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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
At the heart of how history sees the French Revolution lies the enigma of the Terror. How did this archetypal revolution, founded on the principles of liberty and equality and the promotion of human rights, arrive at circumstances where it carried out the violent and terrible repression of its opponents? The guillotine, initially designed to be a ‘humane’ form of capital punishment, became a formidable instrument of political repression and left a deep imprint, not only on how we see the Revolution, but also on how France’s image has been depicted in the world.
This book reconstructs the Terror in all its complexity. It shows that the popular view of a so-called ‘system of terror’ was retrospectively invented by the group of revolutionaries who overthrew Robespierre, as a way of trying to exonerate themselves from culpability. What we think of as ‘the Terror’ is best understood as an improvised and sometimes chaotic response to events, based on the urgent needs of a revolutionary government confronted by a succession of political and military crises. It was a government of ‘exception’ – a crisis government.
Terror brings together a wealth of factual elements, along with recent thinking on the ideological, emotional and tactical dimensions of revolutionary politics, to throw new light on how the phenomenon of terror came to demonise the image and memory of the French Revolution. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the French Revolution and for anyone concerned with the ways in which political conflict can descend into violence.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Note on the Text
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: The Demons of Terror
Notes
Chapter 1: The Terror – a Concept Imposed by the Thermidoreans
1. How the ‘system of terror’ and the black legend of Robespierre were retrospectively invented
2. Developing use of the word ‘terror’ between 1789 and 1794
3. ‘Terror as the order of the day’: an unsaid, unofficial yet widespread order from the Convention
Notes
Chapter 2: The Meaning of ‘Terror’ Before the Revolution
1. Terror and Enlightenment. A problematic connection
2. The concept of ‘terror’ in the Ancien Régime
3. The role of terror in political theory
Notes
Chapter 3: Terror in the Heart: The Weight of Fears and Emotions
1. The spectre of conspiracy and treason
2. The flow of emotions and fears
3. The impossible combination of virtue and terror
Notes
Chapter 4: The Revolution and its Opponents: Clashes and the Intensification of Repression
1. Legislation targeting refractory clergy and émigrés
2. ‘The suspects’: how the net of suspicion widened
3. Repression against ‘federalism’ and the emblematic case of the Lyon revolt
Notes
Chapter 5: Creating Revolutionary Law: A Time of Political Exception
1. From ordinary law to ‘revolutionary’ law
2. ‘Revolutionary’ institutions and their role in repression
3. The recourse to extraordinary justice
Notes
Chapter 6: Terror in the Convention: Political Conflict as an Engine of ‘Terror’
1. The Convention and the clubs: from political strife to ‘purging’
2. From arrests to political trials
3. Death as a means to eliminate opponents in the Convention
4. The elimination of factions, the apogee of ‘terror’ or the will to end it?
Notes
Chapter 7: Paris and the Vendée at the Heart of the ‘Terror’
1. Paris, capital of the sans-culotte movement
2. Paris, epicentre of the ‘Terror’
3. The ‘military Vendée’, a zone of civil war
Notes
Chapter 8: Who Lived and Who Died? The Difficult Balance Sheets of Terror
1. Working out the death toll
2. Fraternal France and fratricidal France
Notes
Conclusion: How the Convention Reconstructed Itself After Thermidor
Notes
Chronology for the Years of the National Convention
Maps
Some Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Maps
Map 1:
The clergy who died in the Year II, ‘victims’ of the ‘terror’ according to the m…
Map 2:
The deputies of the Convention sent ‘on mission’, by department.
Map 3:
The deputies sent ‘on mission’ with the armies.
Map 4:
The armées révolutionnaires. Departments where at least one army, a battalion, o…
Map 5:
Operations of the Parisian armée révolutionnaire.
Map 6:
Prisons, sites of the guillotine, and cemeteries used for victims in Paris.
Map 7:
Number of people sentenced to death, by department.
Map 8:
The military commissions.
Map 9:
Number of individuals judged to be ‘outlawed’ (hors la loi), by department.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Note on the Text
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: The Demons of Terror
Begin Reading
Conclusion: How the Convention Reconstructed Itself After Thermidor
Chronology for the Years of the National Convention
Maps
Some Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Terror
The French Revolution and Its Demons
Michel Biard and Marisa Linton
With a Foreword by Timothy Tackett
polity
Originally published in French as Terreur! La Révolution française face à ses demons. By Michel Biard & Marisa Linton © Armand Colin 2020, Malakoff. Armand Colin is a trademark of DUNOD Editeur, 11, rue Paul Bert, 92240 Malakoff
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4837-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
In memory of Michel Vovelle (1933–2018)
Note on the Text
This is a shortened and revised version of the original French language editon: Terreur! La Révolution française face à ses démons, Armand Colin, 2020, Malakoff, a trademark of Dunod Editeur.
Acknowledgements
Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 8 were originally translated by Élise Trogrlic, with the support of the GRHis University of Rouen, Normandy. All other translations and the rewriting for this edition were by Marisa Linton.
Our grateful thanks to those who generously gave their time to read the original draft of the French edition and gave us invaluable advice and further suggestions (Françoise Brunel, Carla Hesse, Hervé Leuwers and, especially, Timothy Tackett).
Foreword
We can only applaud this cross-channel collaboration between two of the most distinguished and prolific scholars of the French Revolution, the French historian Michel Biard and his British counterpart Marisa Linton. They bring together some of the most recent Revolutionary studies in both English and French for a rich and creative new synthesis. Although their study touches on aspects of the entire period from the late Old Regime through the Napoleonic period, the primary focus is on the phenomena of ‘terror’ and stateimposed violence in the years 1793 to 1794: the origins, the ongoing dynamic, the broad impact on French society and the prolonged challenge – longer than is often realized – of bringing such ‘terror’ to a close. The book also presents valuable reflections on the lengthy and contentious historiography of the phenomena in question, on debates whose origins can be traced to the writings of contemporaries of the Revolution itself and that have continued unabated into the twenty-first century.
