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PARTISAN REVIEW
Counterrevolution. According
to
this view, the Revolution's failure to estab–
lish stable republican institutions could be blamed on counterrevolutionary
opposition and not on the Terror. In the mid-nineteenth century, Louis Blanc
added a new dimension. His originality, as Fran<;;ois Furet remarked, was in
discerning in the Jacobin dictatorship the annunciation of socialism - a strong
protectionist state that could prevail over individualism and protect workers
from capitalist exploitation.
According to this implausible yet influential interpretation, the Terror
was the renaissance of state power in service of the disadvantaged. The
opposing theory was offered by the liberal republican historian, Edgar
Quinet, for whom the Terror was the fatal renaissance of the absolutist
tradition , binding the Revolution to the past instead of opening the way to
freedom and the future. By assimilating the Terror and the monarchy,
Quinet not only gave a bad name to the Old Regime but failed to distinguish
between Jacobin lawlessness and Bourbon legitimacy. In Jacobin ideology,
Quinet could find neither a denunciation of despotism nor any justification of
the Terror - no civilizing purpose, no meaning, no goal other than hatred and
violence.
It
was simply the cynical recourse to the traditional methods of
force and power. The negation of 1789 was 1793, a doomed return to the
past.
It was Jules Michelet, probably the greatest nineteenth-century histo–
rian of the Revolution, who, more than anyone else, established the narrative
elements of the history of the Revolution. His colorful, profound, empathic
"resurrection" of the past identified characters, fathomed souls, developed
plots, created myths , and articulated for his century the heroic legacy ofthe
Revolution. His vision of a humanitarian and idealistic Revolution became the
foundation of nineteenth-century republican ideology.
It
tormented Michelet
to have to deal with the Terror, which he described as a desert where pity
was mute and only horror spoke. But his commitment to narrative obliged
him to describe it fully and meditate upon its significance.
It
was not possible
to treat the Terror as in any way inconsequential, and yet he was loath
to
associate his cherished Revolution with 1793. His strategy was therefore to
portray Jacobinism as a phenomenon produced by a minority with no popular
support and which owed its success to the manipulation of an ideological or–
thodoxy. Unlike the Girondins who publicized their internal differences, the
Jacobins emphasized unity, bending all positions and circumstances to fit their
ideological canon. The Terror borrowed nothing from the Old Regime nor
did it have roots in the humanitarian idealism of 1789: it belonged solely to
the Jacobins.
Since Michelet, the Marxist school Oaures, Lefebvre, Soboul) has fused
Mignet's idea of the Terror as an understandable and necessary reaction to
