In Defence of the Terror by Sophie Wahnich

Author:Sophie Wahnich [Wahnich, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

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3

THE TERROR AS A LONG CYCLE OF VENGEANCE: TOWARDS A REINTERPRETATION OF THE LAWS OF TERROR

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The establishment of the revolutionary tribunal on 9 March 1793, the law of suspects of 17 September 1793, and the reorganization of this extraordinary tribunal on 22 Prairial of year II – a reorganization which historians mark as the start of the Great Terror – are three key moments in the history of the terror, as well as of its representation. The tribunal was established before the spokesmen of September 1793 demanded that it be placed on the agenda, leading among other things to the law of suspects. This tribunal amounted to an institutional foundation and precursor of the Terror, which – for those who like a precise periodization1 – extended from 5 September 1793 to 9 Thermidor of year II. It was perceived as a genuine break, which led certain members of the Convention to reject it violently. The tribunal, however, came into being in order to avoid a repetition of the September massacres, and was presented in this respect as a negative replay of those events. It proposed a version of violent insurrection that was channelled into a juridical apparatus, designed to avoid the people having to experience once more the scourge of non-symbolized vengeance: the tribunal opened a cycle of institutional vengeance. It did not break with vengeance; its logic was always one of bipolar social confrontation between people and counter-revolutionaries. It was the tribunal of vengeance.

The law of suspects is both more familiar and harder to understand. It has led historians to conceive revolutionary repression as something unlimited. Generalized suspicion provoking a runaway terror with no possible end led to the Thermidorian representation of a solitary Robespierre among a forest of guillotines. According to the impressive list of supposedly ‘suspect’ categories, anyone could in fact become a suspect. The representation of a revolution in which no one remained safe from a dynamic of deadly political exclusion is based on an analysis of this law, which was disturbing for the revolutionaries themselves, who feared from the start its devastating effects. In this cycle of vengeance, however, ‘rules and rituals were conceived in order to open, suspend and hem in vengeance’.2 The position I shall defend here is that this law of suspects, far from increasing deadly repression, actually suspended it. For being suspected did not amount to being accused, and if the death penalty was there potentially, it was deferred, sometimes indefinitely. By giving form to the confrontation of opposing political groups, suspicion was a response to a multiform demand for vengeance (one that is undoubtedly hard to grasp) without meting out death to the members of the offending social group. This law was a manner of deploying vengeance with a maximum scope, yet without transforming it into a generalized bloodbath. The prisons filled, but the guillotine was used relatively little in terms of the number of suspects.

But everything changed again with the tribunal of Prairial, which always leaves historians of the French Revolution speechless.

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