Few periods in French history have been so afflicted by misinterpretation, deformation and facile oversimplification. The array of explanations for the phenomenon of Revolutionary ‘terror’, proposed by historians, social scientists, philosophers, literary scholars and novelists is impressive indeed. In their great majority, however, such writers had very little understanding of the actual historical reality of the events they claimed to describe and explain. The majority based their interpretations on a veritable myth concerning the years 1793–4, a myth that originated in the efforts of the post-Thermidorian Conventionnels to distance and exculpate themselves from the period of intense state repression in which they themselves were frequently complicit. ‘The Terror’ came about, they argued, through the machinations of Maximilien Robespierre and a few of his Montagnard henchmen, who sought to create a dictatorship – some even argued a new monarchy – dominated by ‘the monster’ Robespierre himself. The Terror was thus a calculated and unitary ‘system’ imposed by a small minority.
In a series of chapters organized both thematically and chronologically, the authors bring together a range of new research – including many of their own studies – to confront and demolish the ahistorical legend of 1793–4. As they make abundantly clear, the repression of those years was never conceived as a ‘system’. Most of the measures associated with the ‘terror’ were pieced together, adapted and strengthened by the National Convention over a period of several months, in response to the transforming circumstances of foreign war, civil war and popular pressure. Some had precedents dating back to the early years of the Revolution or even to the Old Regime. There was never anything approaching a single pre-conceived ideology at work in this process. And while the role of Robespierre was far from insignificant, he was by no means the dominant force as he has so often been presented. Indeed, in many cases Robespierre’s opponents, the Girondins, were at least as complicit in the creation of ‘terrorist’ institutions as were the Montagnard Jacobins.
Moreover, as the authors also make clear, it is impossible fully to understand the behaviour and political choices of the leaders of the Revolution without taking into consideration the role of emotions. On the one hand, it is important not to underestimate the extraordinary force of the joy and enthusiasm and the collective love of ‘fraternity’ as motivating factors – and the possible frustration and impatience that sometimes arose when the Revolutionaries were compelled to confront those who did not share the same enthusiasm. But to understand the repression of 1793–4, it is above all essential to examine the multiple manifestations of fear: fear of military invasion, fear of revenge, fear of traitors, fear of conspiracy: a complex of fears that might well be transformed into anger, hatred and cynical efforts at manipulation. The authors provide a graphic demonstration of the extent to which the ‘terrorists’ themselves might well feel ‘terrorized’.
To be sure, and it is to their credit, Biard and Linton are careful not to gloss over the human toll of the ‘terror’. They examine the statistics available for the executions ordered by Revolutionary tribunals and military commissions. They do not overlook the terrible repression against the Vendée rebellion and the so-called ‘Federalist’ revolts; the political ‘show trials’ against various factional opponents; and the generalized hecatomb in Paris in June and July 1794 arising from the ‘Prairial law’. They take note of the impact on the physical and mental health of those compelled to spend long months in insalubrious prisons. They meditate on the extent to which the Revolutionaries chose to set aside the Rights of Man in the face of the perceived necessity of ‘violating the law to save the law’.
But the authors also take care to contextualize all such actions in terms of both circumstances and emotions. They are impatient with the utterly inaccurate putative links between the terror phase of the Revolution and the totalitarian regimes and ideologies of the twentieth century. They underline the substantial number of exonerations and case dismissals (non-lieux), often 50 percent or higher, among those individuals brought before the Revolutionary tribunals. And they note the widely varying impact of the repression from region to region, department to department. It is clear that the most intense repression was precisely in those areas that were the scene of major armed counter-revolution against the Convention.
In conclusion, we must express our gratitude for the publication of this enormously thoughtful and nuanced study and for the authors’ efforts to come to grips with the phenomenon of French Revolutionary ‘terror’ in all its complexities and contradictions.
Timothy Tackett
Introduction: The Demons of Terror
Terror … the word has become synonymous with the French Revolution. When we think of the French Revolution, it is perhaps inevitable that we also think of the demons that came to haunt it and to overshadow its humanitarian project – the demons of terror. In our modern world this association has been intensified by the huge importance that the words ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ have assumed for us, and the visceral fears and hatreds that these words invoke. The use of a capital letter for the Terror has reified the word, all the more so as it is accompanied by a definite article intended to reinforce it: it has become the Terror, sometimes The Reign of Terror. By making this word signify a unified phenomenon, we assume that we know what it meant, and what it encompassed. Yet when the women and men of the Revolution used the term ‘terror’, they almost never gave it a capital letter, or the definite article. However they experienced terror, it was not yet, for them, the Terror.
The term, the Terror (definite article, capital T) comes primarily from historians who wanted to impose a particular narrative on the past. This process began with nineteenth-century French historians, above all, Jules Michelet. In Michelet’s general introduction to his Histoire de la Révolution française (published from 1847 onwards) not only did he use this capital letter, but, with his fluent, impressionistic style, he practically personified Terror, making it almost another character in his narrative of the Revolution, and giving it the capacity to speak, like a monster lurking in wait to savage the achievements of the Revolution.1 From that time onwards the practice of using a capital letter for Terror was increasingly adopted.2 A search on the Internet using the Ngram Viewer linguistic application demonstrates a surge in the use of the term with its capitalization in the decades 1840–60, a peak in the 1880–1910 period (linked to the Centenary of 1789) and then a marked decrease. Another surge, still more spectacular, came with the Bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989, an anniversary that coincided with intense historiographical controversy from historians of both left and right over the meaning and nature of the Revolution.3 Thus, the Terror as a unified and reified entity is a creation of historians, a polemical construction based on antagonistic interpretations, a means for historians to obsessively denigrate this revolution, or, indeed, any revolution.
One of the most problematic features of the term, the Terror and, even more so, The Reign of Terror, is that these words have so often been depicted as synonymous with a chronological period, although historians do not necessarily agree on when that period began, or when it ended. Whilst the expression the Terror has often been used to designate the entirety of the most radical phase of the Revolution, during the years 1793 and 1794, some of it coinciding with the Year II in the new revolutionary calendar (22 September 1793–21 September 1794), there is little consensus on when in 1793 the Terror began. To confuse us further, some historians have dated its onset further back, to August 1792, with the overthrow of the monarchy; still others have contended that the Terror began even earlier, seeing it as intrinsic to the entire Revolution – a view epitomized by Simon Schama’s often-cited pronouncement that: ‘The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count’.4 This chronological definition of the Terror is particularly misleading because it carries the implication, whether intended or not, that everything within the designated dates (assuming we go along with September 1793 to the end of July 1794) was about the Terror, and that nothing outside those dates qualifies as terror. Of course, the years 1793 and 1794 were a time as unprecedented as they were exceptional, but they cannot be reduced to the repressive aspects that for 200 years have commonly been associated with the Terror.
In recent years a growing number of historians have been prepared to call into question traditional delineations of the Terror.5 This is not an easy task, not least because the term is such a familiar one, to be found in almost all the older history books, and throughout popular culture. We are faced with a practical question – if we do not call it the Terror, then what do we call it, how do we define and explain it? What words do we use that do not become impossibly involved and complicated? Recently, the eminent American historian of the Revolution, Timothy Tackett stated that he continued to use ‘the term “Terror” – with the initial capital letter and the definite article … simply because, like other terms such as “the Renaissance” or “the Industrial Revolution”, it has long been adopted by almost every historian.’6 As a pragmatic judgement, Tackett’s perspective has much to recommend it. Regardless of anything else, the term is a convenient shorthand, and for this reason, if no other, is likely to prove tenacious.
Nevertheless, in this book we shall put the case for changing how historians and the wider public speak of this subject, or at least to give them pause. Our intention is to call into question many of the assumptions that lie behind the easy recourse to speaking of the Terror, and to invite readers, as well as to challenge ourselves, to think anew. While this book is in part a synthesis of the most recent works on the question both in France and in English-speaking countries, it is also, of course, based very much on our own researches on a subject to which we have, between us, dedicated a daunting number of years.
We will make the case, therefore, for historians to speak henceforth of ‘terror’ and no longer only of the Terror. We emphasize that this does not in any way mean we desire to minimize the violence of the revolutionary period – as shall become clear, in some locations there was a great deal of violence, as well as widespread threats of violence. Nor are we trying to restate the classic thesis that the revolutionaries were forced by ‘circumstances’ to adopt ‘terror’ to ensure the survival of the Republic, making terror a regrettable necessity. One thing that becomes apparent is that, when revolutionaries resorted to terror to defend the moral gains of the Revolution, in an undeniable sense those moral gains were lost anyway. Yet neither do we endorse the thesis that the French revolutionary terror can be conceived as a matrix and model for twentieth-century totalitarianisms. The Jacobins were not the Bolsheviks. Robespierre was no Stalin.
The notion that terror was simply a logical result of circumstances, devised to stave off threats of military violence and the potential annihilation of the revolutionaries and the Revolution itself, by the foreign powers and opponents from the old social elite, is not in itself enough to explain the part played by emotions in revolutionary decision-making; nor why revolutionary leaders turned on one another with such catastrophic effects. The colossal impact of war and civil war accounts for some of this, but it is far from being able to explain everything. Nor can any study of the ideologies of 1789, of liberty, equality and the rights of man, of justice, the general will, or natural rights, do much to help us to understand why revolutionaries, terrified of conspiracy, turned on one another.
We wish, from the outset, to steer clear of historiographical visions that are more related to ideological polemics than to historical research. For that reason, rather than begin our study with a hypothetical date that would mark the supposed beginnings of Terror, or with a wide-ranging and possibly nebulous account of its much-debated origins, we will start at a moment that is so often said to have ‘ended’ the Terror, but which, we will contend, saw the beginning of its invention as a unifying concept. That moment came immediately after the overthrow and execution without trial of the revolutionary leader, Maximilien Robespierre and many of his adherents over four days from 27 to 30 July 1794. This was the so-called ‘Thermidorian’ moment, named after Thermidor, the month in the revolutionary calendar in which it took place.
The men who joined forces to kill Robespierre would become known as the ‘Thermidorians’. They were, like him, members of the National Convention, the parliamentary body that had been responsible for the laws that enabled terror. Many of these men, like Robespierre himself, were Montagnards, that is, members of the Jacobin Club who sat in the Convention. Thus, they themselves had been, over many months, at the heart of a wider group (including many non-Montagnards), which had worked together to promote revolutionary policies, including those that enabled terror. They too, therefore, shared in collective responsibility for the violence and threats of violence of the previous months.
Through the ensuing weeks from late July to mid-September, the men who had killed Robespierre, began to systematically spread a vengeful prose intended to cast opprobrium on the ‘monster’ who had been slaughtered, but also to collectively exonerate the National Convention of its responsibility in the legislation that made it possible to crack down on its adversaries. They then created from scratch the idea of a ‘system’ or a ‘coherent policy’ that would have triggered and then implemented the ‘terror’, the whole blame resting posthumously on Robespierre and his supporters, an episode that was said to have been closed by his elimination in Thermidor. Ironically, many people in regions away from Paris, areas of civil war, federalist revolts, and the frontiers, were barely aware of terror, and learned about it retrospectively from Thermidorian texts, images, pamphlets and prison memoirs which informed them that they had been subjected to a ‘Reign of Terror’ led by Robespierre and his allies.7 Not content with self-amnesty, the ‘Thermidorians’ claimed that the ‘terror’ had ended, even as they continued to use the machinery of the extraordinary government that had been gradually put in place during 1793 and given the title of ‘revolutionary government’, encompassing the use of repressive methods and state violence.
This thesis of an end to the Terror in the aftermath of 9 and 10 Thermidor was to impose itself durably in historiography, both by minimizing the violence that continued to take place during the remainder of the existence of the Convention until October 1795 (before separating, the deputies voted themselves an amnesty for the actions in which they had taken part) and the succeeding regime, that of the Directory. By positing a neat and convenient date for the ‘end to the Terror’, this thesis had the effect of pushing historians to look for one or more dates likely to mark the ‘beginning of the Terror’, rather than to try to detect terror’s deeper, more problematic roots.
The most common date chosen by historians for the start of a system of terror is in September 1793, when it has often been stated that the Convention decreed that ‘terror’ should become an official policy (made ‘order of the day’). In fact, no such decree was passed, either then or at any other date. Should we then look for the beginnings of this ‘terror’ in legislation passed in response to the military crisis of spring 1793; or a little earlier, in January of that year with the execution of the king; or earlier still, in August 1792 with the overthrow of the monarchy; or even earlier in the Revolution, in line with Schama’s pronouncement that terror was already in place with the Rights of Man in 1789? In our judgement, trying to establish a birth date for ‘terror’ is a vain approach: ‘terror’ cannot be explained or understood as a chronological sequence limited by a beginning and an end. As Haim Burstin has pointed out, to persist in proposing a birth date of the Terror (‘one of the favourite exercises of historians’, he wrote) is to go down the wrong path in seeking to discover a kind of ‘original sin of the Revolution’, or even the moment when it ‘slipped’, to use the verb formerly proposed by revisionist historians, François Furet and Denis Richet.8
In order to grasp what terror really meant for the revolutionary generation, it is advisable not to limit our enquiries to its violent aspects alone, but to understand terror in a bigger context of crisis, and, even more, we need to situate the contemporary meaning of terror in the context of a political exception, the same one that brought about the revolutionary government in the autumn of 1793 and which developed out of its beginnings the previous spring. The growing weight of fears and emotions, the progressive aggravation of the confrontations and the parallel radicalization of repressive legislation, the accentuation of political struggles within the Convention, all of these factors contributed to the step-by-step development and maintenance of ‘terror’. Linked to exceptional institutions set up alongside the constitutional machinery of power, the phenomenon naturally had its own rhythms and logics, geography and balance sheets, all of which contribute to illustrating the impossibility of speaking of a ‘system’ that uniformly extended its hold over the entire national territory.
‘Terror’ is a watchword that has circulated exhaustively, a political concept that has been the object of much discourse and theoretical justification, a process, but also and above all, a phenomenon that has permeated both our understanding of the Revolution and of its revolutionaries. By covering the chronological period of the Revolution in an all-encompassing blanket on which is written ‘this was the time of the Terror’, anything that cannot be designated under that heading is obscured. Whether intentional or not, this can be misleading. We should not lose sight of the extent to which revolutionaries remained committed to liberty, equality and the rights of man, even during the crisis years of 1793 to 1794. The demons of terror should not blind us to this fact. To take just one example, it was revolutionary France that, before Britain and long before America, in February 1794, at the height of the chronological period traditionally designated as the Terror, decreed the freedom of all slaves in the French colonies. While this decree followed on from the slave uprising in the colony of Saint-Domingue (later the Republic of Haiti), and the question of rights for all remained deeply problematic in France, we need to acknowledge the achievements of the revolutionaries in all their complexity.9
We should also be aware that part of the reason why our minds picture the guillotine and the Revolutionary Tribunal as so powerful and so indelibly redolent of terror – literally terrifying – is that French revolutionaries made it that way. If we still, in the present day, think of the French Revolution as synonymous with the theatre of the guillotine, this is due in large part to the symbolism, rhetoric and imagery deployed by the revolutionaries as a deliberate strategy, presenting themselves as striking back hard at the Republic’s many enemies through this spectacular form of revolutionary justice. In this sense, the revolutionary terror was, as Carla Hesse concludes, ‘a weapon of the weak’.10
Finally, there is the problem that to label what happened in France as the Terror, encourages the misleading supposition that somehow ‘terror’ was specifically and uniquely French, attributable to some endemic characteristic of the French situation or political theory. If we state that only France in the late eighteenth century had the Terror, how then do we designate the violence of the American Revolution, or the brutal repression by English forces of the revolt in Ireland in 1798? To quote Hesse again: ‘The French Revolution was, it is now clear, quantitatively, a no more – and probably a significantly less – violent affair than its sister revolution across the Atlantic’.11 The American and French Revolutions shared much common ancestry, though they developed in different ways. ‘Liberty or death’ was a rallying cry for both. It was a phrase that owed much to ideas about love of liberty and devotion to political virtue, drawn and adapted from the common culture of classical antiquity. Its literal meaning, in the words of the American revolutionary, Patrick Henry in 1775, was ‘give me liberty or give me death’.12 For many of the French revolutionaries this would be their fate. They sought liberty, but ultimately the demons of terror brought death. This book is an attempt to explain how that happened.
Notes
1.
Jules Michelet,
Histoire de la Révolution française
, Paris, Chamerot, 1847, vol. I, p. XI. The definite article and the capital T then reappear many times in his writings, above all in volumes VI and VII, devoted to the years 1793 and 1794, even if there is nothing systematic about their employment. In 1841, a capital letter also features in the
Souvenirs de la Terreur
, but only in the title of the work, which is something else (
Souvenirs de la Terreur de 1788 à 1793, par M. Georges Duval; précé-dés d’une introduction historique par M. Charles Nodier
, Paris, Werdet, 1841). Moreover, the author himself distinguishes between the use or non-use of capital letters, especially since he systematically underlines the term in italics: ‘Now a word about the title of my book. I entitle it
Souvenirs de la Terreur
, although my account begins in the year 1788. It’s my opinion that
the terror
began at the same time as the revolution […] up until 9 thermidor of the year 2 of the republic, Paris and the whole of France were under the yoke of
the terror
’ (ibid., pp. ix–x). Precedents also exist for the use of capital letters in the title of a work but not in its text (thus
Des Effets de la Terreur
by Benjamin Constant in the Year V, and again the capitalization does not appear clearly until the ‘printer’s notice’ that opens the edition. The title itself is composed entirely in capital letters). On the other hand, in their original editions, the first histories of the French Revolution, by Thiers (1823–1827), Mignet (1824), Buchez and Roux (1834–1838), Blanc (1847–1862) and Lamartine (1847) do not use the word with a capital T. Lamartine sometimes emphasized the word using italics, but not in a systematic way, and without using capitalization. Cabet, for his part, sometimes used it in his own account of the Revolution, but this is hardly significant, because this author multiplies his use of capitals erroneously and indiscriminately, for example to write: ‘People’, ‘Virtue’, ‘Morality’, ‘Deputy’, etc. (Etienne Cabet,
Histoire populaire de la Révolution française de 1789 à 1830
, Paris, Pagnerre, 1839–1840).
2.
Louis Blanc,
Histoire de la Révolution française
, Paris, Furnes, Pagnerre, second edition, 1869. Louis Blanc had previously critiqued Quinet’s use of the term: ‘I would not be one of those whom Edgar Quinet’s book has deeply grieved, if the author had not distorted […] the nature of what he condemns […] if, by making the Terror a
system
, he had not made the most intelligent and devoted revolutionaries responsible for the fatality they had to endure and the very excesses they fought against […] No, no, whatever Mr. Quinet says, the Terror was not a s
ystem
; it was, quite otherwise, an immense misfortune, born of prodigious peril’ (ibid., vol. I, pp. xvii–xviii. The italicizations are those of Louis Blanc). The work of Edgar Quinet had appeared in 1865 under the title
La Révolution
, Paris, Lacroix, Verboeckhoven.
3.
The politics behind this controversy featured in a polemical study by Steven Kaplan,
Farewell Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France, 1789–1989
, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1996 (French edition, 1993).
4.
Simon Schama,
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
, London, Penguin, 1989.
5.
For recent approaches to these debates, see the contributions by Michel Biard, Mette Harder, Carla Hesse and Ronen Steinberg, edited and introduced by Marisa Linton, to ‘Rethinking the French Revolutionary Terror’, part of the H-France Salon, ‘230 Years After: What does the French Revolution Mean Today?’,
H-France Salon
, vol. 11, nos 16–21 (2019), at:
https://h-france.net/h-france-salon-volume-11-2019/
6.
Timothy Tackett,
Anatomie de la Terreur. Le processus révolutionnaire 1787–1793
, Paris, Le Seuil, 2018 (the English-language edition appeared under the title:
The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution
, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2015). As an indication of a shift in Tackett’s own thinking, this sentence does not appear in the original edition, but in a note in the foreword to the French edition (p. 379).
7.
See Howard G. Brown, ‘The Thermidorians’ Terror: Atrocities, Tragedies, Trauma’, in David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker (eds),
Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth of the Modern World
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 193–235. Brown states that, ‘The “Terror” as a distinct period of the French Revolution was largely a construct of lawmakers who took the reins of government after the defeat of Robespierre and his closest allies’.
8.
Haim Burstin,
Révolutionnaires. Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française
, Paris, Vendémiaire, 2013. François Furet and Denis Richet,
La Révolution
, Paris, Hachette, 1965–1966.
9.
It was Napoleon Bonaparte, some years after the time designated as
the
Terror
, who forcibly reinstated slavery in those colonies that remained to France. Saint-Domingue remained at liberty, though at a terrible cost in lives. The complex issue of slavery in the colonies and within France has generated a formidable historiography, including Jeremy Popkin,
You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010; and Laurent Dubois,
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005. For recent thinking on the problematic nature of ‘rights’, see the contributions by Mita Choudhury, Pernille Røge and Pierre Serna, edited and introduced by Ian Coller to ‘Whose Revolution?’, part of the
H-France Salon
, ‘230 Years After’.
10.
Carla Hesse, ‘Terror and the Revolutionary Tribunals’, in ‘Rethinking the French Revolutionary Terror’.
11.
Ibid. On violence in the American Revolution, see Holger Hoock,
Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth
, New York, Crown, 2017. See too, Annie Jourdan,
La Révolution, une exception française?
, Paris, Flammarion, 2006; and the contributions by Rafe Blaufarb, Paolo Conte, Anna Karla and Matthijs Lok, edited and introduced by Annie Jourdan to ‘The French Revolution Abroad’, part of the
H-France Salon
, ‘230 Years After’.
12.
Henry and other founding fathers of the American Revolution were familiar with this political phrase which appeared in Joseph Addison’s play,
Cato, a Tragedy
, written in 1712.
Chapter 1The Terror – a Concept Imposed by the Thermidorians
One of the first texts openly attacking the French Revolution, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, was published in 1790. This work by the Anglo-Irish author and Member of Parliament was quickly translated into French and other languages.1 For some it was seen as a prophetic vision announcing the Terror, as it denounced the violence of 1789, especially the killing of two royal guards during the revolutionary days of 5 and 6 October, when a crowd broke into the palace of Versailles, and under the threat of popular violence, the king agreed to move to Paris, to be under the watchful eyes of the populace. Burke not only uses the word ‘terror’ but also describes the Constituent Assembly as a meeting of deputies trembling before popular violence: ‘It is beyond doubt, that, under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations.’2
A very different view was taken by another British author, Thomas Paine, already known for having politically engaged several years earlier with the independence movement in the American colonies with his seminal pro-revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense. Paine strongly objected to Burke’s exaggeration of the extent of the violence of 1789, as well as his comparisons with the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the late seventeenth century, which Burke depicted in glowing, Manichean terms. Paine sharply responded to Burke in Rights of Man, a work published in early 1791 and translated into French that May. Whilst Paine also used the word ‘terror’, he saw its purpose and the reasons behind it very differently. For Paine, if the ignorant populace resorted to inflicting ‘terror’, this was the consequence of them having learned such tactics from the autocratic government under which they had lived. Paine stressed that the violence of 1789 could only be understood if viewed in relation to the cruelty of the Ancien Régime, with the ‘terror’ that the people suffered provoking the appearance of another ‘terror’:
It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practise.3
To this idea of a passive ‘terror’ (which one suffers under) ripening into an active, vengeful ‘terror’ (which is directed at one’s enemies), Paine added that governments need to be taught about the notion of humanity before asking it of ‘the people’. To prove his point, Paine recalled the punishment of Damiens, who had been convicted in 1757 of having attempted regicide against Louis XV. Damiens was subjected to extensive ritualized torture, climaxing in his being ‘drawn and quartered’; the sentence carried out as a public spectacle to terrify the populace. Paine concluded that governments make a mistake in ‘governing men by terror, instead of reason’.4 One year later, in late July 1792, just before the fall of the constitutional monarchy, Robespierre took up the link between ‘terror’ and bad government, assimilating ‘terror’ with despotism: ‘Montesquieu said that virtue was the principle of republican government, honour that of a monarchy, and terror that of despotism. We need to imagine a new principle for the new framework of things that we are in.’5 Montesquieu was again a source for Robespierre in early 1794 when he attempted to bring together ‘terror’ and ‘virtue’ in his speech on 5 February 1794 (17 Pluviôse Year II). Without virtue, terror was disastrous, but virtue was powerless without ‘terror’.6 The despotism of liberty, to take up the bold oxymoron coined by Robespierre, the union between ‘terror’ and ‘virtue’, between ‘terror’ and justice, would be linked to a state of exceptional or crisis government that was by essence transitional – the condition of France in 1793 and in the Year II – and not to a preconceived political project as the ultimate goal in itself. For Robespierre, ‘terror’ was closely linked to justice – a harsh and improvised justice for a time of crisis, but still justice. After the fall of Robespierre, the meaning of ‘terror’ would quickly evolve into something rather different, when the victorious Thermidorians started to retrospectively invent the idea of a unified ‘system’ of terror.
1. How the ‘system of terror’ and the black legend of Robespierre were retrospectively invented
On the morning of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, member of the Committee of Public Safety (the most important of the Committees of the National Convention), rose to make a speech in the Convention in which he intended to support his colleague and friend on the Committee, Maximilien Robespierre. As Saint-Just began to speak, he was interrupted by a fellow Montagnard, Jean-Lambert Tallien, who pushed his way to the rostrum, supported by a concerted group of revolutionaries, many of them also Montagnards, to denounce Robespierre. Tumult ensued. Over several hours accusations spiralled, culminating with the arrest of five deputies: Robespierre, his younger brother, Augustin, Saint-Just, Georges Couthon (also on the Committee of Public Safety), and Philippe Le Bas, of the Committee of General Security. Both Augustin Robespierre and Le Bas had actually asked to be arrested, rather than become party to arresting the others. By nightfall of the following day, 10 Thermidor, all five were dead. This moment, the Thermidorian moment, marked the onset of a sea-change in revolutionary politics, whereby the immediate past would be rewritten and reinvented, in order to blacken the reputations of Robespierre, Saint-Just and their adherents as having been personally responsible for creating a ‘system of terror’, whilst exculpating many surviving revolutionaries, who had been equally involved in revolutionary government and the recourse to ‘terror’ policies, but who had chosen the winning side in the conflict of Thermidor.
Bertrand Barère, who had been a close colleague of Robespierre and Saint-Just on the Committee of Public Safety, took an early lead in the frantic rush to distance himself from the fallen deputies. In his speech on 14 Thermidor, Barère separated ‘terror’ from ‘justice’, two terms that Robespierre had often tied together. Arguing that ‘terror was always the arm of despotism [whereas] justice was the weapon of liberty’, he urged the Convention to ‘substitute inflexible justice for terror’.7 Barère knew very well – none better – how the repressive legislation against the opponents of the Revolution, real or imagined, had been conceived and implemented, for he had been at the heart of it. Now, in a remarkable political volte-face, Barère removed any responsibility from the Convention, in particular from members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security (the Committee of General Security had responsibility for policing, security and prisons). Barère denounced the ‘usurpation of national authority’ that Robespierre and his followers had committed when they had imposed decrees in response to ‘circumstances forced and prepared by themselves’.8
Less than three weeks later, on 2 Fructidor (9 August), an exchange between three other Montagnard deputies illustrated the divide within the Convention. Louchet, the Montagnard deputy who had been the first to demand the vote authorizing the arrest order against Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, now took to the floor to defend policies of terror. He underlined the seriousness of the dangers threatening the Republic and the need to combat them, stating that he was ‘convinced that there is no other way to do so than to maintain terror as the order of the day everywhere’.9 With the hall resounding with cries of ‘justice, justice!’, Louchet clarified his position by associating the two words: ‘I understand by the word “terror” the most severe justice’. This position was immediately supported by Charlier: ‘Justice for patriots, terror for aristocrats’.10 A third Montagnard, Tallien, who had led the attack on Robespierre and his fellow Montagnard deputies, Saint-Just, Couthon, Le Bas and Augustin Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, defined ‘terror’ as a weapon of tyranny, even while supporting the idea that justice must remain severe against ‘the enemies of the nation’. According to Tallien: ‘Robespierre too constantly repeated that terror needed to be made the order of the day, and while with such language he imprisoned patriots and led them to the scaffold, he protected the rascals that served him’.11 This was another political sleight-of-hand. In Robespierre’s speeches and writings he had always linked the terms ‘terror’, ‘justice’ and ‘virtue’; whilst the expression ‘terreur à l’ordre du jour’ (‘terror made the order of the day’) was not his doing. Robespierre had mentioned these two words together only four times. In the summer of 1794, he used them to refer not to the repressive measures put in place by the Convention and its committees but to a ‘system of terror and slander’ targeted towards him, depicting him as a dictator, and attempting to destroy the revolutionary government.12 It was Tallien, rather than Robespierre, who would develop the political concept of the ‘system of terror’ just a few days later.
It was on 11 Fructidor (28 August), that Tallien elaborated the concept of a ‘system of terror’. While he was not the first to use the term, previously deputies had mentioned it almost in passing, and directing it at different political rivals.13 In his momentous speech Tallien developed and defined a new theory of a ‘system of terror’. In speaking of this system, he coined a new term, one which would haunt our modern world: that of ‘terrorism’. He also called it a ‘government of terror’ and a ‘terror agency’. He took great pains to exclude the new – post-Robespierre – revolutionary government of which he was himself a member (he had been rewarded for his part in the fall of Robespierre by a seat on the Committee of Public Safety) from this supposed system. Thus he could better denounce terror as an illegitimate system of the immediate past, whilst safeguarding the legitimacy of the current revolutionary government, which was to serve the Thermidorians’ new political agenda. In defining the ‘system of terror’ he gave a vivid picture of the feelings of fear it engendered: terror took place in the mind’s imagination, as well as in reality:
There are two ways that a government can make itself feared: it can police bad actions, threaten and punish them with proportionate punishment, or it can threaten people, threaten them at all times and for all things, threaten them with whatever the imagination can conceive as most cruel. The impressions that these two methods produce are different: one is a potential fear, the other a ceaseless torment; one is a foreboding of the terror that follows upon a crime, the other terror itself instilled in the soul despite knowing one is innocent; one is the reasonable fear of the laws, the other the stupid fear of persons. The characteristics of terror should be distinguished. Terror is a generalized, habitual trembling, an exterior trembling that affects the most hidden fibres, degrading man and turning him into an animal; it is the disruption of all physical forces, the commotion of all moral faculties, the disruption of all ideas, the upheaval of all emotions …
Since terror is an extreme emotion, it is not susceptible of being either more or less. The fear of the laws, on the other hand, can be increased if needed. Which of these two fears supports, consummates, guarantees the revolution? That is what the question boils down to and what I will examine. Let us begin with terror: judge it by the means it is supposed to employ and by the effects it produces. A government can only inspire terror by threatening capital punishments, only by threatening them with it ceaselessly and threatening everyone, only by threatening through acts of violence ever renewed and ever increased; only by threatening all sorts of action, and even inaction; only by threatening with all sorts of proof and even without a shred of proof; only by threatening with the always striking sight of absolute power and limitless cruelty. To make every person tremble, it is necessary not only to link every action with a torment, every word with a threat, every silence with suspicion; it is necessary to place on every step a trap, in every house a spy, in every family a traitor, in the service of a tribunal of assassins. It is necessary, in one word, to know how to torture all citizens by the misfortunes of some, cutting the life of some by shortening the lives of the others; that is the art of spreading terror. But does this art belong to a regular, free, humane government, or is it tyranny? I often hear it asked why the system of terror cannot be limited to suspect classes while leaving others alone. In response I wish to ask how there can be security for someone where actions are prejudged based on persons, and not persons by their actions. I would like to add that terror must be everywhere or nowhere. The Convention should no longer accept that the republic be divided into two classes, those who create fear and those who live in fear, persecutors and the persecuted. Couthon and Robespierre are no longer here to obstruct the defence of equality and justice. I am also asked if it is possible to strike terror in the hearts of evildoers without troubling good citizens of any class; I answer that it is not, for if the government of the terror pursues some citizens based on presumed intentions, it alarms everyone; and if it only monitors and punishes actions, it is no longer terror that is inspired but another kind of fear that I have already mentioned, the healthy fear of punishment following upon a crime. It is thus right to say that the system of terror presupposes the exercise of an arbitrary power in those charged with spreading it.14
Tallien added to the horror by stating that the ‘terror’ could strike any citizen anywhere in France; that the increasing number of capital punishments came from the very nature of this ‘system’ that could well fall into excess; that the executions were accompanied by the spectacle of rivers of blood to strike fear even harder into people’s minds; that executing different kinds of people together indiscriminately was another means to instil fear; and, finally, that a most cruel refinement was the collective executions of friends or members of the same family sent to the guillotine together.15 When it came to the guilt of Robespierre and his co-conspirators, there was, for Tallien, no doubt:
Citizens, everything that you have just heard is but a commentary on what Barère said at this very rostrum on the day that followed Robespierre’s death. I would like to add one thing: this was Robespierre’s system. He was the one who put it in practice with the aid of several subalterns, some of whom were killed alongside him and others of whom are buried alive in public hatred. The Convention was a victim, never an accomplice.16
In the weeks that followed Tallien’s speech, another new term would be coined, that of ‘terrorist’, to define those who had supported the ‘system of terror’.
