In Defence of the Terror

Liberty or Death in the French Revolution

Sophie Wahnich

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781784782023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781683996
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by "timeless" standards of morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violence-in Danton's words, to "be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be so"-and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war. The Terror was "a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty."

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1

THE EMOTIONS IN THE
DEMAND FOR TERROR

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SUBLIME DREAD: WELLSPRING OF THE SACRED

In the summer of 1793, the death of Marat aroused a feeling of dread in the people of Paris. This dread was initially sublimated in the form taken by Marat’s funeral ceremony, before being turned into a popular demand for vengeance and terror.1 Around Marat’s corpse, which represented the injured people and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, feelings of affliction and grief were transformed into enthusiasm. Spectators of the event moved from a palpable sense of discouragement to a feeling of enthusiasm towards ‘the spirit of Marat’. His burial was accompanied by the declaration that ‘Marat is not dead’. This proclaimed that the Revolution had not been destroyed, and would not be so. It then became possible to demand vengeance, and put terror on the agenda. This movement, which Jacques Guilhaumou describes in terms of the aesthetics of politics,2 involved not simply the disposition of bodies, the circulation of emotions and sentiments that inspired them, but also, as I see it, the relationship established to a sacred object.

In fact, if the bloodied body of Marat produced such disarray, it was because, by embodying the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, this was a sacred body, and its assassination a severe profanation. The question then was to re-establish the aura of sacredness around Marat’s decomposing body, which the funeral ceremony did by transposing sentiments from the body to the ‘spirit’, from the embodied meaning to the symbolized meaning of ‘Marat’. We could say, in the language of the Revolution, that this ceremony secured public safety by re-establishing the power of enthusiasm for right, in place of the affliction felt towards the dead body. Because the body was sacred, its death produced dread; but because this sacredness was based on a text proclaimed under the auspices of the Supreme Being, it could become a point of support for regaining the initiative.

(I use the notion of ‘sacred’ here without giving it a precise prior meaning. The composite definition given by anthropology, in fact, allows us to avoid fixing it in a single denotation, and in this way to introduce different aspects of it that are pertinent to the revolutionary period. Durkheim’s analytic definition, according to which the sacred is what is protected by prohibitions, seems essential to me in order to conceive the question of the boundary that if crossed makes someone an enemy, or the boundary to be re-established so as to avoid being destroyed by boundless dread. But the sacred in the sense of Hubert and Mauss, a transcendent reality that can be experienced, is also useful to grasp experiences such as funeral ceremonies. When this transcendence is nothing other than the society itself, and the sacred/profane opposition is combined with that of society/individual, this sacred can be given the name of ‘value’, as it is with Louis Dumont. We are then very close to the situation in the Revolution, where the sacred was essentially immanent.)

With the death of Marat, therefore, it was the transaction between sacred body and sacred text that made it possible to resist the enemies of the Revolution and to sublimate dread. This type of transaction recurs throughout the revolutionary period. It arises time and again whenever public safety is at stake, which is another way of saying, whenever dread risks dissolving the revolutionary social and political bond.

The notion of public safety runs right through the Revolution, and gives a name to a situation of extremity in which the safety of the people is the supreme law. Since this supreme law finds its theoretical foundation in the body of rules of natural right, its evocation serves to produce, around dread, the aura of the sacredness of right.3 But appealing to the sacred is not sufficient for public safety; it has also to be enacted. And enacting it always means engaging bodies to rescue right as the condition of liberty. Formulas such as ‘liberty or death’ have to be understood literally: they express a transaction that passes via the sacrifice of the body. The first oaths of the National Guard are quite explicit on this point. That taken in 1789 by the fédérés of the Guerche ran:

We, military citizens of the towns and countryside that form the district of the Guerche, swear on our arms and our honour to be loyal to the nation, the laws, and the king . . . to maintain the constitution with all our power, to be ever united in the closest friendship, to assemble at the first sign of common danger, to support one another and our brother fédérés on every occasion, to die if need be in order to defend liberty, the first right of man, and the sole foundation of the happiness of nations, and to regard as irreconcilable enemies of God, nature and man those who seek to undermine our rights and our liberty.4

From 1789 on, therefore, these oaths inscribed the definitions of friend and enemy in the order of the sacred. This enemy is irreconcilable because he infringes the sacred order, in which God, nature and men are very clearly associated. It was by affirming their determination to die to defend the laws and rights of the French that the fédérés considered themselves defending a sacred order. Each time that dread surged up, the question for the people was to save themselves by committing themselves in a sacred fashion, what could be called ‘body and soul’.

This same will to commitment is evident in the many addresses and petitions drawn up by the popular societies in May and June 1792, demanding a declaration that ‘the patrie is in danger’. The word patrie made it possible to name the place of liberty and laws. Saint-Just thus asserted: ‘Where there are no laws, there is no longer a patrie.’5 To ‘die for the laws’, then, became ‘to die for the endangered patrie’. Addresses, deputations and petitions, which expressed public opinion and transformed diffuse rumour into political assertion, declared that the ‘dread’ provoked not only by war but also by the treason of the king – and in particular his perjury, which was likewise a profanation of sacred rule – had to be countered. For example:

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 bei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Foreword: The Dark Matter of Violence, Or, Putting Terror in Perspective
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: An Intolerable Revolution
• 1. The Emotions in the Demand for Terror
• 2. The September Massacres
• 3. The Terror as a Long Cycle of Vengeance
• 4. The People and the Popular
• Conclusion: The Terror and Terrorism