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haps suicidally, imagined that they could profit from the exclusion of their
adversaries. Neither group had the political intelligence or the commit–
ment to democracy and individual rights to create institutional
mechanisms and guarantees for the expression of dissent and opposition.
Politics is the art of persuasion, not annihilation. What French politi–
cians did not grasp, as they were wiping out their political adversaries, is
that political majorities and minorities are forever fluctuating, new coali–
tions always replacing old ones. Did they simply not know that, in the
world of politics, political adversaries are potential friends and political
allies are potential defectors, and that politics is largely the art of the deal?
None of them viewed conflict as something that might add to rather than
subtract from the nation. And as they spat out their vitriolic denunciations,
their rage against the "monsters" who opposed them, they insisted that
political change could somehow take place in a non-conflictual, harmo–
mous arena.
The cult of unity that rejected
non-~iolent
political conflict led iron–
ically but naturally to the most extreme form of conflict: murder and
violence. But were not the precepts that made the Terror possible-the
dogma of the oneness of the nation, the passion for equality at the expense
of individual rights and freedom, the exclusion of factions and parties, the
refusal to accord legitimacy to opposition-already present in Sieyes's
original definition of the unitary revolutionary nation? To Sieyes's exclu–
sionary formula for unity and concord, the Jacobins added their paranoia,
their arrogance and intellectual shallowness, their desire for power, their
taste for repression and punishment, and finally a lethal dose of violence.
The fictitious idea of political unity, which mesmerized some revolution–
aries while serving others as a cynical mask for political intimidation,
became a terrifying and bloody reali ty under the blade of the guillotine.
In revolutionary America, terror never took over the legal system.
During the War of Independence, the wealth of loyalists was occasionally
confiscated, some acts of violence and vengeance were committed, and
some people were killed, but neither then nor during the late 1790s were
there any poli tical trials that ended in a death sentence.
But lest we exaggerate the wisdom of the American Founders, we may
ask whether Americans, had they been faced with the problems of hyper–
inflation, food shortages, a proliferation of provincial insurrections, radical
mass street demonstrations, and extremist parties on the left and on the
right, could have sustained their tolerance for conflict. The Alien and
Sedition Acts as well as Jefferson's own forays into suppression of criticism
demonstrate that respect for opposition was a lesson that took decades to
be absorbed and integrated into the political culture. It is perhaps also fair
to note that the harmony in Philadelphia that led to the adoption of the
