SUSAN DUNN
AND
ROBERT
F.
DALZELL,JR.
647
elite of the new republic would embody? Without Washington, the
drama might still have run its course, but nowhere near as convincingly.
*
*
*
And how very different indeed all this was from the French experi–
ence! While American revolutionary leaders had succeeded both in lo–
cating an acceptable political tradition in their own past and in finding a
living symbol of the virtues they prized, with the onset of the Terror the
French increasingly conceived of their political goals in ahistorical, purely
theoretical terms. Far from seeking continuity, they strove to alter com–
pletely the country's social and religious fabric, to dismember its political
institutions, to wrench it from its history. And that history included the
opening stages of the Revolution no less than the
ancien regime.
The
Terror accepted only heroes of its own making and soon enough de–
stroyed even those. As early as 1790 Edmund Burke had formulated the
essence of the problem: "Is it then true, that the French government was
such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform; so that it was of abso–
lute necessity that the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and
the area cleared for the erection of a theoretical, experimental edifice in
its place?"
In fact, it was precisely such a
tabula rasa
that the Jacobins craved.
The founding of the French Republic in 1792 marked the Year One of a
new historical and political era. And in order to assure that all ties to the
past were severed, the living symbol of French history, the king, had to
be annihilated. Centuries of injustice and despair would be magically
erased when the head of the tyrant fell. The first precious months of the
revolutionary Convention were therefore spent, not drafting a Constitu–
tion, but determining the King's fate. But how exactly was the void left
by Louis's departure to be filled?
It was Rousseau who had answered that question. A special kind of
goodness - identified simply as
la vertu
-
would, as Conor Cruise
O'Brien has observed, take the place of the old God of the churches
while the nation (the general will) took the place of the king. However,
the fatal stumbling block for the Revolution concerned precisely this
ambiguous concept of virtue. Robespierre defined
la
vertu
in the broadest
possible terms. It was man's inner goodness as well as the inherent good–
ness of the people, the spirit
ofjraternite,
the love of the public welfare
and of
la patrie.
But it was also opposition to everything corrupt
(Robespierre himself was called the Incorruptible), not to mention suspi–
cion of the wealthy and powerful and finally of anyone thought to be
less than utterly committed to the Revolution and its works. So the
promise of brotherhood withered, and virtue, at first associated with
goodness, came to be identified with vengeance.
