Jacobin review (1/29) of Sophie Wahnich In Defense of the Terror

The Terror was, therefore, a necessary corrective to “popular vengeance,” delimiting the sort of violence seen in September, and thus boasting a quasi-mollifying function. As Danton said in a typical moment of rhetorical thunder: “let us [the Convention] be terrible so as to save the people from being so.” Wahnich continues:

Establishing the Terror had the aim of preventing emotion from giving rise to dissolution or massacre, symbolizing what had not been done in September 1792 and thus reintroducing a regulatory function for the Assembly. For Danton, the members of the Convention had to be “the worthy regulators of national energy.”

Wahnich’s subversive reflection, then, is that far from taking lives the Terror was actually about saving them.

Wallerstein, from Davidson:”The struggle between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, in so far as it existed at all, was a “diversion” in both senses: “fun and games; and a displacement of the attention of others, in this case, the peasants and the sans-culottes.”

Re: the passage you quote.

‘Is x true?’ sort of means the same as ‘X is true’, in an abstract semantic sense. But the difference in force introduced by the interrogatory, as opposed to assertion, makes it very unwise (I should think) to say that any given question is merely a ‘paraphrase’ of one possible answer to it. If you see what I mean.

In the post I actually reject, in passing, as obviously false, the extreme view that all revolutions end in terror. That is, the only thing you ever get is 4. This is the view of the passage you quote, so what is your evidence for attributing this view I say I think is obviously false to me?

The French Revolution has inspired some fairly ridiculous hypotheses about key factors, identified in counterfactual speculation about how the whole bloody mess might have been avoided. Doyle, author of the current Oxford History of the French Revolution, takes the view that the violent chaos of the French Revolution was something of an unlucky accident. He does Marie Antoinette one better, by suggesting that the whole starving mobs of Paris thing might have been absent, if only the French peasants had been a little bit quicker in adopting the potato.

Alexis de Toqueville, writing in the shadow of the collapse of the liberal Orleans monarchy and the rise of Napoleon III (with some, who remembered still alive), thought that the French suffered from having too little acquaintance with the forms and habits of civic engagement. They didn’t have Roberts Rules of Order in their blood, and couldn’t deliberate productively in political assemblies, because they had so little experience of it.

I think it is hard for us to even imagine the political world of ancien regime France, where so much of the virtual reality of institutional politics would be so alien to us. There’s a tendency — acute in de Toqueville’s account and many others, which make use of social science statistics, to highlight the emerging modern bourgeois world we recognize as precursor to our own, alongside the Enlightenment ideas, which we also recognize as our heritage — and, to ignore the larger bulk of economic, political and social institutional reality almost completely alien to the 19th let alone the 20th century, which was immolated in the French Revolution. So much was heaped on that pyre, because there was so much to heap on that pyre.

Peter Gay, the great historian of the intellectual Enlightenment, liked to make the point that the philosophes, who did so much to lay the foundations of our own thought, our modern ideologies, social science and philosophies and understanding of ourselves and the world, were, in their own time, in the 18th century, literally outnumbered nearly 10 to 1, by conservative Catholic prelates. For every philosophe, there were five or ten Abbé’s, writing and publishing and debating, tutoring the children of the rich and advising or administering various institutions. We forget them, because we have no use for them or their ideas, but they nearly overwhelmed the French Enlightenment with sheer force of numbers. Ancien regime France had a government within a government, in the Catholic Church and in its ancient nobility of the sword and its venal nobility of the robe both, preserving strictly an ideology and a hierarchical cadre, as much as the Soviet Union had the Communist Party. For the organic state, these were some very powerful homeostatic systems — well-developed and powerful immune systems, ready to envelope and expel the modern as an infection.

I don’t like tales of inevitability. History only happens one way, as I’m constantly repeating, but that doesn’t justify a narrative, which eliminates all notice of the contingencies that shaped the behavior of those, who lived through it. I don’t say Turgot had to fail, because he did fail. I do think Turgot was a doctrinaire idealist, and there was much less of practical economics or political morality there than claimed, by the man or his fans. I do think France suffered from the underdevelopment of institutions of deliberative governance, and the overdevelopment of the politics of court intrigue. Turgot had the favor of the King, but no deep understanding, but more importantly, no adequate means to mobilize political support or put into motion the apparatus of the state.

