Susan Dunn
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
AND THE LANGUAGE OF TERROR
In 1858, eight years after the publication of his book,
The Old
Regime and the French Revolution,
Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the
centrality and the mystery of a question he had not even raised in that lumi–
nous and seminal work, the question of the virus of the Terror:
There is in this disease of the French Revolution something very
strange that I can sense, though I cannot describe it properly or ana–
lyze its causes. It is a
virus
of a new and unknown kind. There have
been violent Revolutions in the world before; but the immoderate,
violent, radical, desperate, bold, almost crazed and yet powerful and
effective character of these Revolutionaries has no precedents. What
produced it? What made it so effective? What perpetuates it? I am
exhausting my mind trying to conceive a clear notion of this object
and seeking a way
to
depict it properly.
Tocquev ille died the following year, and we shall never know what
insights into political violence and revolutionary dictatorship he may have
had.
In
The Old Regime,
violence never occupied the center stage; it was a
given, beneath contempt. A lethal dose of it was all that the Revolution had
added of its own to the progressive trends already set in motion by a mod–
ern, enlightened, energetic, and conscientious monarchy.
For two centuries, historians have grapp led with the problem of the
Terror, hypothesizing either two quasi-independent Revolutions, idealistic and
humanitarian 1789 and merciless and
self~destructive
1793, or only one -
an essentially violent phenomenon, whether the violence was spontaneous
and popular as in 1789 or institutionalized as in 1793. In one way or an–
other, 1793 had to be accounted for, as a product of or an aberration from
1789. A few profoundly conservative historians, such as the ultra-reac–
tionary Joseph de Maistre, considered the Terror the essence of a satan ic
Revolution. Others, liberals like Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant,
who were among the first historians of the Revolution, regretted the Terror
as an unfortunate but not crucial accident of history. Still others, such as
Mignet, made excuses for the Terror by claiming that it was the result of
political necessity, a forced reaction to desperate circumstances such as the
