The Legacy of History (VII)
Friday, 15 February 2008 23:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
montagnarde1793The Terror
André’s appraisal further emphasizes what has been clear from two centuries of agonized accounts of the troubled creation of the Republic. That, central to its elaboration, central to the construction of Danton and Robespierre, lies the Terror; that every analysis of the Revolution seems compelled, first and foremost, to take the Terror into account, explain it, or else explain it away. Nineteenth-century historians, like Aulard, saw the Terror as an unavoidable response to growing threats mounting against the Republic. The Terror was a desperate response to outside pressure. Taine, on the other hand, saw in the Terror the proof of revolutionary evil. As Donald Greer put it, for Taine, “the Terror was a political philosophy written in blood. The Philosophy was that of Rousseau, and the Terror was an interlude of Jacobin paranoia induced by the virus of the Social Contract – a crime committed collectively by the dregs of society which this poisonous leaven had brought to the top for a brief reign of destruction.”[1] For their part, the Bicentennial’s revisionist historians left the horror intact in its tragic unfolding while simultaneously producing what Jean Baudrillard calls “a perfectly pious vision of the Revolution, cast in terms of the Rights of Man. Not even a nostalgic vision, but one recycled in the terms of postmodern intellectual comfort. A vision which allows us to eliminate Saint-Just from the Dictionnaire de la Révolution. ‘Overrated rhetoric,’ says François Furet, perfect historian of the repentance of the Terror and of glory.”[2]
Although it accounted for fewer victims in Paris than the Saint-Barthélémy [sic] massacre (when 3,000 persons were killed in a single night),[3] royal reprisals against peasant insurrections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the Bloody Week of the Commune, the Terror still appears as unprecedented violence. It exerts on readers and historians alike the fascination elicited by senseless serial murders.[4] Even more singular is the fact that, under the word “Terror” are collapsed many distinct events, some preceding what is strictly called the Terror (which is associated with the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunals), others related to the civil war in the Vendée. Unlike the September massacres, that cost a greater number of lives but have failed to arouse among commentators the angst and the horror provoked by the decisions of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror was not an unmediated, irrational act of violence. Why are these deaths more disturbing? Certainly, when the law appears to promote the Terror, the citizen is no longer afforded the protection the law is meant to provide; and it may be this visible failure of the legal structure that made the Terror more horrifying than unpremeditated scenes of mob violence.
Politically, the Terror has been amplified and dramatized in order to discredit the republican process. Nineteenth-century chroniclers of the Revolution relied heavily on the theatrical horror of the guillotine to show how far the Revolution had strayed from its original goal and, by extension, to cast the most serious doubts on the possibility that what they viewed as an illegitimate republican government could establish a wise and orderly rule. It did not matter that the guillotine replaced deaths by hangings, burning at the stake, often preceded by horrendous torture. Little consideration has been given to the fact that the Revolution did away with the most revulsive aspects of arbitrary justice under the Old Regime. The Terror appears as an act of personal revenge enacted by a blood-thirsty government first against the supporters of the king, then against their own friends and followers.
Beyond the partisan politics that one unavoidably encounters in any account of the Revolution, however, there remains an underlying anxiety that cannot be explained solely by political prejudices. It is worth noting that the Terror’s victims, unlike those of the Saint-Barthélémy [sic] massacre, have names and personal histories that have become known to us. Beginning with the royal family, victims of the Terror have haunted posterity with their tragic individual destinies. A striking example is Marie-Antoinette’s posthumous representations, as censurable though hapless queen, or as a queen who was above all a mother and wife.[5]
Most forceful among the touching accounts of scenes that took place on the way to the scaffold were scenes of shattered domestic happiness: “The Royal family cell at the Temple prison,” long the subject of a special exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet; Marie-Antoinette’s wrenching separation from the Dauphin, recorded many times on canvas; Camille and Lucile Desmoulins’s destroyed domestic bliss, or André Chénier’s last verses to his beloved, written on the tumbril that led him to his death. These far-from unknown victims have left indelible marks on the popular imagination, historical accounts of the Revolution, and generations of French pupils.[6] With the exception of Robespierre, who was made into a decidedly fantastic, unfeeling being, all victims of the guillotine, whatever their past or identity, have been made to appear familiar, in all the senses of the word. In his hugely popular Citizens, Simon Schama introduced his story of the Terror with an account entitled “Death of a Family.”[7] Books have been published that contain diaries written from prisons, farewell letters to one’s family, and more scenes of shattered domestic innocence.[8] The Terror remains terrifying in its uncanny familiarity in that, as it is recounted to us, it was not directed against a recognizable Other, an enemy coming from the outside,[9] but against the very people who contributed to the revolutionary process. Far from taking a toll on a threatening Other, the horror specific to the Terror, and expressed in different ways, lies in its destruction of the Same. The Same kills the Same. The brothers kill each other. The Revolution devours its own children.
The pre-Thermidorian victims of the guillotine have been exonerated by posterity. Where revolutionary fervor could not fully be invoked, domestic values relieved them from all political guilt. Danton was a regicide and a terrorist, Michelet notes, but also a devoted husband. Although some of these images may have faded from contemporary historical accounts of the Revolution, a rapid bibliographical survey indicates that the Terror, the guillotine, and the family (royal and other) still occupied center stage during Bicentennial revisitations.[10] Its domestic quality suggests that the Terror, our image of the Terror, has been embedded, not so much with the originary murder of Totem and Taboo, but with Freud’s definition of the unheimliche. If Freud is to be invoked, Freud’s analysis of the Uncanny would offer the best guide to the way we have both emphasized and tamed the horror of the guillotine.
With the Terror, historiography argues, no one is safe. Furet calls it “an ubiquitous form of government” whose effects took gigantic proportions.[11] Dismissing the carefully documented numbers produced by Georges Lefebvre, and revising his previous assessment that the revolutionaries “were not these blood-drinkers created by royalist legends,”[12] Furet speaks of 16,600 victims and of close to a half million arrests, to which must be added, he notes, the “tens of thousands of deaths” resulting from the actions of Carrier in Nantes and Turreau in Vendée.[13] As Furet’s source specifies, but Furet omits to mention, these numbers (based on a “statistical method”) result from distinct factors (including deaths from disease), yet they are largely imputed by Furet to the “Dictatorship of Year II.” The repeated mentions of dramatic, largely unverifiable numbers, and the concurrent disclosures of a “Revolutionary holocaust” (or a “génocide vendéen”),[14] lend support to the thesis that the Bicentennial of the Revolution served largely to occult the fiftieth anniversary of the 1939 defeat and the more recent Holocaust to which Vichy France contributed.
Finally, André’s essay provides another and more complex answer to our undiminished anxiety about the Terror. In the concluding lines of La Révolution fratricide, he writes that with Robespierre’s death “Terror ceases to be on the agenda: on the agenda of democracy, of which it could be a fundamental, and necessarily unrecognized, element” (p. 243). That Terror may be an unavoidable component of the democratic process, that the origin of the modern state should be tainted with bloodshed that would be part and parcel of Revolution itself, is a question all historians – of all political stripes – have labored hard to elude. Anxiety about origin necessarily founded in violence may in turn account for the necessity historians have felt, either to ascribe the violence to outside factors (the war, the effects of the European coalition against France), or to put the blame fro the Terror on an extra-ordinary individual. This anxiety may explain how and why the posthumous image of Robespierre was created.
[1] Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 5.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994) pp. 23-24.
[3] During the night of August 23rd to
[4] See, for example, Daniel Arasse, La Guillotine et l’imaginaire de la Terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
[5] The Bicentennial has done more for the posthumous image of the queen than for any other character of the Revolution. See Chantal Thomas, La Reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Pierre Saint-Amand, “Terrorizing Marie-Antoinette,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 379-92; Lynn Hunt, “The Bad Mother” in The Family Romance of the French Revolution, pp. 89-123; Sara Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Jacques Revel’s entry on Marie-Antoinette in Furet and Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, pp. 252-64.
[6] Particularly interesting is the recasting of the royal victims of the guillotine as an ordinary family of simple habits and ordinary, authentic emotions. The countless images of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the Dauphin in the
[7] Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: A. Knopf, 1989), pp. 822-27.
[8] For a recent example of these publications, see Olivier Blanc, Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution, 1793-1794, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987).
[9] When discussing the Terror, many historians stress the fact that aristocratic victims, even the royal family, were ineffective threats against the Republic.
[10] A full bibliographical account would be tedious, but it is worth mentioning that Norman Bryson entitled his history of the French Revolution Prelude to the Terror. The title is fully explained in his introduction, where he states simply that he would like to know why, two years after claiming a “triumph for humanity … these same Frenchmen were at each other’s throats and the country was heading for civil war and the Terror.” Prelude to the Terror: The Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Consensus, 1789-1791 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. x.
[11] François Furet, Terror in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Furet and Ozouf, p. 140.
[12] François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1973), p. 233.
[13] A Critical Dictionary, p. 143. Furet invokes the authority of Donald Greer, The Incidence of Terror During the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation. It should be pointed out that Greer’s numbers do not result from new archival research but from the compilation of previously published data. On the reliability of such sources, Greer himself acknowledges that they are often tainted by partisan politics. Indeed, some of the published sources quoted are reliable, others are not. Finally, Greer proposes to produce a statistical estimate, rather than an historical figure. Knowing the limitations of his method, Greer is extremely prudent in advancing his numbers; Furet is much less so in reproducing them. I am not interested in the probability or improbability of such numbers, however, but in their symbolic value. It is enough to emphasize here the extraordinary disparity in modern accounts of the Terror.
[14] The word “holocaust” was used repeatedly in the press. The Figaro-Magazine, in particular, made numerous references to “l’holocauste vendéen,” with mentions of one million deaths.
In other news, please tell me I'm not the only one completely squicked by the thought of Maxime/Mme Duplay. More on that later. >__>
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Date: Sunday, 17 February 2008 03:00 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 20 February 2008 00:33 (UTC)