When Virtue Wed Terror
WEBER, EUGEN
Winter & Books When Virtue Wed Terror By Eugen Weber IF you want t? learn where the paranoid element in French politics comes from, read David Andress' The Terror: The Merciless War for...
...That same summer a Constitutional Convention met just in time to abolish royalty and declare the fledgling republic "one and indivisible," even as civil war in the West and Southwest and risings in great cities like Lyon and Marseille had visibly begun to divide it...
...Before the slaughterous paroxysm of 1793-94 that The Terror traces, France had lived in the throes of turmoil for several years...
...not least in Paris, where references to the St...
...Then, as opponents advanced and fortresses fell, Parisians demonstrated their determination to resist foreign foes by massacring the Paris prison population: priests, thieves, prostitutes, forgers, women, children...
...Precisely because there was nothing new, both Right and Left (neologisms born in 1789) found in Sardou's denunciation a perfect springboard for long-honed arguments...
...The piece is a denunciation of the Terror which even now finds a few defenders and perhaps would-be repeaters, but there is nothing new in this indictment...
...There would be no more privileged nobles or clergy, only one fraternal community, with its collective will democratically revealed by majority votes...
...What he said was that there is and there always was another possible side to the Revolution...
...A lot M ofpeople never forgot the dread, suffering and losses of the seemingly endless blood-soaked drag that began in 1793...
...And what about the White (royalist) Terror...
...That eventuality was excluded when, on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor), Robespierre and his gang were declared outlaws and executed the following day...
...Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a representative to the National Assembly, proposed a reform of capital punishment in keeping with the equality of citizens under the new Rights of Man...
...Fast forward now to 1891...
...The Comédie, bowing to authority with ill grace, substituted Tartuffe for Thermidor, then had to cancel because season-ticket holders were too angry to let the show go on...
...Anyway, Larousse pointed out, compared to royalty ("one long terror") let alone to religious terrors like the Inquisition, 1793 and 1794 had been trifles...
...fervent aspirations to dominate and control...
...In revolution it had to be virtue and terror: the prompt, severe, inflexible justice without which virtue is impotent...
...But after 1789, as noted by that alert Swiss, Benjamin Constant, they showed common traits that can be recognized today: the ready irritability of a lively, ardent, passionate nation...
...Fear and insecurity henceforth flavored the taste of the Revolution devouring its children...
...a special Revolutionary Tribunal was set up, whose expeditious sessions would soon dispatch many of those who voted for its creation...
...An epoch cannot be more strikingly and faithfully delineated...
...It did not overcome economic crisis, or achieve victory in wars that were being won before the terrorist outbursts of the spring and summer of 1794...
...No more ropes for the poor and axes for the rich...
...The guillotine, introduced to further equality and humanity, offers a good example...
...Yet when the Revolution tested the virtues of terror, results were dubious...
...A major stumbling block was the human race it had hoped to remold...
...We might like to dissociate 1789 and 1793, but realistically we cannot...
...Many did not speak French...
...Fusty feudal remnants were replaced by fractures and disruptions...
...Winter & Books When Virtue Wed Terror By Eugen Weber IF you want t? learn where the paranoid element in French politics comes from, read David Andress' The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (Farrar Straus Giroux, 456pp., $26.00...
...After Thermidor, popular tumults and food riots were more effectively put down...
...It was not easy to forget when you were constantly running into someone whose father had murdered your brother or your cousin, or vice versa...
...Priests who refused the oath were exiled or imprisoned...
...Against Sardou, and against more moderate Republicans eager for a deal with the Center-Right, he was defending not merely his party but his household deities...
...The Chamber of Deputies debate provided the occasion for a notable intervention by Georges Clemenceau...
...Unsurprisingly, when Gustave Flaubert strolled through post-Commune Paris in the summer of 1871, he found that "half the population wants to strangle the other half, which returns the feeling...
...Defeated in the field, the ill-disciplined troops blamed alleged spies, traitors and their generals, whom they accused of treason...
...specifically, the French people, who were not yet one people...
...Elected representatives made speeches, spewed out decrees, introduced price controls, home searches, currency regulations, and sanctions against those who did not toe the line...
...Hoary memories were further spurred as the story of the first Revolution was played out again and again in 1830,1848, 1870, 1871, with subsidiary tremors in between...
...Hungry, angry sans-culottes (wearing plebeian trousers rather than the stockings and knee breeches of their social betters) plundered food stores and repeatedly invaded the Convention...
...Death would be swift, merciful, and administered by that modern ideal: a machine...
...That was the first step in the collapse of social and legal structures built up over the centuries...
...Nobody has forgotten...
...He was the son of a Voltairean physician who "worshipped the gods of the Revolution" and had been arrested for it...
...You pays your money and you makes your choice...
...A passionate (and distinguished) Republican, Sardou had supported the revolution of 1848 to the point of dating his diary entries by the Republican calendar of 1793...
...Shortly after that, the encyclopedist Pierre Larousse devoted nine dense columns to an eloquent defense of the Terror against "the incessant attacks of blind supporters of the past...
...It did bring factional struggles to an end by putting revolutionary radicals to death...
...Many did not feel French...
...Humanitarians like Robespierre wanted to abolish capital punishment altogether...
...Soldiers who flinched, officers baffled in battle, nuns, priests, alleged informers, hoarders, butchers, bakers, landlords, neighbors, were denounced by the hundreds of thousands in 1871, as they had been in the 1790s and would be again in the 1940s...
...That year a scandal erupted when a play by Victorien Sardou, Thermidor, was banned by government fiat from the stage of the Comédie Française...
...Radical firebrand and Left-wing nationalist in the revolutionary tradition, Clemenceau deplored that foes of the revolution had come to accept the Revolution, while friends of revolution were eager to discriminate between aspects they approved, like patriotism, and those they reproved, like terror...
...In 1789, as Andress makes clear, dire financial straits forced the king to call what soon became a National Assembly fated to skid back to war, forward to revolution, and finally to the overthrow of Louis XVI...
...Robespierre's policies endured...
...It concerns young lovers doomed by mindless violence to die pathetically on 9 Thermidor, just as Robespierre and his fellow ogres get their comeuppance...
...The kingdom had spent most of the century at war...
...It remains polarized still...
...But you cannot pick and choose, he insisted: "The Revolution is a bloc from which you cannot subtract anything...
...We imprisoned because it had imprisoned...
...We arrested," said Arthur Arnould, a Communard in exile, "because [the Convention] arrested...
...Terror had beennecessary...
...When students demonstrated inside and outside the Comédie Française, Radicals denounced the outrage of a play in a subsidized theater where the founders of the Republic were insulted in four acts, and announced they would raise the matter in debate...
...The London Times praised the play as an excellent melodrama: "Realism has never been brought to greater perfection...
...And it is because these memories are still with us...
...The most emphatic symbol of this sundering of the past from the present would be the war of religion that broke out when all Church property in the kingdom was nationalized to make up the budget deficit...
...It was the tum of terrorists to be hunted...
...This other side, which more moderate Radicals wanted to sweep under the mat, was the combination of democracy and despotism the Terror represented, that first Napoleon instituted and then his nephew reinstituted, that liberals denounced, and that Clemenceau himself leaned toward before the formula was taken up in Moscow...
...This is an issue David Andress does not seem to recognize, or refuses to face...
...Enlightened schooling and didactic festivals would teach those who were teachable how to live free and open the way to a new, regenerated race...
...The organic society of orders, estates, corporations, and guilds, each possessing particular prerogatives, was supplanted by a new society of free and equal men, including Protestants and Jews, but not women, domestics, or those too poor to vote...
...It also came from the speaker's heart...
...You can see this clearly in the eye of the passers-by...
...Benjamin Clemenceau "was for Robespierre...
...and a strong inclination to humiliate one another...
...When, in February 1794, the Convention voted millions for the poor and decreed the liberation of slaves in French colonies, these were preambles to messianic revolution...
...Neither victims nor survivors of 9 Thermidor appear more virtuous than they had once been...
...National defense justified browbeating whoever did not wholeheartedly support the war effort...
...One process those years illustrate is the easy passage from benign principle to brutal practice...
...Like the religion it temporarily suppressed, though, the Terror bit off more than it could chew, and it imploded...
...Many would have gone to their death, had it not been for the coup of Conventioneers afraid that if patriots like Robespierre were not eliminated, their heads would roll next...
...Young men eager to evade the call of conscription begot guerrilla bands that destabilized the country further, confirming the suspicions of embattled Republicans who saw the nation besieged in an inimical, conspiratorial world...
...Eugen Weber is a frequent NL contributor whose books include The Western Tradition and A Modern History of Europe...
...Within a few years, General Bonaparte's coup of November 1799 (18 Brumaire) installed one more regime that, as Karl Marx would observe, "fulfilled the Terror by replacing permanent revolution with permanent war...
...Neighborhood Surveillance Committees allowed activists to keep an eye on suspects...
...Greed, fear, anger, and messianic pipe dreams set friend against friend, sibling against sibling...
...On that score old Benjamin Clemenceau was right, and so was his son...
...But that was not what it had been about...
...He has turned a grim and intricate narrative of crime and foul play into a cautionary tale and an exciting adventure story that bears out the most famous line of Sartre's No Exit: "Hell is other people...
...The string of seismic shocks created traditions that clan and local acrimonies corroborated...
...Memory of violence past fueled violence present and future, demonstrating once more the law of unintended consequences...
...Still, he has written a readable, informative, depressing book—the former characteristics making the latter more palatable...
...Where, asked Clemenceau, were the forebears of the present Right during the Revolution...
...the envy of neighbors, masters, betters...
...When patriotic Paris rose in 1871 against Versailles reactionaries suspected of favoring royal restoration, the General Assembly of its Commune repeatedly referred to 1793 and the Convention...
...that everybody is so excited today...
...Instead of rallying the country by canceling dissent, the passions embittered by the Terror polarized it...
...Civil and foreign war required massive requisitions and mass levies...
...The storming of the Bastille fortress on July 14,1789, marked the official birthdate of the Revolution...
...Its cascade of intrigues and counterintrigues, purges, plots and counterplots—plus notable imaginary plots—provides the answer...
...The Terror did not sear contemporaries alone...
...Indeed, Thermidor is about as politically provocative as Strike Up the Band...
...Even indifference, reservations, or compassion for those injured by revolutionary actions set off the horrors of repression...
...The lares and pénates of the Terror were his own...
...Clemenceau had been born in the Vendée, where political choices were painfully clear...
...The heart has its reasons that reason ill conceals...
...Though he said nasty things about "cannibal morality" and "rabble despotism," his opinions were liberal, national, mushy, but hardly subversive...
...no demeaning barbaric practices...
...That proved self-fulfilling: Unsuccessful leaders who risked being lynched or beheaded joined the enemy...
...Its fragile tax base was crumbling, its economy contracting...
...The howling of the mob, the tocsin, the revolting jests are marvelously depicted...
...Robespierre had explained, Andress reminds us, that the mainspring of truly popular government in peacetime was virtue...
...In September 1793 the Convention, determined to expedite repression of the Republic's foes, proclaimed Terror "the order of the day...
...Andress cites that line in his conclusion, but not its continuation...
...The King agreed...
...Hatreds born of the 16th-century Wars of Religion fermented on in many localities...
...Clemenceau was not simply arguing that in 1891 "this admirable Revolution" was far from over...
...Unanimity, as defined by the sect in power, was the sole acceptable stance...
...And just like the Terror, the Commune came to an untimely end...
...The revolution of revolutionaries was sagging...
...In 1789, riding the tide of philanthropy that washed over the land, Dr...
...Do not think we have forgotten...
...Bartholomew's Day massacre of August24,1572,could be heard in the 1790s...
...but if retained, it had better be efficient...
...Another tradition that Arnould did not mention Andress does: denunciations...
...The Convention, its commissions, and those of the Paris Commune (the municipal assembly of the capital) generated cacophonies of radical and patriotic rhetoric, a virulent clatter of pots calling kettles black: radicals against moderates, radicals against still more radical revolutionaries, secularizers against papists...
...We voted a law of hostages because they had voted a law of suspects...
...By 1794, half a million people moldered in the Republic's prisons...
...In 1783, at the end of its successful participation in the American War of Independence, the country was close to bankruptcy...
...The economy ran on coercion and printing paper money...
...Not only did the tendency to suspect and distrust others become a national characteristic, but the difference between opposition and treason was erased...
...Family and neighborhood recollections last a long time in France...
...Raw recruits were being rushed into battle with little or no training...
...Georges grew up surrounded by portraits of his father's gods...
...Fighting their fellow French on the country's borders, or in the rebellious Vendée...
...In 1792, however, collective will and ideological overbidding plunged the new democracy into a conflict that would ravage Europe for 23 years...
...War for freedom generated the first modern police state...
...Clerics became public servants paid by the state, to which they were expected to take a loyalty oath...
...The marriage of virtue (a glimmer) and terror (a gory reality) was supposed to regenerate first France and then mankind...
...The fuss about Thermidor was about contemporary politics all right, but it was also about how one reads the reality of the Revolution...
...Votaries of regeneration sought to redraw the map of France, establish a new calendar, replace Christian worship by revolutionary ritual, and inaugurate a new order...
...The Terror had lasted nearly 17 months...
...Terror did not exterminate aristocracy...
...Brief and brilliant, the intervention fitted the struggles of a moment whenRadicals did not want moderates confusing political issues...
...those who took it were largely rejected by their parishioners...
...Robespierre, the incorruptible icon of Republican orthodoxy, put it bluntly: Critics of what is politically correct must be either stupid or perverse, and neither can be tolerated...
...Apocalyptically, blood would wash sins away, and eliminate the wicked whom past history had perverted...
...The road to the guillotine was paved with good intentions...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
