ponty, in keeping with his existentialist disquiet, wondered whether from the perspective of the “ambiguity and contingency” of the crisis and infighting in the Bolshevik party and Soviet government, “violence is the infantile disorder of a new history or merely an episode in an unchanging history.”64
Merleau-Ponty probed the problem of terror in the unsettled aftermath of what he conceived to have been the epochal confrontation of Communism and Fascism, in which he clearly sympathized with the former. Hannah Arendt, for her part, did so in the dawn of the Cold War, when the two isms began to be conflated. Indeed, she was among the pioneers of public intellectuals who postulated the essential similarity, if not identity, of Communism and Fascism, notably National Socialism, which they conceptualized as belonging to a distinct and indifferentiated totalitarianism. After 1945, with the resumption of the “capitalist world’s” struggle against the Russian Revolution in the form of the Cold War, this new-wrought political society called for extrinsic diagnosis rather than empathetic understanding. In essential respects Arendt supplements or displaces Merleau-Ponty’s existential perspective, which blends critical Einfühlung and alertness to contingency, on the one hand, with a phenomenological point of view that combines objectification and ideological determinism, on the other.
Hannah Arendt makes a “decisive difference between … tyrannies and dictatorships established by violence and … totalitarian domination based on terror.”65 By the same token she distinguishes between two species of terror, the one essentially instrumental, the other an end in and of itself, or intrinsically totalitarian.
The first of the two types of terror is “enacted in good faith” and directed against “real, [i.e.] known or suspected enemies” during a revolutionary regime’s early beginnings. In particular “Robespierre’s ‘terror of virtue’ ” was of this type: although his terror was, in its own right, “terrible enough” and “boundless,” it was “directed against a … hidden enemy,” so that the real enemy had to have “the mask of the disguised traitor … stripped off.”66 As for the circumstances “justifying” the terror of the French Revolution, they included counterrevolutionary resistances, popular revolts for social justice, and the perils of foreign intervention.
The second type of terror is of another nature altogether. Arendt discerns a “totalitarian” terror specific to the twentieth century: that of the Russian Revolution and Nazi Counterrevolution, intended to achieve ideological rather than political goals. All in all Arendt, compared to Merleau-Ponty, considered terror to be driven more by fixed ideology than contingent circumstance. In her reading, successive purges in the Bolshevik party were “motivated chiefly by ideological differences,” so that the “interconnection between terror and ideology was manifest from the very beginning.”67 As further evidence of the enormous if not primary importance of ideology, Arendt stresses that judging by developments in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, terror does not become, in Quinet’s sense, a system or a form of government until “after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for ‘objective enemies’ [has] begun.” In sum, and paradoxically, credible resistance is “the last impediment to [the] full fury” of terror, not its urgent justification or “pretext.”68
The Russian Revolution was, Arendt argues, the first to “consciously” use “terror as an institutional device to accelerate the momentum of the revolution,” and it did so “guided by the concept of historical necessity whose course was determined by movement and counter-movement, by revolution and counterrevolution.” In her construction this “concept of historical necessity” and the attendant “concept of ‘objective enemies’ ” were “entirely absent from the French Revolution.”69
Despite her emphasis on the immanence and primacy of ideology in the terror of the Russian Revolution, Arendt allows for a distinct break in it, in that she sets apart the terror of the first founding years of 1917 to 1921. In terms reminiscent of her reading of the terror of the Committee of Public Safety, she notes that during this initial phase the Soviet regime faced real domestic and foreign enemies which “might ally themselves.” Arendt contrasts this “dictatorial” terror under Lenin to the “totalitarian” terror under Stalin during the 1930s. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty, she holds that by then the Soviet regime “was no longer in danger” from within or from abroad.70 In keeping with her thesis, Arendt argues that once past all danger the Bolsheviks set to punishing “possible or even necessary enemies,” which involved “putting the mask of the traitor on arbitrarily selected people,” including former “friends and supporters.”71 Indeed, terror became “total” and the “essence of totalitarian domination” once it was “independent of all opposition … and nobody any longer stood in the way.”72
The radicalizing force of the “social question” very much engaged Arendt’s attention. Tocqueville had preceded her with this concern, and she seems to have taken her cue from him. In Tocqueville’s view, the objective of the English and American revolutions was political freedom, while that of the French Revolution was “principally [social] equality.” In particular, contrary to the leaders of the thirteen American colonies, who sought to secure or reclaim free government, the leaders of revolutionary France aimed at “the destruction of privilege,” which involved a “total subversion of society.” Above all, the role of “the multitude” was much greater in France than it had been in either England or America. Tocqueville postulated that the “top of society, [which] was civilized … and gentle, … endured the Revolution [while] the bottom, [which] was barbarian … [and] uncivilized, actually made it.” As for the relationship between the two tiers, Tocqueville hypothesized that to advance their project “the disinterested enthusiasm of the upper [classes] made good use of the needs and passions of the lower [classes].”73
In contraposing the “success” of the American Revolution to the “failure” of the French, Arendt stresses that since the former was not burdened with the “predicament of poverty,” it could afford to confine itself to the pursuit of political freedom.74 To be sure, there was “poverty” in America, as in most of the rest of the world since “time immemorial.” But the colonists “were not driven by want” and there were no miséreux in the streets or fields to “overwhelm” the Founding Fathers.75 As a result theirs was a struggle against political tyranny rather than economic and social injustice, or for a new form of government rather than a new social order.76 Of course, for Arendt—and the colonists—to pass over the “social question” was to be blind to the violence and cruelty of slavery, not to be confronted until nearly a century after the foundation of the American republic, in a violent and deadly civil war.
In the French Revolution, to the contrary, the political sphere was invaded by the needy of Paris whose suffering became so unbearable as to “explode into rage,” thereby “releasing overwhelming forces.” In Arendt’s reading, “the masses of the suffering people … [took] to the streets unbidden and uninvited by those who then became their organizers and spokesmen.” Indeed, the wretches of the French capital did not become active agents until sworn revolutionaries “began to glorify [their] suffering … [and] set out to emancipate the people not qua prospective citizens but qua malheureux.” Thereafter the quest for political freedom was perverted by reason of soaring pressure to meet the furious demands of economic and social necessity.77
Although “no revolution has ever solved the ‘social question’ and liberated men from the predicament of want,” all revolutionaries inspired by 1789 have continued to “use and misuse the mighty forces of misery and destitution in the struggle against tyranny or oppression.” Dismayed by the monstrous costs of the economic and social project of the Russian Revolution, Arendt expounds the view that “every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror, and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom.” By taking a social turn, revolutionaries make a “fatal” if not entirely avoidable “mistake,” since by doing so they tempt violence and corrupt the foundation of a steadfast democratic order which Arendt posits to be the supreme vocation of modern revolution.78
These theoretical reflections running from Machiavelli through Quinet to Arendt at once inspire and confound historians of revolutionary terror. Were the terrors of 1789 to 1795 and 1917 to 1922, respectively, a seamless web or were they internally differentiated and disjointed? What were the connections between the spontaneous insurgent violence from below and the subsequent enforcement terror from above? In the escalation from the one to the other, what was the mixture of temporality and ideology? To what extent was the organized and centralizing terror of mutually reinforcing civil and foreign war designed to bring convulsive and erratic popular violence under control? To what degree was the praxis of revolutionary actors informed by their propensity to conjure up conspiracies, to brave conceptual aporia, to tempt Providence, and to vindicate founding violence?
The defining and confining conditions for terror include the ebb and flow of popular violence, of civil and foreign war, of economic and social stresses, of anti- and counterrevolutionary resistances, and of internecine political feuds. All these pressures and cross-pressures unfold in a context of ruptured political and judicial sovereignty as well as of centrifugal gravity.
Any discussion of the mainsprings and dynamics of the escalation of violence needs to examine the balance and interconnection of bottom-up and top-down violence, with close attention to chronology. Just as there is no revolution without violence and terror, so there is none without popular furies on both sides of the growing friend-enemy divide. To be sure, defecting elites excel at exploiting the physical and moral force of the initial violence of protest in the interest of prophylactic reforms. But they find it difficult to consolidate such reforms without enlisting or condoning further outbursts of popular violence in the face of unexceptional resistances.
Indeed, essentially spontaneous popular interventions played a critical role in 1789 and in 1917. Both times elites of the loyal opposition took advantage of urban and rural upheavals to press their drive for limited if indeterminate political, social, and cultural reform. In 1789 the verbal, symbolic, and physical violence attending the Réveillon riots of April 27–28, the storming of the Bastille on July 14, and the Great Fear of late July contributed to the establishment of the National Assembly on June 17, 1789, the renunciation of seignorial rights between August 4 and 11, the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on August 26, and the transfer of King Louis XVI and the Assembly from Versailles to Paris on October 5–6. In 1917 the violence accompanying the mass demonstrations and strikes for peace, bread, and higher wages in Petrograd on February 13–14 and 23–24, the concurrent desertion of soldiers and mutiny of sailors, and the storming of the Peter-Paul Fortress, followed by the burning of the Palace of Justice on February 27, helped bring about the establishment of the Provisional Government on March 2 and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on March 4.
As previously noted, the circumscribed popular furies in 1789 and in 1917 were disproportionately effective because the incumbent governments lacked the political will or military capability to repress them. Besides, to follow Arendt, while this violence of the first hour dramatized and publicized grievances, it was not driven by a coherent leadership or project. Even assuming that ideologically the initial enragés of the cities, rebels of the countryside, or mutineers of the armed forces were not completely artless, probably only few of them were impregnated with the ideas or tenets of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
In point of fact, the first explosions of popular violence in 1789 and 1917 assumed some of the features of former times, before the state had imposed its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and administration of justice. The Furies of the July days in France and the February days in Russia were marked by a savagery and vengeance running counter to the reputed civilizing process.
Michelet insists that le peuple, not the Legislature, the Commune, or the Jacobin club, deserves credit for the great remonstrances of July 14 and October 6, 1789, as well as of August 10, 1792. Not since the crusades had France seen a comparable élan among people of all stations, in town and country.79 Characteristically, from the outset the new worldly elite of wealth, education, and the professions at once hailed and feared this paroxysm of popular self-affirmation fraught with dark dangers. While some notables, à contrecoeur, applauded the lower orders for their heroic contribution to the struggle for freedom, others almost instantly fretted about the risk of unbinding them. The ghastly murder and dismemberment of several notables following the fall of the Bastille merely confirmed the upper ten thousand in their profound disquiet about the coarseness, savagery, and irrationality of the rabble, for which they disclaimed all responsibility. Indeed, in 1789 and in 1917 the reformists’ flirtation with the ordinary people, including their crowds, was short-lived.
In both revolutions popular violence assumed many forms and was moved by diverse motives and purposes on all sides of the friend-enemy divide. Acts of collective popular violence ranged from spontaneous to organized, irregular to paramilitary, urban to rural, local to regional. Its agents were variously driven by a sense of injustice, rancor, frustrated expectation, fear, principle, and fanaticism. Their objectives were to seek redress, claim a voice, preserve threatened gains, pressure hesitant governments, reclaim violated traditions, crush real and imagined enemies, and wreak vengeance.
In the sweep of European history perhaps the chief peculiarity of the explosions of spontaneous violence early in the French and Russian revolutions was their intended victims and targets. Quinet suggestively notes that whereas in the Middle Ages such explosions “were above all directed against les petits,” in the French Revolution they were significantly aimed at “les grands” as well. As a rule, outrages against ordinary people neither “arouse indignation” nor “produce an echo,” so that “centuries go by without anyone hearing about them.” Conversely, assaults on notables instantly cause a “terrible uproar” and are denounced for “going against the course of nature.” Besides, through the ages nearly all the world held with those “shedding blood in the name of Heaven” but accursed whoever did so “on behalf of men on Earth,” which with 1789 became the order of the day.80
The prison massacres of September 2–6, 1792, were at once the closing climax of the agitational terror from below—which the Girondins approved as much as the Montagnards—and the beginnings of the enforcement terror from above. In mentality and practice this popular violence, a heritage from the abyss of time, was unpremeditated, fitful, and primitive. By contrast, the untried terror of the embryonic revolutionary regime was deliberate, centralized, organized, and codified. Rather than fasten upon victims for their presumed individual responsibility, the new terror fixed them for their alleged association with a social or political group targeted for intimidation or exclusion. As part of their effort to reestablish an undivided political and judicial sovereignty, the embattled revolutionary authorities set up tribunals intended to legitimate and institutionalize the terror. Hereafter, instead of being instantly savaged and pilloried, suspects and prisoners were hauled before summary courts. While the politically reliable judges of these courts returned not a few verdicts of not guilty, they pronounced the death sentence for the majority of the accused before they were unceremoniously executed and buried. This shift in venue from the streets and squares, with their spontaneous, anarchic, and glaring terror, to the prisons and emergency tribunals, with their willful, streamlined, and muted terror, brought a quantum jump in the number of victims.81
Fear was a common denominator of the popular and official terrors. Their connecting link was less ideology than the uncertainties and perils of fractured sovereignty and civil war which fired the conspiratorial turn of mind and the attendant propensity to strike at scapegoats. Of course, with the civil war heating up and exacerbated by foreign war, terror became increasingly ideologized and polemicized. The opposing sides exploited its uses and abuses for political ends: on one side, a swelling and instrumentalized fear of manifold dangers, heightened by the conspiratorial stratagems of domestic and foreign enemies; on the other, a similar fear of the perils of the consolidation and unfolding of an intrinsically murderous regime.
Clearly, by 1792, in the wake of the royal family’s flight to Varennes and with the prospect of worsening food shortages, the revolutionary camp was gripped by panic in the face of an imminent foreign invasion and a fast-spreading aristocratic conspiracy, seemingly orchestrated by the royal court and the émigrés. With self-appointed tribunes justifying and inflaming the popular furor, this fear lost some of its earlier ingenuous spontaneity of action and purpose. Even if, as in the case of the prison massacres, most of the killings were barbaric and the bulk of the victims were, politically, “blameless in life and pure of crime,” the designated targets were of a different order altogether. By the agency of the tribunes, popular pressures were deliberately directed at the political arena in which critical decisions were being made in both domestic and foreign affairs. The subsequent drive to make the terror official government policy—to transform bottom-up agitational terror into top-down enforcement terror—sought to make the means of terror as modern and rational as its intended aims. While the revolutionary tribunal, the law of suspects, and the guillotine may be said to have symbolized the new ways and means of the cold terror, the warrant to create a new man and society encapsulates its extravagant pretense and purpose. It is this quasi-religious zeal which in revolutions makes for the sudden return and intensification of traditional impulses and practices, alongside contemporary ones.
The establishment and operation of the reign of terror was inseparable from the tangled contingencies of civil war, foreign hostility, economic disorganization, and social dislocation, which called for quick, centralizing, and coercive action. The ensuing forced-draft political, military, and economic mobilization and deployment were backed by an enforcement terror, complete with rhetorical intimidation, arbitrary arrests, quasi-legal summary justice, and mass execution. To be effective, the regime of revolutionary terror had to rule by patent fear, which often escaped control.
There were, then, two overlapping but not preordered or consistent phases of terror.82 The first phase was the one in which a diffuse and upturning “process of violence” worked against the newly incumbent, unsteady, and hesitant authority system. Deliberate “acts or threats of violence” against things and persons were represented and perceived as generating an atmosphere of fear intended to affect the behavior of embattled and wavering decision makers.
The second phase of terror “coincide[d] and coact[ed] with … [the] system of authority and … [was] directed” by those who had only yesterday assumed or seized power. These new men of power put in place a “system of terror” to further their improvised policies. Even if they used violence and fear primarily, if not exclusively, to establish and extend their own precarious control, they claimed to do so in the interest of eventually implementing radical structural changes. The embryonic revolutionary regime appointed a “directorate of violence” to run the system of terror, which quickly acquired its own “agents of violence” in the form of executioners and men-at-arms. Although the aim was to have a centralized and orderly system of terror as part of the effort to reestablish a single sovereignty, entire “zones” spun out of control. In these “zones of terror” the process of violence had many of the archaic features of the “hot terror,” with little or no semblance of legality.
By virtue of never managing to establish a single seat of authority and coordinated battle plan, the anti- and counterrevolution remained confined to outlying zones in which the processes of violence were distinctly archaic and erratic. By necessity rather than choice, there was nothing comparable to the “cold terror” of the revolution in the zones of resistance, whose counter-terror was heavily local, communal, and personal.
