The Afterlives of the Terror

Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France

Ronen Steinberg

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501739248
• eBook ISBN: 9781501739262
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

The Afterlives of the Terror explores how those who experienced the mass violence of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. Focusing on the Reign of Terror, Ronen Steinberg challenges the presumption that its aftermath was characterized by silence and enforced collective amnesia. Instead, he shows that there were painful, complex, and sometimes surprisingly honest debates about how to deal with its legacies.

As The Afterlives of the Terror shows, revolutionary leaders, victims' families, and ordinary citizens argued about accountability, retribution, redress, and commemoration. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and the scholarship on the major traumas of the twentieth century, Steinberg explores how the French tried, but ultimately failed, to leave this difficult past behind. He argues that it was the same democratizing, radicalizing dynamic that led to the violence of the Terror, which also gave rise to an unprecedented interrogation of how society is affected by events of enormous brutality. In this sense, the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts is one of the unanticipated consequences of the eighteenth century's age of democratic revolutions.

Thanks to generous funding from Michigan State University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.

CHAPTER 1

Nomenclature

Naming a Difficult Past after 9 Thermidor

On August 28, 1794, precisely one month after the execution of Robespierre, the Thermidorian leader Jean-Lambert Tallien delivered a seminal speech in the National Convention on the future of the revolutionary government in France. There had been much uncertainty since the events of 9 Thermidor. On the one hand, there was little doubt that the repression, which had characterized the previous months, was being relaxed. In the time that had passed since those events, the revolutionary government abolished repressive laws, relaxed censorship, and began the mass release of prisoners. According to the journalist Jean-Joseph Dussault, the gates of the prisons were not so much opened as “torn off their hinges.”¹ The playwright Georges Duval described in his memoirs the revival of Parisian night life after a year of Jacobin austerity: “From every corner of the Capital, the joyous sounds of the clarinet, the violin, the tambourine, and the flute call on passersby to the dance halls.”² On the other hand, it was far from clear that the dangers of the Terror were over.³ Two days before Tallien delivered his speech, his former secretary, Méhée de la Touche, published a pamphlet titled La queue de Robespierre.⁴ The pamphlet was a diatribe against the Montagnards, but its title became a popular catchphrase of the period, warning readers that they must remain vigilant against “Robespierre’s Tail,” that is, those who would revive the Terror.⁵ Officially, the government was still revolutionary, and the Republic was in a state of emergency. It was time then, declared Tallien, to put an end to “this state of oscillation we have been living in for a month now.”⁶

To end the instability, one had to define the present moment, and to define the present moment, one had to define the Reign of Terror. The Terror, according to Tallien, was a political system based on the principle of fear. “The art of Terror,” he said, “consists in setting a trap for every step, a spy in every home, a traitor in every family.” The regime must know how to use the public death of the few to terrify the many. Executions had to be spectacular, even theatrical, in order to make a lasting impression on the spectators. The goal was not to eliminate the enemies of the Revolution but to break their will to resist. To be effective, the Terror had to be unpredictable and self-expanding. “One achieves nothing by having cut off twenty heads yesterday if one is not prepared to cut off thirty heads today, and sixty tomorrow.” This method of governing, according to Tallien, split society in two: “those who are afraid, and those who make others afraid.” So unique was this system of power, that Tallien used a new word—terrorisme—to describe it.⁷

This was the birth of the modern definition of terrorism.⁸ Historians of political violence point routinely to the French Revolution as the first time that terror was used systematically and deliberately to create a new and better social order.⁹ Scholars, philosophers, and revolutionaries have been arguing since the late eighteenth century about the relationship between the violent overthrow of the Old Regime and the emergence of the new one.¹⁰ The terms used during the Revolution to describe these forms of political violence—terreur, système de terreur, système de la terreur, terrorisme, and the derivative terroriste—meant many different things, but as Annie Jourdan has argued recently, they constituted, first and foremost, “a rhetorical strategy for intimidating or delegitimating an adversary.”¹¹

But the Reign of Terror was something else as well: a difficult past. Tallien introduced this problem early in his address. “The shadow of Robespierre,” he said, “still hovers over the Republic; the minds that have been divided for so long and agitated so violently … have not yet been reconciled.” The Terror, in other words, may have ended, but its effects were present. Tallien described these effects explicitly in his speech. “The Terror,” he stated, “produced a habitual trembling; an external trembling that affects the most hidden fibers, that degrades man and likens him to a beast.” The experience of Terror had a negative impact on the physical, psychological, and mental well-being of those who went through it, resulting in “a real disorganization of the mind.… An extreme affliction.” These effects were not limited to individual psyches; they were collective as well. The Terror, Tallien exclaimed, “de-fraternizes, de-moralizes, and de-socializes.”¹² In a language that traversed the domains of political analysis and medical diagnosis, and that brings to mind modern definitions of PTSD, Tallien named the Terror a difficult past; that is, a destructive episode that was over, but not gone.¹³

