In Defence of the Terror (12 page)

Daunou, in a debate on article 2 on 16 Messidor (4 July 1795), declared that

the commission [of eleven] had suppressed from article 2 of the Declaration of Rights only the statement of the right of resistance to oppression, which it had seen as presenting too great a danger and as opening the door to too much abuse.
21

What had been the foundation of the juridical legitimacy of the revolutionary movement had thus become intolerable.

PERSISTENCE OF IMAGE AND DISTURBANCE OF VISION

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies. The Terror took place in an uncertain struggle waged by people who tried everything to deflect the fear felt towards the counter-revolutionary enemy into a terror imposed on it. This enemy, for its part, tried everything to bring the Revolution to an end. The greatest danger was then that of a weakening of the revolutionary desire – a discouragement, a corruption of the founding desire. It was this danger that haunted those actors most committed to the revolutionary process.

This is why the Terror was a deliberate self-constraint: it was not just a policy of arbitrary violence or extreme fear to intimidate its enemies. It was the historic moment when the sovereign violence of ‘making die' was that of a people driven to make use of it to maintain the extraordinary claim to have conquered sovereignty.

‘The abyss of the Terror' is never completely closed, as this unlikely encounter between the political and the sacred remains fascinating and disturbing. Kant commented on the ‘sympathy of admiration' aroused by the French Revolution in terms of ‘enthusiasm' and the ‘moral disposition of the human race' – even if ‘a sensible man would never resolve to attempt the experiment at such cost'. This moral disposition is what the revolutionaries called the sentiment of humanity. The experiment of the revolution, according to Kant, was thus not a loss of the sentiment of humanity, but on the contrary precisely a sign of this.

‘Citizens, what illusion managed to persuade you that you were inhuman?' Saint-Just exclaimed on 8 Ventôse year II (26 February 1794):

Your revolutionary tribunal has dispatched 300 scoundrels in the last year; did not the Spanish inquisition do more? And for what cause, in the name of God! And did the English courts execute no one this year? . . . And no one mentions the German prisons in which the people are buried.
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What then was the price of the Terror? The classic response is that the two months between 22 Prairial and 9 Thermidor year II saw 1,376 people perish on the scaffold.
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And brutal as the summary measures of the revolutionary tribunal then were, they were not the only price of the Terror or of the Revolution. This price also involved infringing the political border of the sacred. Fear, disgust, terror and enthusiasm were the emotions that signalled the experience of this border, the place where the Revolution and its actors might tumble into the void, where the violence inflicted on the body of the enemy was linked with a foundational vengeance and with popular sovereignty.

The members of the Convention wanted to protect the people from the injury of this sacred deed by focusing it in the Convention itself, its committees and the revolutionary tribunal. But no one was truly protected from a sacred transaction in which the foundation of values required the death of men, in which body and soul had to be committed, and anyone could perish from fear or be overcome by disgust. This in my view is the forgotten price of the Revolution, the buried price of the Terror – a price that is indissociably moral and political at once,
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and that lies in discomfort, risk and a gamble.

‘Terrorism' and ‘terrorists' are words that originated with Thermidor. Those who sought to found a new and egalitarian political and symbolic space were defeated by history. The terrorists meant Robespierre and Saint-Just, but also all who fought for ‘liberty or death' – the Jacobins whose club was closed, the citizens reduced to political passivity by the establishment of a property-based suffrage and the abolition of the right of resistance to an oppression which refused them any active citizenship. The terrorists were all those who were referred to as ‘men of blood', those whose cruelty – cold or intoxicated, depending on whether they gave or fulfilled commands – came to be stigmatized as one that in every case saw politics only as a pretext to assuage a passion for blood. The Terror would be the name given by history to this period of ‘terrorism'. The view of year II of the Republic as a period of terror and dread is essentially Thermidorian.

By inventing the neologism ‘terrorist', the Thermidorians not only anthropologized a violence that was also seen as popular, but they actively obscured what had given this terror a situational legitimacy: a juridico-political process of collective responsibility. In fact, the duty of insurrection made each person a watchman who had either to rise up at the risk of his life, or take responsibility for the decisions of the national Convention.
4

Active forgetting is what is effected after the time of foundation, when the notion of the irreconcilable enemy becomes obsolete and intolerable. From this point on, the ‘terrorists' were the Other of the republicans. The most fervent of these, such as Victor Hugo – little suspected of counter-revolutionary ideology – constantly asserted that, even faced with a crime such as that of 2 December 1851, they would never call for revolutionary terror. The acts of those defeated by history became infamous for those of their heirs who might be of a mind to repeat them. Even if they were understood – and Hugo's
1793
bears witness to this – no situation could lead to their repetition. Even those responsible for defending revolutionary memory knew that the foundational time was not replayable, and that such acts of terror now belonged to a different age.

‘What difference does it make whether one dies from plague or revolution? Moral nature (or history) does not have to be any more moral than physical nature.' This is the argument attributed to Saint-Just by Georg Büchner in
Dantons Tod
(Danton's Death; 1834–5), in this way championing the Thermidorian view. This has recently been reprised in
Le Monde
's op-ed section, where a certain philosopher claimed to make Saint-Just speak about the events of 11 September 2001.
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We are thus faced with a double condensation: the language of the nineteenth century founds the representation of those events of the eighteenth century that composed the ‘French Revolution', and more precisely, the ‘revolutionary Terror'. This representation, not made specific, but cited as a source by the author of this text, is supposed to be able to inform us about what happened on ‘9/11'. To make a contemporary moralizing use of this literary text under cover of a source means introducing political confusion over what meaning to give to acts of cruelty in history, and deploring a non-meaning that one has oneself put forward. For nowadays, it does not matter which body is cruelly affected and for what reason; the only worthwhile thing is the ‘beautiful day of life', whatever this might be. To destroy it always means producing a victim and becoming guilty. Walter Benjamin protested against this kind of morality. In his text on violence and law, in fact, Benjamin criticized a ‘theorem' that has become a virtual rule in the West, namely

the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal and even vegetable life, or limit to human life. Their argument, exemplified in an extreme case by the revolutionary killing of the oppressor, runs as follows: ‘If I do not kill, I shall never establish the world dominion of justice . . . that is the argument of the intelligent terrorist . . . We, however, profess that higher even than the happiness and justice of existence stands existence itself.'
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For Benjamin, however,

the proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life . . . Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, any more than it can be said to coincide with any other of his conditions and qualities, including even the uniqueness of his bodily person.
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‘Terrorist' is thus used as a normative disqualification which proclaims both the intolerable character of the danger that circulates and traverses exposed bodies, and the de-legitimation by the Thermidorian victors of a sovereign violence, practised yesterday by the legitimately elected representatives of the people who are now turned into defeated terrorists, retrospectively criminalized and excluded from the legal and legitimately political field. The terrorist is someone potentially defeated and always outside the law.

The term has been often recycled. It was a label used for
résistants
who proclaimed, at the cost of their lives, that they were not yet defeated under the regimes of occupation and collaboration during the Second World War. In Algeria, again, those who proclaimed the necessity of ending the second-class citizenship that France then offered its colonial subjects were ‘terrorists'. Likewise all who sought to found the possibility of a politics that stood against the domination experienced by the conquered. As well as those who were known, from 1969 on, as ‘hijackers'.

Revolutionary terror is not terrorism. To make a moral equivalence between the Revolution's year II and September 2001 is historical and philosophical nonsense. Is this the effect of what we have called the persistence in vision of the image of revolutionary terror? The point is to note the effects of this disturbance of vision on the moral appreciation of various political cruelties that have been practised, and still are practised, around victors and the defeated, the perpetrators and victims of the events of 9/11. If care is not taken, this deadly ballet could become unending.

The events of 9/11 have not yet found a name. They are spoken of as a fascinating shock, with all that such fascination means in terms of ambivalence: the irresistible attraction of seeing and the privation of defensive reaction.

Under Thermidor, such fascination with the representation of cruelty was not deployed immediately, in real time, but after the event. What has since been constantly represented as object for this fascination are the massacres. The September massacres, the Nantes
noyades
, the forests of guillotines . . . the tale of cruelty offered as the only image of the Revolution, the only fascinating explanation of this history with its trail of victims and executioners.

In September 2001, the image preceded the story, fascination with cruelty preceded analysis and political judgement. But if such deprecation and disgust attest to some people's inability to understand, these sentiments cannot completely obscure a different reception of these events. We saw the ‘V' of victory in Nigeria and Palestine, while adolescents in Seine Saint-Denis – department 93! – chose to write in the name of Bin Laden on their voting slips for the election of school councillors. Commentaries from several countries of the global South immediately gave these events a dimension of implicit revenge against the imperial domination of a hegemonic political model. The dissymmetry of weapons no longer seems an obstacle in causing the eternal victor to bend. It is less a question of approving this cruel decision than of declaring that the United States also shares responsibility for it.

Rather than proposing an explanation for the decision in favour of terrorism, we should grasp in relief how this enabled those who never have access to public speech to take hold of this, to make known through it what is happening today on the side of those left out of account. If the French Revolution can help in analyzing such events, this is perhaps in the connection between the public speech of the voiceless, the ‘understanding nothing' of this speech by those who make politics, and certain events of cruelty.

The absence of public spaces in which popular speech could beat a path for itself, be heard and echoed in the form of pacifying laws, is partly linked with the upsurge of violence. When it is no longer possible to have insurrection recognized as such, violence can no longer be restrained and bloodshed is no longer unanimously reproved.

A DIFFERENT POLITICAL SACRALITY

After 11 September 2001, New York experienced a ‘state of dread'. Disturbance and discouragement came in the wake of the large number of dead and this mass-death's effect of de-subjectification. As the target of these attacks, the ‘sacred body' of the United States had been assassinated. The question was how to rediscover courage after the misfortune. Such was the rhetoric of the discourse that followed, starting with George W. Bush's speech to the joint houses of Congress and the nation on 20 September 2001.

The American sacred body is of course the centre of commerce, the fetish of capitalism, the government in Washington, the presidential and military power, but above all – one might say, before all else – the bodies of the dead. In the
New York Times
, it was the ‘beautiful day in the life' of the dead that had become the sacred body of the American nation. Each of these ‘beautiful days' was reconstituted in a little story which, narrating marriage proposals, diseases overcome, beloved children, memories of childhood, spoke this sacrality. It was one of an ordinary humanity that now founded an indescribable or undiscoverable citizenship. Whereas in the eighteenth century, it was by becoming a citizen that the humanity of humanity was attained, everything here seems to say that it is as a human being without civic history that the sacrality of the political body was is attained. These stories constitute so many little cenotaphs for the dead, who, in their multiplicity, speak the sacred identity of the American nation. It was in the face of this profaned sacrality that Americans had to rediscover energy against discouragement.

Bush set out above all else to describe the operations that made this subjective reprise possible. He opened his speech on 20 September with what would replace the funerals that were impossible: ‘We have seen the state of our union in the endurance of rescuers working past exhaustion.' The rescue operations made possible a sublimation in the event. Bush could then reconnect with the aesthetic of emotional heroizing. He closed his speech with an anecdote worthy of a funeral oration for simple heroes: