In Defence of the Terror

by Sophie Wahnich

  Weep for the guilty victims assigned to the revenge of the laws, who fell under the sword of popular justice; but let your grief have an end, as with all human things. Keep some tears for more touching calamities. Weep for a hundred thousand patriots slain by tyranny, weep for our citizens dying under the fires of their roofs, and the sons of citizens murdered in the cradle or in the arms of their mothers. Do you not also have brothers, children and wives to avenge? The family of French legislators is the patrie; it is the entire human race apart from tyrants and their accomplices. Weep then for humanity dead under their hateful yoke. But console yourselves if, imposing silence on all common passions, you wish to ensure the happiness of your country and prepare that of the world, console yourselves if you wish to restore exiled equality and justice on earth, and to uproot by just laws the source of crimes and the misfortunes of your kind. A sensitivity that trembles almost exclusively for the enemies of liberty strikes me as suspect.31

  Robespierre is thus replying here with a veritable call to vengeance, and stressing the necessity to choose one’s camp in order to found the values of the Revolution: happiness, equality, justice. For, if

  the institution of vengeance avoids the blind unleashing of violence and establishes socially founding moral values . . . once it exists, it demands that its members make crucial choices, towards both the living and the dead, that they make a commitment towards these values.32

  The pain at having witnessed massacres – which did indeed wound the sensibility of the time, marked as this was by the desire to no longer make the human body the place where the symbolic register was expressed – had to have an ‘end’, in Robespierre’s expression. Despite the deep pain caused by the effects of avenging the laws, he summoned revolutionaries to choose their camp: the sentiment of political humanity, which was also the exercise of sovereign judgement for the citizenry as a whole, had to prevail in each person over the sentiment of natural humanity. And it was this political sentiment that established the boundary between friends and enemies, making perceptible and explicit the question of vengeance.

  The revolutionaries directly experienced this conflict over human sentiments, and the manner in which they dealt with it determined their political camp. On 28 December, speaking about the king, Robespierre described this conflict with the greatest of clarity:

  I felt republican virtue vacillate in my heart on seeing this guilty man humiliated before the sovereign power . . . I could even add that I share with the weakest among us all the particular emotions that can interest us in the fate of the accused . . . Both hatred of tyrants and love of humanity have a common source in the heart of the just man. Citizens, the ultimate test of devotion that representatives owe to their patrie is to strangle these initial movements of natural sensitivity in favour of the safety of a great people and of oppressed humanity! Citizens, the sensitivity that sacrifices innocence to crime is a cruel sensitivity, the mercy that compromises with tyranny is barbaric.33

  To which Sèze replied: ‘Frenchmen, the revolution that regenerates you has developed in you great virtues, but beware that it has not weakened in your souls the sentiment of humanity, without which there can only be wrongdoing.’34

  It was thus in the name of humanity, and to struggle against one’s particular emotions, that it became imperative in the eyes of the revolutionaries to constrain their immediate sentiment of humanity. In year II, this conflict was again apparent when political hatred of the English government’s accomplice35 had to be asserted:

  As a Frenchman, a representative of the people, I declare that I hate the English people . . . I am interested in the English only as a man; I admit, then, that I feel some pain at seeing so great a number subject to scoundrels . . . This pain in me is so great that I confess it is from hatred of its government that I have drawn the hatred I bear to this people.36

  The Terror thus brought two sentiments of humanity into conflict. One of these, committed to saving bodies indifferently (those of friends, enemies, accomplices, traitors, slaves) so as not to injure its sentiment of natural humanity, was attached above all to the life of each human being as such, while the other was attached to preserving the meaning that a person wishes to give to life, to the common wellbeing. Emotion towards living human beings seems constrained by a different emotion, arising from the risk of seeing damage not to human bodies, not to bare lives, but to the foundation of their humanity, i.e. their mutual liberty.

  This is why ‘we have to desire the Terror as we desire liberty’.37 This is always an effort – a constraint on oneself, on one’s personal sentiments, on natural emotions. Here, what is involved with the definition of the sentiment of ‘humanity’ as no longer a natural but a political sentiment is also the notion of ‘fraternity’, which must no longer describe the vast family of the human race, but rather the political capacity of men to produce effective conventions of peace. In this respect, ‘fraternity’ becomes above all else a political sentiment specific to men who respect natural right. The notion of ‘humanity’ is then no longer a descriptive notion, but a prescriptive one: it is the dutiful character of the human race, provided that the French revolutionaries do not fail.

  It is in this context that the notion of sensibility replaces that of raw emotion. In fact, if it is agreed that emotions derange, it is expected of the revolutionary that he should forge his new sensibility as a free man in the thick of events, and respond in this way to the prescriptive character of humanity. The emotion experienced in a particular situation thus makes it possible to politically judge the quality of the man of revolution. Robespierre’s accusation against Camille Desmoulins and Le Vieux Cordelier is exemplary in this respect. While in 1789 the sensitive man, and more particularly the sensitive lawyer, was politically opposed to the perverted aristocracy,38 in 1793 and 1794 a division of sensibility took place within a sensitive common humanity, and increasingly explicitly referred to what we still today call ‘political sensibilities’. The plurality of political sensibilities during the Terror thus meant a plurality of politics of terror. What Camille Desmoulins proposed was not to renounce terror towards the Girondins (‘I have never spoken for a clemency of moderation, clemency for the leaders’),39 but rather to conceive of it differently. For him, terror was indeed a response to the risk of an overflow of punitive emotions, and in this respect it was actually conceived as a procedure of pacification towards the intolerable. But this procedure can go into reverse if the boundary between bad men and men of goodwill – those with a just reputation for having a heart – is impossible to draw. What clemency proposes is a particular line for this boundary, a boundary that claims to properly restore civil trust. By admitting that man is always a fallible and divided being (‘Since when is man infallible and exempt from error?’),40 Desmoulins claimed that political action should not aim to distinguish between good and bad but rather between those who had gone astray and those who were irredeemable. The Comité de clémence should therefore recognize the irredeemable, and help those who vacillated not to collapse into counter-revolution. This impossible boundary had to be worked on within each individual. Whereas terror sought to produce a system of external constrains, Desmoulins proposed a policy aiming to lead the subject to freedom. His conception of truth was radically opposed to that of Robespierre. If both agreed in basing truth on the forum interior, for Robespierre that truth was either whole or nil: any fault destroyed the subject totally. For Desmoulins, on the contrary, truth remained relative or polemical. Referring to Galileo and his ‘eppur si muove’, he argued that truth and error were not absolutes but figures of convention. It was thus in the name of an extremely modern conception of truth that Desmoulins proposed to base his Comité de clémence, without abandoning the quest for a universal republican truth. Desmoulins introduced the plurality of political sensibilities – from the very fact of political work, and his experience of the world – as a plurality of conventions that were not all equivalent, but wer
e nevertheless all capable of evolution, transformation and displacement. Robespierre rather hoped for a radical change in political sensibility on the part of his contemporaries. This did not come about, and republicans could only grow melancholy in tracking down their ever more numerous enemies. Camille Desmoulins hoped to rescue the greater part of anachronistic sensibilities. The abyss of terror swallowed them up, rendering impossible such a work of political conflict as a conflict of sensibilities. After Thermidor, politics would no longer be the place of a division of sensibilities; it rather became the place of professional distribution of knowledge of the social art.41

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  3

  THE TERROR AS A LONG CYCLE OF VENGEANCE: TOWARDS A REINTERPRETATION OF THE LAWS OF TERROR

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  The establishment of the revolutionary tribunal on 9 March 1793, the law of suspects of 17 September 1793, and the reorganization of this extraordinary tribunal on 22 Prairial of year II – a reorganization which historians mark as the start of the Great Terror – are three key moments in the history of the terror, as well as of its representation. The tribunal was established before the spokesmen of September 1793 demanded that it be placed on the agenda, leading among other things to the law of suspects. This tribunal amounted to an institutional foundation and precursor of the Terror, which – for those who like a precise periodization1 – extended from 5 September 1793 to 9 Thermidor of year II. It was perceived as a genuine break, which led certain members of the Convention to reject it violently. The tribunal, however, came into being in order to avoid a repetition of the September massacres, and was presented in this respect as a negative replay of those events. It proposed a version of violent insurrection that was channelled into a juridical apparatus, designed to avoid the people having to experience once more the scourge of non-symbolized vengeance: the tribunal opened a cycle of institutional vengeance. It did not break with vengeance; its logic was always one of bipolar social confrontation between people and counter-revolutionaries. It was the tribunal of vengeance.

  The law of suspects is both more familiar and harder to understand. It has led historians to conceive revolutionary repression as something unlimited. Generalized suspicion provoking a runaway terror with no possible end led to the Thermidorian representation of a solitary Robespierre among a forest of guillotines. According to the impressive list of supposedly ‘suspect’ categories, anyone could in fact become a suspect. The representation of a revolution in which no one remained safe from a dynamic of deadly political exclusion is based on an analysis of this law, which was disturbing for the revolutionaries themselves, who feared from the start its devastating effects. In this cycle of vengeance, however, ‘rules and rituals were conceived in order to open, suspend and hem in vengeance’.2 The position I shall defend here is that this law of suspects, far from increasing deadly repression, actually suspended it. For being suspected did not amount to being accused, and if the death penalty was there potentially, it was deferred, sometimes indefinitely. By giving form to the confrontation of opposing political groups, suspicion was a response to a multiform demand for vengeance (one that is undoubtedly hard to grasp) without meting out death to the members of the offending social group. This law was a manner of deploying vengeance with a maximum scope, yet without transforming it into a generalized bloodbath. The prisons filled, but the guillotine was used relatively little in terms of the number of suspects.

  But everything changed again with the tribunal of Prairial, which always leaves historians of the French Revolution speechless. While the dangers and dread that the country experienced had been removed by the end of the factional crisis and the military victories of spring 1794, this drastic reorganization of the revolutionary tribunal meant that it could only pronounce two sentences: acquittal or death. The vengeance carried out by the law of suspects chose not to make die: it was a question of ‘restoring the balance between groups and thus putting an end to the cycle of vengeance’.3 The law of Prairial took the paradoxical form of a ‘making die’: it was aimed no longer at a social group to be controlled, but rather at irreconcilable enemies. I shall seek to break through the totally enigmatic character of this law, by taking seriously its return to a ‘making die’ which this time was more akin to warfare than to penal justice or vengeance. In this sense, I believe that this law was one of the forms chosen by the revolutionaries to emerge from vengeance before they could in the end dispense with terror.

  ‘LET US BE TERRIBLE, TO SAVE

  THE PEOPLE FROM BEING SO’

  The revolutionary tribunal – called an ‘exceptional’ tribunal by historians and an ‘extraordinary’ tribunal by the revolutionaries themselves – was both a symbol of the Terror and a replay of the scenario of the September massacres. Its creation proceeded from a popular demand by the Paris sections, on 9 March 1793, in a context of crisis: the victorious enemy was preparing to invade the country; traitors and counter-revolutionaries remained unpunished and rose up against the republic in the Vendée, in Paris itself, as well as in the central departments; the price of bread made for a dramatic situation, and riots proliferated.

  In that month of March 1793, the Convention member Bentabole, returning together with Tallien from a visit to the section of l’Oratoire with the aim of accelerating the levée en masse,

  observed that the only reason citizens were unwilling to go off was because they could see that there is no real justice in the Republic, and held that traitors and conspirators must be punished. As a consequence, they demanded a tribunal that they could be sure of, a revolutionary tribunal.4

  Jean Bon Saint-André and Jacques-Louis David returned from the Louvre section and reported the same demand from its members:

  They begged the National Convention to punish and annihilate the plotters, so as to do justice to the people if the people are being deceived or badly served. They demanded . . . that the blood of our soldiers, spilled either by treason or by incompetence or by cowardice, be avenged.

  The assembled members of the Louvre section had

  decreed that it invited citizens Saint-André and David, in the most pressing fashion and in the name of the patrie, to express its wish to the National Convention that a tribunal without appeal be immediately established, to put an end to the boldness of the major culprits and of all enemies of the public cause.5

  At the heart of this argument lay the sacred transaction between the body of patriots and the advent of the Republic. To spill one’s blood for the patrie was premised on the advent of the Republic. To give the people justice within the Republic meant the justice of blood spilled on the frontiers. Vengeance and justice were indications of enthusiasm and sources of life; disgust had to be overcome, as dread had had to be overcome in 1792. Both of these mortifying emotions could lead to the annihilation of the people and the Revolution. Disgust had to be transmuted into the patriotic enthusiasm which was needed to save the Republic. As in the spring of 1792, public safety involved a transmutation of emotions. But while these had previously been bound up with the dynamic of insurrection (dread, anger, indignation), they re-emerged in March 1793 from a dynamic of aftershock. To displace dread, revolutionary anger had to be discovered and brought to insurrection. To displace disgust, this insurrection, the September massacres and the king’s trial had to be followed by a genuine transformation imprinted in everyday political practices. Justice and vengeance would be its tokens. This is why only the sentiment of justice could overcome discouragement. Then it would be possible once again for people to make their bodies a rampart for liberty. We should not forget that in the revolutionary discourse it was the heart and not just the mind or reason that guaranteed the defence of the project. ‘Honour the mind, but base yourselves on the heart.’6

  On 10 March 1793, the Convention was on the point of dispersing without having established this tribunal, when Danton took the floor:

  What, citizens, can you leave without taking the great mea
sures that public safety demand? I feel it is of utmost importance to take judicial measures that will punish the counter-revolutionaries, as it is for them that this tribunal must supplement the tribunal of popular vengeance . . . If it is so hard to convict for a political crime, is it not necessary that extraordinary laws, taken outside of the social body, should make rebels tremble and convict the guilty? Here public safety demands great means and terrible measures. I see no middle way between the ordinary forms and an extraordinary tribunal.7

  Danton thus presented the revolutionary tribunal as an antidote to ‘popular vengeance’, or more precisely as a potential control on this by an institution arising from ‘exceptional laws, taken outside of the social body’, in this foundational sphere of popular sovereignty by sovereign vengeance. But popular vengeance re-opened the question of the September massacres, which Buzot had in mind when he declared that the revolutionary tribunal would lead ‘to a despotism more dreadful than that of anarchy’,8 or when Amar recalled: ‘There is no other measure that can save the people, otherwise it will have to rise up and fell its enemies.’9 As for Danton himself, he saw the revolutionary tribunal not only as a way of putting limits to the sovereign exception in its function of vengeance, but also as an opportunity to renew the pacifying function of the National Assembly:

  Since some have ventured in this Assembly to recall the bloody days when any good citizen trembled, I will say, for myself, that if a tribunal had then existed, the people, who have been so cruelly reproached for these journées, would not have covered them with blood; I will say, and I have the assent of all who were witness to these events, that no human power was in a position to stem the outpouring of national vengeance. Let us profit from the mistakes of our predecessors. Let us do what the Legislative Assembly failed to do, let us be terrible so as to save the people from being so. Let us organize a tribunal – not well, for that is impossible, but as best we can, so that the sword of the law weighs over the heads of all its enemies . . . [and] so that all will be avenged.10