Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution by Marisa Linton (review)

Georg Büchner’s 1835 play Danton’s Death attributed the Terror to the misguided search for transparency: for to know anyone’s motive ‘we would have to break open each other’s skulls and squeeze the thoughts out of the brain tissue’ (I. 1; trans. by Victor Price (OUP, 1971)). Marisa Linton asks a similar question: what motivated otherwise non-violent people with ‘normal lives’ to ‘choose terror’ (pp. 23–24)? She also acknowledges the same restriction: that there is no ‘automatic window into the inner world of consciousness’ (p. 17). This illuminating study reveals how escalating demands to demonstrate virtue resulted in a double bind, requiring Revolutionary politicians to ‘be prepared, if the public safety demanded it, to denounce and destroy their friends, and even to sacrifice their lives’ (p. 288). Adopting a non-partisan approach, Linton tracks a large cast of characters from the period 1789–94 to show, in an impressive synthesis, how the ideological, personal, and political interacted. Her approach also reflects a twenty-first century concern to regard networks of patronage, friendship, and exchange as equal to, if not more important than, ideological belief and political language. Such a ‘close-to-the-ground’ perspective yields dividends, enabling her to demonstrate the ongoing influence of private politics in a ‘transparent’ Revolution. It also tempers the habitually sharp distinction between ‘hardline’ Jacobins and ‘liberal’ Girondins (now recast as the party of war and the first to initiate the tactic of denunciation). Robespierre is more thoughtful than sometimes represented, appearing here as a committed liberal republican who opposed war and the death penalty, while Desmoulins presents a more ambiguous figure, not just the ‘liberal’ critic of the Terror but also a key innovator of a discourse of denunciation. The overall picture is of fracture rather than ideological opposition: like-minded individuals, who had once wined and dined together, engaged in a struggle to the death to prove individual virtue. Choosing Terror communicates rich biographical and social material in clear, even-handed prose, making it a good teaching resource. Yet Linton’s foregrounding of the emotional motors that drive personal choice while avoiding the temptation to reduce the Revolution to a history of motive sits awkwardly at times. By considering events mainly from the perspective of political actors, she essentially submits the Revolution to an ethical analysis. The implication that various Revolutionary actors shared similar psychological profiles, while highlighting social context, underplays the epic quality of the Revolution, which presupposes the freedom and unpredictability of individuals as well as genuine differences of belief. More interestingly perhaps, Linton’s close analysis suggests that Revolutionary politics contained deeper contradictions. The Terror, according to Linton, resulted from an overinvestment in virtue as a means of understanding both ideology and everyday political life. The Revolutionaries closed the gap between being and appearance by collapsing the distance between the space of authority and everyday politics (bringing to mind Claude Lefort’s distinction between le and la politique). Every political act, therefore, became a referendum on the deeper question of legitimacy, in an unworkable manner. In sum, Linton’s accomplished book highlights important problems of political authority in an egalitarian age, although, arguably, such contradictions go beyond the psychological motive of personal ambition and/or individual choice.