DEMOCRATIC TERROR: REDEMPTIVE VIOLENCE AND THE FORMATION OF NINETEENTH CENTURY FRANCE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Kevin Trieu Duong January 2017 © 2017 Kevin Trieu Duong DEMOCRATIC TERROR REDEMPTIVE VIOLENCE AND THE FORMATION OF NINETEENTH CENTURY FRANCE Kevin Trieu Duong, PhD Cornell University 2017 During the struggle for democracy in France, political thinkers across the spectrum pressed into service an unusual image of violence. Rather than a source of anarchy and disorder, this violence generated social cohesion. Instead of fragmentation, it promised to retie the bonds of democratic society. This dissertation studies how a variety of writers and intellectuals weaponized this image of violence in the political culture of nineteenth century France. What could this violence accomplish that other languages of democratic agency could not? What were the sources of its appeal? To answer these questions, I consider four episodes where French thinkers believed social disintegration threatened the nation: the regicide of Louis XVI, early French colonization of Algeria, the Paris Commune, and the eve of World War I. In each episode, political thinkers warned of social breakdown spurred by democratization. In each case, they also claimed that violence by the people could repair the cohesion of the French social body. Studying these episodes underscores how no single intellectual tradition held a monopoly over regenerative violence in France, because the problem it hoped to answer was fundamental: how can the cohesion of the social body be repaired in the age of democracy? It was a problem that could not be remedied by simple appeal to constitutionalism or natural law theory. Thus, to repair the moral foundations of “the social,” French thinkers on both the left and right pushed towards a vision of democratic violence as social regeneration. To form a democratic society in history rather than in theory, French thinkers did not repudiate violence as anti-social or pre-political. Instead, they reached for it in the form of democratic terror. Biographical Sketch Kevin Duong studies political theory, with an area focus on the politics and intellectual history of modern France. Having received his doctorate from Cornell University, he is currently Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Before Cornell, Kevin completed a master’s degree at the University of Chicago and an undergraduate bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. He was born and raised in east Tennessee. iii Acknowledgments My undergraduate mentor, Brooke Ackerly, told me before I left for graduate studies that surviving in academia was like passing through the eye of a needle. I am grateful to her and Lisa Guenther for teaching me how to do that, and for introducing me to feminism. At the University of Chicago, Patchen Markell and Dipesh Chakrabarty graciously mentored me. I’m indebted to their continuing advice and friendship. At Cornell, I joined a terrific community. Thanks to Jason Frank, for chairing the project; Camille Robcis, for teaching me French history; Aziz Rana, for improving my arguments; Isaac Kramnick, for being a model teacher and historian; and Enzo Traverso, for serving as my external reader. Beyond Cornell, I’m indebted to Eric Brandom for help in the dissertation’s early stages, and to Sarah Sussman and Dan Edelstein for their support when I was visiting Stanford. Thanks also to Ilil Benjamin, Michaela Brangan, Aaron Gavin, Michael Gorup, Sinja Graf, Nina Hagel, Ulas Ince, Lena Krian, Jon Masin-Peters, Alison McQueen, William Pennington, Vijay Phulwani, Ed Quish, Adam Schoene, Bécquer Seguin, Nathan Taylor, Alexis Turner, Timothy Vasko, and Ian Zuckerman for giving me a home whether I was in Ithaca, Paris, or Oakland. Special thanks to Paul Fleming and Jill Frank for always dispensing advice, in person and over long phone calls. I owe a unique debt to Nolan Bennett and Avery Slater for being my best friends and my first line of defense on all matters intellectual and personal. Finally, I thank my family. They have always had faith in me, even when I did not want it. It is from them that I learned to wear my political convictions with pride and to hold my comrades close. iv Table of Contents Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments iv List of Illustrations vi Introduction Democratic Terror in Times of Social Disintegration 1 Chapter I Regicide and Redemptive Violence in the French Revolution 23 Chapter II From Glory to Terror in Algeria 78 Chapter III From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune 139 Chapter IV Irrationalist Violence on the Eve of World War I 199 Conclusion Democracy and the Return of the Social 251 Bibliography 259 v List of Illustrations Fig 1 Jacques Bertaux, Prise du palais des Tuileries, 10 août 1792 33 Fig 2 Medallion commemorating 10 August 1792 assault on Tuileries 66 Fig 3 Allégorie sur la journée du 10 août 1792 69 Fig 4 “Sans Union Point de Force” 71 Fig 5 Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Lightning from the Sky 71 Fig 6 Gardens of Versailles 72 Fig 7 “Expédition de Constantine” 80 Fig 8 Horace Vernet, Première campagne de Constantine 128 Fig 9 “Défense héroïque de Mazagran” 129 Fig 10 Jean Adolphe Beauce, Défense héroïque du capitaine Lelièvre à Mazagran 131 Fig 11 Jacques Louis David, Léonidas aux Thermopylae 132 Fig 12 Decree for the abolition of the Expiatory Chapel of Louis XVI 172 Fig 13 “Jaurès assassiné” 200 Fig 14 Jaurès’s funeral 200 Fig 15 “L’Antimilitariste et le Tambour-Major” 202 Fig 16 Jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui 202 Fig 17 Henri Bergson 212 Fig 18 Henri Bergson's lectures, 14 February 1914 212 vi Fig 19 Charles Péguy 217 Fig 20 La Boutique des cahiers, 8 rue de la Sorbonne 217 Fig 21 Thor, “the old Germanic divinity” 250 vii Introduction Democratic Terror in Times of Social Disintegration The way we think about violence is bound up with our understanding of society and the bonds connecting individuals. When we consider different shapes that violence can take, our accounts of social interdependence shift, as do the patterns of agency and vulnerability that we perceive. In the case of the social contract tradition, its vision of society has been shaped by an image of political violence as anarchy. Since Thomas Hobbes, to talk about violence is to talk about disorder and the ways the social bond snaps from injury or death. For John Locke, he who commits violence “declares himself to live by another Rule, than that of reason and of common Equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of Men, for their mutual security.”1 The person who transgresses nature’s law becomes a criminal, a threat to society’s commodious living. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, violence against a fellow citizen expels a person from the social body as an anarchic pathogen: “Every evil-doer who attacks social right becomes a rebel and a traitor to the fatherland…he ceases to be a member of it, and even enters into war with it.” Thus Rousseau concluded, “he must be cut off from [society] either by exile as a violator of the treaty, or by death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral person, but a man.”2 In this tradition, violating the social compact designates oneself as an hostis humani generis or an hors-la-loi, an outlaw.3 It invites the violence of 1 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 272. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Politics Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64-5. 3 Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French 1 organized society upon oneself, not as a type of counter-violence, but as justice. Within the revolutionary and republican political culture of modern France, a different, less familiar image of violence came to prominence. French thinkers invoked it alongside its contractualist counterpart. But in this alternative image, violence was not identified with anarchy. Instead, it was its solution. Rather than something sublimated as men escaped nature into society, thinkers portrayed violence as constitutive of the social bond. This was especially true when the agent of that violence was “the people,” whose world making powers this violence expressed and vindicated. Maximilien Robespierre captured this image of violence in a 1793 speech when he argued that terror “has nothing in common with anarchy or disorder.” On the contrary, its violence instituted society, for it was “not [guided] by individual passions, but by the public interest.”4 That link to the public interest made the people’s violence unifying rather than anarchic. “Woe betide us,” Robespierre warned, if through violence they were to “break the bundle apart, instead of binding it.”5 This alternative image of violence reappeared in the century following the Revolution by thinkers both right and left. General Thomas Robert Bugeaud invoked it to characterize the French conquest of Algeria in the 1840s. “It is a cruel extremity” to wage total war against native Arabs, “but a horrifying example was necessary to strike terror” into their hearts.6 The anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon appealed to it in his Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18-20. 4 Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Revolutionary Government” (25 December 1793), in Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2007), 98-107, at 100. 5 Robespierre, “On the Principles of Revolutionary Government,” 102.