In Defence of the Terror (6 page)

The people have stood up, ready to avenge their outraged national majesty. These rigorous measures are justified by article 2 of the Rights of Man: ‘Resistance to oppression'. What misfortune, however, for the free men who have handed you all your powers to see themselves reduced to drenching their hands in the blood of the conspirators!

. . .

Shall the people be forced to return to the time of 13 July, to themselves take up the sword of the law and avenge with one blow the outraged law, to punish the guilty and the cowardly depositaries of this very law? No, gentlemen – you see our concerns and alarms, and you will dissipate them.
20

The means for dissipating these fears lay in giving popular enthusiasm a normative symbolic form. It was explicitly demanded that the sovereign emotive power of the people, so that it should not turn destructive, be translated into terms of law. These emotions, from pain through to rage, had therefore to be deposited by the people in the hands of the legislators, in the sacred precincts of the Assembly, and to find their place there: ‘It is in your breast that the French people deposits its alarms, and that it hopes at last to find the remedy for its ills . . . We have deposited in your breast a great pain . . .' The legislators had first of all to listen to the political pain of the people, to understand that this pain, if overcome, could produce anger, and then to re-translate this into the symbolic order so as to channel it. ‘Legislators, you will not refuse the authorization of the law to those ready to go and die to defend it.'
21

Confronted with popular emotions, therefore, the legislators, as free and sensitive men, had to become good translators of the voice of the people. And this had already found its expression, symbolized by such spokesmen as Santerre. But the intersubjectivity that was anticipated relied not on an argument to be rationally debated, but rather on a sensibility to be shared. The heart had to be touched more than the mind.

For a long time we have comforted our ulcerated hearts. We hope that the latest cry we address to you will make your own heart feel. The people have stood up, they await in silence a response that is finally worthy of their sovereignty.
22

The role of legislators in the process of pacification was therefore fundamental. They had to effect the translation of emotions into laws, into what a number of addresses termed the ‘sanctuary of the laws', a sacred place in which men came together to make and guard laws. They thus gave a legal form to emotions, and above all invented the symbolic forms and practices that would permit enthusiasm to be contained. The spokesmen themselves invented a pacifying gesture. On 19 June, a deputation asked to be received with its weapons, after planting a liberty tree. They then did a few dance steps in the Assembly precinct, to the sound of a drum: we can speak of a ritual of pacification. But the issues were focused in the reception of the emotions expressed in the addresses, petitions and deputations that spoke for the people. The petition of 20 June divided the Assembly: the right called the Marseillais and the faubourg Saint-Antoine ‘factious', whereas the left reasserted the need to translate popular emotions into the order of the law. Lamarque:

Coblenz says that enthusiastic patriots are factious. Gentlemen, the only true patriots are enthusiastic ones . . . I pride myself on being one of these factious. You will ask if I am referring to the petition of pikes? Yes, gentlemen. I speak of the decrees of the National Assembly; I speak of the law; I speak of the countless number of petitions that you hear each day at the tribune, and that proclaim without ambiguity the wish of the nation.
23

To demand in June 1792 that the
patrie
be declared in danger meant demanding carnage and fury, so as to forestall the possibility of frenzy: a pacification by means of a decree that reflected quite precisely a love of the laws; the recognition of popular sovereignty, the opening of the National Guard to ‘passive' citizens, and the right to legitimate violence on the part of all citizens of the male sex.
24

Jean de Bry, a legislator of the left, in his report of 30 June 1792, replied both to the people who wanted the
patrie
to be proclaimed in danger, and to the right of the Assembly that incriminated the same people for having dared to enter the king's residence on 20 June. He asserted that, if the
patrie
had to be declared in danger, it was up to the Assembly to do so in order to produce order. The nation had to be ‘a well-disciplined body that, without consuming itself in useless movements, calmly awaits the order of a leader in order to act. The nation will march if need be, but it will march together and regularly.'
25
Sovereign power, therefore, was not truly settled on the side of the people, who could simply be instrumentalized when necessity demanded: ‘Convinced that by reserving for itself the right to declare the danger', the Assembly ‘puts off the moment and calls for calm in the minds of good citizens. The formula to utter will be: “Citizens, the
patrie
is in danger”.'
26

The same preoccupation with order can be seen with Danton on 12 August 1793: ‘Let us know how to take advantage of this memorable day. You have been told that a
levée en masse
is needed. Yes, to be sure, but this must be done with order.'
27
Order so as to avoid carnage; order as a means to control the sovereign power.

But between spring 1792 and summer 1793, the hypothesis of an Assembly, supposedly representing the sovereign people but by its inaction forcing free men to ‘drench their hands in the blood of conspirators', had become actual experience with the September massacres.

THE RUPTURE OF THE SACRED BONDS
BETWEEN PEOPLE AND ASSEMBLY

On 30 June 1792, Delaunay, a deputy of the left, asserted that the moment had come to declare the
patrie
in danger:

The people, cognizant of the peril to the public good, are awaiting a strong and extraordinary measure on the part of those to whom they have entrusted their destiny. They know that your mission is to carry out their wish and to legislate what is required by the nation. Maintaining the constitution can become a superstition contrary to the general national will. However immense the powers of the Constituent Assembly may be, they do not have the power of commanding the passions. I tell you, gentlemen, that so long as the state of revolution persists in an empire, a constitutional commitment can only ever signify commitment neither to add nor to subtract anything until the date set for such a revision.
1

Not only was Delaunay's proposal not acceptable at that moment, but the Assembly proceeded towards the indictment of the men of 20 June 1792, under the aegis of Lafayette and a petition from Le Havre of 6 July, which demanded ‘vengeance on the wretches who violated the asylum of the hereditary representative, vengeance on those factious who summoned him with daggers in their hands'.
2
As against the king's sacred character, associated with that of the constitution of 1791 and both allegedly profaned, the sacrality of the people and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were now proclaimed. Could the honour of the people be scorned in the name of the honour of the king?

The conflict crystallized in terms of indictment: indict the people or indict Lafayette. On 9 August 1792, the Assembly voted by a quite large majority that it was acceptable to acquit the general, even though he was accused of having sought to overthrow the national representative body and had betrayed his military mission by coming to Paris to threaten the people. The following day, 10 August, the taking of the Tuileries and the establishment of an insurrectionary Commune took place without the Assembly being forewarned or consulted: the Assembly was simply informed of these events. Its prevarications regarding the ‘
patrie
in danger', and its ambiguous attitude towards Lafayette, radically brought into question the trust that the people had granted it. No longer was it a matter of awaiting the signal of the law in order to insubordinately rise and demand the abdication of the perjured king. Contrary to what had occurred on 20 June, there was no longer any sense in waiting for a decree before acting. The decree would not come in time. The Assembly was no longer a possible site for the sacred translation of the will of the people, but simply a place for registering accomplished facts. In September 1792, a new step was taken in this disavowal of the Assembly. This was because the Parisians' dread no longer arose simply from the defeats suffered on the French borders, but also from the sense of being betrayed by legislators who had not taken the measures called for by the insurrection of 10 August, and in particular by those measures aimed at ‘judging the crimes of 10 August'.

When the Swiss Guards opened fire, the Marseilles
fédérés
, the Paris sans-culottes and the National Guards were already engaged in the Tuileries. They came armed, aware that the king and the royal family had been put under protection, and desired that in this context there should be no spilling of blood. They undoubtedly remembered that ‘the insurrection of a free people is the expression, arising from the general will, to change the Constitution', and that it presupposes the self-control of violence. If they came armed, this was to express the effective shift in the sovereign power, the change of the constitution
in fact
. They had come ready to fight to take the Tuileries as they had taken the Bastille. But the palace did not appear to resist their entry, which was made in calm. If justice was demanded for the crimes of 10 August, this was with the feeling of having been caught in an ambush aiming to spill the blood of the people, when the political die was already cast. It was because they sensed the betrayal of what should be a
common
desire, bound up with the
common
sense of natural humanity not to spill blood, that the Parisians of 10 August demanded justice. If there was intolerable cruelty, this was on the part of the defenders of the palace. To deal with and pacify the emotions that arose in the face of such treason, justice needed to be promptly done. This demand for justice was also a way of restoring trust in the Assembly, while waiting for the meeting of the National Convention promised for September. No one wished to spend too long on pacifying symbolic mediations, and only the renewal of these mediations could prove that popular sovereignty had been genuinely established, that citizens were now recognized as equal, fully disposing of the sovereign power. If justice was done, the insurrection would then have truly established democratic principles without dislocating the community of citizens. If justice was refused, this would be the sign of an uncertain, fragile and thwarted foundation. The political community would then be torn apart, and the insurrectionary confrontation renewed in forms that would certainly be more difficult to control: not the forms of a velvet insurrection, but those of the public vengeance of the people. This was a matter of importance, and Robespierre, Danton and Marat all stressed the necessity of a tribunal that would judge these crimes. Robespierre intervened on 15 August, as a delegate of the Commune, and proclaimed: ‘Since 10 August, the just vengeance of the people has not yet been satisfied.'
3
On the 17th, a citizen and temporary representative of the Commune declared at the tribune of the Assembly:

As citizen, as magistrate of the people, I come to announce to you that tonight at midnight the tocsin will sound, the call to arms will be given. The people are tired of not being at all avenged. You should fear lest they make their own justice. I demand that you decree without hesitation the appointment of a citizen in each section to form a criminal tribunal.
4

The deputies Choudieu and Thuriot sought to challenge this representative's legitimacy by maintaining that he did not know the ‘true principles and true laws'. In the event, the Assembly did not proclaim the decree demanded, while the tribunal established on 17 August, far from adopting this extraordinary form of popular tribunal, simply renewed the regular legal forms. The September massacres thus found the deputies marginalized, one could say ‘absent', i.e. their presence no longer counted for the protagonists of the event. When representatives of the constituted authorities – whether those of the Assembly, the departmental directory or the municipality – appeared before the Septembrists using the language of the law, this language was no longer effective. Their speech had become unwelcome. Reference to the law had lost its sacred character.

The emotional economy I have described, which is also that of the sacred, had thus broken down. The sacred voice of the people demanding vengeance – ‘vox populi, vox dei'
5
– had not been listened to or translated into law by those whose function this was. The representatives had lost their position as necessary intercessors. From now on, the people expected nothing more from the Assembly, and the acts of the Septembrists would make a gap between this de facto delegitimized representation and the people. Reference to the law was no longer a demand from the people but an imposition by their representatives, whose legitimacy to proclaim the law or ‘make it speak'
6
had been invalidated. In practice, then, they were no longer recognized as representatives. The transaction between sacred text and sacred body could no longer find expression, and a relation of body to body was now substituted for the symbolic operation that had become impossible.

In the written records of representatives of the constituted authorities, the insurgents' absence of animosity towards them is striking. For example, when Pétion appeared at the prison of La Force, he was neither turned away nor molested. We even get the impression that the Parisians would have liked to be able to please him by obeying his instructions, but that their duty had changed:

I spoke to them in the austere language of the law, I spoke with the sentiment of deep indignation that I felt. I made them all come out before me. But I had hardly appeared myself before they went back inside.
7

This disavowal does not indicate the expression of a new aggressiveness, but rather that intermediaries who had not managed to elaborate the laws indispensable for public safety were declared useless and negligible. Nonetheless, certain arguments still resonated:

