Terror in the Historiography of the French Revolution*

Terror in the Historiography of the French Revolution* Mash Khazeni uring the first half of the twentieth century, the social interpretation of the French Revolution prevailed among historians. The social interpreters of the Revolution D described it as the outcome of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the nobility. The social interpretation was a classic Marxist analysis of the material and social changes in eighteenth century France. Since the 1950s, however, new explanations have challenged this stance. Post-social historians have suggested that the French Revolution cannot be understood as a manifestation of the rise of the bourgeois class. To many scholars, the revolutionary age in France was an illusory world invented by the words and ideas of French political culture. These historians use linguistic approaches to understand revolutionary society and politics. The social interpretation and the post-social/linguistic interpretation are twentieth century reconstructions of the French past. However, these explanations are related to theories that have existed since the time of the French Revolution itself. A basic conceptual question has remained since the beginning. This question asks whether the Revolution was the result of circumstance or “the dissemination of ideas.” It is true that historians continue to examine the Revolution through the concepts of circumstance and ideas.2 The social interpretation, with its emphasis of rising social forces, overlaps with the thesis of circumstance. While the post-social interpretation, through its emphasis on language and culture, revives the old notion that the Revolution was caused by “bad books” and dangerous ideas.3 One of the areas in which the social and post-social interpreters have tested whether the French Revolution was the result of inevitable circumstance or books has been the realm of revolutionary violence, a subject traditionally classified as “the Terror”, a period lasting from September 1793 to July 1794 (Year II until 9 Thennidor on the Republican Calendar). Such accounts of “the Terror” depict great revolutionary leaders in Paris who motivated the French masses to act by providing the legal and systematic justification of revolutionary violence.4 Thus, “the Terror” generally refers to an official government policy. “Terror” by contrast, often suggests factors beyond the Year II and the exclusive realm of famed writers and politicians. “Terror” refers to the wide, fragmented array of social institutions and mentalities that existed in France before, during, and after Year II. It can be said that “terror” has become the focus of most social and post-social interpretations of revolutionary violence, for “terror” cannot be limited to its institutional fonn during the Year II. The social interpretation of the French Revolution shifted the emphasis of scholarship towards more ordinary revolutionaries found amongst the “crowd”, the sans-culottes, and the popular societies. Terror was viewed from “below” rather than from “above.” In the process, the histories ofphilosophes and diplomats were complemented by accounts of common people. And although many scholars continued to focus on the Year II, their arguments moved beyond “the Terror” proper, as an official policy of government. The often fragmentary forms of “terror”, in general, were uncovered by the social interpretations of Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, George Rude, and Richard Cobb. 60 Georges Lefebvre, the master of the social interpreters reknowned for his studies of the French peasantry, emphasized the material causes of revolutionary attitudes and activities. InfLuenced by the work of the Annales,5 Lefebwe saw rural disturbances and the Paris crowds as the exhibition of les sentiments affectzfs or “collective mentalities”. In the essay “Revolutionary Crowds” (1954), Lefebvre seeks to move beyond the monolithic clash of classes in order to understand the mental outlook of each class.6 Lefebvre argues that collective mentalities, ex?ressed through conversation, propaganda, and coercion, stemmed from prior circumstances. He criticizes the “purely ideological conception of revolutionary movements...from which historians have gleaned nothing,” and argues that the existence of a collective mentality “clearly implies economic, social, and political conditions.”8 As “material circumstances became unfavorable... the dominant class [was] held responsible” by the poor.9 Lefebvre finds a collective revolutionary mentality based on economic and material conditions.’° Here the social interpretation of the French Revolution overlaps with the age-old thesis of circumstance. Albert Soboul, a pupil of Lefebvre’s, continued the call for history “from below” with The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionwy Government, 1793-1794 (1958). Soboul intended to add to the studies of the Convention and the Paris Commune a study of “the Parisian people in its general assemblies and sectional societies.”1’ In the opening paragraph of The Sans-Culottes, Soboul reveals his acceptance of the social interpretation, claiming that “the French Revolution constitutes the culmination of a long economic and social revolution that made the middle classes the masters of the world.”2 But Soboul also asserted that the revolutionary bourgeoisie could not have toppled the ancien regime without help from the sans- culottes.’3 Although the sans-culottes were swept into the general trend of the Revolution, in the direction of class-conflict, they nonetheless pursued independent objectives.’4 In many ways the sans-culottes acted in opposition to the bourgeoisie. Similar to Lefebvre, Soboul relies upon the social interpretation and the thesis of circumstance to explain the cause of revolutionary uprisings. Another student of Lefebvre, George Rude, examined in detail the revolutionary crowd. In The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959), Rude criticized the mob theory, which viewed the Parisian crowds as degenerate and evil.’5 By contrast, Rude’s crowds acted upon revolutionary agendas and purposes. Rude, like Soboul, noted the autonomous revolutionary behavior of the lower classes. The sans-culottes and the revolutionary crowd could not be “dismissed as passive instruments of middle class leaders and interests; still less [could] they be presented as inchoate ‘mobs’ without any social identity or, at best, as drawn from criminal elements or the dregs of the city population.”6 Far from social abstractions, the crowd consisted of a variety of ordinary people with varying social needs. However, Rude generally believes that the involvement of these various social stratas in the riots of the ancien regime and Revolution is an indication of prevailing economic circumstances and the class struggle. The most complex descendant of Lefebvre was Richard Cobb. Cobb’s subjects were the outcasts and outsiders, the inhabitants of the so-called demi-monde.’7 His biographical approach detailed the sociability of the most marginal revolutionaries and terrorists. In The People’s Armies (1961-63) and Reactions to the French Revolution (1972) Cobb used case histories to trace the emergence of a terrorist mentality and the commitment to revolutionary violence. 61 The People’s Armies (originally published as Les Armëes Révolutionnaires) is Cobb’s most substantial work. It is also the easiest work by Cobb to place upon a historiographical spectrum. In Les Armées Révotutionnaires, Cobb concentrates upon the institutions and mentalities of the popular armies.18 Seeking to correct the slanderous depictions of the armees that began with the accusations of the Thermidorean period, Cobb claims that the list of epithets used in the pamphlets of Year III were resurrected in nineteenth century historiography. Thermidoreans and historians had dismissed the armées révotutionnaires as elements of la derniere pleb, the lowest people.19 With The People ‘s Armies, Cobb intends “to assess the place of the armëes in the history of the Terror and the popular movement of the Year II.20 According to Cobb, the armées represent the primordial violence of France raised to a spontaneous institution under revolutionary circumstances. During the emergency of Revolution, “the triumph of violence [wasJ exalted to a political system.”2’ But Cobb is not merely concerned with the structure of the people’s armies; he also considers the various individuals within them. Cobb finds that not everyone in the armées became “revolutionaries through circumstance.” Some were “militants by choice.”22 The Revolution was an outlet for fundamentally violent temperaments that were, in certain cases, intensified during the Terror. The armées révotutionnaires were a phenomenon irreducible to, but nonetheless affected by, general prevailing circumstances. Cobb’s later works became more dissonant. In the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, Cobb increasingly viewed the Revolution as the sum of innumerable biographies. His subject, more so than ever, became the idiosyncrasies of people on the margins of society. In Reactions to the French Revolution, Cobb retreats from the discussion of the overarching concepts of circumstances and ideas, and examines the minutiae of terror conveyed through the biographical approach. In Reactions, Cobb admits to “an inability, in the last resort, to sympathise with those who seek to exercise power, be their motives good or evil.”23 Noting his “extreme repulsion for Robespierre,” he seeks to study individualism, dans la durée, over a period of time.24 The works of Lefebvre, Soboul,

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