This chapter is about the construction of the Terror as a difficult past after 9 Thermidor. The narratives about the Terror that emerged after the fall of Robespierre are usually seen as part of the Thermidorian Reaction; that is, as a political tactic designed to delegitimize the previous regime and to legitimize the current one. This is undoubtedly true, but as this chapter tries to show, there is more to it than that. Representations of revolutionary violence that were produced after 9 Thermidor were not only part of a political reaction but also the result of much broader processes. Secularization and the rise of the public sphere—developments that predate the Revolution—transformed European attitudes to cataclysmic events. Natural disasters and mass violence came to be seen less as manifestations of divine will and more as social and political problems. The Revolution accelerated and inflected these changes. Specifically, the Revolution opened up a debate about the relationship between violence and the social order. Violence came to be seen as the guarantor of the new world the revolutionaries were trying to create, and, at the same time, as its very undoing. Representations of the Terror after the fall of Robespierre displayed a telling ambivalence. On the one hand, revolutionary leaders, writers, and ordinary citizens proclaimed repeatedly that the Terror had ended, and that the violence of Year II was a thing of the past. On the other hand, the texts that they produced often included the acknowledgment, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, that this was a past that could not be laid to rest so easily; that its traces were all around, in the landscape and in the minds of people. This chapter situates these iterations in the context of changing attitudes to catastrophic events, as well as in the new understandings of the relationship between violence and the social order that emerged from the Revolution. Ultimately, it argues that the construction of the Terror as a difficult past after 9 Thermidor was rooted in a semiotic crisis created by the Revolution; that is, the increasing difficulty of reading and interpreting the social world in the context of the tumultuous events that unfolded from the storming of the Bastille.

Attitudes to Cataclysmic Events on the Eve of the French Revolution

Massacres, atrocities, disasters, wars, famine, and political upheaval: this litany of calamities was part and parcel of the collective memory of European men and women on the eve of the French Revolution. Historians of Europe have shown that there was a steady decline in the incidence of violence in everyday life between the early modern and modern periods.¹⁴ The agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, the beginnings of industrialization, and the ongoing imposition of judicial order by ever stronger centralized states meant that increasing numbers of people had access to more and better food and fewer chances of meeting a violent death. Life, generally speaking, was becoming safer.¹⁵ Yet Europeans did not need to look far for reminders that dangers abounded. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) had left an imprint of death and destruction on European culture.¹⁶ The Enlightenment emerged, at least in part, as a reaction to the religious violence of the preceding century. Incessant warfare continued throughout the period, from the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the century (1701–1713) to the War of the Austrian Succession in its middle (1740–1748.) The Seven Years War alone (1756–1763) left over a million combatants dead, although most of them lay buried across the Atlantic.¹⁷ Apart from war, the eighteenth century was also a period of extensive natural disasters.¹⁸ The Lisbon Earthquake (1755) in particular left a lasting impression on Europeans, though the number of people killed in it was much lower than the number of people killed as a result of war. The eighteenth century, writes the philosopher Susan Neiman, “used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today.”¹⁹

Collective attitudes toward cataclysmic events changed in the transition from the early modern to the modern period mainly because of two developments: secularization, and the emergence of the public sphere. Secularization is a controversial concept. In its classic formulation, it refers to the growing rationalization and declining religiosity of the modern world. One of the major results of the Enlightenment, according to this view, was the gradual replacement of belief with scientific understanding. The sociologist Max Weber referred to this transition to modernity as the “disenchantment” of the world.²⁰ This view of secularization has come under increasing criticism in recent decades. Religion, scholars point out, has not faded from modern life. The relationship between science and faith, Enlightenment and religion, was never as antagonistic as the narrative of secularization would have it. Instead, what has emerged is a more complex set of accommodations, whereby church and secular society adapt to each other.²¹

In the case of French history, the critique of secularization has yielded a more nuanced understanding of the changing place of religion in everyday life. The Enlightenment had its religious dimensions, and most of the philosophes that were identified with it held on to religious belief.²² A majority of the population clung to Catholic rituals even after the aggressive dechristianizing campaigns of the French Revolution. Laïcité, the French version of secularization, emerged in the nineteenth century in an effort to codify the relationship between state and church, but that does not mean that religious faith was disappearing from the lives of French men and women.²³ Nevertheless, it remains clear that the transition from the early modern to the modern periods entailed a profound transformation of the place of religion in everyday life. Perhaps it is best to understand secularization as a change in the degree to which people possess a sense of existential security, “that is, the feeling that survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted.”²⁴

What does all this have to do with changing attitudes to cataclysmic events in the period leading up to the French Revolution? As life in Europe became increasingly safer, religious explanations for massive destruction became less common or less appealing. Narratives written in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) show that people at the time made sense of the carnage mostly by referring to divine will. Most interpretations of the event situated it in the context of the great cataclysms mentioned in the Bible: the deluge, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Babylonian exile—all evidence of God’s anger.²⁵ In contrast, authorities turned to science in order to make sense of disaster after the Lisbon Earthquake. The Portuguese secretary of state, the marquis of Pombal, distributed a questionnaire to the parish priests of the country in 1756, but, tellingly, the questions were mostly scientific in nature, marking a “repudiation of those who viewed the earthquake primarily as an act of God.”²⁶

Although some French writers did interpret the violence of the Revolution from a religious perspective, theological explanations were becoming less and less persuasive by the late eighteenth century.²⁷ This “secularization of catastrophe” matters for the aftermath of the Terror because it means that those who sought to make sense of revolutionary violence after 9 Thermidor had to look less in the realm of divine will and more in the realm of human action.²⁸ In this context, the bloodshed of the Revolution became a political rather than a theological problem. This politicization of cataclysmic events would have all kinds of implications for questio...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Nomenclature
• 2. Accountability
• 3. Redress
• 4. Remembrance
• 5. Haunting
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index