THIS BOOK, like any historical work, has a history, and it was crafted in a specific political and historiographic context. In 1987, I finished Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? and resumed work on the sequel to The Persistence of the Old Regime, which I had put aside to ponder and search into the Judeocide. But a turbulence in the surrounding political and intellectual atmosphere distracted me.
I spent much time in France in 1987–90, the years of the rites of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, in which historians were prominent officiants. There was nothing exceptional about French historians, particularly the public intellectuals among them, playing their self-assigned roles. They had been doing so practically ever since 1789, taking three distinct positions: abjure and excoriate the Revolution, root and branch; redeem the “revolution without a revolution” over against the radical revolution of the Terror; exalt and justify the Revolution, en bloc. There is something archetypal about these three positions: since 1917 they have defined the debates about the Russian Revolution, except that the third position eventually split in two over the question of the continuity or break between Lenin and Stalin.
The “crescendo of violence” (Jules Michelet) has been the single most important defining issue of the indomitable debate about the Great Revolution. For the bicentennial, French historians reenacted the tried and true battle between the prosecutors who blame one or more ideologically driven political leaders for the spiraling Furies, including the Terror, and the defenders who attribute them to the force of circumstance. Indeed, it seemed as if old polemical wine was being poured into new historiographic bottles.
Presently, however, the bicentennial debate became singularly polemical and impassioned. In part this was so because as may be expected, it served as a screen for heated arguments about France’s unmastered recent past. Had Vichy been the last stand of the counterrevolution dating from 1789, shielded by Nazi Germany? Had the French Communists, since the 1930s, been nothing but latter-day Jacobins, subservient to Soviet Russia? Not unrelated, the great historical ventilation was marked by the changing Zeitgeist which, in turn, it helped to shape. Because or in spite of the return of the tempered “left” to power in France in 1981, there was a vigorous resurgence of the far “right” and of traditional conservatism. This political and intellectual mutation coincided with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with their neoconservative clerks, in the United States and Great Britain, as well as with the breakthrough of glasnost and perestroika in East Central Europe and Russia. Simultaneously, academic Marxism was going out with the tide.
This was the context in which ultraconservative historians resurfaced to revive and update their position: they argued that in addition to being an inexpiable sin, the French Revolution was the ultimate source of all the purgatorial fires of the twentieth century. No doubt these latter-day “counterrevolutionaries” would have remained inconsequential had they not found soul mates, not to say fellow travelers, among moderate conservatives and new-model liberal democrats. Among them in particular the ex-Communist renegades, who by European standards carried disproportionate weight in the Parisian intelligentsia, became vital intermediaries: even if unintentionally, they legitimated the resurgent die-hard position and its champions, and made them salonfähig in the 6th and 7th arrondissements. Georg Simmel, founder of “formal” sociology, incisively conceived renegades to be sworn to a “distinctive loyalty” because rather than “naively grow … into a new political, religious, or other party,” they join it after having broken with a previous one, which never ceases to “repel” and incense them.
The inverted true-believers took two successive steps to concretize the charge of the right-wing resurgence, in the process emerging as its chief and emblematic voice. First, they postulated the essential sameness of the ultimate causes and inner workings of the crescendo of violence of the French and Russian revolutions: Robespierre, Rousseau, and the Great Terror were said to be all but analogous with Lenin/Stalin, Marx, and the Gulag. They read the Jacobin Terror by the light of the Bolshevik Terror at the same time that they asserted that the rule of fear and blood of 1793–94 had been the dress rehearsal and portent for that of 1917–89.
Their second step was to stretch the analogic fabric to comprise the Third Reich. The Soviet and Nazi regimes were deemed to be fundamentally if not wholly identical: both were variants of the same totalitarianism, whose philosophic roots reached back to the Jacobin moment. Whatever the dissimilarities between the two regimes—there was no Soviet equivalent for Nazism’s genocidal racism—they were outweighed not only by the likenesses of their structures and methods of domination but also by the purpose of their murderous Furies. Compared to the line of descent from the Jacobin to the Bolshevik terror, that between the Bolshevik and Nazi terrors was not only immediate but material: by virtue of their chronological head start the Cheka/KGB and the Gulag presumably served as models for the SS state and concentration camps which Hitler set up to better fight Bolshevism at home and abroad. The ground was being seeded for the rehabilitation and justification of the anti-Communist warrant of Fascism and National Socialism, including of Vichy France’s “national revolution.”
