citizen and the good citizen was the good patriot. Saint-Just summed this up when
he said that the ‘good citizen’ was ardent, pure, austere, and disinterested. There,
he proclaimed, was the ‘character of a patriot’.34 The common good was always to
take precedence over the individual interest; the public realm was at all times to
have priority over the private sphere. The Jacobins were unambiguous about this.
‘A man who lacks public virtues’, Robespierre announced, ‘cannot have private
virtues.’35 Again, this had an overt political message. What, Robespierre asked,
have the ‘enemies’ of the Revolution understood by virtue? ‘By this word’, he
responded, ‘they have all understood fidelity to certain private and domestic
obligations; but they have never understood it in terms of public virtues, never as
selfless devotion to the cause of the people.’36
Accordingly, the moral regeneration of the individual––at times for Robespierre
it was also a physical regeneration, achieved through the regimentation and control
of a citizen’s diet and clothing37––could best be secured in a communal setting and
it was this that explained the fascination of the Jacobins for civic festivals. Of these,
the most portentous and imposing were the ceremonies constructed around the
cult of the Supreme Being.38 This new civic religion was to purge the individual of
everything that was to distinguish him or her from the civic body. All divisions
would disappear before the universal religion of nature.39
How did this lead to the Terror? Everything indicates that the Jacobins believed
that moral regeneration would be spontaneous and would be grounded upon the
innate moral goodness of the people. Once the aristocratic prejudices and practices
of the old order had been removed and once, most importantly, the people had
33 Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. 567.
34 Quoted in Jaume, Le Discours Jacobin, 211.
35 Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. 520.
36 Ibid. 531.
37 Ibid. 15–20.
38 See Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789–99 (1976).
39 See ‘Sur les Rapports des idées réligieuses et morales avec les principes républicains, et sur les fêtes
républicains’, Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. 443–62.
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
9
been placed in an appropriately beneficial educational environment, virtue would
reign triumphant. Everyone could participate in this renewal, even the former
noble and Catholic priest. Indeed, so embracing was this vision of universal
fraternity and moral harmony that it could even welcome the foreigner.
However, real human beings, with their earthly passions, presented the Jacobins
with something of a problem. Not everyone showed themselves prepared to be
convinced by this vision of the sublime; opponents refused to go away; dissenting
voices continued to be heard; well-intentioned measures for reform produced
practical disasters. The only explanation could be the continued existence of
selfishness and wickedness. So, with mounting intensity, the Jacobins deployed
a rhetoric that contrasted ‘virtue’, ‘truth’, ‘purity’, and ‘people’ with that of ‘vice’,
‘falsehood’, ‘corruption’, and ‘individuals’. There could be no compromise with
such ‘evil’ and therefore death could be perceived as the rational alternative to a
failure or absence of virtue.
Thus, the remorseless logic of extermination could begin. The corrupt, the
traitors, the turncoats, the backsliders, the opportunists, the cowards, the moder-
ates, the false revolutionaries, the immoral, those lacking in virtue, all could be
removed. Robespierre’s speeches are littered with such language, possibly his
favourite derogatory expression being that of fripon or rascal. The world was full
of such unworthy characters, all of them eager to subvert the government of the
Republic. Yet each purification, each wave of executions, seemed only to leave
France still divided between the pure and the wicked, necessitating renewed zeal.
Category upon category of people became the objects of suspicion, up to and
including the revolutionaries themselves, such that they started to slaughter one
another, with Robespierre being obliged in each case to further radicalize the
process, if only to keep his own head. So, little by little, there emerged an ideology
of Terror, which not only justified its use but also identified its victims. Terror was
to be an emanation of virtue and the guillotine was to be the means of separating
the good from the wicked.40
Its clearest definition came in Robespierre’s speech before the Convention on
5 February 1794.41 ‘Within the scheme of the French Revolution’, Robespierre
declared, ‘that which is immoral is impolitic, that which is corrupting is counter-
revolutionary.’ If, he went on, ‘the mainspring of popular government in peacetime
is virtue, amid revolution it is at one and the same time virtue and terror: virtue,
without terror, is ill-fated; terror, without virtue, is impotent.’ Terror, therefore,
was ‘nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice’. Slowness of judgement
amounted to impunity, to punish oppressors was ‘clemency’ and to pardon them
was a ‘barbarity’. No one except the guilty had anything to fear but to tremble was
itself a sign of guilt.42
40 Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, 69–70.
41 For key speeches by Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon in support of the Terror see L’Impossible
Terreur (1989).
42 Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. 350–66.
10
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
What was needed for the guilty to be punished? Here Robespierre and his
colleagues had no doubts: revolutionary government.43 This, Robespierre acknowl-
edged, was a concept that was ‘as new as the revolution that had produced it’. Its
definition and description could not be found ‘in the books of writers on politics’,
because they had not foreseen the Revolution. Yet, with astonishing prescience,
Robespierre understood exactly what it was, and so made the all-important distinc-
tion between revolutionary and constitutional government. ‘The goal of constitu-
tional government’, he clarified, ‘is to conserve the Republic; that of revolutionary
government is to establish it. The Revolution is the war of liberty against its
enemies; the Constitution is the regime of victorious and peaceful liberty.’ Under
a constitutional government, it was sufficient to protect the individual from the
abuses of public power; under a revolutionary government the public power was
obliged to defend itself against all the factions that attacked it, ‘deploying without
cease new and rapid means in response to new and pressing dangers’. Revolutionary
government owed its citizens the full weight of its protection; towards its enemies it
owed ‘only death’. Revolutionary government, in short, was government without
limits, government in a vacuum, government as absolute power. It was, to cite
Robespierre’s most famous phrase, ‘the despotism of liberty against tyranny’. Its
goal was nothing less than ‘the
salvation of the people’.44
How could such a revolutionary government come to an end? This was possible
only when all the enemies of the Revolution had been defeated. But this, as defined
by the revolutionary project, was not a possibility. The alternative was the death of
the revolutionaries themselves. ‘Is not’, Robespierre asked, ‘the death of the
founders of the liberty itself a triumph?’ Only the ‘tomb’ would bring them
‘rest’. ‘I’, he announced, ‘do not believe in the necessity of life.’ On 30 July 1794
Robespierre, having first tried to kill himself, was granted his wish, leaving behind,
as he said in his final speech, ‘only a terrible truth and death’.45
The men who secured Robespierre’s dramatic removal from power and his
execution had as their goal not only that of preserving their own lives but also that
of terminating the Revolution. The Constitution of Year III, promulgated during
the summer of 1795, sought to establish the Republic upon a secure and stable basis,
limiting popular sovereignty, protecting individual liberties, and locating power in
the hands of an educated elite.46 First, however, France had to extract herself from
the Terror, a task which entailed much more than the execution of Robespierre
and his closest associates.47 The administrative and organizational structure of the
Terror had to be dismantled and those deemed responsible needed to be judged.
This was an entirely new experience, and was not one to be accomplished either
quickly or easily. Nor was the restoration of justice without its own acts of arbitrary
43 ‘Rapport sur les Principes du gouvernement révolutionnaire fait au nom du Comité du Salut
Public’, ibid. 273–7.
44 Ibid. 357.
45 Ibid. 567.
46 See Michel Troper, Terminer la Révolution: La Constitution de 1795 (2006).
47 Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur: Thermidor et la Révolution (1989). See also
Sophie Wahnich, Les Émotions, la Révolution française et le présent (2009).
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
11
revenge. As Benjamin Constant was to observe shortly afterwards: ‘nothing is rarer
than the passage from arbitrary power to the rule of law’.48
But the Terror left an even more enduring problem. What sense could be made
of it? How could it be explained? What had been the cause of its genesis? Did its
original source lie in the people or in their leaders? How could its reappearance
be prevented? There is an argument, recently advanced by Patrice Gueniffey,
which sees the resort to Terror as the ‘fate’ not just of the French Revolution but
of all revolutions. Seen as such, the use of Terror is integral to the logic of revolution
itself, its employment intrinsic to a situation where power is used absolutely
and without limits.49 Gueniffey is probably correct and, it could be argued, it was
precisely this truth that was perceived by Edmund Burke as early as 1790. But this
was not an argument available to those who sought simultaneously to understand
their own immediate past and to move France forward towards the establishment of
a more enduring and less threatening regime.50
No one better represented this endeavour than Benjamin Constant. In the
uncertain years that followed the establishment of the Directory in 1795 he
published a series of brilliant pamphlets designed to alert France to the need to
break with what he termed her ‘revolutionary habits’. These habits included an
enthusiasm for counter-revolution.51 Most persuasive of all was his text Des effets de
la Terreur, published in May 1797. Here Constant set out to demolish all of the
arguments which suggested that the Terror had been somehow either ‘inevitable’ or
‘beneficial’. It had not saved the Republic. It had not overcome the obstacles faced
by the Revolution. It had not created a ‘new people’. It had not prepared France for
a ‘free constitution’. Rather, Constant argued, it had destroyed the ‘public spirit’ of
the people, prepared them for ‘servitude’, and produced the vicious circle of crime
following crime. Worse still, the savage events that had accompanied the birth of
the First Republic had led people ‘to conflate the Republic with the Terror, the
republicans with their executioners’.52
What then did the future hold? With his usual lucidity, Constant realized that
there could be no return to the past. If people wanted rest, that rest ‘had to be found
in the Republic’ because, if not, the alternative was ‘to recommence, in the opposite
direction, the terrible path that France has taken and to return to tyranny by
revisiting the river of blood which had flowed in the name of liberty’.53 Like it or
not, in other words, France’s future was inextricably linked with the republican
form of government, in whatever shape that might be. Somehow or other, that
48 Benjamin Constant, Des Réactions politiques (1797), 92.
49 Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur, 226.
50 See Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French
Liberalism (Ithaca, NY, 2008).
51 In addition to Des Réactions politiques, see De la Force du Gouvernement actuel de la France et de la
necessité de s’y rallier (1796) and Des Suites de la contre-révolution de 1660 en Angleterre (1799).
52 Constant, Des effets de la Terreur (Lausanne, 1948), 45. The text was originally published
in May 1797.
53 Constant, De la Force du Gouvernement actuel, 109.
12
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
regime had to be built and consolidated. The choice, Constant averred, was a stark
one: between ‘order and liberty on one side, anarchy and despotism on the other’.54
Which path would France take? Constant himself feared the worst, correctly
perceiving that, for many, the exercise of arbitrary power had not lost its attractions.
Accordingly, the stark choice he set out for France was one that was to remain well
beyond the final decade of the eighteenth century. Here perhaps we should again
refer to Robespierre. The Revolution, in a very real sense, came to an end with his
fall. The dream of recreating human beings and of rebuilding society from top to
bottom was over. Yet, as Robespierre knew, even in death he was leaving behind a
powerful legacy. In his final, passionate, and furious speech, denouncing enemy
after enemy, he again called upon his fellow revolutionaries to draw upon all their
resources of courage. For, if they did not, the consequences were clear. France, he
told them, would suffer ‘a century of civil wars and of calamity’ and they, in turn,
would perish. What followed was accurately to bear out this sombre prediction. It is
that century of civil war and calamity that provides the political backdrop for the
ideas examined in this volume.
I I
If the dramatic course taken by the Revolution of 1789 could not have been
foreseen, the same might perhaps not be said of the collapse of the social and
political order that was soon to be known as the ancien régime. Successive attempts
at financial and institutional reform––both half-hearted and genuine––had all
come to nothing, a situation greatly acerbat
ed by the inertia of the kindly but
irresolute Louis XVI. In the end the French monarchy ran out of both money and
ideas. If few now take seriously the claim, beloved of Marxist historians such as
Georges Lefebvre, that the decisive and determining cause of the French Revolu-
tion was the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie,55 it would equally be a mistake to
believe that the Revolution was entirely without social origins. The actions of the
peasantry and of the people of Paris in the summer of 1789 were proof alone of this.
More interesting from our perspective, however, was the realm of public opinion.
Never before had it been so powerful or (as the unfortunate Queen Marie-Antoin-
ette was to discover) so fickle.
Here recent investigations into how people lived, worked, dressed, con-
sumed, and spoke––l’histoire des choses banales56––have successfully opened
up the way for ground-breaking studies of the press, book-selling and readership,
education, religious rituals, public festivals, and sexual habits. Thus, by moving
away from the ‘great texts’ of the High Enlightenment towards the actual diffusion
and vulgarization of books and pamphlets (including pornographic ones) of
54 Constant, De la Force du Gouvernement actuel, 3.
55 But see Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789–1815 (New York, 2006).
56 Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales (1997).
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
13
eighteenth-century low life,57 it became possible to provide an entirely novel
account of the cultural origins of the French Revolution. They were to be found,
as Roger Chartier has shown, in the de-Christianization of French society and the
de-sacralization of the monarchy. By separating the person of the monarch from
the divine, these long-term trends meant that the institution itself could be subject
to ridicule and profanity.58 Likewise, by looking at ‘perceptions and conceptions,
customs and practices’ of the people, Daniel Roche in his La France des Lumières
has revealed how the ‘popular representation’ of the monarchy came under
severe strain––there was, he writes, ‘a demand for irreverence, transgression,
and subversion’––leading ultimately to ‘a major symbolic crisis’ affecting ‘the
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