The words "terrorism" and "terrorists" were coined in the wake of the French revolution to describe the "men of blood" who established and exercised the mechanisms of fearsome repression the Revolutionary Tribunal, its Law of Suspects and the guillotine designed to conquer tyranny and secure liberty in the name of the sovereign people. "Liberty or Death", the Jacobins proudly proclaimed, before their club was closed. "Did you want a revolution without a revolution?" Robespierre sharply remarked.
In her provocative essay, Sophie Wahnich has new things to say about the difference between today's terrorists and their nominal 18th-century predecessors. She also offers a bold reconstruction of the emotions that drove the French revolutionaries to terror, reminding her readers that this particular period of history remains a political laboratory where it is possible to ask extreme questions about the causes and consequences of revolutionary violence. Her premise is that dismissive disgust at blood spilt and life lost is an edifying but overly simplistic and apolitical response to revolution past and present.
On the putative connection between the French revolution and the terrorists of 9/11 Wahnich is clear: "Revolutionary terror is not terrorism. To make a moral equivalence between the Revolution's year II and September 2001 is historical and philosophical nonsense." In her conclusion she reiterates the disjunction: "The violence exercised on 11 September 2001 aimed neither at equality nor liberty. Nor did the preventive war announced by the president of the United States."
According to Wahnich, there is an analogy to be drawn between 1793 and 2001, in the way the French revolutionaries and the Americans responded to "being in fear" by seeking common resistance to the enemy through anger, courage and justice. But here the analogy ends because, "the Americans, despite what they say, do not live in a time of foundation, and we have not finished observing the forms of dread that the American response has provoked the dread of a violence that is not foundational but policing, and recently also preventative."
The French revolutionaries, in contrast, did live at a time of foundation (of new political values), represented by the universal "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", which, Wahnich argues, could not be secured without heroism in the face of profanation. On her account, the price of the Terror was "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, and that lies in discomfort, risk and a gamble."
Wahnich is especially good at describing the fracturing of the revolutionary movement over the question of clemency. On the one hand, Danton "Since when is man infallible and exempt from error?" who could ask pardon on the scaffold for his role in establishing the institutions of the Terror. On the other hand, Saint Just, who asked for no forgiveness but pointed to the copy of the Declaration of Rights on the wall of the room in which he was held the night before his execution and said: "After all, I did that!" As for Robespierre, there is no way of knowing whether he had regrets about the price of the Terror, or thought the gamble had paid off. In the end he could not speak because half his jaw was shot off (by his own hand or another) and when he gestured for a pen, no one would give him one. But such had been his commitment of body and soul to the revolution, for good or ill, that regret seems unlikely.
Wahnich's essay contributes to and is informed by a reassertion of the left's historiographical grip on the revolution. In this story, the historian François Furet is the arch enemy, for stridently declaring on the eve of the bicentenary in 1989: "the French Revolution is over!" Furet's heirs are derided for focusing attention on the liberal constitutional aspirations of 1789, instead of the dark days of the Terror, which surely played a part in the founding of our western democracies.
An introduction by Slavoj iek ill-serves this book. Gushingly and flamboyantly welcoming "we were not waiting merely for a book like this; this is the book we were waiting for" he opens with Zhou Enlai's well-worn quip that "it is still too early to tell" what the French revolution has achieved. Then comes an anticapitalist rant that makes passing reference to a number of contemporary films. It is only in the last paragraph of his introduction that iek reminds himself to get "back to Wahnich's book". Finally, he issues some orders: " the reader should approach its topic terror and terrorism without ideological fears and taboos, as a crucial contribution not only to the history of the emancipatory movements but also as a reflection on our own predicament. Do not be afraid of its topic: the fear that prevents you from confronting it is the fear of freedom, of the price one has to pay for freedom."
Being frightened of terror and terrorism and refusing to think carefully and accurately about the topic are not the same thing. Nor is being frightened of terror and terrorism necessarily connected to the fear of freedom, or the price one might be made to pay for freedom in specific political circumstances. Many of the participants in the French revolution thought long and hard about such questions, and while it is sometimes difficult to understand their thoughts, and not always comfortable to do so, it is always interesting to go back into that perennial political laboratory and try. Wahnich's provocative book is testament to that.
Ruth Scurr is the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Vintage).