His failure to reform was the not the first nor the last. Machault d’Arnouville had failed Louis XV, a more competent monarch, in what was, in many ways, a more sweeping reform. Turgot and Necker were really just trying to kick the can down the road in different ways, because of the difficulty of systemic reform, already revealed by d’Arnouville’s failure. And, it wasn’t just the constraints on them, real as those were, which condemned their pitiful efforts to failure: it was their lack of imagination, and the lack of imagination of the society as a whole. Even with the example of British state beating them on every front in global war and economic competition, and of the American Revolution, there was more of the heady sense of possibility than any real and deliberate appreciation of what was necessary or possible. Until the Estates Generale were called, no one had proposed a permanent institution, able to deliberate on, and press successively, for reform. And, even then, Necker revealed his small-mindedness, by treating them as an administrative council. And, right up to, and through the beginning of the Revolution, the ferme générale, the private for-profit, corporate collectors of taxes, was busily constructing its very elaborate wall around Paris, the better to collect taxes. (Lots of proposals to change tax policy, but little appreciation of the need to change the apparatus, or expectation that it would be changed, whatever the reform.)

I focus on the legislative and economic mainstays. I cannot account for the extreme reaction against the Catholic Church or the nobility. That’s where the violence erupted after all. For that, I think historians need more imagination then I can bring to bear. And, I think, for me and for them, it is just really hard to recognize the full massive weight — we look back into that distant mirror and see what survived and developed, and wondered why the world we know had to have such a violent birth — and, realistically, maybe the answer is that it didn’t. Our mistake is that we fail to see clearly the necessity for the violent death of what no longer is, because we have no acquaintance with it.

Irving Kristol, 1973

By her criteria the French and Russian revolutions should more properly be called “rebellions,” whereas only the American Revolution is worthy of the name. A rebellion, in her terms, is a meta-historical event emerging out of a radical dissatisfaction with the human condition as experienced by the mass of the people, demanding instant “liberation” from this condition, an immediate transformation of all social and economic circumstances, a prompt achievement of an altogether “better life” in an altogether “better world.” The spirit of rebellion is a spirit of desperation ”a desperate rejection of whatever exists, a desperate aspiration toward some kind of utopia. A rebellion is more a sociological event than a political action. It is governed by a blind momentum which sweeps everything before it, and its so-called leaders are in fact its captives, and ultimately its victims. The modern world knows many such rebellions, and all end up as one version or another of “a revolution betrayed.: The so-called “betrayal” is, in fact, nothing but the necessary conclusion of a rebellion. Since its impossible intentions are unrealizable and since its intense desperation will not be satisfied with anything less than impossible intentions, the end result is always a regime which pretends to embody these intentions and which enforces such false pretensions by terror.

Why, thank you, Bruce, for not attributing to me a fallacy I do not hold. I have become slightly disenchanted with CT (which has so many other intelligent contributors) on finding that if I propose A, I am immediately accused of proposing unrelated B on account of my accuser disagreeing with both A and B.

Regarding your particular point: we are probably agreed in thinking that, by 1789, the defects of the French Government finances and of French society had become so intertwined that, in all probability, nothing could be done that was more or less like the initial stages of the Revolution.

Which is not to say that, if something had been done much earlier, or had continued to be done as was being done under Turgot’s administration of the finances, the defects could not have been amended. Restore the finances by abolishing sinecures and pensions, suppress counter-productive internal taxes, attack the nobles’ privileges: above all, keep out of the catastrophic American war [fn1]. I don’t say that would have preserved France, but might it not?

Nor is it to say that the catastrophes of the early French Revolution after the-bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive time, and its successors – attack on France’s neighbours, Terror, ascent of Napoleon, Empire, millions dead, restored Bourbons – were necessarily an inevitable consequence of the early Revolution. But if you argue Turgot’s failure was inevitable since it happened …

Fn1: Yes, I realise that might have changed the course of American history. At worst, the current USA might be sunk into the despotism, squalor and poverty of their northern neighbours,

The idea that the state should take no role in the management of the economy was actually a novelty in the mid 18th century: the favored doctrine of the physiocrats, to whom are attributed the phrase, laissez faire, and the pejorative, bureaucracy. Feudal tradition and Catholic doctrines provided a background expectation, though, of an obligation to organize relief in famine, to routinely regulate fair prices and product quality and repress usury, as well as to promote public works and the development of industry, in accord with the mercantilist ideas current at least since the 16th century.

Turgot, a physiocrat, was the proto-neoliberal, preaching a strict austerity and free trade. Turgot, as an intendant in Limoges had promoted industry and organized famine and work relief efforts. He had addressed lending money at interest, seeking a compromise between traditional Catholic moralistic criticism and the newer, capitalist ideas. Like most Frenchmen of his day, he recalled Law’s system with little real understanding, but much passionate contempt. Here’s what the Wikipedia article on Necker says about the campaign of Necker and his wife to promote him as a replacement for Turgot in the direction of state finances:

Madame Necker entertained the leaders of the political, financial and literary worlds of Paris, and her Friday salon became as greatly frequented as the Mondays of Mme Geoffrin, or the Tuesdays of Mme Helvétius. In 1773, Necker won the prize of the Académie Française for a defense of state corporatism framed as a eulogy of Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert; in 1775, he published his Essai sur la législation et le commerce des grains, in which he attacked the free-trade policy of Turgot. His wife now believed he could get into office . . .

Necker, like virtually all of the leading bankers and financiers of Paris, was a Swiss Protestant. He would replace Turgot’s strict austerity with loans at high interest rates. (He would also make himself popular by creating a nationwide system of pawn brokers — a very unCatholic thing to do, but a desperately needed service in a country without much of a banking system.)

Free trade in grain, an end to privilege and taxation of land, (which is to say, the rich) had become the consensus of Enlightenment opinion, on the eve of the Revolution. Brienne would get free trade in grain during his brief turn in office; bad timing as it turned out. In the event, high bread prices would motivate mass participation in the Revolution. The October March, which brought King and Assembly back to Paris, changed everything.

The fact that direct knowledge of banking and finance was the monopoly of a Swiss Protestant colony in Paris contributed to the hopeless fumbling about of the revolutionary governments with assignants and the like. The loot of foreign conquest relieved an acute shortage of currency in Paris, which no one in government had the understanding to remedy in any other way, turning the character of the Revolution. In the end, Napoleon took power, in part, by negotiating with the Swiss bankers for a Banque of France, just as he negotiated an agreement with the Catholic Church.

Not just in Ireland. The first (and subsequent) Jacobite risings were a direct consequences of the “glorious” “revolution”. Which led to the not-particularly-non-violent Massacre of Glencoe amongst other things.

The revolutionaries started out to reform the revenue system – and the associated complex of laws, rights and privileges – wholesale. They did not reckon on immediate international intervention, or on the degree of internal resistance they encountered. Perhaps they should have. But, given that one of the main aims of the reform was to allow France to compete militarily, the success in war of the revolutionary and the successor Napoleonic regimes is an indicator that they did in fact get what they wanted.

It is clear that any serious attempt to put French finances on a basis comparable to those of Britain or the United Provinces was going to have to over-ride serious opposition – just as any attempt to bring the US banking system under control is going to anger and hurt a lot of people (many of them not plutocrats). And that opposition was going to involve violence, because that was the way politics was played.

We may well be simply talking past each other, or quibbling over nuance.

Revolutions, in my view, are redeemed by the success, if any, of the institution-building that comes after. Doctrines of non-violent civil disobediance are persuasive to me, in that they recognize that the violence of insurrection or revolutionary resistance may prejudice later efforts at institution-building, which efforts are the prize.

The institutions, which govern social cooperation, ante-revolution, have their own costs in dysfunction and injustice. Imagining that they were better by reason of some degree of apparent peace, or more amenable to amelioration or reform than they were, is a common Tory trick of selective memory, which I scorn, without intending to attribute such fallacy to Stephen. Outright collapse was what triggered the French Revolution; counter-revolution, which triggered so much violence, was trying to restore a completely dysfunctional regime.

The Whigs did emerge at the tail end of the English Civil War(s). Their political tendency got its name from the Wiggamore Raid. More importantly, the Whig style of meta-political thinking in strategic and institutional terms emerged from the paranoid style of the Civil War(s), and continued, to inform the American Revolution in the 18th century, with subtle arguments about instituting constitutional government.

The French Revolution went badly in large part because the French were so ill-prepared to address the urgent problems, which brought down the ancien regime: money and bread. French Enlightenment thinking on these subjects was largely rubbish; the Revolution arrived with enlightened opinion centered on a consensus in favor of laissez faire and hard money, which enshrined rank ignorance as truth, and a People, unaccustomed to civic deliberation on public policy, was disabled in the midst of crisis, by the inability to even imagine, let alone legitimate, technocratic competence in the management of political economy. For lack of a better marker, they turned, eventually, to the Man on Horseback — a successful general — to institute reform by authoritarian fiat. Napoleon did an OK job of it, for the most part: thoroughly rationalized Code of Law, Banque of France, efficient civil administration, kinda sorta separation of church and state, etc., though still pretty rough on the proletariat and easy on the wealthy and land-owning classes.

Much is sometimes made of the spirit of the French Revolution, which so influenced political thinkers in the 19th century. It should be noted that the spirit of counter-revolution was born at nearly the same moment, and was responsible for most of the violence that followed attempts at political modernization in Europe, well into the 20th century. Was counter-revolution ever worth it? (Asked ironically)

One thing I would say for revolutionary violence, even where it appears to fail abjectly, is that it pays dividends to others in later situations, by lending credibility to the threat of violence. The French Revolution may not have netted much to the French, but it is difficult to imagine that the Whig-Liberals would have been able to put over even the weak tea of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, if the London mob pelting the shutters of the Iron Duke did not remind the powers-that-be of something more dire. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 surely owed a debt to the fear of renewed civil war.

Again, I fully expect my own country will pay a high price, because the banksters, and the complacent “lesser evil” enabling them, cannot imagine the violence they carelessly nurture. Ditto for the Europeans following the precepts of the hapless Turgot, in managment of the Euro.

When I said I didn’t expect to make much headway, etc., I was expecting that you’d manage to come up with some gem like the penultimate sentence in 120. You didn’t disappoint!

In any case, the answer is exactly what Katherine says at 125 (though I might put the point even more strongly).

How can it be justified or unjustified? A revolution, as I understand it, is a spontaneous mass uprising. It can not be initiated by a decree, and for as long as it’s happening its leaders have a very limited power to steer it in any intended direction. It’s not in the category of things that can be justified. Some individuals (whose actions can be justified or not) will try to ride it and hope to come out on top, but that’s about as much as anyone can do.

There’s a new book called Why Civil Resistance Works, which I haven’t read but (apparently, and I guess it partly addresses your point) shows how non-violence is more effective and leads to better long term solutions. Which is good news all round! (I think the case studies show how a revolution becomes violent or not, but I’m not sure)

I don’t really know anything about Iran but, afaik, on the cultural aspects there have been pretty strong arguments against religion playing a major role in the revolutions ‘non-violence’, and instead ‘national characteristics’ (for example the role of mass protests in recent Iranian history in Ervand Abrahamian, Mass Protests in the Iranian Revolution) have been given some credit in the outcome. Although whether or not that’s true I don’t have a clue

He also mentioned the specifics of the revolution itself as being vital – the context both domestically (the pressure the Shah was under for his human rights record, greater ‘liberalisation’ etc) and internationally (rise in human rights promotion, Carters concentration on human rights, at least rhetorically) – specific acts the revolutionaries took to make it non-violent (which it wasn’t always) specific acts the Shah took (not cracking down hard enough, and then encouraging the protesters by offering concessions)

This contention seems to be backed up ‘scientifically’ by Karen Raslers ‘Concessions, Repressions and political protest in the Iranian Revolution’, which identifies the success of the revolution and its relatively peaceful nature in the mix of concessions and coercion employed by the Shah. (I reread them to make sure I wasn’t misremembering, which I still might be tbh, but they’re both online)