A large number of citizens from the Luxembourg section cannot regard without dread the terrible situation in which the French empire now stands. The enemy is at the gates. Fanatics are conspiring within. The seditious, writhing in all directions, are profiting from all possible circumstances to achieve the terrible work they have been plotting for a long time. The king swore to be the father, the support of all the French, and he is exposing them to destruction.6
The transition from dread to defensive action ran by way of implementing the proclamation that ‘the patrie is in danger’.7 What was involved here was the opening of the National Guard to ‘passive citizens’, and the possibility for each person to participate in this sacred transaction – to offer their body to rescue the people and the Revolution, to save right.
Response thus presupposes the wellspring of the sacred produced by the relationship between the event and the Declaration of Rights, a relationship committing the bodies of the revolutionary actors, ready to die in order to save the revolutionary project because this was identified with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This is why the notion of vengeance, one of the modalities of expression of resentment towards enemies, and likewise that of punishment, always come up when public safety is at stake. On 12 August 1793, for example, when Royer demanded the raising of ‘the terrible mass of sans-culottes’, Danton replied:
The deputies of the primary assemblies have come to exercise among us the initiative of terror against domestic enemies. Let us respond to their wishes. No amnesty for any traitor. The just man does not show mercy to the evil. Let us signal popular vengeance on the conspirators within by the sword of the law.8
The demand for terror was inseparable from the levée en masse demanded by Royer. As for the revolutionary army,9 as a popular army it was the site par excellence of the transaction between the sacred body of the patriot, the law that was sacred by definition, and the sacred body of the impure enemy. On 5 September 1793, an exchange between the movers of the address drafted by Hébert and Royer and the president of the Assembly, who was none other than Robespierre, displayed this immediate relationship of the citizens to the exercise of sovereignty, as both a military exercise and an exercise of justice:
It is time that equality waved its scythe over all heads. It is time to terrify all conspirators. Very well, then, legislators, put terror on the agenda. Let us be in revolution, since our enemies hatch counter-revolution everywhere. Let the sword of the law hover over all the guilty. We demand the establishment of a revolutionary army, divided into several sections, each followed by a fearsome tribunal and the terrible instrument of the vengeance of the laws.
Robespierre then replied to the delegation: ‘Citizens, it is the people who have made the revolution, and it is up to you to ensure the execution of the prompt measures needed to save the patrie . . .’10
To demand that terror be placed on the agenda meant demanding a politics aimed at constantly renewing this sacred character of the laws, permanently reaffirming the normative value of the Declaration of Rights, demanding vengeance and punishment for the enemies of the patrie. The slogan ‘patrie en danger’ and the watchword ‘terror’ were launched by the people. Sovereign emotions coined sovereign slogans, with terror perhaps being seen as ‘one of the modalities by which the popular appropriation of sovereignty is effected’.11 Citizens asserted their sovereignty by demanding to be the first agents of public safety.
Far from being signs of a death-dealing tendency, these demands were the sign of a movement of life and enthusiasm.12 They transmuted the dissolving emotions produced throughout the social body by acts of profanation into emotions that gave new courage. Thus, on the revolutionary journée of 20 June 1792, the faubourg Saint-Antoine came en masse to the Tuileries, exchanged toasts with the king and made him wear the red cap of liberty. It was a symbolic victory of little substance, since even so the king did not ratify the decrees that aimed at the defence of Paris and its revolutionary gains – decrees that he had already vetoed.13 But this journée was also when the faubourg explicitly demanded that the Assembly should declare the patrie to be in danger. Santerre, in his speech to the Assembly, reaffirmed this ability to regain the energy of liberty in action when what was sacred was in danger:
Do the enemies of the patrie imagine that the men of 14 July have gone to sleep? If they appeared to be so, their awakening is terrible. They have lost nothing of their energy. The immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man is too deeply engraved in their hearts. This precious treasure will be defended by them, and nothing will be capable of stealing it from them.14
In order to understand the emotional economy of the demand for terror, we do not have to ask whether the obsession with plots was really well-founded, and how the revolutionary sacrality that had been produced was being flouted. What effectively instilled dread was this rupture of the sacred.
It remains to be understood how this movement of enthusiasm that demanded vengeance did not produce a ‘fury of destruction’15 in the sense of a generalized massacre, but led to the establishment of a specific mechanism that aimed on the contrary to pacify it.
THE ASSEMBLY MUST TRANSLATE THE
EMOTIONS OF THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE
The revolutionaries were aware of the volcanic character of popular emotions. In June 1792, the question of insurrection was debated at the Jacobin club. Jean Bon Saint-André contrasted ‘the insurrection of a people of slaves that is accompanied by every horror’ with ‘that of a free people’, which was ‘simply the expression subject to the general will to change or modify certain articles of the Constitution’.16 This argument aimed to avoid attaching to the idea of insurrection ‘that of revolt and carnage’.17 A poem sent by citizen Desforges in spring 1792 is particularly eloquent in this respect:
And in the great theatre where fate has placed us,
liberty means life and licence death.
Licence dares everything with no thought
to the custom of sovereign laws or a wise liberty;
‘free’ is the word for a man, not for a raging beast.
