In Defence of the Terror (7 page)

The slow pace of the forms [of justice], healthy and just in time of calm, was deadly at a time when the prisons themselves had become centres of conspiracy and workshops of revolt, in which criminals already judged by their country were planning a deadly explosion. The national crowd struck the parricides; the people and heaven were avenged.
17

This failure on the part of the legal institutions in the face of treason and unpunished crimes led to a foundation which was deprived of symbolic mediation. From 2 to 6 September, the sovereign power identified itself with a ‘making die' that fused the various powers – legislative, executive and judicial – in a single movement.
18
But those who killed were presented in the immediate commentaries as victims, as people who deserved sympathy. Thus Mme Julien from the Drôme, the partner of the deputy: ‘My friend, I cast a veil here with a trembling hand over the crimes that the people were forced to commit by all those whose sorry victim they have been for three years.'
19
In the
Chronique de Paris
for 4th September, we can read: ‘The spilling of blood caused a wretched sensation . . . It is an unfortunate and terrible situation when the character of a people naturally good and generous is forced to deliver itself to such acts of vengeance.'
20
Finally,
Le Moniteur
of the same date spoke of

events that any decent man would wish to cover with a veil and withdraw from history. But the counter-revolutionaries are indeed far more guilty than [are] certain illegal avengers of their crimes. Humanity is in no wise consoled, but the mind is left less disturbed.
21

The scene of the September massacres could be interpreted as the sovereign scene described both by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. In his
Critique of Violence
, Benjamin maintained that

all mythic, lawmaking violence, which we may call ‘executive', is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, ‘administrative' violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign' violence.
22

This ‘divine violence' is the violence of
vox populi, vox dei
. To recognize the divine character of this violence, as of this voice, does not mean drawing support from established religion to legitimize a violence which is underway or a voice that takes bodily form. It is rather to maintain that the blood spilled is not that of mythical sacrifice – which, according to Benjamin, ‘demands it for its own sake against pure and simple life' – but rather that of a
divine violence
that ‘accepts sacrifice for the sake of the living'. This is why

those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment [‘Thou shalt not kill'] are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.
23

This solitude of decision is that of the sovereign power. For Giorgio Agamben, ‘the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice'; as for the lives of those massacred, they are the ‘sacred lives' of homo sacer, exposed to murder and unsacrificable, captured in the ‘first properly political space of the West distinct from both the religious and the profane sphere, from both the natural order and the regular juridical order'.
24
These theoretical illuminations help us understand how everyone has found the September massacres intolerable, despite the great majority of spectators finding them legitimate at the time.

The commentaries of radical revolutionaries on the September massacres use the notions of justice and vengeance indifferently – a proof that the lapse of ordinary institutions leads to the vengeance of the laws, or of the people, since for the revolutionaries avenging the people meant avenging the laws. These commentators insist on the necessity of recognizing that it was indeed the people that acted. For Marat: ‘The people have the right to take up the sword of justice when the judges are concerned only to protect the guilty and oppress the innocent.'
25
Such statements find their place in registering the failure of legal institutions, the National Assembly and the tribunals, which no longer championed the respect due to the people as a group. Robespierre spoke of ‘the justice of the people thus expiated, by the punishment of several counter-revolutionary aristocrats who dishonoured the French name, the eternal impunity of all the oppressors of humanity'.
26
The people, a social group inscribed in the
longue durée
of history as against the social group of the ‘oppressors of humanity', defended the honour of its name. On 13 Ventôse of year II (3 March 1794), before maintaining that happiness was a new idea in Europe, Saint-Just encouraged the people to preserve this honour: ‘Make yourselves respected by pronouncing with pride the destiny of the French people. Avenge the people for twelve hundred years of offences against their fathers.'
27
On 26 Germinal of year II (16 April 1794), he accused history of ‘several centuries of folly' as against ‘five years of resistance to oppression', emphasizing the values borne by the name of Frenchman as the name of the people in the revolutionary project. ‘What is a king as opposed to a Frenchman?' The name of Frenchman made it possible both to say what was to come, and to define the present conflictual division between oppressors and oppressed. It was on this basis that the name of the people was really constituted. In his reply to Jean-Baptiste Louvet, who accused him in November 1792 of having failed to prevent the massacres and perhaps even having encouraged them, Robespierre could argue that it was necessary to read in the September massacres an act of popular sovereignty:

Can magistrates stop the people? It was indeed a popular movement, not the partial sedition of a few wretches to murder their kind . . . What could magistrates do against the determined will of an indignant people, who opposed to their speeches both the memory of a victory won over tyranny and the devotion with which they were about to hurl themselves against the Prussians, and who reproached the very laws for the long impunity of the traitors who tore the breast of their
patrie
?
28

The appropriation of sovereignty by the people did not in the end indicate a transfer of sacrality, but rather the application of a sacrality, a mode of action specific to the political. ‘“Sacred insurrection”, “sacred duty” were commonplace phrases in the language of the sections in August 1792 and May 1793', and this vengeance was likewise defined as sacred by a number of patriots: ‘National vengeance is every bit as just, as sacred, and perhaps more indispensable than insurrection itself.'
29

It is possible to regret that the foundation of sovereign power should rest on the exercise of the sovereign exception, just as it is to deplore that the representatives of the people refused to translate the voice of the people and thus brought them to this replay of sovereign foundation, to vengeance effected without symbolic mediation. As early as 20 June 1792, the popular spokesmen feared a breach in the sacred bonds of law that united the people with the Assembly. Santerre reminded the representatives of the people that they had ‘sworn before heaven not to abandon our cause [i.e. the cause of popular sovereignty], to die to defend it', and addressed them in the following terms: ‘Remember, gentlemen, this sacred oath, and suffer the people, afflicted in their turn, not to ask if you have abandoned them.'
30

Despite this defection, the Septembrists founded popular sovereignty in an irreversible manner, by assuming the sovereign exception as popular vengeance. Those who maintain that there was no crime, but rather an exercise of sovereignty, are faithful to this way of seeing things: like the Septembrists, they take a political decision on which they refuse to concede. This was true at the moment of the trial of the king, when what was at issue was not only the fate to be meted out to the royal traitor, but also and indissociably, the reinterpretation of 10 August 1792 and the September massacres. It was true again in the
journées
of 31 May to 2 June 1793, with the exclusion of those representatives who refused to understand what they had witnessed on 20 June, 10 August and 2–3 September 1792 – namely, the founding appropriation of popular sovereignty. A triad of events in 1792 and a series of interpretations of these events in 1793 thus led up to the same decision, that of founding popular sovereignty by assuming what was then called the Terror – or said differently, the employment of sovereign vengeance by the people.

THE SENTIMENTS OF NATURAL HUMANITY
AND POLITICAL HUMANITY

How could the agents of a public vengeance that led to the spilling of blood claim the sentiment of humanity? Those revolutionaries who refused to incriminate the Septembrists maintained that a human society, full of humanity, had to envisage not only the principle of sovereign exception, but also the necessity of transforming that principle into action. A democratic republic had to succeed in holding the sovereign exception to the margins of political life, had to manage to avoid spilling blood by way of the power of symbolic mediations suited to translating the voice of the people into political
logos
. The sentiment of humanity dictated a greater responsibility on the part of the representatives, who had to assume violence so as not to let it thoughtlessly spread. The September massacres, insufferable but justifiable, paradoxically offer an initial angle of analysis for understanding the revolutionary use of the notion of ‘humanity' and the sentiment of humanity.

Replying to Jean-Baptiste Louvet, Robespierre, while acknowledging the value of a sentiment of natural humanity, maintained that, in a context of avenging the laws, no one could allow themselves to lament what happened to the body of the enemy. Robespierre thereby redrew the camp of friends to be avenged, against the lack of differentiation produced by the sentiment of natural humanity and a concern for all victims outside any political consideration. Paraphrasing the
Marseillaise
, he pleaded for a sentiment of revolutionary humanity:

Weep for the guilty victims assigned to the revenge of the laws, who fell under the sword of popular justice; but let your grief have an end, as with all human things. Keep some tears for more touching calamities. Weep for a hundred thousand patriots slain by tyranny, weep for our citizens dying under the fires of their roofs, and the sons of citizens murdered in the cradle or in the arms of their mothers. Do you not also have brothers, children and wives to avenge? The family of French legislators is the
patrie
; it is the entire human race apart from tyrants and their accomplices. Weep then for humanity dead under their hateful yoke. But console yourselves if, imposing silence on all common passions, you wish to ensure the happiness of your country and prepare that of the world, console yourselves if you wish to restore exiled equality and justice on earth, and to uproot by just laws the source of crimes and the misfortunes of your kind. A sensitivity that trembles almost exclusively for the enemies of liberty strikes me as suspect.
31

Robespierre is thus replying here with a veritable call to vengeance, and stressing the necessity to choose one's camp in order to found the values of the Revolution: happiness, equality, justice. For, if

the institution of vengeance avoids the blind unleashing of violence and establishes socially founding moral values . . . once it exists, it demands that its members make crucial choices, towards both the living and the dead, that they make a commitment towards these values.
32

The pain at having witnessed massacres – which did indeed wound the sensibility of the time, marked as this was by the desire to no longer make the human body the place where the symbolic register was expressed – had to have an ‘end', in Robespierre's expression. Despite the deep pain caused by the effects of avenging the laws, he summoned revolutionaries to choose their camp: the sentiment of political humanity, which was also the exercise of sovereign judgement for the citizenry as a whole, had to prevail in each person over the sentiment of natural humanity. And it was this political sentiment that established the boundary between friends and enemies, making perceptible and explicit the question of vengeance.

The revolutionaries directly experienced this conflict over human sentiments, and the manner in which they dealt with it determined their political camp. On 28 December, speaking about the king, Robespierre described this conflict with the greatest of clarity:

I felt republican virtue vacillate in my heart on seeing this guilty man humiliated before the sovereign power . . . I could even add that I share with the weakest among us all the particular emotions that can interest us in the fate of the accused . . . Both hatred of tyrants and love of humanity have a common source in the heart of the just man. Citizens, the ultimate test of devotion that representatives owe to their
patrie
is to strangle these initial movements of natural sensitivity in favour of the safety of a great people and of oppressed humanity! Citizens, the sensitivity that sacrifices innocence to crime is a cruel sensitivity, the mercy that compromises with tyranny is barbaric.
33

To which Sèze replied: ‘Frenchmen, the revolution that regenerates you has developed in you great virtues, but beware that it has not weakened in your souls the sentiment of humanity, without which there can only be wrongdoing.'
34