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The corollary of this marriage of virtue and vengeance was a
growing emphasis on revolutionary energy and potency. Hence Saint–
Just's denunciation of the "cowardly" inertia of the Girondins, who
wished to spare the king: "Some have not yet abandoned monarchy.
Others seem to fear that later they
will
suffer for their courage: they lack
all
energy.
The disputes, the perfidies, the malice, and the anger which
show themselves in turn are meant to entrap that
soaring vigor
of which
we have such need; else they are a mark of the
impotence
of the human
spirit." Thus was the
vir
to be put back into
virtus.
In America George Washington had presented his fellow citizens
with an exemplary model of personal restraint. In contrast, the Jacobins
offered France a depersonalized, disembodied myth of virtue, the
apotheosis of reason gone mad - a salad of moral superiority, patriotism,
vengeance, and violence. Danton's comment, "Let us be terrible so that
the people will not have to be," captures well the Jacobin sense of duty
to the nation conflated with a moral obligation to kill. Virtue had be–
come the justification for persecution and murder. Not even Thomas
Paine could translate Washingtonian self-restraint into language that
could be understood in France in 1793.
But fortunately the revolutionary cult of virtue - detached from a
two-thousand year tradition of Judeo-Christian morality - was short–
lived. The republic of virtue held limited appeal for an exhausted nation.
Soon enough terror and vengeance were disavowed, and in the early
decades of the nineteenth century there was instead an intense desire to
overcome the radical discontinuity the Revolution had injected into
French history as well as the deep divisions that had split the nation. Po–
litical theorists, historians, and poets were agreed on the need to find a
unifying moral and political basis for post-Revolutionary society. Both
the left and the right were eager to replace theoretical, abstract public
myths with ones anchored in France's historical and religious past.
During the Restoration, the pro-royalist right believed that the
problem of bringing ethics back into politics had been resolved in their
favor. The imprisonment and beheading of the king had aroused a cer–
tain amount of genuine sympathy among the French, which to the
royalists signified a disavowal of Louis's Jacobin judges and their Revo–
lution. Given the facts of the case, too, it was easy to depict the fate of
Louis XVI in Christian terms - even to liken it to Christ's own Passion.
Moments before his death, the king had pardoned those who were
about to execute him, and using his words of forgiveness, writers like
Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand created the myth of a compassion–
ate monarchy eager to help the French expiate their collective guilt for
the crimes of the Revolution.
The myth of royal martyrdom and forgiveness was highly useful to