There are, my friends, imperious rights
and eternal laws that must not be infringed.
If we flouted these we would have too much to fear
from the whole world, as history can witness.
The first of these rights is the first need,
ever arising anew, that each has for the other.
Rescue my good and I shall rescue yours,
and I shall impose on myself the respectable law
of daring all for the man that risks all for me.
Then you can understand how, at a moment of crisis,
a whole people is kindled and electrified . . .18
It is mutual aid, then, that gives legitimate insurrection its value, over against a generalized massacre committed by the ‘furious’ who are outside the laws and devoid of political value. Those who brought the word of the people to the Assembly were no less aware of this. When they demanded that the patrie be declared in danger, they mentioned this problem quite explicitly. In an address of the Marseillais on 19 June 1792, for example: ‘Popular force makes for all your force; you have it in your grasp, use it. Too long a constraint would weaken it or lose it.’19 And in Santerre’s speech of 20 June 1792:
The people have stood up, ready to avenge their outraged national majesty. These rigorous measures are justified by article 2 of the Rights of Man: ‘Resistance to oppression’. What misfortune, however, for the free men who have handed you all your powers to see themselves reduced to drenching their hands in the blood of the conspirators!
. . .
Shall the people be forced to return to the time of 13 July, to themselves take up the sword of the law and avenge with one blow the outraged law, to punish the guilty and the cowardly depositaries of this very law? No, gentlemen – you see our concerns and
alarms, and you will dissipate them.20
The means for dissipating these fears lay in giving popular enthusiasm a normative symbolic form. It was explicitly demanded that the sovereign emotive power of the people, so that it should not turn destructive, be translated into terms of law. These emotions, from pain through to rage, had therefore to be deposited by the people in the hands of the legislators, in the sacred precincts of the Assembly, and to find their place there: ‘It is in your breast that the French people deposits its alarms, and that it hopes at last to find the remedy for its ills . . . We have deposited in your breast a great pain . . .’ The legislators had first of all to listen to the political pain of the people, to understand that this pain, if overcome, could produce anger, and then to re-translate this into the symbolic order so as to channel it. ‘Legislators, you will not refuse the authorization of the law to those ready to go and die to defend it.’21
Confronted with popular emotions, therefore, the legislators, as free and sensitive men, had to become good translators of the voice of the people. And this had already found its expression, symbolized by such spokesmen as Santerre. But the intersubjectivity that was anticipated relied not on an argument to be rationally debated, but rather on a sensibility to be shared. The heart had to be touched more than the mind.
For a long time we have comforted our ulcerated hearts. We hope that the latest cry we address to you will make your own heart feel. The people have stood up, they await in silence a response that is finally worthy of their sovereignty.22
The role of legislators in the process of pacification was therefore fundamental. They had to effect the translation of emotions into laws, into what a number of addresses termed the ‘sanctuary of the laws’, a sacred place in which men came together to make and guard laws. They thus gave a legal form to emotions, and above all invented the symbolic forms and practices that would permit enthusiasm to be contained. The spokesmen themselves invented a pacifying gesture. On 19 June, a deputation asked to be received with its weapons, after planting a liberty tree. They then did a few dance steps in the Assembly precinct, to the sound of a drum: we can speak of a ritual of pacification. But the issues were focused in the reception of the emotions expressed in the addresses, petitions and deputations that spoke for the people. The petition of 20 June divided the Assembly: the right called the Marseillais and the faubourg Saint-Antoine ‘factious’, whereas the left reasserted the need to translate popular emotions into the order of the law. Lamarque:
Coblenz says that enthusiastic patriots are factious. Gentlemen, the only true patriots are enthusiastic ones . . . I pride myself on being one of these factious. You will ask if I am referring to the petition of pikes? Yes, gentlemen. I speak of the decrees of the National Assembly; I speak of the law; I speak of the countless number of petitions that you hear each day at the tribune, and that proclaim without ambiguity the wish of the nation.23
To demand in June 1792 that the patrie be declared in danger meant demanding carnage and fury, so as to forestall the possibility of frenzy: a pacification by means of a decree that reflected quite precisely a love of the laws; the recognition of popular sovereignty, the opening of the National Guard to ‘passive’ citizens, and the right to legitimate violence on the part of all citizens of the male sex.24
Jean de Bry, a legislator of the left, in his report of 30 June 1792, replied both to the people who wanted the patrie to be proclaimed in danger, and to the right of the Assembly that incriminated the same people for having dared to enter the king’s residence on 20 June. He asserted that, if the patrie had to be declared in danger, it was up to the Assembly to do so in order to produce order. The nation had to be ‘a well-disciplined body that, without consuming itself in useless movements, calmly awaits the order of a leader in order to act. The nation will march if need be, but it will march together and regularly.’25 Sovereign power, therefore, was not truly settled on the side of the people, who could simply be instrumentalized when necessity demanded: ‘Convinced that by reserving for itself the right to declare the danger’, the Assembly ‘puts off the moment and calls for calm in the minds of good citizens. The formula to utter will be: “Citizens, the patrie is in danger”.’26
The same preoccupation with order can be seen with Danton on 12 August 1793: ‘Let us know how to take advantage of this memorable day. You have been told that a levée en masse is needed. Yes, to be sure, but this must be done with order.’27 Order so as to avoid carnage; order as a means to control the sovereign power.
But between spring 1792 and summer 1793, the hypothesis of an Assembly, supposedly representing the sovereign people but by its inaction forcing free men to ‘drench their hands in the blood of conspirators’, had become actual experience with the September massacres.
* * *
2
THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES
* * *
THE RUPTURE OF THE SACRED BONDS
BETWEEN PEOPLE AND ASSEMBLY
On 30 June 1792, Delaunay, a deputy of the left, asserted that the moment had come to declare the patrie in danger:
The people, cognizant of the peril to the public good, are awaiting a strong and extraordinary measure on the part of those to whom they have entrusted their destiny. They know that your mission is to carry out their wish and to legislate what is required by the nation. Maintaining the constitution can become a superstition contrary to the general national will. However immense the powers of the Constituent Assembly may be, they do not have the power of commanding the passions. I tell you, gentlemen, that so long as the state of revolution persists in an empire, a constitutional commitment can only ever signify commitment neither to add nor to subtract anything until the date set for such a revision.1
Not only was Delaunay’s proposal not acceptable at that moment, but the Assembly proceeded towards the indictment of the men of 20 June 1792, under the aegis of Lafayette and a petition from Le Havre of 6 July, which demanded ‘vengeance on the wretches who violated the asylum of the hereditary representative, vengeance on those factious who summoned him with daggers in their hands’.2 As against the king’s sacred character, associated with that of the constitution of 1791 and both allegedly profaned, the sacrality of the people and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were now proclaimed. Could the honour of the people be scorned in the name of the honour of the king?
The conflict crystallized in terms of indictment: indict the people or indict Lafayette. On 9 August 1792, the Assembly voted by a quite large majority that it was acceptable to acquit the general, even though he was accused of having sought to overthrow the national representative body and had betrayed his military mission by coming to Paris to threaten the people. The following day, 10 August, the taking of the Tuileries and the establishment of an insurrectionary Commune took place without the Assembly being forewarned or consulted: the Assembly was simply informed of these events. Its prevarications regarding the ‘patrie in danger’, and its ambiguous attitude towards Lafayette, radically brought into question the trust that the people had granted it. No longer was it a matter of awaiting the signal of the law in order to insubordinately rise and demand the abdication of the perjured king. Contrary to what had occurred on 20 June, there was no longer any sense in waiting for a decree before acting. The decree would not come in time. The Assembly was no longer a possible site for the sacred translation of the will of the people, but simply a place for registering accomplished facts. In September 1792, a new step was taken in this disavowal of the Assembly. This was because the Parisians’ dread no longer arose simply from the defeats suffered on the French borders, but also from the sense of being betrayed by legislators who had not taken the measures called for by the insurrection of 10 August, and in particular by those measures aimed at ‘judging the crimes of 10 August’.
When the Swiss Guards opened fire, the Marseilles fédérés, the Paris sans-culottes and the National Guards were already engaged in
the Tuileries. They came armed, aware that the king and the royal family had been put under protection, and desired that in this context there should be no spilling of blood. They undoubtedly remembered that ‘the insurrection of a free people is the expression, arising from the general will, to change the Constitution’, and that it presupposes the self-control of violence. If they came armed, this was to express the effective shift in the sovereign power, the change of the constitution in fact. They had come ready to fight to take the Tuileries as they had taken the Bastille. But the palace did not appear to resist their entry, which was made in calm. If justice was demanded for the crimes of 10 August, this was with the feeling of having been caught in an ambush aiming to spill the blood of the people, when the political die was already cast. It was because they sensed the betrayal of what should be a common desire, bound up with the common sense of natural humanity not to spill blood, that the Parisians of 10 August demanded justice. If there was intolerable cruelty, this was on the part of the defenders of the palace. To deal with and pacify the emotions that arose in the face of such treason, justice needed to be promptly done. This demand for justice was also a way of restoring trust in the Assembly, while waiting for the meeting of the National Convention promised for September. No one wished to spend too long on pacifying symbolic mediations, and only the renewal of these mediations could prove that popular sovereignty had been genuinely established, that citizens were now recognized as equal, fully disposing of the sovereign power. If justice was done, the insurrection would then have truly established democratic principles without dislocating the community of citizens. If justice was refused, this would be the sign of an uncertain, fragile and thwarted foundation. The political community would then be torn apart, and the insurrectionary confrontation renewed in forms that would certainly be more difficult to control: not the forms of a velvet insurrection, but those of the public vengeance of the people. This was a matter of importance, and Robespierre, Danton and Marat all stressed the necessity of a tribunal that would judge these crimes. Robespierre intervened on 15 August, as a delegate of the Commune, and proclaimed: ‘Since 10 August, the just vengeance of the people has not yet been satisfied.’3 On the 17th, a citizen and temporary representative of the Commune declared at the tribune of the Assembly:
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