Terror, Vengeance and Martyrdom in the French Revolution: the Case of the Shades
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W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Book Chapters Arts and Sciences 6-2-2014 Terror, Vengeance and Martyrdom in the French Revolution: The Case of the Shades Ronald Schechter College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters Part of the European History Commons Recommended Citation Schechter, R. (2014). Terror, Vengeance and Martyrdom in the French Revolution: The Case of the Shades. Dominic Janes and Alex Houen (Ed.), Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (pp. 152-178). Oxford University Press. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/68 This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Book Chapters by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PRE-MODERN TO CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES EDITED BY DOMINIC JANES AND ALEX HOUEN - ~:•- - . -- -. 6 ·; ,- . ' ~ .. - ... ' - . ~•.,{ ~ - --.,.,- ' ;· i !. :;I ,, MARTYRDOM AND TERRORISM Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives -(((J)l-------- Edited by DOMINIC JANES ALEX HOUEN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxfordis a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress 13579 8642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents List of Illustrations Vll Acknowledgments IX Contributors Xl Introduction-DOMINIC JANES AND ALEX HOUEN 1 PART ONE: Pre- and Early Modem Violence and Martyrdom 1. Martyrdom, Memory, and the "Media Event": Visionary Writing and Christian Apology in Second-Century Christianity-KATE cooPER 2. Martyrdom in Islamic Thought and Praxis: A Historical Survey-ASMA AFSARUDDIN 3. Rendering unto Caesar: The Rhetorics of Divided Loyalties in Tudor England-susANNAH BRIETZ MONTA 59 4. Kristeva's "New Knowledge": Terrorism, Martyrdom, and Psychoanalytic Humanism: Insights from Two Early Modern Instances-GARY WALLER PART TWO: TheFrench Revolution and the Invention of Terrorism 5. Martyrdom, Terrorism, and the Rhetoric of Sacrifice: The Cases of Marat, Robespierre, and Loiserolles-JULIA v. DOUTHWAITE 109 VI Contents 6. The Sentimental Construction of Martyrdom as Motivation in the Thought of Maximilien Robespierre, 1789-1792-DAVID ANDRESS 131 7. Terror, Vengeance, and Martyrdom in the French Revolution: The Case of the Shades-RONALD scHECHTER 152 8. John Foxe and British Attitudes to Martyrdom afterthe French Revolution-DOMINIC JANES 179 PART THREE: Martyrdom, Terrorism, and the Modern West 9. Fenianism and the Martyrdom-Terrorism Nexus in Ireland before Independence-GUY BEINE R 199 10. Spurning "This Worldly Life": Terrorism and Martyrdom in Contemporary Britain-A KIL N. AWAN 221 11. Martyrdom and Hostage Executions in the Iraq War: The Cases of Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan-ALEX HOUEN 252 12. Filming the Ends of Martyrdom-JOLYON MITCHELL 271 Select Bibliography 291 Index 297 7 Terror, Vengeance, and Martyrdom in the French Revolution THE CASE OF THE SHADES Ronald Schechter HISTORIANS SPEND THEIR days reading, writing, and talkingabout the dead, but what typically interests historians about their human subjects is their lives. Historians tend to lose interest in the people they study after those people are dead. The eminent historian William Doyle writes that "when impatient crowds forced an entry to the inner courtyard [ of the Bastille on July 14, 1789] the garrison panicked and opened fire, killing almost a hun dred. "1 He never mentions these victims again. However, to the French revolutionaries those roughly one hundred martyrs who died in the as sault on the Bastille went on to a new existence.They became "shades." What were shades? They were ghosts, but ghosts of a particular kind. They were typically portrayed as corporeal, often "still bleeding." They therefore inhabited a liminal world between the dead and the living. As taboo and therefore dangerous beings, they represented a threat to the living.2 They haunted theliving but wanted to rest, so they resembled "un dead" beings such as vampires. Also like vampires, they showed a re8i lection for blood. Yet unlike such monstrous revenants, they were sacred 1. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. no. 2. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1966). Terror, Vengeance, and Martyrdom 153 :ind enjoyed moral authority. Victimsof some counterrevolutj.onaryforce, theyhad sacrificedtheir lives for the Revolution, and theycould theref ore iemand sacrificesfrom the living. Their principal demand was for venge- ince. If they were not "satisfied," they threatened to tum their desire for 1engeance upon the revolutionaries themselves. In what follows I would like to take a closer look at the shades. I would ike to argue that the shades enable us to see the French Revolution in a 1ew light. They help us understand the motivation for revolutionary ac ion, the willingness of politicalactors to kill and to risk their own lives for 1ew and otherwise abstract causes: liberty, the fatherland, the Republic. ikewise, the shades help us understand the elusive Reign of Terror (or simply the Terror, as the French call it) and the role of martyrs and mar iyrdom in producing it. Finally, the shades reveal a profound spirituality n the revolutionaries,a religiosity that is usually discounted or dismissed n the historical scholarship. The French had two words for shades: ombres and manes. The revolu ionaries much pref erred the latter, especially when they were referring ::> shades of martyrs. The word ombre also had the ordinary meaning of shadow," whereas the term manes was unmistakable. It derived fromthe .atin manes, which literallymeant "the good ones" but which the Romans .sed to refer specificallyto departed souls.3 As an appellation it had the pa na of antiquity,and the revolutionarieswere famously fond of Republican .ome and its tyrannicides. Strictlyspeaking, not all shades were martyrs, ut all martyrs were shades. It is the shades of martyrs that I would like I> focus on here, not merely because this volume is concernedwith mar irrdom,but because the shades of martyrs played such an important role 1 the French Revolution. Although it was possible to speak of "the shades f Rousseau" when paying homage to him, it was the shades of martyrs tat really motivated the revolutionaries. Motivated them to do what? To 111. To r·sk their lives. To do things that do not come naturally and some mes require supernatural intervention. According to Jean Nicot's 1606 dictionary, the Thresor de la langue .francoyse, the word in :ated "the departed souls of human bodies" and derived from the Latin manes. According the Dictionaryof the Academie Fran�aise (of 1694), manes (without the circumflexaccent) ts the "[n]ame that the ancients gave to the shade (a l'ombre)." The editors noted that "one II makes use of it sometimes in Poetry, and in the sublime style." They gave an example ,m classical literature: "Polixena was sacrificedto the shades of Achilles." A similar defini n appeared in the 1762 edition of the Academy dictionary; see "Dictionnaires d'autrefois" ARTFL, http://artflx.uchicago.edu/ cgi-bin/ di cos /pubdicotlook.pl ?strippedhw=manes. 154 THE INVENTION OF TERRORISM In order to track the usage of manes during the Revolution, I have con sulted digitized volumes of the Archives parlementaires, the massive record of legislative debates, reports, and correspondence. 4 Comprising 101 vol umes, roughly 60,000 folio pages and 70 million words, this corpus pro vides a unique lens onto revolutionary speech. A search of manes in the Archives parlementaires yields 433 hits for the period beginning in June 1789 and ending in July 1794. The term was particularly popular during the more radical phase of the Revolution: during the period of the Constitutional Monarchy (mid-June 1789 through early August 1792), when violence was relatively sparse and emergency measures relatively limited, it only appears 42 times. By contrast, during the period beginning with the violent over throw of the monarchy (August 10, 1792) and ending with the execution of the revolutionary leader Robespierre (July 28, 1794) the word appears 391 times. Allowing for the difference in duration of these two periods (the first lasting 37 months, the second lasting 23), and assuming that the volu minous Archives parlementaires are representative of the kind of language revolutionaries used, we can say that manes appeared in revolutionary speech roughly fifteentimes as frequentlyafter the fall of the monarchy as before. This discrepancy is easily explained. Shades in revolutionary dis course were almost always martyred shades who had died violently in acts of sacrifice for their country.