The hunt for Robespierre’s surviving ‘subalterns’ started right away. The next day, 12 Fructidor, the deputy, Lecointre denounced seven former members of the two major committees, among them Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, and Barère. The denunciation was timed to follow on from Tallien’s speech. While the accusation was rejected as slanderous, it was followed a month later with a second denunciation, made by another deputy, Legendre, against the three former members. Vadier took it up and an investigative committee was created.17
Contrary to Tallien’s claims, when Barère had denounced Robespierre and his ‘co-conspirators’ on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety on 11 Thermidor, he had made no mention of a ‘system’ they had put in place. Rather, Barère’s denunciation had followed a standard pattern amongst revolutionary factions, of accusing the four deputies who had been executed the previous day of having usurped public authority to make themselves rulers of France, a triumvirate of tyrants. Such accusations owed much to a common trope in revolutionary politics of accusing opponents of imitating Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic.18 According to Barère’s hastily-manufactured charges, Robespierre was supposed to ‘reign’ over Paris and the central part of the Republic, Saint-Just over the North (a fabrication based on his having served as a deputy on mission to the armies on the northern fronts and the Rhine), whilst Couthon and Robespierre’s brother, Augustin, would rule over the South.19 Not one word was said on the fifth deputy who died on 10 Thermidor, Le Bas, who chose to commit suicide rather than have the Convention send him to the guillotine with his friends. Barère’s speech contributed to the black legend of Robespierre, the ‘new Catiline’, stories which started circulating in the summer of 1794, if not earlier.20 While Barère’s speech was fundamentally different from Tallien’s in almost every respect, they had one key thing in common: the Convention and its committees (including, of course, themselves) had no responsibility for the ‘terror’ – it was the fault of other men. Dissenting voices could hardly rise to be heard. Thus Cambon was not heard at all when, in spite of denouncing Robespierre and ‘his system of terror’, he also pointed out that a number of exceptional institutions had been created by decrees voted in, quasi-unanimously, by the Convention to meet the crisis: ‘Take note that we are not in an ordinary time; take note that the Declaration of Rights did not institute surveillance committees, and yet you have unanimously judged them necessary.’21
The Convention had given itself an amnesty for its actions in supporting crisis measures enabling terror. It gave itself this absolution by making Robespierre the scapegoat, the so-called sole ‘mastermind’ behind a ‘reign of terror’. As a consequence, over the next two centuries, Robespierre would be remembered as the originator and master of the ‘terror’, an all-powerful dictator who had stifled all debate by imposing his domination over the Convention and kept adding names to endless interminable lists of undesirables, a tyrant who dreamed of being crowned king by marrying the daughter of Louis XVI so as to be tied in blood to the Bourbon line, a ferocious triumvir who imposed his authority upon Saint-Just and Couthon (Augustin Robespierre, mentioned by Barère, quickly disappeared from the group, not only to refine the formula of a conspiratorial triumvirate inspired by antiquity but also because he was not condemned to death for any reason except his family name, as no crime could be pinned on him). This allowed the Convention to spread the news over the entire national territory and to the armies, presenting Thermidor as the fall of yet another faction that would have usurped the sovereignty of the nation. A flood of letters gushed in to Paris in the summer and autumn of 1794. Written in a language laden with clichés and a limited, stereotyped range of vocabulary, they give an idea of how the news had been circulated to the provinces and how local authorities, popular societies and simple citizens saluted the Convention for its fine deed against ‘the infamous Robespierre’ or the ‘monstrous triumvirate’.22
Many pamphlets and brochures came out in the weeks after Thermidor, some waxing on the popular motif of ‘Robespierre’s queue’ – literally ‘Robespierre’s tail’ (meaning the remains of his faction, but also a term with a humorous phallic connotation)23 or the arrival of Robespierre and the Jacobins into hell.24 Among this mass of writings, the blood spilled in the execution of the ‘system of the terror’ occupied pride of place, while the sexualized humour offered light relief, attracting readers whilst giving an opportunity to exorcize fear through laughter: thus, ‘the revolution’s events often give new words to the republican dictionary – and here is one that makes all the women laugh: everyone wants to know his queue: Robespierre’s queue, give me his queue, respond to the queue, defend your queue, cut off the queue.’25
Mixing the Incorruptible’s queue with his descent into hell, a supposed letter that Robespierre’s ghost sent to his followers from the other side, claims that he explained to the ‘tribunal of hell’ that he wished to apply a ‘policy … just like yours’, sharpening the ‘liberticide daggers’, robbing fortunes, destroying commerce, spreading famine, protecting brigands, ‘immolating so many men in the name of humanity’ – in short, ‘put terror in power’.26 As Robespierre’s ghost adds that it would have ‘taken five mortal years to arrive at [his] goal’, the author provides a chronological list of the projects put in place for the ‘reign of the terror’ between summer 1789 and summer 1794. The political demonstration imparted two ideas to the reader: on the one hand, Robespierre had been moved by an ambition to impose a bloody dictatorship from the beginning of the Revolution; and, secondly, that his execution put an end to ‘the reign of the terror’, an expression with a long life ahead of it.27 Tallien’s political analysis is confirmed, with the word ‘terror’ having a widely different meaning in 1794 than it had in 1789, to say nothing of the fact that ‘terror as the order of the day’ had never been imposed by Robespierre and his supporters.
2. Developing use of the word ‘terror’ between 1789 and 1794
As we shall see in the following chapter, the term ‘terror’ was already familiar to the revolutionaries of 1789 from a number of contexts, both political and non-political. In the first period of the Revolution, including up to the crisis point of 1794 when a new political meaning triumphed, these diverse meanings of ‘terror’ continued to circulate.
In the autumn of 1792, a letter in the newspaper Le Moniteur reported how French troops entered Belgium after the victory at Jemappes (6 November): ‘Dumouriez is at the gates of Brussels. Terror precedes the republic’s victorious armies. The despots and their cowardly servants are on the run.’28 In the first months of the Vendée uprising in 1793 (on the Vendée, see chapter 7), ‘terror’ was often used in its military, not political, meaning, as in a terror inflicted by soldiers, as two news items in Le Moniteur on 2 July show. The first, a dispatch from the northern front, related that ‘the French victory near Arlon had truly instilled terror in the area, so much so that the boat masters of Trier had received an order to keep their boats nearby in order to transport the warehouses further away.’29 The second item, a letter from General Westermann, announced that ‘the terrible example of Amailloux and the castle of Lescure sowed terror among the lost inhabitants’. Amailloux was a town in which Westermann’s troops hunted down the Vendéen rebels, burning down buildings and killing a number of inhabitants while the general proclaimed that any village providing aid or recruits to the rebels would suffer the same fate. That same day, he burnt down the castle of Clisson, residence to Lescure, one of the Vendéen leaders. This recourse to terror did not, in itself, seem to raise any doubt, considering that the convergence of these two events, on different military fronts, one exterior, the other interior, shows that the military meaning of the term was well accepted. On the other hand, the fact that the example Westermann wished to give affected not only the armed rebels but also civilians testifies to the horrors of a
