La Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence revolutionnaire, 1789-1794 (review)

La Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789-1794. By Patrice Gueniffey (Paris, Fayard, 2000) 376 pp., 165.00 FF paper.

Evoking the differing ways in which an observer "at the foot of a mountain" and one "at its summit" look at a valley (197), Gueniffey's analysis of French revolutionary violence and terror provides a fascinating example of an established scholar wrestling with the legacy of a celebrated (and recently deceased) mentor and patron. Thus, obviously referencing the style of "philosophical history" generally associated with Furet, his renowned teacher, Gueniffey notes that looking at the Revolution "in its totality" and "from on high" inevitably creates "an impression of fatality as to its drift into Terror, as if it were carried toward the worst by an irresistible logic" (197).¹ On the other hand, the "more modest," but "no less legitimate," project of considering the Revolution "from ground level" and on a "day to day basis" tends to generate an appreciation for historical contingency and an emphasis on the explanatory importance of the "petty calculations" and "petty motives" that often underlie the most profound historical developments (197-198).

From his post at the foot of the historiographical mountain, Gueniffey, who has always displayed more interest in the details of revolutionary politics than other members of the Furet "équipe," is at his best in presenting the strategic dimensions of revolutionary terrorism, convincingly demonstrating in a wide variety of instances how specific decisions instituting judicial repression served particular political ends. Through this optic, revolutionary ideology, generally seen by the Furet school as the central determining factor in driving revolutionary events, is reduced to a weapon deliberately fashioned and deployed by revolutionary actors for their own purposes. For example, after attributing the revolutionary government's spring 1794 immersion in a discourse of republican virtue to a need to develop a new justification for repressive policies that were becoming increasingly difficult to explain as responses to emergency circumstances, Gueniffey declares that "it is not ideology which led to the Terror but the implementation of the Terror which led to the reign of ideology" (275).

As if concerned that these kinds of forays against "an improbable autonomous logic of ideas" (328) were leading him too far astray of Furetian orthodoxy, Gueniffey makes occasional nods in the direction of the master at the top of the mountain. Hence, ideological utopianism is described at one point as rendering the Terror "almost inevitable" and the revolutionary will to re-make the world, increasingly highlighted in Furet's own work, appears as the Terror's "first root" and "ultimate source" (50, 52). No effort is made, however, to reconcile such statements with later descriptions of ideological formulations as "pure sophisms" (332), and, in fact, a systematic attempt to bring together and coordinate the multiple strands of historical causation that are proposed throughout the book is never undertaken.

Gueniffey's ambivalence toward the legacy of his mentor also seems to be indicated in the hesitant way that he challenges Furet's emphasis on early revolutionary radicalism. Thus, seemingly reluctant to draw out the implications regarding the origins of the Terror of his own interesting analysis of Constituent Assembly moderation, Gueniffey states that the Assembly was moderate only with respect to means rather than ends (104). But in considering the sources of revolutionary terror or, more generally, the issue of how societies deal with political opposition, is it not the question of means that is most important?

However much uncertainty concerning Furetian orthodoxy may have influenced this study, it continues to bear the imprint of the Furet school in its palpably hostile attitude toward the French Revolution and toward the idea of revolutionary change in general. Indeed, Gueniffey's ground-level focus on the calculations and maneuvers of individuals sometimes lends itself to the employment of a language of personal denunciation (especially of Maximilien...