In Defence of the Terror (5 page)

Besides, approaching the Terror from the side of the emotions makes it possible to distinguish between the violence triggered by the circulation of discourse,
31
and that triggered by the rupture of a conscious or unconscious sacred equilibrium. Patrice Gueniffey, borrowing the concept of a ‘cumulative radicalization of discourse' from Hans Mommsen, who coined it in relation to National Socialism, maintains:

As soon as it is formulated, any definition of the Revolution is exposed to the competition of other definitions that deepen its nature and radicalize its objectives. In this lies the motor of that revolutionary dynamic which, escalating in the definition of ends and the choice of means, leads inexorably to violence by way of a process of cumulative radicalization of discourse.
32

Far, however, from viewing the Terror as based on this kind of dynamic of narrative economy which aimed at the liquidation of an enemy to be overthrown, I shall put forward the hypothesis of a founding dynamic of emotional economy, one that arises from the sacred and from vengeance.
33
In this context, the revolutionaries had both to understand the risks of violence and dislocation of society bound up with the rapid circulation of emotions, and to control these by the symbolic activity of which discourse is part – in particular, the discourse of law.

What put the Terror on the agenda, as we know, was a new declaratory turn. Faced with the intent of the counter-revolutionaries to terrorize the patriots, the latter replied: ‘Let us be terrible.'
34
This turn has been interpreted in terms of a ‘terror-response'.
35
Both of these combined terms are suggestive, as it was precisely a question of response, in the sense of finding a new voice after a sense of annihilation. Response is not like a simple rebound in which the ball is sent back across the net: it is rather a question of a resumption, in the sense in which a subject recovers and thus takes ‘the initiative of terror'.
36
And the notion of emotional economy strikes me as particularly pertinent for analyzing the modalities of this resumption, since this return or resumption can be described not as a mere shift in utterance, but rather as a shift in emotions, from ‘being terrorized' to ‘being in anger' and ‘being terrifying' – or more precisely, as a transcending of ‘agitation' (
émoi
). This French word
émoi
derives from the earlier
esmayer
, meaning ‘to disturb, frighten, deprive someone of their strength, discourage'. This verb also means to take someone out of themselves by casting a spell.
Émoi
is therefore a generic figure of fright, and thus deadly. Far from presupposing an immediate response, it implies for those who feel it a high risk of demise.

The question, ‘How was Terror put on the agenda?' should thus be replaced by the question, ‘How was the dread instilled in the revolutionaries by their enemies overcome and transformed into the demand for terror?' And beyond this, how was this demand was understood and accepted? And finally, what did the Terror found, or seek to found?

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 being signs of a death-dealing tendency, these demands were the sign of a movement of life and enthusiasm.
12
They transmuted the dissolving emotions produced throughout the social body by acts of profanation into emotions that gave new courage. Thus, on the revolutionary
journée
of 20 June 1792, the faubourg Saint-Antoine came en masse to the Tuileries, exchanged toasts with the king and made him wear the red cap of liberty. It was a symbolic victory of little substance, since even so the king did not ratify the decrees that aimed at the defence of Paris and its revolutionary gains – decrees that he had already vetoed.
13
But this
journée
was also when the faubourg explicitly demanded that the Assembly should declare the
patrie
to be in danger. Santerre, in his speech to the Assembly, reaffirmed this ability to regain the energy of liberty in action when what was sacred was in danger:

Do the enemies of the
patrie
imagine that the men of 14 July have gone to sleep? If they appeared to be so, their awakening is terrible. They have lost nothing of their energy. The immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man is too deeply engraved in their hearts. This precious treasure will be defended by them, and nothing will be capable of stealing it from them.
14

In order to understand the emotional economy of the demand for terror, we do not have to ask whether the obsession with plots was really well-founded, and how the revolutionary sacrality that had been produced was being flouted. What effectively instilled dread was this rupture of the sacred.

It remains to be understood how this movement of enthusiasm that demanded vengeance did not produce a ‘fury of destruction'
15
in the sense of a generalized massacre, but led to the establishment of a specific mechanism that aimed on the contrary to pacify it.

THE ASSEMBLY MUST TRANSLATE THE
EMOTIONS OF THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE

The revolutionaries were aware of the volcanic character of popular emotions. In June 1792, the question of insurrection was debated at the Jacobin club. Jean Bon Saint-André contrasted ‘the insurrection of a people of slaves that is accompanied by every horror' with ‘that of a free people', which was ‘simply the expression subject to the general will to change or modify certain articles of the Constitution'.
16
This argument aimed to avoid attaching to the idea of insurrection ‘that of revolt and carnage'.
17
A poem sent by citizen Desforges in spring 1792 is particularly eloquent in this respect:

And in the great theatre where fate has placed us,

liberty means life and licence death.

Licence dares everything with no thought

to the custom of sovereign laws or a wise liberty;

‘free' is the word for a man, not for a raging beast.

There are, my friends, imperious rights

and eternal laws that must not be infringed.

If we flouted these we would have too much to fear

from the whole world, as history can witness.

The first of these rights is the first need,

ever arising anew, that each has for the other.

Rescue my good and I shall rescue yours,

and I shall impose on myself the respectable law

of daring all for the man that risks all for me.

Then you can understand how, at a moment of crisis,

a whole people is kindled and electrified . . .
18

It is mutual aid, then, that gives legitimate insurrection its value, over against a generalized massacre committed by the ‘furious' who are outside the laws and devoid of political value. Those who brought the word of the people to the Assembly were no less aware of this. When they demanded that the
patrie
be declared in danger, they mentioned this problem quite explicitly. In an address of the Marseillais on 19 June 1792, for example: ‘Popular force makes for all your force; you have it in your grasp, use it. Too long a constraint would weaken it or lose it.'
19
And in Santerre's speech of 20 June 1792: