Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2020 The Architecture of Violence: the Reign of Terror and the Character of Bloodshed Aidan Turek [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses Part of the Comparative Politics Commons, European History Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Political History Commons, and the Political Theory Commons Recommended Citation Turek, Aidan, "The Architecture of Violence: the Reign of Terror and the Character of Bloodshed". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2020. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/848 1 The Architecture of Violence: The Reign of Terror and the Character of Bloodshed Adv. Reo Matsuzaki A.P. Turek Spring, 2020 1 2 Table of Contents Chapter I: Revolutionaries, Theorists, and the Terror ........................................................................... 4 I.I Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 4 I.II Theory on Revolution: Moore, Skocpol, and Ignoring Violence ............................................. 10 I.III Violence from a Theoretical Standpoint ................................................................................. 14 I.IV Analysis to Come ................................................................................................................... 22 Chapter II: The Popular Terror—A Performative Explanation of Violence ..................................... 29 IV.I Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 29 IV.II Constructing a Performative Theory ..................................................................................... 32 IV.III Performing the Terror .......................................................................................................... 41 IV.IV Theoretical Conclusions ...................................................................................................... 48 Chapter III: A Utilitarian Terror— An Instrumental Explanation of Violence ................................. 57 II.I Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 57 II.II Instrumental Theory of Violence ............................................................................................ 58 II.III Origins of Insurrection: A Bottom-up Perspective ................................................................ 62 II.IV Suppressing the Rebellion: A Top-down Perspective ........................................................... 69 II.V Theoretical Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 77 Chapter IV: A Terror of Ideas—An Ideological Explanation of Violence .......................................... 80 III.I Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 80 III.II Violent Ideas ......................................................................................................................... 82 III.III Rousseau and the Jacobins ................................................................................................... 87 III.IV The Radicalization of Revolutionary France ....................................................................... 92 III.V Institutionalizing Terror: The Fall of Lyon ........................................................................... 94 III.VI Theoretical Conclusions .................................................................................................... 100 Chapter V: The Width, Breadth, and Dimensions of Violence ........................................................... 105 V.I Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 105 V.II Presentation of Theories ....................................................................................................... 107 V.III Theoretical Forces in Action: the Case of the Revolutionary Armies ................................ 112 V.IV Reconstructing Theory ........................................................................................................ 124 V.V Building a Theoretical Synthesis ......................................................................................... 133 V.VI Synthesis and Theory .......................................................................................................... 139 2 3 This thesis is dedicated to Professor Reo Matsuzaki. I began writing with more passion than foresight, and it has only been through the careful attentiveness of one superior editor, knowledgeable theorist, and caring teacher, that this thesis was completed at all. At every stage, Professor Matsuzaki has been supporting me in my effort to produce meaningful scholarship. His constant forbearance and kindness have facilitated not just the completion of this thesis, but my maturation as a Trinity student and as a scholar in my own right. Between penetrating critiques and insightful comments is a clear passion on the part of Professor Matsuzaki to see his students succeed. I am proud to have worked with him in completing this paper. I know writing this thesis has taken as much from him as it has for me—and I am certain this is the last time he will agree to have so much historical frippery in a work of political science. I would also like to thank my parents, who, both in their professional and in private lives, preach the same message—that knowledge is its own reward. It has given me no small amount of pleasure to write about the various Parisian locales I toured with my mother, or to have flipped through the tattered old copy of Tilly’s Vendée that served as my father’s copy when he was my age. Their constant sacrifices are humbling, and I hope this work proves a fair reward for their investment of blood, sweat, tears—and love. Finally, I would like to thank Mary Tursi, whose intelligence and grace are a constant reminder of what a true scholar looks like. No amount of praise can do justice to her singular drive. 3 4 I. Revolutionaries, Theorists, and the Terror It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.1 I. The Terror and its Antecedents So reads the first words of Charles Dicken’s totemic novelization of the single most influential event in European history—the French Revolution. In the space of a single generation, Europe saw the fall of its strongest monarchy, the birth of the first modern republic, the advent of universal manhood suffrage, the creation of the first bureaucratized centralized advanced polity, the implementation of total war, and the beginning of the largest continental conflict the continent had yet seen. Death came in a thousand forms with a thousand names, from the stalking famines that plagued the peasants of Languedoc, those tens of thousands fallen in battles like Valmy, Neerwinden, Fleurus, Jemappes, and countless others, or those who perished in that most controversial of Revolutionary developments: the Terror. The Reign of Terror lasted barely two years, and yet marked the nadir of not just the Revolution 1 Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities, pg. 4 4 5 but human character itself, a point made all the more poignant by the high ideals, grandiose claims, and democratic and humanitarian intentions with which the Revolution began. It was a period of great and seemingly intractable contradictions. No better recapitulation of the extremes of this period exists than Charles Dickens’ words. In his masterful novelization, Dickens provides perhaps the neatest description of the Revolution—it was a time of superlatives. The French Reign of Terror raged from 1792 to 1794 during the latter half of the French Revolution. Most frequently described as period of mass state violence and repression, the Terror culminated with the execution of its architect Maximilien Robespierre in 1794. After his fall, the Terror as a concept was quickly buried in political polemics from every quarter, obscuring the event in a haze of ideological praise and disparagement. Some of the first to profit from the violence of the Terror were the Thermidorians, those conspirators who, in July 1794, overthrew Robespierre and the Montagnard clique that controlled France; they found their justification for usurpation the ending of ‘the Terror,’ and began the long—and ongoing—process of manipulating history for their ends. All violence was assigned to the recently beheaded Robespierre, while the numbers of victims was expanded beyond imagination. After the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, an alliance