On Ferenc Fehèr's The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism
Wolin, Richard
THE FROZEN REVOLUTION: AN ESSAY ON JACOBINISM, by Ferenc Fehèr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 178 pp. Since the appearance of François Furet's Penser la Revolution Française in...
...Instead, he focuses on the incident that has long been considered a first principle of revolutionary mythology: the execution of Louis XVI...
...Both the moral and legal issues surrounding his execution remain to this day fascinating...
...Here, it is hard to disagree with his conclusion that the major historical lessons to be learned from Jacobinism as a premise of Western political modernity are negative...
...A thesis merely suggested by Furet —that "Stalinism took root in a modified Jacobin tradition that consisted in grafting onto the Soviet phenomenon the ideas of a new beginning and a new nation in the vanguard of history" —becomes the point of departure for Feher's reexamination of Jacobinism...
...For this reason Kant suggests that the execution of the king on the part of the people is justifiable as an act of self-preservation— "For that may be done by the people out of fear, lest if he is allowed to live he may again acquire power and inflict punishment on them"—but never as a judicial process, since this would be a perversion of the principles of law...
...and the Revolution to come would complete the work begun by its forebear...
...The conclusion Feller reaches on this matter is unyielding: "In making the law 'revolutionary,' the revolutionary actors made law political and politics lawless...
...As Feller shows, four years later, in the Jacobin constitution of 1793, the rights of man and citizen are reinterpreted such that the citizen, rather than being primarily a bearer of "rights," is understood in the first instance as a "subject" of the republic...
...Suddenly, revolutionary mythology seemed to fall under suspicion...
...And thus, with the appearance of Solzhenitsyn's book, and the leftwing self-scrutiny it provoked in France, an intellectual space was created in which conventional socialist wisdom concerning the Revolution could be criticized and reexamined...
...For example, could not the trial and execution of Nazi officers following World War II be viewed as an instance of ex post facto justice...
...There is no circumventing the fact this represents a form of ex post facto 408 • DISSENT justice and thus, in a strictly legal sense, is wholly unjustifiable...
...Perhaps the major aspect of revolutionary mythology that Feher seeks to undo is that of "revolutionary justice," the idea that a revolutionary situation warrants a "political suspension of the ethical...
...The second crucial underpinning was Sieyes's "metaphysics of the nation" as the formative power of modern political life...
...Feher —like Furet before him—must cut through a maze of earlier interpretations...
...And appropriately, this is not the ground where Feller feels great need to stake his claim as a critic of the imaginaire revolutionnaire...
...In recent years, however, conditions were prepared for a major historiographical break by an event that seemingly had little relation to French history: the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's expose of the Soviet gulag...
...If it is a crime to reign, so by implication is it a crime to have been a noble, a priest, a rich man, a suspect or an egoist...
...It is perhaps with reference to the last point that Feher scores his major breakthrough: In his view, what is historically specific about Jacobinism will forever recede from our grasp unless we accord the ideological and philosophical features of the movement their due...
...They raise important questions concerning the problem of justice under exceptional situations...
...the trial of the King introduced "political justice" in post-Enlightenment politics...
...In the nineteenth century the Revolution served to buttress the legitimacy of republican claims...
...above all, against Walzer's claims that (1) the execution of Louis set no precedent for the Jacobin terror that followed and (2) the King's death was a necessary and justifiable act from the standpoint of the Revolution's survival and goals...
...For most of the twentieth century, indeed, the French Revolution has enjoyed the status of a left-wing icon...
...In the twentieth century, when the achievements of the Republic could be treated as an accomplished fact, it was the socialists (e.g., James) who embraced the events of 1789 as portents of a revolution that had not yet been made...
...SUMMER • 1989 • 409...
...As a founding act of the Republic, regicide formed a precedent that was ominous if not inherently fatal to the future course of the Revolution...
...Yet this only meant that the Revolution had merely gone halfway...
...Certainly, there are general principles, many of which have their origins in the ideology of the French Revolution itself, to which we can appeal under such circumstances...
...Closer to the views of Hannah Arendt, he stresses the specifically political aspect of Jacobin revolutionary practice, unlike Furet, who collapsed the "social" and "political" dimensions of the revolutionary process too quickly...
...In this regard, the crucial intellectual groundwork for Jacobin ideology was laid first by Rousseau's notion of the "general will...
...Fehr shows little sympathy for any such justification of Louis's execution, especially the moral-philosophical variety expounded by Saint-Just and Robespierre...
...Feher's arguments concerning the trial are forceful and convincing...
...When coupled with his pessimistic philosophical anthropology, Rousseau's political philosophy implied that if the realm of liberty were to be realized, a privileged minority, as yet uncorrupted by the influences of a degenerate "civilization," might need "temporarily" to seize the reigns of government in order to institute a moral political order...
...And thus, the seeds of revolutionary despotism were already present in the first Assembly—the Assembly that progressively minded individuals frequently point to as the Revolution's "liberal option...
...And throughout the course of his investigation, Feller keeps a constant eye on the tension between Jacobin historical realities and the role Jacobinism has come to play in the twentieth century imaginaire revolutionnaire...
...In this respect, Feher's book provides an instructive correction to Furet...
...The "causal factors" that account for Jacobinism as a historical "first" are summarized by Feher as follows: a driving of the revolutionary process beyond all limits as the criterion of radicalism, an amalgamation of radical political motives with social demands, and the rejection of the whole armory of parliamentary and party policy as it had begun to emerge in the first years of the Revolution...
...Perhaps it is not much of a feat to make this criticism stick, in the post-Gulag era, with reference to the Jacobin reign of terror...
...The Bolsheviks, after all, had viewed the Jacobin dictatorship as a SUMMER • 1989 • 407 historical preclude to their own...
...Second, his refutation of Walzer's defense of regicide on "utilitarian" grounds, that is, that only a public trial and execution of the monarch could do away with monarchy as an institution...
...Ferenc Feher's provocative and original study, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism carries the process of demythologization a step further...
...Furet, following Tocqueville, tends to view Jacobinism as a logical outgrowth of the leveling tendencies of abstract egalitarianism when unchecked by the moderating influences of liberal political institutions...
...For quite some time such "conventional wisdom" has been left wing...
...The major failings of most prior views of Jacobinism have been a dogmatic treatment of the Revolution as a unified stream of events as well as the attempt to understand Jacobinism itself solely in structural or class-specific terms...
...This theory was elaborated in a way such that all institutional or procedural hindrances to "the nation" as a political entity were immediately viewed as suspect: The nation was to be homogeneous and no one could stand outside of it...
...Feller, on the other hand, sees the Jacobin experiment as a departure from the events that preceded it...
...At the same time, the differences between Furet's and Feher's understandings of Jacobinism must also be stressed...
...Yet the difficulties involved in addressing such matters should in no way imply that the problem of justice in situations without legal precedent should be held in abeyance...
...Its supreme maxim read as follows: anybody, and if need be, almost everybody, can be crushed if those who respect not forms, but who share ruthless principles, hold sufficient power to present their decree of proscription as the "interest of the cause" that stands higher than the banal idea of justice...
...First, his critique of the pseudo-legality of the "symbolic trials," i.e., the attempt to try Louis not for his deeds but as a symbol of "monarchy in general...
...Here Feller directs his argument against the most sophisticated defense of the regicides, Michael Walzer's interpretive essay in Regicide and Revolution...
...On two points especially his position is persuasive...
...The promise of universal equality heralded by the revolt of the Parisian masses was stopped short, we are told, by the triumph of bourgeois selfinterest...
...There is no escaping the fact that the trial and execution of Louis was in the first instance a political act, and hence unjustifiable according to standards of formal legality...
...As he observes: the precedent set by the trial of the King can be dangerously expanded...
...Feher presents us with a seminal contribution toward understanding the pathology of the modern imaginaire rivolutionnaire...
...As Felièr points out, the ensuing course of French history (at least until 1871) stands as a refutation of this claim...
...The determining instance for Fehèr's understanding of Jacobinism is the concrete application of the Jacobin model by Lenin—the "Russian Jacobin" — during the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Since the appearance of François Furet's Penser la Revolution Française in 1978, conventional wisdom concerning the French Revolution has fallen upon hard times...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
