Terror in the Historiography of the French Revolution*

Mash Khazeni

During the first half of the twentieth century, the social interpretation of the FrenchRevolution prevailed among historians. The social interpreters of the Revolutiondescribed it as the outcome of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the nobility. The

social interpretation was a classic Marxist analysis of the material and social changes ineighteenth century France. Since the 1950s, however, new explanations have challenged thisstance. Post-social historians have suggested that the French Revolution cannot be understood asa manifestation of the rise of the bourgeois class. To many scholars, the revolutionary age inFrance was an illusory world invented by the words and ideas of French political culture. Thesehistorians use linguistic approaches to understand revolutionary society and politics.

The social interpretation and the post-social/linguistic interpretation are twentieth centuryreconstructions of the French past. However, these explanations are related to theories that haveexisted since the time of the French Revolution itself. A basic conceptual question has remainedsince the beginning. This question asks whether the Revolution was the result of circumstance or“the dissemination of ideas.” It is true that historians continue to examine the Revolutionthrough the concepts of circumstance and ideas.2 The social interpretation, with its emphasis ofrising social forces, overlaps with the thesis of circumstance. While the post-socialinterpretation, through its emphasis on language and culture, revives the old notion that theRevolution was caused by “bad books” and dangerous ideas.3

One of the areas in which the social and post-social interpreters have tested whether theFrench Revolution was the result of inevitable circumstance or books has been the realm ofrevolutionary violence, a subject traditionally classified as “the Terror”, a period lasting fromSeptember 1793 to July 1794 (Year II until 9 Thennidor on the Republican Calendar). Suchaccounts of “the Terror” depict great revolutionary leaders in Paris who motivated the Frenchmasses to act by providing the legal and systematic justification of revolutionary violence.4Thus, “the Terror” generally refers to an official government policy. “Terror” by contrast, oftensuggests factors beyond the Year II and the exclusive realm of famed writers and politicians.“Terror” refers to the wide, fragmented array of social institutions and mentalities that existed inFrance before, during, and after Year II. It can be said that “terror” has become the focus ofmostsocial and post-social interpretations of revolutionary violence, for “terror” cannot be limited toits institutional fonn during the Year II.

The social interpretation of the French Revolution shifted the emphasis of scholarshiptowards more ordinary revolutionaries found amongst the “crowd”, the sans-culottes, and thepopular societies. Terror was viewed from “below” rather than from “above.” In the process, thehistories ofphilosophes and diplomats were complemented by accounts of common people. Andalthough many scholars continued to focus on the Year II, their arguments moved beyond “theTerror” proper, as an official policy of government. The often fragmentary forms of “terror”, ingeneral, were uncovered by the social interpretations of Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul,George Rude, and Richard Cobb.

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Georges Lefebvre, the master of the social interpreters reknowned for his studies of the

French peasantry, emphasized the material causes of revolutionary attitudes and activities.

InfLuenced by the work of the Annales,5 Lefebwe saw rural disturbances and the Paris crowds as

the exhibition of les sentiments affectzfs or “collective mentalities”. In the essay “Revolutionary

Crowds” (1954), Lefebvre seeks to move beyond the monolithic clash of classes in order to

understand the mental outlook of each class.6Lefebvre argues that collective mentalities, ex?ressed through conversation, propaganda,

and coercion, stemmed from prior circumstances. He criticizes the “purely ideological

conception of revolutionary movements.. .from which historians have gleaned nothing,” and

argues that the existence of a collective mentality “clearly implies economic, social, and political

conditions.”8 As “material circumstances became unfavorable... the dominant class [was] held

responsible” by the poor.9 Lefebvre finds a collective revolutionary mentality based on

economic and material conditions.’° Here the social interpretation of the French Revolution

overlaps with the age-old thesis of circumstance.Albert Soboul, a pupil of Lefebvre’s, continued the call for history “from below” with The

Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionwy Government, 1793-1794 (1958).

