In joining the Volscians, Coriolanus does not betray Rome out of a sense of petty revenge but regains his integrity – his only act of betrayal occurs at the end when, instead of leading the Volscian army onto Rome, he organizes a peace treaty between the Volscians and Rome, breaking down to the pressure of his mother, the true figure of superego Evil. This is why he returns to the Volscians, fully aware what awaits him there: the well-deserved punishment for his betrayal. And this is why Fiennes’s Coriolanus is effectively like the saint’s eye in an Orthodox icon: without changing a word in Shakespeare’s play, it looks specifically at us, at our predicament today, outlining the unique figure of a radical freedom fighter.
So, back to Wahnich’s book: 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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Discussions at several different places gave rise to this little book. I have to thank Antoine de Baeque for having suggested that I take part in the study day he organized on the Terror in 1999, thus helping me to put these reflections into shape; Didier Fassin for having invited me to an interdisciplinary seminar on the notion of the intolerable; Alain Brossat for inviting me to a conference on terrorism; Arlette Farge for having encouraged me in my reflection on political emotions at the seminar she and Pierre Laborie organized on the event and its reception; and Marc Abélès for having opened up paths of anthropological reflection in the LAIOS seminar. My thanks also to those colleagues and friends, fellow historians of the French Revolution whom I joined in conducting a seminar on ‘L’Esprit des Lumières et de la Révolution’: Françoise Brunel, Yannick Bosc, Marc Deleplace, Florence Gauthier and Jacques Guilhaumou. My special thanks to Éric Hazan for having re-read the text of this essay with care and friendship. And thanks, finally, to Didier Leschi, who helped me so often to clarify my investigation by re-reading the different pieces of the puzzle as they came to light.
INTRODUCTION:
AN INTOLERABLE REVOLUTION
In Éric Rohmer’s film The Lady and the Duke (2001), the French Revolution is seen through the eyes of Grace Elliott. This friend and former lover of the duc d’Orléans, before being imprisoned herself during the Terror, was confronted with two of those events that have given the Revolution its savage reputation: the massacres of September 1792 and the death of the king. During these massacres, Grace Elliott crossed Paris in a carriage. After having managed not to faint at the sight of the duchesse de Lamballe’s head – whose well-known face was paraded in front of Elliott’s carriage atop a pike – she cried in delayed shock when she reached her home and explained what she had seen. Faced with the impending death of the king, she hoped right until 21 January 1793 that the revolutionaries would not dare to kill him, and interpreted the cries of the people that she heard from her residence in Meudon as a demonstration to prevent his execution. After his death she went into mourning, and would not get over her anger at the duc d’Orléans, who had not only done nothing to oppose the king’s death, but had actually voted for it. Revolutionary violence was imprinted on human bodies, whether in the institutional no man’s land of the September massacres or in the context of the inventive institution of the king’s trial. Grace Elliott’s reactions were both sensitive and moral: fear, anger and sadness are the expression of an emotional and normative judgement. We can well imagine that she found these two events ‘insufferable’.
Elliott’s point of view, which was also that of Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, was expressed in the memoirs she later wrote and that were eventually published in 1859. But today, through the effect of this historical film, it has also become a contemporary point of view on the French Revolution.
If we cannot maintain that this vision of the Revolution is completely dominant today – since it is certainly not detested by all its heirs – we have to admit that the film’s reception, both before and after its release in September 2001, was highly positive, not just on account of its aesthetic innovations but also for its ideological standpoint. Marc Fumaroli, in an article for Cahiers du Cinéma in July 2001, saw it as a key film on ‘the bloodiest and most controversial days in our history’,1 and constructed a parallel between the prisons of the Terror and the Nazi-era extermination camps:
When she meets up in prison with duchesses, countesses, laundrywomen and actresses, all condemned to the scaffold for the mere fact of their birth or their allegiance, she is almost happy to share their fate, just as a ‘goy’ résistante would have been in the Drancy transit camp in 1942–43.2
We see here the conscious construction of a new reception of the French Revolution which, out of disgust at the political crimes of the twentieth century, imposes an equal disgust towards the revolutionary event. The French Revolution is unspeakable because it constituted ‘the matrix of totalitarianism’ and invented its rhetoric.3
The social and ideological cleavages that form the fabric of the revolutionary event have constantly plagued its representations. There have always been counter-revolutionaries – and they were perceived as such. Today, however, what is more surprising is that these counter-revolutionary representations can pass as majoritarian, commonplace, and – like Éric Rohmer’s film – be considered both by critics and the public as historically correct. We are no longer in an age in which different standpoints argue over an event that resists interpretation, but rather one of unquestioned detestation of the event. Since the French Revolution includes what the British call the ‘Reign of Terror’, and the French simply ‘the Terror’, not only can it no longer be seen as a historical movement which is redeemable en bloc, but it can in fact be rejected en bloc. The French Revolution is a figure of what is politically intolerable today, as it had already become in 1795.
But is this disgust and rejection based on any reflective and critical stance? One small anecdote makes it possible to doubt this. At the Sorbonne, allegedly the stronghold of Jacobin historians, Michel Vovelle replaced Albert Soboul in 1985. The following year he offered to organize a ‘calf’s head dinner’ for postgraduates on 21 January. This is a traditional republican ritual in which the calf’s head represents the head of the king: the people, gathered at a banquet, replay the king’s death in carnival mode. Vovelle’s proposal met with an icy reception. For the majority of students, even those enrolled in the Sorbonne’s course on the history of the Revolution, it seemed indecent. The merry chuckling of Michel Vovelle was met by an embarrassed and incredulous silence. The calf’s head ritual had become non-contemporary, without time being taken to assess it properly. It was impossible now to ‘replay’ the severed head – that kind of thing was shocking, or troubling at the least. To my mind, this collective banquet belongs to the ‘obligatory expression of sentiments’,4 i.e. to ‘a broad category of oral expressions of sentiments and emotions with a collective character’:
This in no way damages the intensity of these sentiments, quite the contrary . . . but all these collective expressions, which have at the same time a moral value and an obligatory force for the individual