In Defence of the Terror
Page 8
Classically, ‘in the institution of vengeance, it falls to those who embody the social group as a totality to assure the mediation between protagonists and to restore, as far as possible, the state of peace’.11 In the system of the Revolution, this function of a mediating third party between mutually confronting social groups fell first and foremost to the Assembly, which had to make laws adequate to the popular emotions, a ritualized and pacifying symbolic discourse to prevent any spillage outside of the political.12
Terror then appeared as a return to the translatability of popular emotions that had characterized the spring of 1792, and to the sacrality of the law; a return to the possibility of the representatives of the people finding appropriate and performative speech. Terror was also the invention of a new place for legislators who had now to fully recognize popular sovereignty, but at the same time prevent the people from having to compromise themselves in unsustainable practices in order to found the Republic. Establishing the Terror had the aim of preventing emotion from giving rise to dissolution or massacre, symbolizing what had not been done in September 1792 and thus reintroducing a regulatory function for the Assembly. For Danton, the members of the Convention had to be ‘the worthy regulators of national energy’.13 Cambacérès questioned this new function of the Assembly in forestalling the disorders of the time by showing itself determined and courageous:
Depositories of national sovereignty, respect yourselves sufficiently so as not to fear the immense responsibility with which you are charged. If times of revolution demand extreme measures, who should take such measures if not those men whom the nation has entrusted to care for its dearest interests?14
Duhem supported this new function of the representative as avenger of the people:
When the people sent us here, they said to us, ‘You have our powers: go, establish liberty, get rid of all tyranny, avenge our oppression. Sincerely avenge the people, sweep away everything that might obstruct revolutionary vengeance, expedite the performance of justice.’15
Contrary to the prevailing interpretations today, then, the Terror was thus aimed at establishing limits to the sovereign exception, putting a brake on the legitimate violence of the people and giving a public and institutionalized form to vengeance. Terror as justice was thus a desperate and despairing attempt to constrain both political crime and the legitimate popular vengeance that could result from it. As a form of exercise of power, it did not amount to a condemnation of the vengeance wreaked in September 1792, but rather of the form that this assumed as a result of the impunity in which the elites had left the counter-revolutionaries.16
It was not enough, however, for the Assembly to take responsibility for violence; this had to be done swiftly. When Danton demanded the creation of a revolutionary tribunal, the moderate sections, whose members did not need to work in order to live, occupied their respective assemblies in the absence of the sans-culottes. They then passed motions that the latter subsequently disavowed: ‘Seeing the honest citizen occupied in his labours, the artisan busy in his workshop, they had the foolishness to believe themselves in a majority.’17 And yet, as Danton declared: ‘These enemies of liberty raise an emboldened brow; after being everywhere put to rout, they make provocations everywhere.’ It was they, therefore, who risked experiencing the just vengeance of the people. ‘Well and good! Uproot them yourselves for popular vengeance.’18
This ‘uprooting’ involved an arduous struggle. Time was pressing. In the report of the events of 9 September 1792 in Versailles, the mayor is portrayed in the midst of the mêlée:
He wanted to speak, sobs stifled his voice . . . he saw the massacre, he lost consciousness, he was taken into a house, he came to his senses, he wanted to leave, he was held, he said that he was dishonouring himself as a man, he wanted to die for the law. ‘There’s no point in trying to save them’, he was told. ‘There’s no longer time.’19
This ‘no longer time’ is like a mirror of the phrase, ‘it is time’, which is characteristic of the discourse of the Terror. We find this expression in the appeal drafted by Hébert and Royer on 5 September 1793, in all the major reports of the Comité de sureté générale and the Comité de salut public. However anodyne it might appear, it was not so in practice. The revolutionary time of the Terror was one in which no one could afford to spend time in long debates, slow and laborious political considerations.20 The translation of emotions had to be both intense and brief, imposing a regime of temporality appropriate to the lightning course of events. ‘Let the sword of the law, reaching with terrible speed the heads of the conspirators, strike terror into their accomplices’, Robespierre demanded on 12 August 1792.21 On 17 Pluviôse of year II, he spoke of a ‘prompt, severe and inflexible justice’.22 Couthon made this more specific on 22 Prairial of year II: ‘The time taken to punish the enemies of the patrie cannot be more than that needed to recognize them; it is not so much a question of punishing as of annihilating them.’23 The Terror presupposed quick action so as to defeat the enemies before they destroyed the Revolution; so that the people would not be disgusted by injustice, and would not have to take up again for themselves ‘the sword of the law’; to spare the people from unheeding injury in their exercise of the sovereign exception, and to effectively restrain this founding sovereignty. The exercise of Terror was thus a race against time. It was undoubtedly here that the project became impossible: to give the expected justice a form that was at the same time controlled – and to do so at lightning speed.
FROM THE LAW OF SUSPECTS TO THE REORGANIZATION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL
The law of suspects, which is no less vilified than the unlimited extension of revolutionary terror, was yet, as we have seen, a means for suspending the mimetic law of spilled blood. To imprison suspects meant maintaining the race against time against the counter-revolution, without having immediate recourse to the power of ‘making die’. Here we come up against the thorny question of distinguishing between the guilty and the innocent, between indulgence and severity, which re-emerged time and again in the course of the Revolution: oppression had to be resisted but, in the repression of traitors, the number of guilty liable to the death penalty had to be restricted. It was Robespierre who demanded that the Girodins be imprisoned and not executed after the insurrectionary journées of 31 May and 21 June 1793, when the sans-culottes, armed with their pikes, entered the Assembly to demand the expulsion of the treacherous representatives. It was Robespierre once again who, on 5 Nivôse of year II (25 December 1793), explained the nature of revolutionary government and terror:
And so, if we regarded as criminals all those who, in the revolutionary movement, exceeded the precise line drawn by prudence, we would encompass in a common proscription along with bad citizens, all the natural friends of liberty, your own friends and all the supports of the Republic . . . What can then untangle all these distinctions? What can draw the dividing line between all the contrary excesses? Love of the patrie and of truth. Kings and scoundrels will always seek to abolish this, they want nothing to do with either reason or truth.24
Such was the political wager that he spelled out again on 17 Pluviôse of year II: ‘We have preferred to be guided in such stormy circumstances by love of the good and the sentiment of the needs of the patrie, rather than by an exact theory and precise rules of conduct.’25 Here he showed the importance of decision in politics, a decision which then melded together with the exercise of the ‘sovereign exception’.
But this exception had to remain precisely that, and the whole art of revolutionary government lay in replacing the right of nations or the right of war, which knows only the death penalty, with what could be called the right of popular vengeance, so eagerly demanded by popular spokesmen from 20 June 1792 onwards. The law of 22 Prairial year II broke precisely with this kind of suspense, veering completely towards the idea of an end to terror as a time of vengeance.
This law of Prairial year II produced more in the wa
y of retrospective dread than any other measure taken under the Terror. The meaning of this sovereign ‘making die’ has not been handed down, which further accentuates its terrifying character. Analysis of the Terror in terms of public vengeance makes it possible to partly remove this enigma and loss of meaning. In actual fact, the reorganization of the revolutionary tribunal was prepared by Saint-Just in the month of Ventôse year II (March 1794), during the factional struggle, at the same time as he declared that ‘happiness is a new idea in Europe’, that ‘the unfortunate are the powers of the earth’, and prepared the means for compensating them by redistributing the goods of traitors (i.e. émigrés) three months before Couthon’s report on the reorganization of justice and the revolutionary tribunal. When Saint-Just was working on this reorganization,26 he envisaged sorting suspects into two categories: ‘unjustly arrested patriots’ and ‘enemies of the Revolution detained in prison’. For the latter, the penalty was to be detention until the onset of peace, and then banishment. Saint-Just thus proposed an end to suspicion and vengeance without inflicting the death penalty. The decree he presented a month later, on 26 Germinal year II (16 April 1794), proposed the establishment of two parliamentary commissions,
one charged with editing the laws that had been passed up until then into a succinct and complete code, suppressing those that had become confused; the other charged with drafting a body of civil institutions appropriate to preserve morality and the spirit of freedom.27
These two projects were to bring the cycle of vengeance to a close, on the one hand by presenting the sum total of laws to govern society, on the other by preparing a project of civil institutions which, by organizing festivals and public education, would bring the Revolution into popular customs. But the first commission not only prepared a code for a future time of peace, but also one for a time of war: the law of 22 Prairial year II. When Saint-Just had tackled the question of a way forward from vengeance in Ventôse, he was preparing for peace. When Couthon presented his legislative project to the Convention in Prairial, he was declaring war. Saint-Just maintained a logic of social vengeance, whilst deferring to a future peace the opportunity of brightening the political horizon and the application of a penalty that would in all cases avoid death. The law of Prairial seemed to assert that the time was no longer suited for maintaining this logic of social division and suspending the counter-offensive specific to vengeance: the only penalty retained was death, and the rule by which judgement was made was the conscience of the judge enlightened by love of justice and the patrie.
The revolutionary tribunal no longer obeyed rules of vengeance, but rather those of war. In this logic, the person judged was no longer assumed to belong to a common social group, he was no longer an adversary to convince or re-educate, but rather an irreconcilable enemy to be struck down rather than banished. The suspect’s alterity had become radical. And the cycle of vengeance thus ended up on two opposing paths: restored peace in a society reconciled to revolutionary values and supported by civil institutions; and a declaration of war on those in the prisons who were viewed as no longer capable of adopting revolutionary values. Such statements as ‘Revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies’ have to be taken literally. This was the logic championed by Robespierre and Saint-Just in the trial of Louis XVI, which according to them applied the right of war: Louis had to be treated as a foreigner and not as a citizen.
‘Vengeance ceases to play the role of regulating violence when, transforming the adversary into an enemy, it degenerates into war and leads to his annihilation.’28 If the period of the Terror is so difficult to grasp, this is because the logic of public vengeance and the logic of war coexist. This is particularly true for the members of the Convention who, embodying the ‘whole’ of the divided society, were exposed to the greatest severity. When they did not match up to the values to be founded, they fell into the camp of enemies.29 The factional struggles in which Hébert and then Danton perished, and which are seen as fratricidal, were bound up with the necessity of not simply choosing one’s camp clearly in a context of vengeance, but also of being able to embody the foundational values as representative of the people. But what matters most to my mind is that the cycle of vengeance was first opened and then closed, and that all the practices for controlling violence during the period of Terror were simply a repetition of the death of the king – from one precipice to another, as it were.30
One of the questions left unanswered in the interpretation of the law of Prairial is that of its political appropriateness. Why so much violence at a time when the Republic seemed to have been saved? Classically, it is easier to open a cycle of vengeance than to close it, and this cycle can become quite protracted or even never close. In that case, society will be constantly subject to a bipolar and reciprocal violence between social groups that do not manage to resume living together. It is not external circumstances that enable us to grasp the logic of the moment at which this desire to close the circle appears, but rather the internal dynamic of confrontation, a conception of repression in which a right of war that is unsparing of the spillage of blood coexists with a right of vengeance that is concerned on the contrary not to ‘make die’.
One way forward from vengeance amounts to declaring that popular sovereignty had been established. Yet nothing guaranteed that such sovereignty would no longer meet with irreconcilable enemies, or that the Prairial tribunal would put an end to them once and for all. Just like the Amalekites of the Old Testament who opposed the divine law and were condemned by God to be annihilated, the people’s enemies could always re-emerge, and for this reason mercy was a fault.31 As for the civil institutions that provided the other way forward from the cycle of vengeance and division, by maintaining the rediscovered social unity of French patriots and affirming the values of the Republic, they make it possible to grasp a further dimension of vengeance: assuring the foundation of a new symbolic system.
VALUES AS TOUCHSTONE
Public vengeance was a way of elaborating values and putting them to the test.32 The great reports of year II constantly hammer home the desire to found a new symbolic order. But the exercise of vengeance can lead to destroying these same values by giving rise to acts that are too contrary to them. For this reason, the exercise of terror cannot be dissociated from ‘morality in action’. The dynamic of the Terror does not invoke politics against morality; the politics that it practises is indissociable from the morality to be introduced.33 As Robespierre declared to the Convention:
Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your aim is to found and consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct must be to relate all your operations to the maintenance of equality and the development of virtue. With virtue and equality, therefore, you have a compass that can guide you in the midst of the storms of all passions and the whirlpool of intrigues that surround you.34
Decisions must therefore rest on the normative intuition of the good, or specifically that of virtue. The notion of reason is not opposed to the register of the emotions, but rather echoes it. Love of the patrie is the foundation of reason. The two are thus reciprocally associated and mutually reinforcing. Vengeance can only be the foundation of republican values if it is based on a moral sentiment which is posited as necessary hypothesis: ‘love of the patrie and of truth’. What we have here, with the Terror, is a political paradigm that places sentiment rather than reason in the founding position. This is why both Robespierre and Saint-Just feared apathy more than excess: apathy risked extinguishing the burning desire to exercise sovereignty and be virtuous in the sense understood by Montesquieu:
If a choice had to be made between an excess of patriotic fervour and the nothing of inactivity or the swamp of moderation, there would be no doubt about it. A vigorous body, tormented by an overabundance of sap, leaves more resources than a corpse. Let us not kill patriotism by seeking to cure it. Patriotism is ardent by nature; who can love t
heir patrie in a cold fashion?35
And yet public vengeance was always terrible and constituted a serious risk. The return of fear could in turn dissolve the social and political bond. Knowledge of the dangers of fury and the principle of mutual aid could fail in harnessing the violence at work in revenge. One of the essential issues in the Terror consisted precisely in forestalling and punishing any arbitrary and bloody overflow, which in the revolutionaries’ vocabulary was seen as ‘anarchy’36 or ‘fury’ – and in the vocabulary of Walter Benjamin, as a mythical violence that founds right without associating it with a principle of justice. Over against such a foundation, the Terror sought to give the anger of the people, as divine anger, forms that were neither discretionary nor arbitrary. The sacrifice of life had to be made to the benefit of a ‘living-well’ that neither could nor should be confused with the simple fact of living.
For the revolutionaries, the arbitrary violence that dissolved all social ties arose from a confusion between private and public emotional wellsprings. With the creation of the revolutionary tribunal and the application of the law of suspects, deputations from the sections deplored that ‘certain ill-meaning members of the revolutionary committees are profiting from their power to satisfy their particular revenge’.37 Citizen Phulpin, justice of the peace for the Arcis section, had printed an Avis à ses frères composant les comités révolutionnaires et à tous les républicains, in which he declared: