The men of all countries are brothers, and must help one another as citizens of a single state. Whoever oppresses one nation declares himself the enemy of all. Those who wage war on a people, in order to halt the progress of liberty and destroy the rights of man, must be pursued everywhere not as ordinary enemies, but as assassins and rebel brigands.12
(We find again here the figure of the brigand, which at this time denoted anyone who placed himself outside the social bond, outside common humanity, despite knowing its rules. The first individual in the French Revolution to embody this position was King Louis XVI, the figure of traitor par excellence.)
The first element in the tradition of natural right that we need to dwell on here is the one that makes it possible to understand on what condition the death of the enemy was necessary. For Locke, it was those who were harmful to common humanity who had to be destroyed:
And that all men may be restrained from invading others’ rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man’s hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation . . .
In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men, for their mutual security; and so he becomes dangerous to mankind, the tye, which is to secure them from injury and violence, being slighted and broken by him. Which being a trespass against the whole species, and the peace and safety of it, provided for by the law of nature, every man upon this score, by the right he hath to preserve mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them, and so may bring such evil on any one, who hath transgressed that law, as may make him repent the doing of it, and thereby deter him, and by his example others, from doing the like mischief.13
Locke introduces here the reciprocity of natural right, reason as law of nature, and the concept of the human race as political entity. This last point was not his invention, as the Stoics were the first to trace the limit beyond which a man removes himself from the universal community of men, becoming inhumanum relative to the genus humanum. Anyone who puts their own interest above that of others acts inhumanely, with a lack of respect for natural law. We find in Cicero the necessary exclusion of the inhuman, when the human race is a political concept:
As certain members [of the body] are amputated, if they show signs . . . of being bloodless and virtually lifeless and thus jeopardize the health of the other parts of the body, so those fierce and savage monsters in human form [such as the tyrant Phalaris] should be cut off from what may be called the common body of humanity.14
A person with whom any community is impossible must be killed.
In the state of the modern period, positive right is not applied to those who do not respect right, i.e. who do not respect their own laws. Nor again is it applied to those who are not given to right and remain brigands, outside of right government. It is then natural right that is applied, and this right knows only the penalty of death.
When a people is constituted – that is, ordered by the principle of sovereignty – it is collectively responsible for maintaining this sovereign order, maintaining the laws. Within this space of sovereignty, responsibility is collective. Someone who does not rise up against tyrant and crime, but allows crimes to happen, himself becomes a tyrant and a traitor. ‘The cruelty of pity’ is therefore not just a figure of rhetoric; it means that allowing political crime means becoming criminal oneself. The logic of natural right thus associates a theoretical humanism (it is in the name of humanity that one must act) with a situational anti-humanism (the life of a man or a people is worth nothing if they betray their humanity). The sentiment of revolutionary humanity does not lead to protecting suffering bodies above everything else, regardless of who and where they might be. The object is to protect above all humanity as a group constituted politically by its respect for declared natural right, from the most local to the most cosmopolitan level. We might say that this sentiment of humanity is entirely on the side of political life, sometimes accepting the need to despise the ‘fine day of life’ that may conceal within it the oppression of the whole human race.
Revolutionary pity does not wish to make poverty disappear, to exclude it from the community, but on the contrary to give it a place that makes insensitivity towards it impossible. To maintain the human identity of all does not therefore mean fantasizing a people identified with the poor, which would suppose a contrario destroying the rich and their wealth. What is imperative here is to maintain that political power does not lie on the side of wealth, but rather on the side of a generalized emancipation – in other words, an emancipation of the poor. Poverty is an aspect of the trajectory of life and fate, but it should not lead to indignity. Thus the passion of the revolutionaries was not passion for the poor, but rather passion for declared, inviolable and sacred rights, the passion for justice and equality. These were the values, rather than a homogenizing egalitarianism, that founded human identity as an identity in which life was worth nothing if there was no respect for the rights that transformed it into a universal political existence.
THERMIDOR
With Thermidor, citizens had to renounce the expression of their point of view; they no longer had access to the political logos. In terms of the deputy Rouzet, ‘the citizen must not be tempted to substitute reasoning for the submission that he owes to the law’.15 Rejection of the revolutionary democratic model in which, in the face of governments that were always assumed to be fallible, each citizen was responsible for maintaining the rights of man and the citizen, was the Thermidorian characteristic. It was accompanied by rejection of universal suffrage, and of those reforms of civil law that led to more egalitarian practices between men and women, as well as among heirs with a view to reducing the disparities of wealth that resulted from birth.16 As for the rejection of revolutionary violence – in particular the September massacres, the death of the king, the Terror – this was the basis for political struggles between Girondins and Montagnards, then between indulgence and inflexible severity. Thermidor seemed to mean the triumph of the Girondins, but gradually, under cover of a struggle against anarchy, it was the entire Revolution that the monarchists of the Directory period sought to disqualify. Their notion of anarchy was initially extremely plastic and polysemic. In year II, the word ‘anarchy’ had disappeared from the political vocabulary. It made its return in Germinal year III (March–April 1795) when, against the sections of the east of Paris who demanded ‘bread and the constitution of 1793’, anarchy was identified with the ‘system of Robespierre’ or the ‘regime of 1793’, and the anarchist with the ‘drinker of blood’. ‘Anarchy’ thus became the expression of a social fear, the fear of the class of property owners who were marked by the trauma of the Terror; its spectres had the names of Equality and Agrarian Law. The anarchist was then placed outside the social law and outside the law of nature: he was a monster. And in year VII, the royalists finally managed to wrap up the whole of the Revolution and the republicans under the name of an anarchy that went back to 14 July 1789. Nevertheless, for those who remained republicans, the infamy that weighed on the Terror of 1793 still spared the earlier period of the Revolution. Jourdan could still maintain in the Assembly that ‘14 July and 10 August were days of anarchy in which the people regained their rights, and in this way shared in the events for which the Republicans claim the honour’. We find here once again the division between the wheat and the chaff that was to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
The division of sensibility, if there can be said to have been such a division after Thermidor, was based on the aestheticizing of the dead body and the fear that ensued from this, without the death evoked being allowed to take on a political meani
ng. To show, and even present, the bodies of the guillotined or the massacred – like the duchesse de Lamballe – produced retrospective dread and the relief of having escaped the barbarism of the ‘drinkers of blood’. The sans-culotte who, in the Thermidorian caricature, asks his victim to drink a glass of blood ‘bottoms up’17 is a figure devoid of political character, a mere barbarian whose rage can find no satisfactory explanation. What is constructed here is a morbid aestheticizing of the period of Terror, but also of all the actors who made the Revolution from 1789 to 1794. The abolition of the political meaning of death meted out makes this death no longer a historic and political fact, but simply an anthropological one in the sense of the eighteenth century, when this discipline separated off from history and was deemed to be a science of human nature. From this point on, man could no longer hope for happiness here on earth, and could not forget that he was not only a being-for-death but also a being-for-being-put-to-death by his fellows. This negation of the meaning of the revolutionary period made way for a providentialism ‘which made meaningless any human desire for earthly happiness’.18 The counter-revolution thus made its bed out of mourning and suffering, which were all the more absolute – and one might even say pleasurable – in that they remained deprived of meaning, while happiness escaped human desires by its very nature. The death of the king had to be made into an irremediable loss, and to be mourned along with the families of the victims of the guillotine. Where the death of the political Other had constituted a sign of the exercise of legitimate right, there were now only victims to be wept over. Thermidor inaugurated for our age the reign of emotional victimhood. If there was competition, it was no longer to produce a hierarchy of heroes or martyrs, but rather a hierarchy of victims. Only those who had suffered by losing a loved one to the guillotine could drown their sorrows at certain balls that were reserved for them, where they aestheticized their status by wearing the famous thread of red silk against their bare necks.
Thermidor thus effected an initial shift towards a notion of the Revolution as incomprehensible and disastrous, by at once denying the meaning of the sovereign ‘making die’ and making death during the revolutionary period into a death devoid of meaning.
It became hard then to voice one’s support for the constitution of 1793 and the revolutionary people without the risk of losing one’s life. This was true not just for the insurgents of Prairial year III (May 1795), who demanded bread and the 1793 constitution and were bloodily repressed, but also for those members of the Convention who wanted to hear and translate this demand that had become intolerable. Whereas in 1792 popular spokesmen emerged, steadily shifted the reception of popular emotions and managed to offer them a place, in Prairial the Montagnard deputies who played this role were immediately disavowed and their actions criminalized. In prison, they chose to kill themselves in the name of the flouted principles. The republican tradition remembers them as the ‘martyrs of Prairial’. For a deputy to offer a place to popular emotions had become a criminal act before its political significance was even discussed. The deputies to the Convention would no longer be translators of popular emotions, but had to reject any exchange with the people. Thus, on the journée of 1 Prairial, Boissy d’Anglas refused a dialogue with the insurgents. The accounts of this journée put forward the rule: popular anger had become intolerable, the people were denied any normative value in terms of justice.
Here we touch on a fundamental point in the Thermidorian enterprise. The operation of repressing emotions was accompanied by an important political translation: the Declaration of Rights and the constitution were changed. The legislative demands that the people could bear within their sovereign emotive movement were always linked to the notion of resistance to oppression. In June 1792, reference to article 2 of the Declaration was perfectly explicit:
In the name of the nation, which has its eyes fixed on this city, we come to assure you that the people are standing up, as circumstances require, and ready to use major means to avenge the outraged national majesty. These rigorous means are justified by article 2 of the Rights of Man: resistance to oppression.19
This image of ‘the people standing up’, as opposed to an enslaved people on its knees, reappears in the journées of Prairial in the following variant: ‘We have stood up in order to support the Republic and liberty.’ This expression gave the signal for popular uprising, for the attempt to resist oppression. And this element of article 2 of the 1789 Declaration, resistance to oppression as an inalienable and sacred right, was abolished by the writers of the constitution of year III, along with article 35 that spoke of the duty of insurrection.
On 5 Messidor of year III, Boissy d’Anglas spoke to the Constituent Assembly as follows:
You will understand that it is immoral, impolitic and excessively dangerous to establish in a constitution such a damaging principle of disorganization as that which provokes insurrection against the actions of any government . . . We have thus suppressed article 35 which was the work of Robespierre, and which, in more than one circumstance, became the rallying cry of brigands armed against you.20
Daunou, in a debate on article 2 on 16 Messidor (4 July 1795), declared that
the commission [of eleven] had suppressed from article 2 of the Declaration of Rights only the statement of the right of resistance to oppression, which it had seen as presenting too great a danger and as opening the door to too much abuse.21
What had been the foundation of the juridical legitimacy of the revolutionary movement had thus become intolerable.
* * *
CONCLUSION:
THE TERROR AND TERRORISM
* * *
PERSISTENCE OF IMAGE AND DISTURBANCE OF VISION
The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies. The Terror took place in an uncertain struggle waged by people who tried everything to deflect the fear felt towards the counter-revolutionary enemy into a terror imposed on it. This enemy, for its part, tried everything to bring the Revolution to an end. The greatest danger was then that of a weakening of the revolutionary desire – a discouragement, a corruption of the founding desire. It was this danger that haunted those actors most committed to the revolutionary process.
This is why the Terror was a deliberate self-constraint: it was not just a policy of arbitrary violence or extreme fear to intimidate its enemies. It was the historic moment when the sovereign violence of ‘making die’ was that of a people driven to make use of it to maintain the extraordinary claim to have conquered sovereignty.
‘The abyss of the Terror’ is never completely closed, as this unlikely encounter between the political and the sacred remains fascinating and disturbing. Kant commented on the ‘sympathy of admiration’ aroused by the French Revolution in terms of ‘enthusiasm’ and the ‘moral disposition of the human race’ – even if ‘a sensible man would never resolve to attempt the experiment at such cost’. This moral disposition is what the revolutionaries called the sentiment of humanity. The experiment of the revolution, according to Kant, was thus not a loss of the sentiment of humanity, but on the contrary precisely a sign of this.
‘Citizens, what illusion managed to persuade you that you were inhuman?’ Saint-Just exclaimed on 8 Ventôse year II (26 February 1794):
Your revolutionary tribunal has dispatched 300 scoundrels in the last year; did not the Spanish inquisition do more? And for what cause, in the name of God! And did the English courts execute no one this year? . . . And no one mentions the German prisons in which the people are buried.1
What then was the price of the Terror? The classic response is that the two months between 22 Prairial and 9 Thermidor year II saw 1,376
people perish on the scaffold.2 And brutal as the summary measures of the revolutionary tribunal then were, they were not the only price of the Terror or of the Revolution. This price also involved infringing the political border of the sacred. Fear, disgust, terror and enthusiasm were the emotions that signalled the experience of this border, the place where the Revolution and its actors might tumble into the void, where the violence inflicted on the body of the enemy was linked with a foundational vengeance and with popular sovereignty.
The members of the Convention wanted to protect the people from the injury of this sacred deed by focusing it in the Convention itself, its committees and the revolutionary tribunal. But no one was truly protected from a sacred transaction in which the foundation of values required the death of men, in which body and soul had to be committed, and anyone could perish from fear or be overcome by disgust. This in my view is the forgotten price of the Revolution, the buried price of the Terror – a price that is indissociably moral and political at once,3 and that lies in discomfort, risk and a gamble.
‘Terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ are words that originated with Thermidor. Those who sought to found a new and egalitarian political and symbolic space were defeated by history. The terrorists meant Robespierre and Saint-Just, but also all who fought for ‘liberty or death’ – the Jacobins whose club was closed, the citizens reduced to political passivity by the establishment of a property-based suffrage and the abolition of the right of resistance to an oppression which refused them any active citizenship. The terrorists were all those who were referred to as ‘men of blood’, those whose cruelty – cold or intoxicated, depending on whether they gave or fulfilled commands – came to be stigmatized as one that in every case saw politics only as a pretext to assuage a passion for blood. The Terror would be the name given by history to this period of ‘terrorism’. The view of year II of the Republic as a period of terror and dread is essentially Thermidorian.
In Defence of the Terror Page 10