Virtue and Terror. Robespierre Maximilien

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СКАЧАТЬ Robespierre serves perfectly today’s anti-totalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray him as a cruel monster with a sneering evil smile, as was the case for nineteenth-century reactionaries: everyone is ready to recognize his moral integrity and full devotion to the revolutionary cause, since his very purity is the problem, the cause of all trouble, as is signalled by the title of the latest biography of Robespierre, Ruth Scurr’s Fatal Purity.⁴⁴ The titles of some of the reviews of the book are indicative: ‘Terror Wears a Sea-Green Coat’, ‘The Good Terrorist’, ‘Virtue’s Demon Executioner’, and, outdoing them all, Graham Robb’s ‘Sea-Green, Mad as a Fish’.⁴⁵ And, so that no one misses the point, Antonia Fraser, in her review, draws ‘a chilling lesson for us today’: Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but ‘[t]he bloodlettings brought about by this “sincere” man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant.’⁴⁶ Happy we who live under cynical public-opinion manipulators, not under the sincere Muslim fundamentalists ready to fully commit themselves to their projects … what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as was clear to Robespierre, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’, the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution:

      But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.⁴⁷

       SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

      ROBESPIERRE TEXTS:

       In English:

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Speeches (with a biographical sketch), New York, International Publishers, 1927.

       In French:

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Oeuvres, edited by A. Soboul and M. Bouloiseau, Paris, 10 vols, 1958–67, (reprinted 2000 by Société d’Etudes Robespierristes (Paris); an eleventh volume of unpublished texts is in preparation).

       Old but useful selections:

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Textes choisis, notes and introduction by Jean Poperen, Paris, Editions sociales, 3 vols, 1956–58 (reprinted 1974).

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Discours et rapports à la Convention, Paris, UGE 10/18, 1965.

       A selection based on that by Jean Poperen, which is the most convenient to use:

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Ecrits, notes and introduction by Claude Mazauric, Paris, Editions sociales, 1989.

       Two recent selections:

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Pour le bonheur et pour la liberté. Discours, selected and edited by Y. Bosc, F. Gauthier, S. Wahnich, Paris, La Fabrique, 2000.

      ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Discours sur la religion, la République, l’esclavage, Paris, Editions de l’Aube, 2006.

      BIOGRAPHIES:

      BOULOISEAU Marc, Robespierre, Paris, PUF, Que sais-je?, 1987.

      JORDAN David P., The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre, New York, Free Press, 1985.

      MASSIN Jean, Robespierre, Aix-en-Provence, Alinéa, 1988.

      SCURR Ruth, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, London, Chatto and Windus, 2006.

      STUDIES ON ROBESPIERRE AND THE TERROR:

      ANDRESS David, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, New York, Strauss and Giroux, 2006.

      BRUNEL Françoise, Thermidor, la chute de Robespierre, Brussels, Editions Complexe, 1989.

      GUENIFFEY Patrice, « Robespierre » in FURET F., OZOUF M., Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, Paris, Flammarion, 1988.

      HAYDON Colin and DOYLE William (eds.), Robespierre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

      LABICA Georges, Robespierre. Une politique de la philosophie, Paris, PUF, 1990.

      MATHIEZ Albert, Etudes sur Robespierre, Paris, Messidor, 1988.

      MAYER, Arno, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, Princeton, PUP 2002.

      MAZAURIC Claude, « Robespierre », in SOBOUL A., Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, Paris, PUF, 1989.

      SOBOUL Albert (ed.), Actes du colloque Robespierre, Paris, Société des etudes robespierristes, 1967.

      WAHNICH Sophie, La liberté ou la mort: essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme, Paris, La Fabrique, 2003.

       GLOSSARY

      Accapareurs: term used to refer to figures hated by the populace who could either be the administrators responsible for food supplies, or those who supported free trade in grain, and especially those who preferred to hoard their produce rather than to bring it to market (the latter could be sentenced to the death penalty from July 1793 onwards).

      Committee of General Security: created under the Convention on 2 October 1792. Responsible for general and interior police matters, it entered into conflict with the Committee of Public Safety dominated by Robespierre.

      Committee of Public Safety: created under the Convention on 6 April 1793, it was charged with taking measures of general internal and external defence. Robespierre began to sit on it from 27 July 1793 and continued to do so until his arrest. The powers of the Committee became more and more extensive, a process which created conflict with the Committee of General Security.

      Constituent Assembly: founded at the Estates-General on 9 July 1789 and lasted until 30 September 1791. Robespierre was a member of this Assembly.

      Convention: assembly elected by quasi-universal male suffrage, it succeeded the Legislative officially on 21 September 1792 with the beginning of the First Republic; first influenced by the Girondins (until 2 June 1793), then by the Montagnards with Robespierre playing a preponderant role (until 9 Thermidor Year II—27 July 1794), and finally by the Thermidorians (until 26 October 1795).

      East India Company Affair: the decree of 24 August 1793 dissolved all joint stock companies. The liquidation of the East India Company was supposed to have been carried out by the state; when the decree was announced it emerged that the minutes had been been falsified СКАЧАТЬ