This republican symbolism, however, came undone in the 1980s and 1990s. When the bicentennial celebration came round, the question of revolutionary violence returned to disturb some of the certainties that had newly imposed themselves since the Liberation. Until this time, the French had no need to be ashamed of the revolutionary event; they even had to be proud of it – proud of the French republican invention, a counter-model to the Vichy regime, and proud above all of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which served as a reference point for the rebirth of international law and the famous Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the time of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, however, 1789 and 1793 were disassociated, the challenge to the Ancien Régime was separated from the invention of the Republic – and in short, the wheat had been sorted from the chaff. 1789 was celebrated; but 1792, the fall of the monarchy and the invention of the Republic, remained in the shadow of Valmy. As for 1793, the preference was to merge its ‘fine anticipations’ with those of 1789. The abolition of slavery and the rights to education and public assistance were removed from their context without any investigation of how these irrefutable values were bound up with the Terror. Democracy in France today does not seem to sit well with its foundation. ‘At a time when democracy has become the sole perspective of contemporary societies, it is essential for attention to focus on its inaugural moment, 1789, and not on the dark days of 1793’, proclaimed Patrice Gueniffey,6 one of the main current detractors of the Revolution, before going on to ask:
Who would dare today to celebrate the Terror with the frankness of Albert Mathiez, who writes in 1922 that it was ‘the red crucible in which the future democracy was elaborated on the accumulated ruins of everything associated with the old order’?7
In this vision, subsequent to the bicentenary but in the same spirit, democracy could no longer have anything to do with this ‘red crucible’. The possibilities of appropriating the event today are encumbered by a sensitivity to bloodshed, to political death meted out and decided: responsibly assumed.
By this evocation of blood, doubt is introduced as to the value of the revolutionary event. We have seen on magazine covers, and in productions for a wide audience, questions that might formerly have been thought peculiar to inveterate monarchists. ‘Was it necessary to kill the king?’, asks Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1993. ‘Would you French television viewers of today have decided to kill the queen?’, asks Robert Hossein at the end of his show about Marie-Antoinette. These questions have the value of interesting symptoms.
By applying the Kantian categorical imperative to judge past events, two hundred years after the facts, these questions involve people today in the historical situation of 1793. They have to put themselves in the place of the Convention members who actually had to judge this question, in the place of contemporaries of the event who had to discuss it and decide their political position. This amounts to inventing a mode of historicity that could be called the concatenation of presents, or of situations. Readers are no longer mere inheritors of an event in which they were not protagonists. If they do indeed want to be its heirs, then they are led to play a part in it. In other words, every heir of the republican foundation could be morally included in the category of regicides, or in what the Thermidorians called ‘men of blood’. Who today, even among republicans, would assume such a designation? Kant’s commentary on the French Revolution is familiar enough:
The revolution of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible man, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to attempt the experiment at such cost – this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition of the human race.8
Moral reverse projection onto the French Revolution, however, ends up making the position of a non-participating spectator impossible. Yet it is the ‘play’ of the actor – in both the theatrical and historical sense of the term – that is required in Robert Hossein’s production. Here, too, spectators cannot remain spectators; they in fact become actors by voting for or against the death of Marie-Antoinette, and in this way collude in a simulacrum of popular consultation that leads to denying one of the very characteristics of the event, namely its irreversible character.
‘To suggest putting Louis XVI on trial is a counter-revolutionary idea’, Robespierre declared. ‘It is making the Revolution itself a subject of litigation.’9 And putting the king’s trial on trial certainly means re-opening such litigation; it explicitly means using the faculty of judgement rather than of understanding. The moral mechanism here stands in the way of historical curiosity. The object is no longer to understand the meaning of the death meted out to the man whom Saint-Just described as ‘foreign’ to humanity and the community. Nor is it to know what such an event succeeded in establishing, in terms of sovereignty. The question, rather, is settled in advance. What is played out here is the figure of historical evil, of the inability to settle political conflicts peacefully – i.e. without inflicting violence on the body, without putting to death. To be a happy heir to the French Revolution means becoming complicit with a historical crime. The event’s character as a political laboratory is thus eroded in favour of a moral question. Scholarly historical debate – in the historicist sense of the term – becomes a forbidden zone. The decontextualizing and naturalizing of the sentiment of ‘humanity’ are made to reign in the eternal present of a moral condemnation.
This replay of the event in the mode of judgement – moral and normative, sensible and emotional, in a context of aestheticization – leads the Revolution to appear insufferable to the very people who, in terms of classic political sociology, are not supposed to be its detractors. From now on the Revolution finds critics not only just on the right of the French political spectrum but also on the left, among the heirs of Jean Jaurès and the Socialist International.
UNDER CROSS-EXAMINATION: ARGUMENTS FOR THE PROSECUTION
This new disgust with the French Revolution is inseparable from a ‘parallel’ constructed with the history of political catastrophes in the twentieth century, and from a related idealization of the present democratic model of politics. It is the impact of this democratic model, which is presented as a culminating point in the process of civilization, that makes possible this charge against the French Revolution. Whereas contemporary democracy protects the individual, the Revolution protected the sovereign people as a political and social group; whereas our democracy institutionalizes a third arbitrating power – the Conseil constitutionnel – between the people and their representation, the Revolution gave all power to the elected assembly; whereas democratic conflict is now supposed to be based on a politics made up of compromise, approximations and calculations, the Revolution dreamed of an absolute politics, illusory and utopian, resting on principles; whereas democratic justice is penal, and restricted by positive law, revolutionary justice is political, resting on social vengeance and the idealism of natural right. Contrasts of this kind, as presented in the arguments of the detractors of the revolutionary political model, could be multiplied ad libitum.10
Disgust and idealization are thus the two emotional faces of the construction of a Revolution as the other to democracy. And the sum total of political and social forms qualified as revolutionary and totalitarian can then be amalgamated in a common rejection.
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