Soboul intended to add to the studies of the Convention and the Paris Commune a study of “the

Parisian people in its general assemblies and sectional societies.”1’ In the opening paragraph of

The Sans-Culottes, Soboul reveals his acceptance of the social interpretation, claiming that “the

French Revolution constitutes the culmination of a long economic and social revolution that

made the middle classes the masters of the world.”2 But Soboul also asserted that the

revolutionary bourgeoisie could not have toppled the ancien regime without help from the sans-

culottes.’3 Although the sans-culottes were swept into the general trend of the Revolution, in

the direction of class-conflict, they nonetheless pursued independent objectives.’4 In many ways

the sans-culottes acted in opposition to the bourgeoisie. Similar to Lefebvre, Soboul relies upon

the social interpretation and the thesis of circumstance to explain the cause of revolutionary

uprisings.Another student of Lefebvre, George Rude, examined in detail the revolutionary crowd.

In The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959), Rude criticized the mob theory, which viewed

the Parisian crowds as degenerate and evil.’5 By contrast, Rude’s crowds acted upon

revolutionary agendas and purposes. Rude, like Soboul, noted the autonomous revolutionary

behavior of the lower classes. The sans-culottes and the revolutionary crowd could not be

“dismissed as passive instruments of middle class leaders and interests; still less [could] they be

presented as inchoate ‘mobs’ without any social identity or, at best, as drawn from criminal

elements or the dregs of the city population.”6 Far from social abstractions, the crowd consisted

of a variety of ordinary people with varying social needs. However, Rude generally believes that

the involvement of these various social stratas in the riots of the ancien regime and Revolution is

an indication ofprevailing economic circumstances and the class struggle.The most complex descendant of Lefebvre was Richard Cobb. Cobb’s subjects were the

outcasts and outsiders, the inhabitants of the so-called demi-monde.’7 His biographical approach

detailed the sociability of the most marginal revolutionaries and terrorists. In The People’s

Armies (1961-63) and Reactions to the French Revolution (1972) Cobb used case histories to

trace the emergence of a terrorist mentality and the commitment to revolutionary violence.

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The People’s Armies (originally published as Les Armëes Révolutionnaires) is Cobb’smost substantial work. It is also the easiest work by Cobb to place upon a historiographicalspectrum. In Les Armées Révotutionnaires, Cobb concentrates upon the institutions andmentalities of the popular armies.18 Seeking to correct the slanderous depictions of the armeesthat began with the accusations of the Thermidorean period, Cobb claims that the list of epithetsused in the pamphlets of Year III were resurrected in nineteenth century historiography.Thermidoreans and historians had dismissed the armées révotutionnaires as elements of laderniere pleb, the lowest people.19 With The People ‘s Armies, Cobb intends “to assess the placeof the armëes in the history of the Terror and the popular movement of the Year II.20

According to Cobb, the armées represent the primordial violence of France raised to aspontaneous institution under revolutionary circumstances. During the emergency ofRevolution, “the triumph of violence [wasJ exalted to a political system.”2’ But Cobb is notmerely concerned with the structure of the people’s armies; he also considers the variousindividuals within them. Cobb finds that not everyone in the armées became “revolutionariesthrough circumstance.” Some were “militants by choice.”22 The Revolution was an outlet forfundamentally violent temperaments that were, in certain cases, intensified during the Terror.The armées révotutionnaires were a phenomenon irreducible to, but nonetheless affected by,general prevailing circumstances.

Cobb’s later works became more dissonant. In the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, Cobbincreasingly viewed the Revolution as the sum of innumerable biographies. His subject, more sothan ever, became the idiosyncrasies of people on the margins of society. In Reactions to theFrench Revolution, Cobb retreats from the discussion of the overarching concepts ofcircumstances and ideas, and examines the minutiae of terror conveyed through the biographicalapproach. In Reactions, Cobb admits to “an inability, in the last resort, to sympathise with thosewho seek to exercise power, be their motives good or evil.”23 Noting his “extreme repulsion forRobespierre,” he seeks to study individualism, dans la durée, over a period of time.24

The works of Lefebvre, Soboul, Rude, and Cobb inspired future scholars to examine thevariety of unexplored aspects concerning the Revolution. A more complex picture ofrevolutionary violence and terror had emerged. In the process the thesis of circumstance wasrevamped through the social interpretation of the French Revolution. However, the socialinterpreters’ emphasis upon mentalités paved the way for post-social historians of public opinionand political culture, who returned to the claim that books and ideas had caused the events of1789.

Post-social interpretations return to the sphere of politics in their contention that politicalspace in eighteenth century France was not limited to the realm of the government apparatus.Some historians of the French Revolution use the concept of political culture to reveal thatpolitics was integral to public life. Political culture refers to the codes that define politicalaction. It refers to the discourses and symbolic practices that order reality. Historians such asMona Ozouf, Francois Furet, Robert Damton, and Bronislaw Baczko have suggested thatlanguage resulted in the communication and creation of the eighteenth century French world.

Festivals and the French Revolution (1976) by Mona Ozouf revives the notion that ideasmake revolutions. Ozouf upholds the rete révolutionnaire as a prime example of theRevolution’s inner contradictions in the quest for utopia. The revolutionary festival combinedliberty and coercion; the idea of a new order was tainted by a preoccupation with unanimity that

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manifested itself in terror.25 In seeking to put everyone on the same level, the revolutionaryfestival “in theory, annihilated variety” and made “the intellectualization of activities total.”26The Revolution and its utopian ideal were flawed by a unitary impulse that was intolerant ofdissent.

According to Ozouf, utopian festivals “were merely a false celebration of peace andunanimity of feeling, a camouflage, a facade plastered onto a gloomy reality”.27 Ozouf traces theviolence of the Revolution back to utopian ideas. Shaped in an atmosphere of terror, the“utopian festivals left no room for the free play of liberty.” Utopian festivals were not places fordeviants; they made “a crime of isolation.” 8 Ideas of a utopia precipitated terror:

Revolutionary violence appears as not that which perverted the utopian festivalbut that which brought it to fulfillment: Prairial, Year II, was the radiant month inwhich the festival of the Supreme Being claimed to establish regeneratedmankind in an innocent dawn; it was also the baleful month in which themechanics of the Terror went into operation... As ideas often contradict humannature, [leadersJ often entrust the task of establishing them to despotism. Whenthe course of things does not go their way, it must be forced to do so by arbitraryauthority.29

Ozoufs return to the concept of ideas provides a more antagonistic view of the Revolution thanthat of the followers of the thesis of circumstance. The Revolution is not seen as a consequenceof the rise of a new social class, but rather as the creation of a pervasive political culture.

In War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1985), Ozouf provides perhapsthe most explicit refutation of the thesis of circumstance. She charges the previous historians ofthe French Revolution for being tra,jed by the original rationalization of the Terror offered bythe revolutionary actors themselves. She contends that both revolutionaries and historians haveengaged in a discourse that dismisses terror as a response to internal and external war.31

Ozoufs focus is language. Language, not circumstances, justified the Revolution forcontemporaries and the generations of historians that followed. She fmds a homogenousdiscourse prevalent during the Revolution and the subsequent “200 years” of historiography.According to Ozouf, the discourse of the Jacobins was adopted by these historians of the FrenchRevolution. They defined Jacobinism, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a policyof public safety and dreamed of a threatened and endangered nation defended by “the miracleperformed by a strong central power.”32 Ozoufs linguistic approach problematizes the basis andevolution of the thesis of circumstance.

In “Terror” (1989), francois Furet explicitly states that the Revolution “cannot bereduced to circumstances,” for it was also a political idea.33 Ideas, “present in the Revolution of1789, predated the circumstances and enjoyed an independent existence, which was associatedwith the nature of French revolutionary culture.”34 Similar to Ozouf, Furet views terror and theRevolution as the inventions of a discursive world. for Furet, revolutionary violence representedthe degeneration of politics, a time when language reigned supreme over reality, and uniformitythreatened pluralism and contestation.

Furet suggests that terror sprang from “sets of ideas” which “predated thecircumstances.”35 Before terror was made the order of the day, and before it established the

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repressive institutions used by the Republic to defeat its adversaries and establish “dominationon a basis of fear,” it was an idea. Terror was “a demand based on political convictions andbeliefs.”36 The French Revolution was a product of the philosophes, such as Rousseau, who hadimagined through their literature how a new society could be. Furet suggests that these ideasinduced revolutionary violence.

Ozouf and Furet, as well as a disciple of theirs, Bronislaw Baczko,37 offer a negativeview of language. For them, language distorts reality; it obscures and veils it. The horrors ofrevolutionary violence were masked by language and other discursive practices. However, thisis not the opinion of all historians of political culture. Some contend that language constitutesreality itself.38 From this perspective, language is seen as the most basic human activity. Ineffect, language gives the world meaning. A good example of this approach can be found inRobert Damton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History(1984).

In The Great Cat Massacre, Damton uses an incident involving the killing of cats tosuggest that French revolutionary violence belonged to a specific idiomatic world. In otherwords, the meaning of a particular event was determined by the time and the place. Themassacre of cats acquired meaning in the context of eighteenth-century Paris, and in accord withthe rules of the contemporary political culture. These rules justified certain acts of revolutionaryviolence. The obvious fact that such a massacre of cats would have a different meaning in thelate twentieth century proves that material activity has no significance until defined by thecultural rules of a given community. Reality is thus unfixed and imbedded in language.39

Damton also criticizes the tendency to derive cultural systems from social conditions.for Damton, culture is idiomatic and shaped by texts.40 His focus is clearly upon the thoughtsand ideas that made violence possible in eighteenth century France. For Damton, words are notjust a record ofwhat has happened, they are a part of the happening.

Yet, not all post-social historians writing today would agree with the claim that therevolutionary age in France was evoked by language. In “Revolutionary Violence, the Peopleand the Terror,” (1994) Cohn Lucas argues that violence is latent in all societies. It is apermanent threat.4’ The fact that the revolutionaries “consciously or unconsciously” examinedthe place of violence in society did not mean that the existence of violence was based on anidea.42 Revolutionary violence existed throughout eighteenth century France and the radicals ofthe Terror were seeking to isolate that violence. Violence was itself the emergency thatnecessitated the Terror.

Lucas claims that the Jacobins sought to impose a “theory of revolutionary violence”upon the violence already rampant in French society.43 Despite its position in the politicalculture of France, the Terror cannot be understood as just an ideological creation: “The Terror, itseems, was as much, if not more, the product of the failure of a theory of revolutionary violenceas it was the product of its invention.”44 Terror is once again seen as the result of pressingcircumstances. Revolutionary language and ideas did not create reality. They gave meaning toit.

A debate on circumstances and ideas has persisted in histories of terror written since the1 950s. The social interpretations of Lefebvre, Soboul, Rude, and Cobb and the post-social, oftenlinguistic, works of Mona Ozouf, francois Furet, Robert Damton, and Cohn Lucas continue todiscuss whether the Revolution was a response to necessities or the result of books. The diverse

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areas of scholarship on terror cannot be reduced to this pervading discussion. The FrenchRevolution is perhaps the most written about event in history, terror its most recognizablesubplot. As noted above, Richard Cobb in Reactions to the French Revolution (and earlierThomas Carlyle) was concerned with biographies. Some historians, writing during therevolutionary years, had seen progress and destiny as the driving force behind the Revolution inFrance.45 Still other currents might be deciphered in the vast body of works. But none havebeen as prevalent as the thesis of circumstance or the claim that the Revolution was born out ofthe spread of books.

Arash Khazeni completed an MA. in the History ofEurope since 1500 at SanFrancisco State University in May 1999. His emphasis has been upon theFrench Revolution and the Modern Middle East. Khazeni is currently workingon a history of the city ofIsfahan and the civilization ofIslam.

The original version of this essay was presented during a course on the French Revolutionary Age in the spring of199$ at San Francisco State University. The ideas presented here are based upon the discussions raised in thatseminar. I here express my gratitude to Dana Young, Kimberly Davis, JeffWittington, Giovanni Ruffmi, KatieGomez, Anthony Swanson, and Mark Rempel, all of whom read and commented on various drafts of this essay. Iam indebted to Professor Frank Kidner for the fortuitous experience of having been his student.Daniel Roche. “Censorship and the Publishing Industry.” Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1 775-1200.Edited by Robert Darnton and Roche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 3.2 The thesis of circumstance, first employed by francois Mignet and later on by Alphonse Aulard, regards the eventsof the French Revolution as real responses to real circumstances. It deems the Terror as a terrible but necessarydefense of the Republic. The Terror is thus a response to pressing political, social, and economic conditions.

The concept of revolution as a result of ideas descends from the plot theory of Abbé Augustin Barruel, whoclaimed that the Terror was caused by bad ideas written by men in books that instigated mass revolutionary actions.The emphasis on ideas, also detected in the works of Hyppolyte Tame and Cochin, is often associated with a fearand disapproval of revolutionary behavior. In the late twentieth century, this line of thought has been updated inworks on political culture by Francois Furet, Mona Ozouf, and Keith Michael Baker.Roche. “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” 5.R.R. Palmer. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. New York: Athenium, 1966.Palmer presented a defmitive account of the “Year of the Terror” in Twelve Who Ruled. He focused on thecircumstances which led to the formation of the Committee of Public Safety. His subjects were the leadingpoliticians who made the Terror a policy of government.

Influenced by the works of Alphonse Aulard, Palmer agrees that the Terror was an emergency “madenecessary by circumstances” (57). Yet, Palmer goes further to state that “the chief of these circumstances was theinternal chaos [and disunity] which the Revolution had produced” (57). Unlike Aulard, who viewed the Terror as apatriotic defense by ardent revolutionaries, Palmer fmds it “inescapable in a country so habituated to violence, sodemoralized by suspicion and torn by irreconcilable parties.” Eighteenth-century France was a place of anarchy:“[t]he Terror was born of fear, from the terror in which men already lived, from the appalling disorder produced byfive years of Revolution, and the lawless habits of the old regime” (56). However, these popular and social factorsare cursorily mentioned by Palmer; he generally depicts the Terror as an official policy of government instigated byan elite group of men.The Annales school and journal were founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien febvre in 1929. The group of historiansassociated with the Annales strived for a new type of history. Though they were not a monolithic group, all wereinterested in the analysis of the history of everyday life, “la vie quotidienne dans l’histofre.” Two of the mostprolific descendents of Bloch and Febvre were femand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Braudel’s TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949) and Capitalism and Material Lfe(1967) revealed the immobile physical factors and structures as more significant and pervasive than the world of

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events. for Braudel, events were “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strongbacks.” He advised that scholars “learn to distrust them” (On History, 21). Mountains, seas, and the materials andstructures of civilization were history’s true motor. In The Peasants ofLanguedoc (1966), Le Roy Ladurie returnsto a concept that Bloch had earlier explored, “outillage mentale,” mental tools. In the course of writing a “total”history of a community in southern France, Le Roy Ladurie examined the collective thoughts, the mentalites ofeveryday people.6 Georges Lefebvre, “Revolutionary Crowds,” New Perspectives on the French Revolution. Ed. Jeffry Kaplow.New York: Wiley and Sons, 1965, 175. Originally published as “Foules revolutionafres” in Lefebvre’s Etudes surla Revolution Francaise, 1954.7Ibid., 1$1-182.8lbid., 177 and 180.9mid., 183.‘°Ibid., 182.Ibid., xxxiv.

12 Albert Soboul. The Sans-Culottes. Trans. Remy Inglis Hall. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, xvii.13 Literally, “without breeches,” sans-culottes refers to small property-owners and wage-earners of town andcountryside: in its Parisian context, the small shopkeepers, petty traders, craftsmen, journeymen, labourers, vagrants,and city poor.14 Soboul. Sans-Culottes, xxviii.George Rude. The Crowd in the French Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Exemplified by

Tame’s unsympathetic use of the term canaille —“rabble”.Ibid., 232.

t7 Frank Kidner. “French Revolutionary Age”. San Francisco State University, 2/23/98. Literally “halfworld” or“half lifes”, le demi monde designates people on the fringes of society.jg A citizen army, composed of sans-culottes, raised in 1793 to ensure that agrarian stocks reached Paris and othercities. They were discredited and disbanded in 1794.19 The men of the armees revolutionnaires were also called “highwaymen”, “bullies”, “ravenous wolves”,“vagrants”, “adventurers”, “banlcrupts”, “lackeys without employment”, “wigmakers without clients”, “robbers”,“deserters”, “cowards”, “vagabonds”, “wretches”, “vicious bloodthirsty hooligans”, “myrmidons”, “boors”,“guttersnipes”, “septembriseurs”, “butchers”, “informers”, and “ultra-Jacobins”. The People’s Armies, 4-5.20Ibid., 14.Ibid., 2.Ibid., 426.

23 Cobb. Reactions to the French Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1972, 5.241b1d., 10.25 Mona Ozouf. Festivals and the French Revolution. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge Massachusetts:Harvard University Press, 1988, 12. Originally published as Lafête révolutionnaire, 1976.26Ibjd 8.27Ibid., 11.28 Ibid., 12.29Ibid., 12.30Ozouf. “War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1792-1794)”. The Rise and Fall ofthe FrenchRevolution. Edited by T.C.W. Blanning. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. p. 272. Ozoufnotes Robespierre’sinfamous question - “Do you want a revolution without revolution?” - as a classic defense of the Terror on thegrounds of exceptional circumstances.31 Ibid., 267.32 Ibid., 283.Francois furet, “Terror,” The French Revolution in Social and Political Perspective. Ed. Peter Jones. New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 463.‘ These ideas, rooted in French revolutionary political culture, are placed by Furet under the categories of “man’sregeneration”, political will, and absolute popular sovereignty, 463-464.Ibid., 463.

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36 Ibid., 451.‘ Bronislaw Baczko. Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1994. Baczko finds the Terror to be marked by a “uniformity of language” (42). He argues that

“the Terror was not brought to an end by the fall of Robespierre; it was a road to be discovered and travelled” (33).

The “wooden language” of Year II persisted after 9 Thermidor. Rather than falling silent, the voices of terrorists

merged with others in the continuing uproar of counter-revolutionary terror.As had Ozouf and Furet, Baczko regards revolutionary violence as a consequence of the rules of dis

course

rather than circumstances. The degeneration of the state of politics, in which dissent and doubt were punished,

coincided with the unanimous and “extravagant rhetoric of praise and blame” (41). To Baczko, the ideas, symbols,

and practices found in political culture molded both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary terror.

Kidner. “Eighteenth Century Europe”. San Francisco State University, 12-7-98.

Robert Daruton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic

Books, Inc., 1984, 5.40Thid., 260.41 Cohn Lucas, “Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror,” Creation ofModern Political Cult

ure IV, 57.

42Ibid.,59.‘ Ibid., 59.Ibid.,76.See works by Antoine Bamave for a perspective of the French Revolution as a culminating process.