In Defence of the Terror (4 page)

This confused analogy finds a more precise and radical formulation in certain contemporary philosophical analyses. Giorgio Agamben, in
Homo Sacer
, expresses it in these terms:

The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism (which here we must, with every caution, advance) is obviously not . . . a historiographical claim, which would authorize the liquidation and levelling of the enormous differences that characterize their history and their rivalry. Yet this idea must nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level, since it alone will allow us to orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen convergences of the end of the millennium.
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The French Revolution, as the alleged founding moment of our Western democracies, is implicitly targeted by this thesis. The historiographical dimension of this criticism is still more explicit in Agamben's
Means Without End
: ‘[In] all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day . . . the state makes nativity or birth (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty.'
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And the historical parallel between revolution and totalitarianism is made still more explicit in an article titled ‘Qu'est-ce qu'un peuple?', in which Agamben maintains that

starting with the French Revolution, sovereignty is entrusted solely to the people, the
people
become an embarrassing presence, and poverty and exclusion appear for the first time as an intolerable scandal in every sense . . . From this perspective, our time is nothing other than the methodical and implacable attempt to fill the split that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded.
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Since we know that, for Agamben, this absence of division among the people leads to the fantasy of a pure, homogeneous, unified people, as in the Nazi notion of
Volk
, this can only be disturbing. In the end, this philosopher rediscovers the thesis of a theoretical matrix common both to totalitarianism and to the contemporary democracies, which can be analyzed in the founding event that is the French Revolution. This is the theoretical matrix of biopolitics, which he claims is inscribed at the heart of the sovereign power of the revolutionary period.

Michel Foucault had already opposed the pair of actions that characterized the sovereign power – ‘making die' and ‘letting live' – to the pair characterizing what he called biopolitics – ‘making live' and ‘letting die'. Such a politics, for him, assumed that ‘the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society's political strategies'.
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‘What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques . . . and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust.'
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This is the point from which Agamben's reflections begin. Far from supporting this opposition between biopolitics and sovereignty, he maintains that both the sovereign exception's practice of ‘making die' and the biopolitical practices described by Foucault involve the production of a ‘biopolitical body'. This body is then an object of power, corresponding to the other side of the Greek
zoē
, animal life as opposed to
bios
, to political or properly human life inasmuch as this is a life of liberty guided by the idea of a collective good life in the community. For Agamben, ‘the exception everywhere becomes the rule . . . right and fact enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction'.
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The extermination camp is the place par excellence where the biopolitical body is formed, and where the state of exception is the only right.

The end point of this long line of argument is that the question asked about the French Revolution indicates a profound solidarity between democratic and totalitarian regimes, a political foundation at which there is no longer a difference between animal life and political life. But is this at all tenable? Is the French Revolution, and the Terror in particular, part and parcel of this zone of irreducible non-differentiation? And if yes, how so? Finally – and this question is fundamental – did the revolutionary effort aim to let this zone of non-differentiation expand without limits, in the way that historians have spoken for example of unbounded suspicion, or did it aim on the contrary to maintain this as a marginal place in the political organization?

This biopolitical body, used to undermine the French Revolution, had also been denounced earlier by Hannah Arendt in her essay
On Revolution
, if without using the new term. The social question and the formulation of a right to existence were in her view the inaugural forms of a politics in which the question of ‘life', as she called it (Aristotle's
zo
ē
, Agamben's ‘bare life'), acquired full right in the field of politics, inaugurating a politics of pity. By denouncing social inequality between rich and poor, the revolutionaries, according to Arendt, destroyed the possibility of a politics based not on the principle of equality but rather on that of liberty. For her, in effect, what was at issue in politics was not life but the world. Liberty was a reality of the world that existed in a common space that men inserted themselves into by action and speech. Men are free when they act. For Arendt, the social question led the Revolution to produce men who, instead of being free and citizens, would be equals in the relationship established to material goods, and reduced – just as under the denounced Ancien Régime – to the state of a flock of animals. In this context of arithmetic equalization, no one would seek any more to act on the world, and all that mattered would be to maintain ‘the beautiful day of life', as Aristotle put it.
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Contrary to what was asserted in the Declaration of Rights, they would be living men who did not manage to rise to the state of citizens.

For Arendt, the question of the blood spilled by the revolutionaries, of cruelty towards the political enemy, was bound up with the entry of the ‘unfortunate' onto the stage in 1793–94: ‘Pity, seen as the wellspring of virtue, was claimed to possess a higher potential for cruelty than that of cruelty itself.' Arendt cites the most radical of the revolutionaries, ‘Out of pity, out of love for humanity, be inhuman', and she continues:

These words are the authentic language of passion, followed by the crude but none the less precise and very widespread justification of the cruelty of pity; the skilled and kindly surgeon uses his cruel and charitable knife to cut off the gangrened limb and thus save the body of the patient.
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In this way, the French Revolution becomes an intolerable historical event, one which injures a general present-day sensitivity by offering the archetype of a violence inflicted and assumed on the body of the enemy, and an imaginary of cruelty at once exceptional and unbounded, since it is legitimated in the minds of those who perform it by their sentiment of doing good.

Aversion to the French Revolution combines rejection of a politics of pity that produces political impotence with rejection of a politics of cruelty bound up with the passion for the unfortunate and the exercise of the sovereign exception. As Giorgio Agamben concludes:

until a completely new politics . . . no longer founded on the
exceptio
of bare life – is at hand . . . the ‘beautiful day' of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.
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These theoretical issues offer a further step towards understanding how aversion for the Republic can draw in the whole of the socio-political spectrum. It is no longer simply with respect to the supposed perfection of the present democratic model that the Revolution is intolerable, but also with respect to what the articulation of its legacy – modern sovereignty – and its inventiveness – the project of a just and happy society – have supposedly produced: political impotence.

In order to reopen these debates, it is necessary to return to the archives, to the nitty-gritty of the revolutionary political and philosophical project. A return to certain key moments of what is customarily known as the revolutionary dynamic will make it possible to cast a new light on the political and historical link between liberty, sovereignty and equality, and to offer a new interpretation.

EXPELLING DREAD: NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TERROR

‘But what can have struck men so greatly that they kill their own kind, not with the amoral and unreflective act of the semi-animal barbarian who follows his instincts without knowing anything else, but under an impulse of conscious life, as creator of cultural forms?'
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This question was formulated in order to try to raise the veil over the mystery of rituals of sacrifice, and it is tempting to apply it to the period of the Terror.

In fact, this explicitly anthropological approach makes it possible to take a distance from any a priori judgement on the Terror, and to associate three terms that today have become unpronounceable together: ‘terror', ‘culture', and ‘impulse of creative life'. Such an inquiry will reopen the dossier on a cause that seems to be satisfactorily understood and closed – that of the reasons for the violence of the Terror. Rejecting the other, more implicit anthropology, which fuels the dominant historical discourse and steers it towards notions of impulses, barbarism and instinct, of the deadly tendency bound up with a ‘rigourism of virtue',
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we might hope to resolve the question of foundational violence.
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If it is nothing new to analyze the Terror in terms of foundational violence, this very idea of
foundation
is always bound up with the struggle against the Ancien Régime and is never made any more specific.
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A violence of this kind, however, can be rehabilitated without considering it as directed specifically against the Ancien Régime. Various religious rituals commemorate times of foundation and symbolically handle the risks of violence bound up with a moment that combines the destruction and the construction of social ties, risks that can indeed lead to the demise of the community. It is these same risks that make it possible to understand and analyze the Terror as foundation. This very exercise, however, is not without its risks.

The first of these is to view the Terror as a resurgence of primitivism. Yet political anthropologists' use of the primitive society/modern society opposition does not seem to me an adequate response.
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Drawing on the investigations of anthropologists cannot today lead to negating a society's historicity. Founding is not a primitive act, though we can hypothesize that there are anthropological analogies in the act of foundation – whether this occurs in the fifth, the eighteenth or the twentieth century. It is also worth recalling here that eighteenth-century anthropology did not merely distinguish between primitive and modern peoples, but also between free peoples and slave peoples; yet ‘primitive' does not coincide with ‘slave', nor ‘modern' with ‘free'. History was then often seen as a procedure of denaturing that led free peoples into slavery – thus adding to the critique of the ‘primitive society/modern society' dichotomy.

The second risk is to propose an analysis in ‘theologico-political' terms. One approach of this kind has already been radically criticized.
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The particular ‘theologico-political' in question here is one that posited the power of religious principles, and Catholicism in particular, in order to interpret such secular revolutionary notions as ‘virtue'. Michel Vovelle emphasized the path taken towards secularism by the French revolutionaries, as opposed to the English revolutionaries who had still needed the Bible in order to act.
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It is true that the question of a sacred bond was far from absent from the revolutionaries' concerns. To ‘re-bind' (
religare
) men by sacred bonds was an important aspect of the revolutionary project of year II. But the question of foundation is not a theologico-political one. The notion of a ‘transfer of sacredness', proposed by Mona Ozouf in order to explain the investment of a secular political sphere by people who were familiar with the imbrication of religious and political power, muddied the waters.
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The invention of a new sacred sphere, in fact, does not presuppose shifting the symbolic and emotional investments of religion towards politics, but rather of adding the two together by offering individuals a different site for their desires for community. Civic religion is another possible way of combining people. If this seemed necessary to the revolutionaries, it was not exclusive. The question, then, is to grasp what political sacrality, as foundation of a circulation of emotions, led to the violence of the Terror in the build-up to year II.
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I have chosen here the paradigm of emotions, and not, as might have been expected for the eighteenth century, that of passions or moral sentiments. Despite not being contemporary with the Revolution, the notion of emotion has the advantage of highlighting an ‘upsurge' that combines a state of the body and a judgement,
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i.e. feeling and judging at the same time. This was indeed what the protagonists of the Terror expected of a good revolutionary. Saint-Just, when depicting the events of 26 Germinal of year II, proposed a combination of mind and heart:

The man of revolution is merciless to the bad, but he is sensitive, he pursues the guilty in the tribunals and defends innocence, he speaks the truth so that it will instruct, and not so that it offends . . . His probity is not a delicacy of spirit but a quality of the heart. Honour the mind but base yourselves on the heart.
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