Mass Violence and the Self by Howard G. Brown

Author:Howard G. Brown [Brown, Howard G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, France, Social Science, Violence in Society, Art, European, General
ISBN: 9781501730726
Google: 4kVQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T01:11:12+00:00

The Hazards of Politicized Pathos

Despite the rising tide of petitions and autodefenses, the debate about annulling verdicts and compensating victims dragged on for months. Government action depended on distinguishing between counterrevolutionary conspirators rightly condemned and innocent victims of a horrible tyranny. Boissy d’Anglas had claimed that among “the innumerable mass of dead … very few are guilty.” Therefore, adopting a policy of restitution toward the “unprecedented mass of innocent victims” was simply expiation for a criminal regime, even if it inevitably restored fortunes to “some families of the guilty.”107 This position was too extreme for most lawmakers at the time. It took a further shift in the political climate to compel them to act decisively on matters of rehabilitation and restitution.

Two failed sans-culottes insurrections in Paris in the spring of 1795 encouraged the Convention to take legal action against individuals implicated in the “system of terror.” These revolts provided the inspiration and justification to expand greatly the range of men to be held responsible for the tyranny of 1793–94. The Convention had recently ordered every public official, whether civilian or military, who had been sacked or suspended since the overthrow of Robespierre to return to his native commune and there be put under surveillance. This effectively made every former public official into an official “suspect” in Thermidorian terms. Following the insurrection of 12–13 Germinal (1–2 April 1795), the Convention ordered a general disarmament of “terrorists,” that is, men known “to have participated in the horrors committed under the tyranny that preceded [9 Thermidor].”108 This exceptionally vague language provided legal cover for a general settling of scores at the local level. The Convention went even further following the insurrection of 1–4 Prairial III (20–23 May 1795) by ordering the arrest and imprisonment of servitors of the former regime, especially targeting members of surveillance committees and revolutionary commissions. This led to the arrest of some thirty thousand would-be “terrorists.”109 Such an approach made individuals politically, morally, and even juridically responsible for actions that had usually been taken collectively. It also automatically cast a pall of presumed guilt over their actions during Year II, thereby further justifying vigilante violence against erstwhile patriots now dubbed “terrorists.”

Taking these major steps toward defining the supposed perpetrators of the Terror was matched by a gradual expansion of the Convention’s efforts to delineate and then compensate their victims. Various laws adopted in the first half of 1795 rehabilitated tens of thousands of people who had emigrated or been subjected to revolutionary justice during 1793–94, notably everyone who participated in the Federalist revolts. Tens of thousands of émigrés, many of them avowed royalists, and all of them now officially recognized as victims of the Terror, rushed back to France. On 9 June 1795, “considering the abuse that has been made of revolutionary laws [and] the impossibility of distinguishing through revisions the innocent from the guilty,” the Convention also decided that property confiscated as part of verdicts rendered using “revolutionary procedures” would be returned to victims or their families. Important

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