It is hardly beyond reason to suggest that violence and terror were both cause and effect of the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution. Almost from the outset, and well before the establishment of the Reign of Terror, the foes of the French Revolution viewed and portrayed it in the darkest of colors. Typically, Edmund Burke had nothing but contempt even for the constitutional monarchists who thought they could “deceive without fraud, rob without injustice, and overturn everything without violence,” as they presumed to usurp France’s government “with decency and moderation.” Needless to say, the censure of these champions of compromise, who were “ineffectual and unsystematic in their iniquity,” was mild compared to the one Burke leveled, well before Varennes, against the as yet inchoate Jacobins of the revolutionary left.83 Without naming names, he castigated them for being usurping “madmen” whose so-called state “was a college of armed fanatics for the propagation of the principles of assassination, robbery, rebellion, fraud, faction, oppression, and impiety.” Burke charged France’s new “despots,” who were governing “by terror,” to be inspired by an “infamous gang” of philosophes who, determined to undermine the fear of God, left “no awe, but that of their committee of research, and of their lanterne.” If these “tyrants” and their “hired blood-thirsty mob without doors” would not disavow their murderous and barbarous practices, which threaten the Continent, the European monarchies might have to intervene, their armies entering France “as a country of assassins” which was not “entitled to expect” the benefits of “civilized” warfare, one of the Christian world’s noblest achievements.84
This general outlook was, of course, congenial to many of the émigrés. Once they realized that they “could not convert the revolutionaries they thought only of annihilating them.” In July 1792 the Count Armand Marc de Montmorin, the king’s foreign minister who perished in the September massacres, proposed to “strike the Parisians with terror,” since “only fear pushes the Assembly in one direction until another terror pushes it in another.” In sum, these people understood no language “other than that of fear,” which was that of the Brunswick Manifesto. Indeed, at Koblenz the émigrés were reported to speak only “of hanging, of exterminating, of subjugating” their enemy brothers. They assumed that the population inside France was more terrified of the vengeance of the émigrés than of either counterrevolution or invading armies.85
This conceptual excursion was meant to raise and reformulate questions, not to provide answers, let alone a theoretic construct or idée maîtresse. A reading of theorists from Machiavelli to Arendt suggests that terror has a long history, is interactive, and bears upon radical regime changes or refoundations in times of fractured political and legal sovereignty. On the one hand this reading serves as a reminder that conspiratorial thinking and discourse, rule by fear, and use of terror are not unique to revolution. On the other it forces critical attention to the singularities of the Great Terrors of the French and Russian revolutions, the one postulated to be systemic, the other totalitarian. But above all, to take note of Machiavelli on cruelty, Bodin on bottom-up violence, Montesquieu on fear, Quinet on conspiracy, Merleau-Ponty on the “terror of history,” and Arendt on the “social question” is to seek help in an effort to find a path beyond “the often explored and marked-out old map”86 which restricts discussion to the force, weighting, and interaction of circumstance, ideology, and leader.
NOTES
1. For the notion of “excessive excesses,” see Alec Nove, “Stalin and Stalinism,” in Nove, ed., The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), p. 28 and p. 201. See also Wolfgang Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1993), ch. 20.
2. Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793, cited in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 25 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 14–17, esp. p. 14.
3. Cited in Ernst Bloch, “A Jubilee for Renegades,” in New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): pp. 24–25. See also André Tosel, Kant révolutionnaire: Droit et politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1990).
4. Cited in Hermann Lübbe, Praxis der Philosophie, praktische Philosophie, Geschichtstheorie (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1978), pp. 78–96, esp. p. 89.
5. Cited in Bloch, “Jubilee,” p. 25.
6. Ibid., pp. 21–22; and Lübbe, Praxis, p. 79.
7. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 435–36.
8. Cited in Mary-Alice Waters, ed., Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 394–95.
9. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State, 1917 to the Present (London: Verso, 1988), p. 72, n. 54. For Kagarlitsky the deaths of the communards in Paris in 1871 and of Salvador Allende in Santiago in 1973 were “glorious,” the death of Bukharin “shameful.”
10. For a discussion of the “conceptual individual,” see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1991), esp. pp. 61–63.
11. Leszek Kolakowski uses this genetic language in his discussion of the terror in the Russian Revolution in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Perspective (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 297.
12. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 187–93; Richard Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 2 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), esp. p. 206; Joseph L. Walsh, “Marx and Sartre on Violence in the French Revolution,” in Yeager Hudson and Creighton Peden, eds., Revolution, Violence and Equality (Studies in Social and Political Theory: Social Philosophy Today) 10:3 (1990): pp. 204–21, esp. pp. 213–14.
13. This discussion of Machiavelli on terror follows Helmut Kessler, Terreur: Ideologie und Nomenklatur der revolutionären Gewaltanwendung in Frankreich von 1770 bis 1794 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1973), pp. 124–26, 159.
14. For this discussion of Bodin, see Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and Kessler, Terreur, pp. 126–27.
15. Kessler, Terreur, p. 159. For Montesquieu on terror, see ibid., pp. 128–29, 159–60; Gerd Van den Heuvel, “Terreur, Terroriste, Terrorisme,” in Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820, vol. 3 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1985), p. 94; Julien Freund, L’essence du politique (Paris: Sirey, 1965), pp. 529–30.
16. President Franklin D. Roosevelt may be said to have spoken in the spirit of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws when in 1933 he proclaimed that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
17. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk. 12, ch. 18.
18. Baron Holbach cited by Van den Heuvel, “Terreur,” p. 96. See also John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, eds., Denis Diderot: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
19. Marat cited by Van den Heuvel, “Terreur,” pp. 99–100.
20. Robespierre cited in Kessler, Terreur, p. 161.
21. Ibid., pp. 162–63.
22. Edgar Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), p. 61.
23. Ibid., bk. 17. Quinet discusses the terror in other chapters as well.
24. Ibid., p. 44.
25. Ibid., pp. 497–98.
26. Ibid., p. 55 and p. 43.
27. Ibid., pp. 500–501.
28. Ibid., p. 316.
29. Ibid., p. 375.
30. Ibid., p. 531.
31. Alexis de Tocqueville, “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 108.
32. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 505.
33. Ibid., pp. 502–3.
34. Ibid., p. 505.
35. Ibid., p. 513.
36. Ibid., p. 498. For the contemporary criticisms of Quinet’s reading of the terror by Alphonse Peyrat and Louis Blanc, see François Furet, La gauche et la Révolution au milieu du XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1986).
38. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 492.
39. Ibid., p. 493.
40. Ibid., pp. 493–94.
41. Ibid., pp. 515–16.
42. Ibid., pp. 516–17.
43. Ibid., p. 504.
44. See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), chs. 1 and 2; and Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Regime, 1750–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
45. See Petrus Cornelis Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. p. viii and p. 200.
46. Foucault, Surveiller, p. 14.
47. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 62; and Foucault, Surveiller, p. 20.
48. Daniel Arasse, La guillotine et l’imaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), esp. pt. 3.
49. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 131.
50. Ibid., p. 146.
51. Ibid., pp. 529–30.
52. Jacob Burckhardt, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1974), p. 266, and Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1978), p. 187.
53. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 427.
54. Ibid., pp. 350–51.
55. The next three paragraphs lean on Alain Corbin, Le village des cannibales (Paris: Aubier, 1990).
56. See Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees, “Le peuple de Juin 1848,” in Annales: E.S.C. 29:5 (September–October 1974): pp. 1061–91, esp. pp. 1069–70.
57. Jacques Rougerie, Procès des communards (Paris: Julliard, 1964); Georges Bourgin, La guerre de 1870–1871 et la Commune (Paris: Flammarion, 1971); Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune, 1871 (New York: Quadrangle, 1973).
58. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 49 and p. 76.
59. See the introduction of Claude Lefort to Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), pp. 11–32. See also Barry Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: From Terror to Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).
60. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, pp. 96–97 (italics in text).
61. Ibid., p. 94.
62. Ibid., pp. 92–93.
63. Ibid., p. 92.
64. Ibid., pp. 97–98.
65. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), p. 55.
66. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), pp. 95–96.
67. Ibid., p. 95.
68. Arendt, On Violence, p. 55, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd enlarged ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 393 and p. 422.
69. Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 95–96.
70. Arendt, Origins, p. 322.
71. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 96, and On Violence, p. 55.
72. Arendt, Origins, p. 464.
73. Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), pp. 334–37.
74. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 62.
75. Ibid., p. 108 and p. 63.
76. Gordon Wood challenges this view. He insists that the American colonists’ project was not confined to securing a democratic-republican form of government, but ought to be seen as having had a significant social objective as well. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), passim. See chapter 1 above.
77. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 107.
78. Ibid., p. 108.
79. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 264, p. 747, and p. 766.
80. Quinet, Révolution, p. 484.
81. See Brian Singer, “Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion,” in Ferenc Fehér, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 150–73. For a detailed discussion of the September prison massacres, see chapter 7 below.
82. This paragraph and the next draw heavily on Eugene Victor Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), chs. 1–2.
83. Burke, “A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly” (1791), in Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 333.
84. Ibid., pp. 305–6 and 319–20.
85. Albert Soboul, La Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), vol. 1, p. 527.
86. Mona Ozouf, “The Terror after the Terror: An Immediate History,” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The Terror (Oxford: Elsevier/Pergamon, 1994), pp. 3–18, esp. p. 17.