Erasing the Terror?

The study of the French Revolution has evolved in many different directions since the bicentennial of 1989. Like historical studies in general, it has taken the “global turn,” relating developments in France to world-wide patterns of imperial expansion, commerce, migration, intellectual exchange, and conflict (this shift led me, nearly a decade ago, to write an article urging a degree of caution: not every significant event in revolutionary France is best explained by the global context). The historiography has also taken the “emotional turn,” with new and careful attention paid to the way revolutionary actors made claims about their emotional states, and the actions which supposedly followed upon emotional responses.

But there is also a new direction that has less to do with overall trends in the discipline, and it is a strange one: the attempted erasure of the Terror. Until recently, most historians of the Revolution took for granted that the severe repression carried out by the Jacobin-dominated First Republic between the late summer of 1793 and the mid-summer of 1794 deserved the name of the Terror. Tens of thousands were executed or died in prison, and many more fell victim to revolutionary military forces. Among these were many killed principally because of their opposition to the government, or their noble birth, or their Catholic faith, or by sheer mistake. Radical terrorists ended up on the scaffold as well, as the Terror spun out of control and the Revolution, like Saturn, greedily consumed its own offspring. Some historians justified the Terror as the product of brutal necessity, as the Revolution struggled to survive against powerful foreign and domestic enemies. Others, like François Furet in the 1960’s, considered it a deviation from the true, liberal spirit of the French Revolution. Still others, like François Furet in the 1970’s, insisted that it stemmed directly from the Revolution’s central ideological currents. But no one doubted that the repression of 1793-94 amounted to a novel, discreet and coherent phenomenon—something that deserved to go by the name of “the Terror.” Works of fiction powerfully reinforced the idea, from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton.

There is still very little disagreement about the basic facts. We have the records of the trials and executions. We have a less clear, but still reasonably accurate idea of the (much larger) number of people who died in zones of war and civil war, including especially the rebel region known as the Vendée. But the older understanding of what these facts added up to has been radically challenged, and a group of historians have forcefully argued that “the Terror,” as a discreet and coherent historical phenomenon, never happened. The French historian Annie Jourdan offers one example in her recent book La Révolution française: Une histoire à repenser. Another comes in the excellent new study by Michel Biard and Marisa Linton: Terror (very deliberately not: “the” Terror). Jourdan’s book last month prompted an interesting response from the American historian Jeremy Popkin, who calls Jourdan a representative of the “Don’t Say Terror school.”

The argument has four basic parts. First, it is pointed out that the phrase “the Terror” itself was a retrospective label, not devised until after the events in question had ended. Drawing especially on the work of Jean-Clément Martin, members of the “Don’t Say Terror” school note that the Jacobin Convention (France’s ruling body at the time), despite a powerful legend, never declared terror “the order of the day.” They add that the so-called Thermidorians who overthrew Robespierre and his allies, desperate to justify their own violent actions, deliberately exaggerated the extent and coherence of what had happened in 1793-94. These politicians made up phantasmagorical stories about Robespierre’s evil deeds and claimed that he and his allies had deliberately constructed a “system of Terror.” Inventing two words with an all-too-bright future, they labeled it “terrorism,” and its instigators, “terrorists.”

Second, it is argued, based on work by Michel Biard and others, that the “Terror” was in point of fact far less systematic than it has often been portrayed. It was very geographically uneven, with some areas of France experiencing enormous violence, and others very little. And the institutions in question were not always or even often manipulated for partisan purposes so as to eliminate political enemies.  The revolutionary tribunals acquitted a large proportion of defendants, and their procedures did not differ enormously from those of ordinary tribunals of the era, even after legislation designed to streamline trials and send the convicted straight to the scaffold (Carla Hesse has made this argument forcefully).

Third, the school insists that there was nothing particularly exceptional, during the age of revolution, about the degree of repressive violence that took place in revolutionary France. Citing such historians as Holger Hoock, its members argue that the American Revolution claimed as many lives. The distinction long insisted upon—notably by Hannah Arendt—between a gentle American Revolution and an extreme, murderous French one, does not hold water.

Finally, the school observes that while Robespierre and his allies fell in July 1794, large-scale revolutionary violence did not in fact come to an end at this time. The Thermidorians carried out a “white Terror” of their own, and much of the country slipped in and out of a state of low-level civil war until its repressive pacification by Napoleon Bonaparte.

As with nearly all the historiography of the French Revolution since the start, there is a politics behind these arguments. Ever since Robespierre’s fall, opponents of the French Revolution have used the Terror as a way to discredit the event as a whole, and to tarnish its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Try to change the world too extensively, too quickly, they claim, and the attempt will inevitably degenerate into blood-soaked horror. In contrast, the “Don’t Say Terror school” looks with sympathy not only at the Revolution as a whole, but especially at the Jacobin Republic of 1793-94—the government that supposedly implemented the Terror—because of its radically democratic and egalitarian social policies. There is no necessary connection, they insist, between such policies and anti-democratic repression. If we are going to look for political inspiration in the age of revolution (as some French historians explicitly argue—see my discussion of one case here) then we should be looking above all at the French Revolution in 1793-94, and not to the supposedly more “moderate” American variety.

These arguments deserve to be taken seriously. They are made with care, and with evidence à l’appui. But, for what it is worth, I haven’t found the overall interpretation convincing. A newsletter is not the place to lay out a full case for a different interpretation, but it’s worth keeping the following points in mind.

First, the facts that no one at the time used the term “the Terror,” and that the Convention never declared terror “the order of the day,” are, in the end, of limited import. They bolster the idea that the Convention did not, from the fall of September 1793 onwards, devise a systematic policy of repression, consciously directed by Robespierre and the men around him. But if we consider the Terror the result of revolutionary processes spinning out of control, then the lack of conscious direction from the start doesn’t matter so much. And while no one used the phrase “a system of Terror” before Thermidor, there were many people who condemned what was happening in similar, and very stark terms—notably the journalist Camille Desmoulins, who already in the late fall of 1793 was warning that the Republic was coming to resemble Rome under Nero. Colin Jones, in his recent book The Fall of Robespierre, quotes a conversation between an apprentice printer and friends, as recorded by police spies in the summer of 1794: “’If they guillotine people just for thinking, how many people will die?’ ‘Don’t talk so loud. They could hear us and take us in.’”

When it comes to the geographical unevenness of the repression, and the fact that many judicial and political institutions continued to function in a normal eighteenth-century manner in 1793-94 (with many defendants acquitted)—this too does not settle as much as one might think. We don’t have to assume that the Terror took place everywhere in the same crushingly sinister manner to see it as a discreet and coherent historical phenomenon. And there is no doubt that the operations of revolutionary justice were in fact very often turned to corrupt purposes. The trial and execution of some of the Revolution’s most prominent political figures—the Girondin leaders, the so-called Hébertistes, and the so-called Indulgents, including Georges Danton—largely amounted to the judicial murder of political opponents. In December 1793, one of the great figures of eighteenth-century France, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, was arrested, along with many of his family members, and charged with conspiring with émigré counter-revolutionaries. Under the Old Regime, as director of the national book trade, he had protected the Enlightenment and ensured the continuing publication of the Encyclopédie. As a noble magistrate in the 1770’s he defied royal attempts to crush the independence of the French high courts, and advocated freedom of the press. During the Revolution he bravely took on the defense of Louis XVI in his trial before the Convention. For this, on April 21, 1794, Malesherbes was guillotined, after being forced to watch the decapitation of his daughter Antoinette, his granddaughter Aline, and their husbands. Were atrocities of this sort the relatively rare (if highly visible) exceptions, or closer to the rule? Even if the former, they still deserve serious historical attention. Think of the outcry today if Vladimir Putin not only tried Alexei Navalny on trumped up charges but had him and several score allies executed.

As for the attempts to compare the number of victims with figures from other revolutions, and from the period after Thermidor, they don’t necessarily prove as much as one might think at first glance. Most historians today recognize that the American Revolution had a very dark side: not just the violent treatment of Loyalists, but the reinforcement of slavery and the murderous campaigns waged against indigenous peoples (for instance, the Sullivan campaign against the Haudenosaunee). But the fact that the French and American revolutions may have taken a similar human toll doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding why this happened, in the one case or the other. Were the same processes at work? Toting up the casualties, by itself, doesn’t do anything to disprove accounts of the Terror that see it as a coherent process stemming directly from the Revolution’s central ideological dynamics. The nature of what happened in France in 1793-94 remains a distinct subject from what happened in other places and times – and the same goes for comparisons with the period after Thermidor.

None of this necessarily disproves the contentions of the “Don’t Say Terror” school. Vive le débat! Its members have certainly done much to sweep away the legends that long accumulated about the Terror, while demonstrating just how much of our historical understanding owes to the construction of these legends by self-interested politicians after Thermidor. But I remain convinced that what took place in France between 1793-94 was nonetheless a distinct, coherent important, and—yes—tragic and sinister event. One that deserves to be called the Terror.