There were important family resemblances between the querelle des historiens in France and the concurrent Historikerstreit in Germany, particularly the style of intellection and political purpose of the “assailants.” Oblivious to space and time, and making no effort to curb their “virus of present-mindedness” (Marc Bloch), they forced the similarities between the Soviet and Nazi systems, leaving little room for basic differences and contrasts, notably concerning the reason and role of terror and war. Profoundly troubled, I considered turning to a comparative and interactive study of the Soviet and Nazi Furies which would not be a portrait in black and white. But the prospect of plunging, once more, into the Judeocide gave me pause.
At this point, in late 1989, my good friend Maurice Agulhon extended an invitation for me to lecture at the Collège de France on Europe’s ancien régime between the two world wars. I refused, insisting that the bicentennial debate had thrown me off course. In conversation, over wine, I complained at some length about the transparent insufficiencies of the ongoing comparisons of the crescendos of violence in revolutionary France and Russia. Having vented my spleen, I facetiously suggested that I speak on this topic, about which I was in total ignorance. Instead of sending me packing, Maurice Agulhon reached for pen and paper and wrote down the title for a lecture series: Violence et Terreur aux Temps de la Révolution Française et de la Révolution Russe. These leçons, delivered in Spring 1991, became the foundation for this book.
An objective and value-free study of the most harrowing and controversial aspects of the revolutionary phenomenon is, of course, a logical impossibility. Paul Ricoeur rightly insists that there is no greater pretense than to allege that “ideology is the thinking of my adversary, that it is the thinking of the other.” In dealing with the crescendo of violence it is difficult to strike a reasonable balance between explanation and condemnation, understanding and justification, detachment and proximity. No doubt by overreacting to historians who blithely assume the role of the prosecutor, judge, and moralizer, I lay myself open to the charge of assuming that of the cynic or apologist. Such is the risk—but also the intellectual challenge and responsibility—of “brushing history against the grain” (Walter Benjamin) and of striving for empathetic understanding of the Furies.
This work does not cover all aspects of the French and Russian revolutions. Instead, it is, specifically, a conceptually informed probe of their upward spirals of violence and terror. Based primarily on secondary sources, it intends to open new perspectives rather than present new facts. Because of the distinctly more thorough and sophisticated scholarship on the Jacobin than on the Bolshevik Furies, the former is of considerable heuristic importance for the study of the latter. At the same time, and paradoxically, there is a need to recover greater empathetic nearness to the French Revolution, which is over-studied and over-objectified, and to seek greater critical distance from the Russian Revolution, whose historiography is only beginning to be extricated from deafening and blinding polemics.
By choosing The Furies as the main title of this book, I mean to suggest that much of the revolutionary violence and terror, by virtue of being fear-inspired, vengeance-driven, and “religiously” sanctioned, was singularly fierce and merciless. Not unlike in the time of Aeschylus’ Greece, intense foreign and civil war, fear and disorder, were entwined with an endless cycle of spiraling violence in defense of the old order and in support of the new, characteristic of moments of rupture and (re)foundation. The transmutation of the “raging” female divinities Erinyes into the kindly Eumenides marked the termination of a difficult transition from a crescendo to a diminuendo of violence. This mutation was symbolized by the establishment of the Council of the Areopagus, which concluded the struggle between chaos and cosmos. Unlike the ancient Furies, which were one-sided, those of the French and Russian revolutions were manifold and dialectical.
I am indebted to Richard Wortman for his close critical reading, for Princeton University Press, of the penultimate version of my manuscript. Time and again I used Maurice Agulhon and Philip Nord as sounding boards on questions of French history, and Moshe Lewin and Stephen Kotkin on questions of Russian history. At different stages of my research and writing I had the thoughtful help of Kristin Gager, Guillaume Garreta, Gavin Lewis, and Moshe Sluhovsky. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Pamela Long, who typed and retyped successive drafts with altogether uncommon accuracy, speed, and, above all, infectious good cheer and understanding. Brigitta van Rheinberg, my editor at Princeton University Press, wielded the scepter with a firm hand and disarming wit, and so did Jodi Beder, my copy editor. At the insistence of Régine Azria, my sprightly and reflective neighbor, an early version of chapter 13 was published in the Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, number 90 (April–June 1995).
Despite growing disagreements which eventually undermined a steadfast personal and intellectual complicité, François Furet accompanied me in my quest. Still and always Carl Schorske, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Sheldon Wolin, besides spoiling me with their unconditional friendship, have been my essential scholarly and intellectual lifeline. This book is written with and for them.
Arno J. Mayer
Princeton and Chérence
Summer 1999