When the mayor of Versailles requested pardon for the innocent, Blomquel, one of the protagonists of the events who was directing operations, replied by making them come out. The mayor, however, was unable to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty.
8

What was involved in the September massacres, then, was not an indifferent, disproportionate and blind vengeance, opposed all along the line to criminal justice. Nor was this vengeance a desire that the law could restrain. Far from being the expression of a vindictive passion, the vengeance carried out appears above all as the exercise of a difficult charge that was forced on people by duty. One of the difficulties in executing it was precisely to distinguish the innocent from the guilty, to trace this dividing line – a question that constantly appears in the major reports of the period of Terror. Robespierre put it like this on 5 Nivôse of year II:

And so, if we regarded as criminals all those who, in the revolutionary movement, exceeded the precise line drawn by prudence, we would encompass in a common proscription along with bad citizens, all the natural friends of liberty, your own friends and all the supports of the Republic . . . What can then untangle all these distinctions? What can draw the dividing line between all the contrary excesses? Love of the
patrie
and of truth.
9

Vengeance maintains the distinction between social groups and constructs their respective identities – here that of the sovereign people towards those who refuse them this sovereignty or do not respect it, those who are responsible for the denial of justice and the guilty who remain unpunished. If the order of
penalty
assumes that offender and offended belong to one and the same group, the order of
vengeance
‘is inscribed in an intermediary social space between that in which the proximity of partners prohibits it and that in which their distance substitutes war for vengeance'.
10
An approach of this kind undermines a supposed evolutionary opposition between vengeance and justice: vengeance is not a more archaic form of justice than penal justice, but a form of justice corresponding to a different social configuration. It is more a question of understanding vengeance as a moment of constitutive justice of the specific identity of each of the social groups that confront one another within the same society. It is at one and the same time

a system of exchange and social control of violence . . . As an integral part of the overall social system, the system of retribution is above all an ethic that deploys an ensemble of representations and values relating to life and death, to time and space . . . it is finally an instrument and site of power identifying and opposing social units and vindicatory groups.
11

This long definition casts a new light on the revolutionary call for vengeance. It shows how, far from being disqualifying, this exhortation appeals to an ethic in which the disturbing question of duty appears. The demand for vengeance implies a reaction designed to obtain respect for the identity of the victim's group:

In this sense, the debt of the offence can be defined as a debt of life, and life as a spiritual and social capital that the members of the group are charged with defending and making fruitful . . . This life-capital is depicted by two symbols: blood, symbol of the union and continuity of generations, and honour, symbol of the identity and difference that makes it possible both to recognize the other and to demand that he respects you.
12

When the spokesmen of the people called for vengeance for the crimes of 10 August, the ‘debt of life' was that of the blood of the patriots, but also that of the honour of the people whose identity as conquering people was challenged. In revolutionary terms, re-establishing honour amounted to manifesting the identity of the sovereign people irrevocably by an act of vengeance. This is why the public vengeance demanded was not an a priori vengeance,
13
not a preventive vengeance carried out by patriots before leaving for the battlefront, but rather a subsequent vengeance for an affront that was hard to repair.

A SOVEREIGN VENGEANCE

In the
Créole patriote
for 2 September, the account begins by evoking 10 August: ‘The people, justly indignant at the crimes committed during the
journée
of 10 August, made for the prisons. They still feared plots and traitors . . . The news that Verdun had been taken . . . provoked their resentment and vengeance.'
14
On 6 September, Mlle de Mareuil, daughter of a member of the Commune's general council, wrote to her brother:

I have to make the following remark: since the
journée
of 10 August, there have only been three people guillotined, and this has revolted the people. Finally people gathered from all sides . . . Oh my dear friend, we are all in a state of dreadful consternation.
15

The same day,
La Sentinelle
expressed very clearly how ‘the crowd, weary at the silence of the laws, delivered swift justice'.
16
On 11 September, the tribunal of 17 August itself sent an address to the Assembly: