* * *
INTRODUCTION:
AN INTOLERABLE REVOLUTION
* * *
In Éric Rohmer’s film The Lady and the Duke (2001), the French Revolution is seen through the eyes of Grace Elliott. This friend and former lover of the duc d’Orléans, before being imprisoned herself during the Terror, was confronted with two of those events that have given the Revolution its savage reputation: the massacres of September 1792 and the death of the king. During these massacres, Grace Elliott crossed Paris in a carriage. After having managed not to faint at the sight of the duchesse de Lamballe’s head – whose well-known face was paraded in front of Elliott’s carriage atop a pike – she cried in delayed shock when she reached her home and explained what she had seen. Faced with the impending death of the king, she hoped right until 21 January 1793 that the revolutionaries would not dare to kill him, and interpreted the cries of the people that she heard from her residence in Meudon as a demonstration to prevent his execution. After his death she went into mourning, and would not get over her anger at the duc d’Orléans, who had not only done nothing to oppose the king’s death, but had actually voted for it. Revolutionary violence was imprinted on human bodies, whether in the institutional no man’s land of the September massacres or in the context of the inventive institution of the king’s trial. Grace Elliott’s reactions were both sensitive and moral: fear, anger and sadness are the expression of an emotional and normative judgement. We can well imagine that she found these two events ‘insufferable’.
Elliott’s point of view, which was also that of Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, was expressed in the memoirs she later wrote and that were eventually published in 1859. But today, through the effect of this historical film, it has also become a contemporary point of view on the French Revolution.
If we cannot maintain that this vision of the Revolution is completely dominant today – since it is certainly not detested by all its heirs – we have to admit that the film’s reception, both before and after its release in September 2001, was highly positive, not just on account of its aesthetic innovations but also for its ideological standpoint. Marc Fumaroli, in an article for Cahiers du Cinéma in July 2001, saw it as a key film on ‘the bloodiest and most controversial days in our history’,1 and constructed a parallel between the prisons of the Terror and the Nazi-era extermination camps:
When she meets up in prison with duchesses, countesses, laundrywomen and actresses, all condemned to the scaffold for the mere fact of their birth or their allegiance, she is almost happy to share their fate, just as a ‘goy’ résistante would have been in the Drancy transit camp in 1942–43.2
We see here the conscious construction of a new reception of the French Revolution which, out of disgust at the political crimes of the twentieth century, imposes an equal disgust towards the revolutionary event. The French Revolution is unspeakable because it constituted ‘the matrix of totalitarianism’ and invented its rhetoric.3
The social and ideological cleavages that form the fabric of the revolutionary event have constantly plagued its representations. There have always been counter-revolutionaries – and they were perceived as such. Today, however, what is more surprising is that these counter-revolutionary representations can pass as majoritarian, commonplace, and – like Éric Rohmer’s film – be considered both by critics and the public as historically correct. We are no longer in an age in which different standpoints argue over an event that resists interpretation, but rather one of unquestioned detestation of the event. Since the French Revolution includes what the British call the ‘Reign of Terror’, and the French simply ‘the Terror’, not only can it no longer be seen as a historical movement which is redeemable en bloc, but it can in fact be rejected en bloc. The French Revolution is a figure of what is politically intolerable today, as it had already become in 1795.
But is this disgust and rejection based on any reflective and critical stance? One small anecdote makes it possible to doubt this. At the Sorbonne, allegedly the stronghold of Jacobin historians, Michel Vovelle replaced Albert Soboul in 1985. The following year he offered to organize a ‘calf’s head dinner’ for postgraduates on 21 January. This is a traditional republican ritual in which the calf’s head represents the head of the king: the people, gathered at a banquet, replay the king’s death in carnival mode. Vovelle’s proposal met with an icy reception. For the majority of students, even those enrolled in the Sorbonne’s course on the history of the Revolution, it seemed indecent. The merry chuckling of Michel Vovelle was met by an embarrassed and incredulous silence. The calf’s head ritual had become non-contemporary, without time being taken to assess it properly. It was impossible now to ‘replay’ the severed head – that kind of thing was shocking, or troubling at the least. To my mind, this collective banquet belongs to the ‘obligatory expression of sentiments’,4 i.e. to ‘a broad category of oral expressions of sentiments and emotions with a collective character’:
This in no way damages the intensity of these sentiments, quite the contrary . . . but all these collective expressions, which have at the same time a moral value and an obligatory force for the individual and the group, are more than simple manifestations . . . If they have to be told, it is because the whole group understands them. More than simply an expression of one’s own sentiments, these are expressed to others, since they have to be expressed in this way. They are expressed to oneself by expressing them to others and for their benefit. This is essentially a matter of symbolism.5
This republican symbolism, however, came undone in the 1980s and 1990s. When the bicentennial celebration came round, the question of revolutionary violence returned to disturb some of the certainties that had newly imposed themselves since the Liberation. Until this time, the French had no need to be ashamed of the revolutionary event; they even had to be proud of it – proud of the French republican invention, a counter-model to the Vichy regime, and proud above all of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which served as a reference point for the rebirth of international law and the famous Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the time of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, however, 1789 and 1793 were disassociated, the challenge to the Ancien Régime was separated from the invention of the Republic – and in short, the wheat had been sorted from the chaff. 1789 was celebrated; but 1792, the fall of the monarchy and the invention of the Republic, remained in the shadow of Valmy. As for 1793, the preference was to merge its ‘fine anticipations’ with those of 1789. The abolition of slavery and the rights to education and public assistance were removed from their context without any investigation of how these irrefutable values were bound up with the Terror. Democracy in France today does not seem to sit well with its foundation. ‘At a time when democracy has become the sole perspective of contemporary societies, it is essential for attention to focus on its inaugural moment, 1789, and not on the dark days of 1793’, proclaimed Patrice Gueniffey,6 one of the main current detractors of the Revolution, before going on to ask:
Who would dare today to celebrate the Terror with the frankness of Albert Mathiez, who writes in 1922 that it was ‘the red crucible in which the future democracy was elaborated on the accumulated ruins of everything associated with the old order’?7
In this vision, subsequent to the bicentenary but in the same spirit, democracy could no longer have anything to do with this ‘red crucible’. The possibilities of appropriating the event today are encumbered by a sensitivity to bloodshed, to political death meted out and decided: responsibly assumed.
By this evocation of blood, doubt is introduced as to the value of the revolutionary event. We have seen on magazine covers, and in productions for a wide audience, questions that might formerly have been thought peculiar to inveterate monarchists. ‘Was it necessary to kill the king?’, asks Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1993. ‘Would you French television viewers of today have decided to kill the queen?’, asks Robert Hossein at the end
of his show about Marie-Antoinette. These questions have the value of interesting symptoms.
By applying the Kantian categorical imperative to judge past events, two hundred years after the facts, these questions involve people today in the historical situation of 1793. They have to put themselves in the place of the Convention members who actually had to judge this question, in the place of contemporaries of the event who had to discuss it and decide their political position. This amounts to inventing a mode of historicity that could be called the concatenation of presents, or of situations. Readers are no longer mere inheritors of an event in which they were not protagonists. If they do indeed want to be its heirs, then they are led to play a part in it. In other words, every heir of the republican foundation could be morally included in the category of regicides, or in what the Thermidorians called ‘men of blood’. Who today, even among republicans, would assume such a designation? Kant’s commentary on the French Revolution is familiar enough:
The revolution of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible man, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to attempt the experiment at such cost – this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition of the human race.8
Moral reverse projection onto the French Revolution, however, ends up making the position of a non-participating spectator impossible. Yet it is the ‘play’ of the actor – in both the theatrical and historical sense of the term – that is required in Robert Hossein’s production. Here, too, spectators cannot remain spectators; they in fact become actors by voting for or against the death of Marie-Antoinette, and in this way collude in a simulacrum of popular consultation that leads to denying one of the very characteristics of the event, namely its irreversible character.
‘To suggest putting Louis XVI on trial is a counter-revolutionary idea’, Robespierre declared. ‘It is making the Revolution itself a subject of litigation.’9 And putting the king’s trial on trial certainly means re-opening such litigation; it explicitly means using the faculty of judgement rather than of understanding. The moral mechanism here stands in the way of historical curiosity. The object is no longer to understand the meaning of the death meted out to the man whom Saint-Just described as ‘foreign’ to humanity and the community. Nor is it to know what such an event succeeded in establishing, in terms of sovereignty. The question, rather, is settled in advance. What is played out here is the figure of historical evil, of the inability to settle political conflicts peacefully – i.e. without inflicting violence on the body, without putting to death. To be a happy heir to the French Revolution means becoming complicit with a historical crime. The event’s character as a political laboratory is thus eroded in favour of a moral question. Scholarly historical debate – in the historicist sense of the term – becomes a forbidden zone. The decontextualizing and naturalizing of the sentiment of ‘humanity’ are made to reign in the eternal present of a moral condemnation.
This replay of the event in the mode of judgement – moral and normative, sensible and emotional, in a context of aestheticization – leads the Revolution to appear insufferable to the very people who, in terms of classic political sociology, are not supposed to be its detractors. From now on the Revolution finds critics not only just on the right of the French political spectrum but also on the left, among the heirs of Jean Jaurès and the Socialist International.
UNDER CROSS-EXAMINATION: ARGUMENTS FOR THE PROSECUTION
This new disgust with the French Revolution is inseparable from a ‘parallel’ constructed with the history of political catastrophes in the twentieth century, and from a related idealization of the present democratic model of politics. It is the impact of this democratic model, which is presented as a culminating point in the process of civilization, that makes possible this charge against the French Revolution. Whereas contemporary democracy protects the individual, the Revolution protected the sovereign people as a political and social group; whereas our democracy institutionalizes a third arbitrating power – the Conseil constitutionnel – between the people and their representation, the Revolution gave all power to the elected assembly; whereas democratic conflict is now supposed to be based on a politics made up of compromise, approximations and calculations, the Revolution dreamed of an absolute politics, illusory and utopian, resting on principles; whereas democratic justice is penal, and restricted by positive law, revolutionary justice is political, resting on social vengeance and the idealism of natural right. Contrasts of this kind, as presented in the arguments of the detractors of the revolutionary political model, could be multiplied ad libitum.10
Disgust and idealization are thus the two emotional faces of the construction of a Revolution as the other to democracy. And the sum total of political and social forms qualified as revolutionary and totalitarian can then be amalgamated in a common rejection.
This confused analogy finds a more precise and radical formulation in certain contemporary philosophical analyses. Giorgio Agamben, in Homo Sacer, expresses it in these terms:
The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism (which here we must, with every caution, advance) is obviously not . . . a historiographical claim, which would authorize the liquidation and levelling of the enormous differences that characterize their history and their rivalry. Yet this idea must nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level, since it alone will allow us to orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen convergences of the end of the millennium.11
The French Revolution, as the alleged founding moment of our Western democracies, is implicitly targeted by this thesis. The historiographical dimension of this criticism is still more explicit in Agamben’s Means Without End: ‘[In] all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day . . . the state makes nativity or birth (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty.’12 And the historical parallel between revolution and totalitarianism is made still more explicit in an article titled ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?’, in which Agamben maintains that
starting with the French Revolution, sovereignty is entrusted solely to the people, the people become an embarrassing presence, and poverty and exclusion appear for the first time as an intolerable scandal in every sense . . . From this perspective, our time is nothing other than the methodical and implacable attempt to fill the split that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded.13
Since we know that, for Agamben, this absence of division among the people leads to the fantasy of a pure, homogeneous, unified people, as in the Nazi notion of Volk, this can only be disturbing. In the end, this philosopher rediscovers the thesis of a theoretical matrix common both to totalitarianism and to the contemporary democracies, which can be analyzed in the founding event that is the French Revolution. This is the theoretical matrix of biopolitics, which he claims is inscribed at the heart of the sovereign power of the revolutionary period.
Michel Foucault had already opposed the pair of actions that characterized the sovereign power – ‘making die’ and ‘letting live’ – to the pair characterizing what he called biopolitics – ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’. Such a politics, for him, assumed that ‘the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies’.14 ‘What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques . . . and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust.’15
This is the point from which Agamben’s reflections begin. Far from supporting this opposition between bi
opolitics and sovereignty, he maintains that both the sovereign exception’s practice of ‘making die’ and the biopolitical practices described by Foucault involve the production of a ‘biopolitical body’. This body is then an object of power, corresponding to the other side of the Greek zoē, animal life as opposed to bios, to political or properly human life inasmuch as this is a life of liberty guided by the idea of a collective good life in the community. For Agamben, ‘the exception everywhere becomes the rule . . . right and fact enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction’.16 The extermination camp is the place par excellence where the biopolitical body is formed, and where the state of exception is the only right.
The end point of this long line of argument is that the question asked about the French Revolution indicates a profound solidarity between democratic and totalitarian regimes, a political foundation at which there is no longer a difference between animal life and political life. But is this at all tenable? Is the French Revolution, and the Terror in particular, part and parcel of this zone of irreducible non-differentiation? And if yes, how so? Finally – and this question is fundamental – did the revolutionary effort aim to let this zone of non-differentiation expand without limits, in the way that historians have spoken for example of unbounded suspicion, or did it aim on the contrary to maintain this as a marginal place in the political organization?
In Defence of the Terror Page 3