Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (review)

Book Reviews Caroline Weber. Terror and Its Disccn'ents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. 295. $63.95, $22.95 (paper). Caroline Weber seeks to enrich our knowledge of the repressive Montagnard regime of 179394 in an analysis ot what she maintains is a crucial but underexamined facet of its agenda, namely, the violence that it inflicted not on bodies but on "expressive faculties" (xiv). The Terror set in motion a political program that demanded the suppression of all individual opinion and desire in the name of the common interest, what Rousseau called the General Will. Weber explores the linguistic effects of this, which lay in the Terrorists' attempt to forge a new type of language that would both facilitate expressions of loyalty to the nation that they were constructing and inhibit all articulations of singularity and difference. Here, she is mostly concerned with the unraveling of this enterprise, traced in two significant sites: first, in the contradictions within Terrorist discourse itself, as this took form in Rousseau's political tracts (chapter 1) and in the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just (chapter 2); and second, in the subverive writings of detractors like Camille Desmoulins (chapter 3) and the Marquis de Sade (chapter 4). In each instance, Weber shows through close textual analysis how the Terror's "rhetoric of oneness" and "transparency" met fatal resistance in the innate "slipperiness" and "opacity" of language, properties that relentlessly stymied the Terrorist effort to quell dissent by controlling the dissemination of meaning, while liberating the anti-Terrorist who discovered in the multivalencies of "suspect words" an alternative freedom to the one advocated by the totalitarian leaders of the Montagnards. The argument is provocative, and unfolds in a narrative that is vigorous and well-written, if at times schematic in its stark opposition of stumbling revolutionaries incapable of mastering their own rhetoric and brave critics who, by contrast, show amazing finesse in their linguistic maneuvers. The strengths of the book lie in the often ingenious readings inspired by Weber's Derridean taste for paradox. When Desmoulins, in the fourth issue of Le Vieux cordelier, appears to capitulate to the brutality of Robespierrism by suggesting that "a blind and generalized policy of forgiveness would be counterrevolutionary indeed," Weber slyly argues that Desmoulins is actually attacking not clemency per se, but the blindness and the generalities of Montagnard politics, as the latter crystallized in the sweeping 1793 Law of Suspects (146-47). Other such examples abound, though this same taste for "aporia" also generates conclusions that can seem incongruously removed from what one might imagine would have been the experience of an 18th-century eyewitness. Weber contends, for instance, that the rhetorical questions in Terrorist oratory represented perilous moments of indeterminacy in a language striving for semantic and moral absolutism (68-69, 88). But it is hard to know what light this sheds on the linguistic agenda of the Montagnard leaders in the absence of any investigation into the specific effect that this device might have had on the audiences that they were seeking to mobilize. Indeed, the generally low profile of the contemporary reader/listener in the book is symptomatic of an inattention to the media of the discourses and counter-discourses of the Reign of Terror. Weber's interpretations do not differentiate between political treatises, newspaper articles, and novels, nor between these and oral/performative modes such as speeches and spectacles. It should, of course, be stressed that her goal, as spelled out in the prologue and epilogue, is to focus on "the functioning of language" rather than "material conditions" or "historical actuality" (xx, 229). Fair enough; yet the insights of an otherwise illuminating study seem encumbered by Weber's tendency to construe this as a choice between mutually exclusive possibilities. Geoffrey Turnovsky Ohio State University Hédi Abdel-Jaouad. Rimbaud et l'Algérie. New York, Tunis: Les Mains Secrètes, 2002. Pp. 174. Rimbaud et l'Algérie est un ouvrage original, riche, que nous offre Hédi Abdel-Jaouad, résultat d'une lecture croisée, multiple, de Jugurtha, un poème en latin d'Arthur Rimbaud, rédigé à Vol. XLIII, No. 4 99 ...