Violence, Terror, and War: A Comment on Arno Mayer's The Furies

Arno Mayer’s The Furies is to be appreciated both for its thought-provoking general discussions of revolutionary violence and terror and, more specifically, for its insistence that the Counter-Revolution be treated as a dynamic, autonomous force in the history of the French Revolution. But Mayer fails to consider the ways the Terror targeted revolutionaries themselves; he describes the Revolution as a conflict between unshifting constellations of “revolutionaries” and “elites,” and he treats Napoleon purely and simply as the Revolution’s heir. In my opinion, his interpretation of the Revolution is unsustainable. It suggests some of the limits to use in a comparison between revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia.