The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (review)

The past few years have seen a bumper crop of writing on what was once a strangely neglected topic—the origins and character of republicanism in eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. Recent standouts in English include Michael Sonenscher's Before the Deluge (2007) and Sans-Culottes (2008), and Andrew Jainchill's Reimagining Politics After the Terror (2009). But for sheer ambition and verve, there is nothing quite like Dan Edelstein's The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Offering no less than a new explanation for the Reign of Terror, Edelstein brings to his enterprise a heady combination of disciplinary proficiencies and theoretical tools—alternately wearing "the hats," as he puts it, of "cultural historian, literary scholar, social scientist, and political theorist," while analyzing historical narratives in the manner of White and decoding political "myths" à la Barthes. Not every reader will be convinced that the "enduring mystery" of the Terror has been put to rest by The Terror of Natural Right. Still, Edelstein's dazzling display of historical imagination and energy is certain to unsettle all conventional understandings of the origins and meaning of Jacobinism.

Edelstein starts The Terror of Natural Right by announcing the discovery of a new species of republicanism, distinct from the neo-classical variants that John Pocock famously observed in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century North America. Rather than any classical model, the "natural republicanism" of the Jacobins was founded on modern theories of "natural right"—above all, the right permanently to dispose of anyone deemed an "enemy of the human race." That category had a long history behind it, mingling fear of the devil with loathing of all manner of "outlaws," from pirates, brigands, and bandits to tyrants. In the age of revolutions, however, now backed by the philosophical resources of Enlightenment naturalism, the idea of a hostis humani generis had it in it to provide a license for political murder on an unprecedented scale—in France, at any rate. The absence of any comparable episode of political terror in the American Revolution is a preoccupation throughout The Terror of Natural Right. What made the difference? Edelstein is not the first to point the finger at philosophic culprits. But what distinguishes his "secret history of natural republicanism"—to which the first part of The Terror of Natural Right is devoted—is the extraordinary breadth of the dragnet, which omits scarcely a leading figure of eighteenth-century French thought. There is no surprise in encountering Fénelon, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mably, all purveyors of "imaginary republics" of one kind of another. But the ancestors of Robespierre and Saint-Just also include a host of more far-flung visionaries, evoking "gold ages" in the past, insular paradises abroad, or scientific utopias to come—Voltaire, Diderot, even the Physiocrats. All of these, in Edelstein's view, contributed something to the natural-republican "sensibility" that crystallized in the thought of Sylvain Maréchal, a far more accurate bellwether of revolutionary republicanism than, say, Paine or Condorcet.

The origines lointaines of "natural republicanism" thus established, Edelstein turns in the second part of the book to its revolutionary career, focusing on the Reign of Terror above all. He canvasses the traditional explanations for the latter—popular violence from below, the struggle of elites from above, the pressure of counterrevolution from without—and finds them all insufficient to account for the killing spree with which the First Republic began its life. The necessary condition of possibility for the Terror, Edelstein argues, was the trial of Louis XVI, who was executed by a Convention invoking its natural right to rid the world of a hostis humani generis. All that remained was for the Jacobins, once in power, to extend exactly the same treatment the rest of the enemies of the First Republic. Only this can explain why the Jacobin response to resistance was "always death" (179...