The French Revolution: Virtue or Terrorism?

Résumé du document

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". A great motto, thoughts important enough to live and even to die for. These were the most enduring thoughts on which the French Revolution was based on. Yet, in order to implement these principles, the French revolutionaries sent more than 40,000 citizens to the guillotine. The French Revolution is the very first example of the use of pure State violence, independent of any explicit religious connotations. This historical episode opens a new era in the history of terrorism, insofar as the revolutionaries used violence consciously. René Girard observed that ancient forms of sacrifice and ritualized violence are always linked to a religious redemption. But historically, the state came to replace religion and to set up an order that supersedes religion. Social techniques were invented to domesticate violent forces, to transform destructive urges into productive tendencies. From this point of view, the Enlightenments was trying to establish the basis of a new kind of society, where social tensions would be reduced to a minimum.

Extraits

[...] A man (and his family) might go to the guillotine for saying something critical of the revolutionary government. If an informer happened to overhear, that was all the tribunal needed. Watch Committees around the nation were encouraged to arrest "suspected persons, those who, either by their conduct or their relationships, by their remarks or by their writing, are shown to be partisans of tyranny and federalism and enemies of liberty[2]" (Law of Suspects, 1793). Civil liberties were suspended. The Convention ordered that "if material or moral proof exists, independently of the evidence of witnesses, the latter will not be heard, unless this formality should appear necessary, either to discover accomplices or for other important reasons concerning the public interest." The promises of the Declaration of the Rights of Man were forgotten and terror was the order of the day. [...]

[...] Paradoxically enough, the United States are seen by Hezbollah or Hugo Chavez as a “terrorist state”, while the Bush administration was waging a on Terror”. Hence the ambiguity of the word State terrorism. In theory, as Max Weber said state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical forces”. But the question is to know when this use of violence is legitimate. This question is even more important that nearly every communist regime directly referred to Robespierre and the Reign of Terror (Lenin considered himself as a Jacobin”). [...]

[...] The French Revolution perfectly fits with this definition. The revolutionaries were motivated by the great Enlightenment's ideals, but ended up slaughtering thousands of citizens. The violence displayed during the Reign of Terror shares many features with religious fanaticism, the guillotine being a purificatory weapon to regenerate the French society. Moreover, when looking at the lyrics of the Marseillaise march! Let's march! May our land with tainted blood be soaked!, the resemblance with Al Qaeda's rhetoric is obvious. Coming back to our very first question, we can ask whether or not the French revolutionaries were terrorists? [...]

[...] When examining those two branches of the historiography of the French Revolution, a strong clash is easily perceptible: one considers violence as a necessity, a sign of virtue, whereas the other regards it as a symptom of the competition between the revolutionaries. Even if the revisionist branch seems to be right on the whole, some elements remain unclear. If it was not a Bourgeois revolution, then what was it? The revisionists have responded with more or less collective silence. This silence is actually telling a lot about the difficulty to theorize State terrorism. “State terrorism” is as controversial a concept as that of terrorism itself. [...]

[...] Class conflict is the engine that drives the French Revolution. The idea was that the revolution was intrinsically communist, but the bourgeois betrayed the revolutionary principles in order to set up a capitalist society. What is striking in Mathiez's works is that the Reign of Terror is understood as something positive, as the last tentative to save the genuine revolutionary principles from the bourgeois individualism: “Robespierre considered nothing but the interest of the Revolution ( Was it the moment to relax or destroy the revolutionary laws, when the Vendeans had crossed to the north bank of the Loire ( Was this the moment to disorganize the revolutionary Government ( His answer is no: severity of repressive measures ( ) was in direct proportion to the danger of the revolt”[10]. [...]