The Terror and Modernity

After more than two centuries the Terror of the French Revolution continues to haunt the modern West like a familiar ghost. Beginning at a time when optimistic contemporaries believed the work of the Revolution to be concluded, the Terror presents the historian with the paradox of a regime that stripped thousands of the most basic rights in the name of preserving liberty. In hindsight, the Terror seems to be in the DNA of modern Western liberal democracies, as the progress in human rights and legal equality that have emerged since the Revolution have gone hand in hand with the excesses of nationalism, imperialism, totalitarianism, and genocide. Even today, as the American War on Terror has shown, there are still those who would make exceptions to the ideal of universal human rights that is the most important legacy of the Age of Revolution.

The relationship between the Terror and modernity has been of great interest to intellectuals and scholars since Edmund Burke first penned his contemporary observations on the Revolution, and the subject has been tackled by scholars of every stripe from Marxists to postmodernists. Although it comprises just a brief episode in the Revolution as a whole, it is an inexhaustible subject with new monographs coming out almost every year. The two books under review here are evidence of the continued vitality of this topic.

Orphans on the Earth: Girondin Fugitives from the Terror, 1793–1794 by Bette W. Oliver is a documentary of the months that several prominent Girondin deputies, whose downfall at the hands of their rivals Robespierre and St. Just set the Terror in motion, spent in hiding after their expulsion from the Convention in the summer of 1793. This work sets out to fill a gap in the historiography because the perspective of the fugitive Girondins is often overshadowed by the actions taken by the Committee of Public Safety. Her narrative is drawn largely from the surviving journals and letters of the main subjects, particularly the memoirs of Jérôme Pétion, Charles Barbarous, François Buzot, and Jean-Baptiste Louvet. Some of these sources have long been available in published form but have received scant attention from scholars. Being a mixture of both private letters and memoirs intended for a public readership, these documents shed an important light on the minds of the men and women who found themselves on the losing side of the first great political struggle of modern France. Because memoirs in particular were consciously written for posterity by men who knew they were going to die, an intriguing element of self-fashioning is at work in these documents.

The book begins with a description of how this social network of moderate republicans formed around the Rolands in the early years of the Revolution. Oliver goes to great lengths to emphasize that they did not make up a political party in the modern sense, or even in the sense of their eventual persecutors in the Mountain. Compared to Robespierre and his political allies, the moderates were unable to present a unified consensus on any issue, even on the fate of the king. The Girondins were linked by social ties and some shared ideological views (particularly their distrust of the Parisian crowds) more than any monolithic agenda, which ultimately contributed to their downfall at the hands of the better-organized Jacobins.

As the war with Austria began to go badly, the Girondins lost credibility among the Parisian sans-culottes. Their situation worsened with their opposition to new laws fixing the price of grain and supplies. While Robespierre and his allies worked on consolidating the support of the Parisian sections, the Girondins relied on their power base in the provinces, which were showing signs of resistance to the increasing influence that capital had on national policy. On 2 June 1793 the Girondins were expelled...