84
PARTISAN REVIEW
blade of the guillotine should never have fallen." Even though the unspoken
maxim of monarchy was "from the king to the people, no justice and no pity,"
pity for the king should not have been withheld: "Guiltier than he realized,
still he was not unworthy of the clemency of the people."
Michelet wrote that "the day when pity becomes a mockery begins a
barbaric age." That day was January 21, 1793. The Terror evoked for
him a moral wasteland rather than a police state. It pained him
to
have
to
examine the Terror and acknowledge the moral defeat of the Revolution
from within. He would have preferred to end his
History
0/
the French
Revolution
in 1792: "Ah! gentle genius of France and of the Revolution ...
If only I could break my pen and end my book here!" With the greatest re–
luctance, he broached the Revolution's
selt~destruction:
"Here I touch upon a
sad subject; history demands it. Having reached the summit of the Terror, I
find, like on the peaks of great mountains, an extreme aridity, a desert where
life has ceased. Pity had been extinguished or was mute; only horror spoke."
In the tenebrous world of the Terror, meanings were reversed; pity became
barbarity; people were condemned to death in the name of empathy. The
deputy Tallien voted against a stay of execution for the king, arguing that it
was barbaric to leave Louis uncertain about his fate: "Humanity demands
that there be no reprieve. One must put an end to his anguish. It is barbaric
to force him to wait as we postpone his destiny." So difIicult was it
to
voice a
word of sympathy for the king that the deputy Fauchet was reduced
to
making the ridiculous argument that "his crimes are so great that death would
be too easy for him; we must condemn him
to
live."
Camus quoted Marat as having complained that people questioned his
claim to the title of philanthropist. "Ah! What injustice! Who cannot see that [
want to cut off a few heads
to
save a great number?" As if he were
predicting modern totalitarianism, Michelet analyzed Marat's mathematics of
terror: "If we accept the supposition that we can sacrifice one for the many,
soon they will prove
to
us that we can sacrifice two, three, etc. Little by little,
we will find reasons for sacrificing all for the happiness of all, and we will
think that it was a bargain."
In her book
On RI'1..IOlution,
Hannah Arendt compared the French and
American Revolutions, locating the
f~lilure
of the French Revolution specifi–
cally in the Jacobin emphasis on pity for the oppressed French masses.
Whereas the American Revolution, not faced with the pmblem of over–
whelming poverty or suffering, committed itself
to
the creation oflasting
institutions, the direction of the French Revolution was determined by urgent
social conditions. "Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue ... played havoc with
justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of ..
. the people, the impartiality ofjustice and law, the application of the same
