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

Dan Edelstein’s The Terror of Natural Right is both a rigorous archival account of the Terror and a study of our times. I would call it a Foucauldian genealogy of the present, but Edelstein himself aligns his methodology with Keith Baker, J. G. A. Pocock, and Hannah Arendt. Calling on literature, political theory, legal history, mythology, and close readings of original sources, he provides a major reinterpretation of the Terror that challenges fundamental tenets of revisionist history and recent Marxist “bottom-up” studies of revolutionary violence. Furthermore, in drawing parallels between the Terror and the War on Terror, he sheds light on current international affairs, challenges recent theories of the state of exception, and demonstrates that the Revolution, far from over, can still captivate and enlighten us as never before.

To begin, Edelstein traces the category of the enemy of the human race through theology, colonialism, piracy, and the law of nations to the king’s trial. Keenly following the development of this category and its relation to natural right, Edelstein advances his central thesis that “[i]t was under the aegis of natural right, not the general will, that the Montagnards brought ‘terror’ into the Republic” (259).

Although he supports this thesis mainly through discourse analysis, Edelstein does offer some methodological innovations: reading political theories as narrative and analyzing myth in political thought. Combining these innovations, part one establishes the history of “natural republicanism,” defined as the attempt to govern by natural laws alone and thus curtail or eschew constitutional law. “Imaginary republics” and the fictional “possible worlds” of Fénelon, Montesquieu, and Rousseau combine with the myth of the golden age in orientalist studies, voyages of discovery, and Physiocracy to forge a “cultural and legal imagination” that sets the stage for the Revolution.

With the stage set, part two delivers the bulk of the argumentative strength and creativity. Here the “ready made models, arguments and justifications” of natural republicanism take action in the trials, constitutional projects, festivals, and institutions of the Revolution. Drawing largely on Saint-Just, Edelstein argues that the Jacobins combined political opportunism with sincere political ideology in a struggle to found “the Republic of Nature.” Rather than a “dérapage” of revolutionary ideals, he insists that natural right continued to play the key role leading up to and during the Terror, particularly in expanding the hors-la-loi category. Postulating a Jacobin “Republic-to-Come,” he reads the Cult of Supreme Being as a “metaphysical panopticon” meant to enforce the laws of nature in the conscience, and the Law of 22 Prairial as a shift away from Terror toward a sustainable judicial system consistent with Jacobin ideology. In conclusion, the Terror does not emerge as a state of exception, as one might view it following Schmitt or Agamben. More dangerous, it, like the War on Terror, establishes a parallel legal system that threatens to erode civil liberty through a fastidious legality.

Certainly not all will welcome this mingling of history, theory, and imagination, but all interested in the Revolution, rights discourse, and contemporary international politics should take stock of it.