The tyranny of virtue: Robespierre and the Reign of Terror
I’ve long known the basics of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. You probably do, too. But except for the history buffs among you, some of the details may have escaped you, as they had escaped me.
Right now I’m reading a book by Christopher Hibbert called The Days of the French Revolution
Here are a couple of the things I’d never thought about before: most of the protagonists were trained as lawyers. And most were young—some really really young (for example, Robespierre’s ironically-named right-hand man Saint-Just, one of the coldest and cruelest of them all, was 25-26 years old during the height of the Reign of Terror, and Robespierre himself was a relative elder statesmen when he became an influential revolutionary at barely 30).
Here is a quote from Robespierre which I found at this website. Robespierre justified what he did in the Terror this way:
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.
In other words, the ends justify the means.
At that same website, Marisa Linton describes the process:
[Robespierre] had an unshakable belief that his own aims coincided with what was best for the Revolution. He was a man of painful sincerity. He was not a hypocrite. He really did believe that the Terror could sustain the republic of virtue. But he was naturally self-righteous, suspicious and unforgiving. All these qualities came to the fore as it became evident that while the Terror played a key part in winning the war and quelling the counter-revolution, it was having the reverse effect as far as installing the republic of virtue was concerned, undermining any genuine enthusiasm for the Revolution.
Very early in the uprising that became known as the French Revolution, massacres had been perpetrated by the mob itself. During the Reign of Terror, revolutionary leaders Robespierre and many of the other Jacobins rationalized their use of government as an instrument of terror to prevent more terror by the mob:
The most notorious instance of the crowd’s rough justice was the prison massacres of September 1792, when around 2,000 people, including priests and nuns, were dragged from their prison cells, and subjected to summary ”˜justice’. The Convention was determined to avoid a repeat of these brutal scenes, but that meant taking violence into their own hands as an instrument of government.
When the Convention debated the fate of Louis XVI, now a prisoner of the revolutionaries, Robespierre and his youthful colleague, Saint-Just (1767-94) – also once an opponent of the death penalty – led the way in claiming that ‘Louis must die in order for the Revolution to live’. Robespierre…was coming to the conclusion that the ends justified the means, and that in order to defend the Revolution against those who would destroy it, the shedding of blood was justified.
In June 1793, the sans-culottes, exasperated by the inadequacies of the government, invaded the Convention and overthrew the Girondins. In their place they endorsed the political ascendancy of the Jacobins. Thus Robespierre came to power on the back of popular street violence. Though the Girondins and the Jacobins were both on the extreme left, and shared many of the same radical republican convictions, the Jacobins were much more brutally efficient in setting up a war government…
…As fellow revolutionary Danton said, “let us be terrible in order to stop the people from being so”…
Many people in France were already indifferent, if not openly hostile, to the Revolution. For many the Revolution now meant requisitioning of supplies, military conscription and the constant threat to their traditional ways of life, churches, even time – for the revolutionaries had even invented a new calendar. Throughout the year of Jacobin rule, it was the sans-culottes who kept them in power. But the price of that support was the blood-letting.
Food for thought. Let me add that once Robespierre and confederates like Saint-Just had been guillotined by former colleagues who had (justifiably) become afraid that they themselves would be next on the block, the Terror abated—although massacres and killings and suffering continued on a somewhat smaller scale. Society and civil order had been broken, and the task of putting them back together (never in the same way, of course) was long and arduous.
Why am I interested? I’ve had a lifelong fascination for the ways in which “good intentions” can lead to—well, you know where they can lead—and just how it has happened time and again in human history. The French Revolution was just one example, a populist movement of the left based on a philosophy that ignores human nature, run by people who seem to have had no idea what they had unleashed or how to control it.
Neo;
Once again another gem.
“The sans-culottes (French: [sɑ̃kylÉ”t], “without culottes”) were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime.”
I cannot but think of many of Trump’s supporters (though not all, by any means) when reading the above description.
Compare this to 18th century French “sans-culottes”…
Can anything Trump do be wrong in that woman’s eyes? Look carefully and you can see the abandonment of reason… “mobocracy” indeed.
Orwell said something about lefties being attracted to playing with fire but not having the sense to know it is hot.
In China the Red Guards were really young, high school and university students.
Why am I interested? I’ve had a lifelong fascination for the ways in which “good intentions” can lead to — well, you know where they can lead to — and just how it has happened time and again in human history.
It seems to me the big disasters happen when good intentions are combined with significant amounts of bad intentions and lack of self-awareness. For example:
The bad intentions here include Robespierre’s smug lust to think of himself as superior, and his desire to indulge his “suspious and unforgiving” nature — among other serious character flaws most likely.
The lack of self-awareness part includes Robespierre’s absurd overestimation of his ability to predict and control the deadly forces he would unleash. He seems to have had no humility, only a reckless, brain-dead, arrogant certainty. And of course there was the vacant ignorance of his own bad motivations listed above.
Ray: “In China the Red Guards were really young, high school and university students.”
A friend of mine grew up in China and came of age when all that was happening; she once told me that the Red Guards were the ones who would normally have been the class clowns, the class trouble-makers, the class bullies, etc. – only during the Cultural Revolution they were given power over all others.
Just goes to show that human nature doesn’t really change.
My daughter calls the French Enlightenment the de-enlightenment because in many ways they moved backwards instead of forwards. One of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment was their belief that everyone before them, especially religious people, were ignorant and superstitious while they themselves were the enlightened ones. France has never been the same since.
It has taken centuries but gradually research into the so called “Dark Ages” is revealing an age of social progress and intellectual advancement which made the Renaissance and subsequent age of science possible.
I know a great deal aboot the French Revolution of 1789, Robespierre and Saint-Just, the Reign of Terror and so on. The “Republic of Virtue.” Every revolution since has followed the same pattern.
One of my favorite books I’ve ever read was a series of diary entries from the time of the French Revolution (published in 1963, no longer in print). It is fascinating. One sentence I always remember was written by a man of means who had to return to Paris and noted that everywhere he looked were the signs and declarations of “liberte, equalite, fraternite” and never was there less evidence of any of these virtues. Just today I took a picture of those words on the Palais du Justice, thinking about that man’s observation. When at Ste. Chappelle we were reminded that it is a monument, not a church when we asked if they sold religious items. Ahhh, France.
“My daughter calls the French Enlightenment the de-enlightenment because in many ways they moved backwards instead of forwards.” Dennis
Prior to the French revolution, I would look to the French philosophers, they took a decidedly different view of humanity than did the English philosophers. Robespierre’s world view did not arise out of a vacuum.
“Every revolution since has followed the same pattern.” miklos000rosza
Again, look to the philosophical underpinnings of the French/German ‘savants’ being the inspiration for those revolutions and/or the cultural foundations of the revolting society. Descartes, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche… all are in fundamental disagreement with the founder’s view of mankind.
Culture is I suspect, the defining characteristic for the failures of African and S. American revolutions.
The role of lawyers in the French Revolution…here’s what Edmund Burke had to say:
“Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of the assembly (a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was composed of practitioners in the law. It was composed, not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities;–but for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions; but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the list, I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow.”
Great find David Foster. May I be so bold as to suggest that Edmund Burke believed that the Establishment, even the Elites, were necessary to give direction to any enterprise–even a revolution?
Plat preferred an oligarchy of educated leaders to decide, not the “free vote” or even the citizens (land owners or freed men or wealthy patrons).
From Democracy to Republic to Oligarchies and Empires, I would say Republic to Oligarchies make for the better government system over time.
A good Emperor is only good until he dies or goes mad/senile. And a good Democracy only lasts as long as the people refuse to cheat, steal, from each other via the vote.
Also the Founding Fathers of America, were not 93% of the population. They weren’t even 51% of the population. They were the top elites, people who had the money and the careers, the education and the success, to have practical experience leading groups of humans. The 3%. Or the 10%.
Almost a carbon copy of an application derived from Plato’s theory.
Dennis Says:
“It has taken centuries but gradually research into the so called “Dark Ages” is revealing an age of social progress and intellectual advancement which made the Renaissance and subsequent age of science possible.”
and a lot of the tropes and cliches tossed around by the left about the period are false… just like most of theirs about the 20th century too.
Neo,
Amazing – I have that very book on my shelf of European history! The part that sticks in my mind the most is Robespierre’s final hours. Incredibly gut-wrenching. How the revolution doth eat its own!
regarding the Obama tyranny and the courts’ responses to it.
A judge just issued an order re the Obama immigration lawlessness which mandated continuing education in ethics for the lawyers involved and my friends have cheered.
Obama and his AG’s have ignored every other court order. This will be different how?
I now know what it is to live in a country run by Iago.
This is what happened to the Martyrs of September, via Atlas Obscura:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/terror-stricken-in-paris-the-crypt-of-bloodstains-and-bones
“The martyrs were a group of priests, seminarians, bishops, and, most famously, the Archbishop of Arles. They were rounded up by a mob of sans-culottes and imprisoned in the convent near St. Joseph’s after refusing to take an oath that undermined papal authority. The mob’s punishment for this transgression was quick and especially brutal. They began killing their prisoners on September 2, 1792, when they bashed in the Archbishop’s head, stabbed him, and trampled the body.
The following day the mob set up a kangaroo court to try the remaining prisoners. Martyrologist John Foxe described them as soaked in blood up to the elbows with executioners and judges freely subbing in for one another without bothering to wipe the gore off their hands.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all the clergy members were found guilty. But instead of condemning them from the bench, the judges simply told them they were free to leave. Each defendant left down the same stairway and at the bottom there were plenty of people waiting to hack their bodies apart. British ambassador, Earl Gower, described the wake the mob left behind:
“After [the killings] their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye… here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.”
When it was over, 190 people were killed at the convent in just two days. Their bodies were thrown in a pit and covered in quicklime.”
The Dark Ages were dark primarily because Islamic pirates cut off trade to Egyptian papyrus. All the technical knowledge and methods to develop and exchange info via writing, relied upon paper and a way to write upon it.
When paper became prohibitively expensive, it also made education in reading and writing more prohibitive. Thus the decline from Charlemagne’s time, which was itself a decline from the Roman centuries in the West, not Byzantine.
It wasn’t so much that Islamic civilization was better than the West, as Islam retained the fruits of their conquest. They had plenty of enslaved Christians and Jews to use as their technocracy.
In order to defend against Vikings and Islamic slave raiding rapists, you needed technology and physical prowess. In other words, weapons tech and feudalism. Being able to read Latin or Greek, being able to understand the ancient philosophers, mattered not at all.
The children of those educated sorts would be the first ones taken to a Sultan’s harem. The rest would be sold off, castrated, or passed around as spoils for the Islamic jihadists.
France should have known better. Killing religious leaders tends to cause one of two reactions. Either God calls down divine disaster by using human greed against human rage. Or, people get used to the violence and they start eating their own. Same thing in the end. But France never knows better. See Joan De Arc. See also the Albigensians.
Good people are only individuals. Whereas once you get a nation full of weaklings, you get something very bad.
As for Pierre, virtue cannot be imposed using methods that destroy free will. Virtue to be virtue, has to be freely chosen. In fact, the only way to see virtue in a Reign of Terror, is to see who dies on their feet, refusing to apologize or bow down to their executioners. That is the presence of virtue. Virtue is not Enforced by Terror. That is a belief much closer to Lucifer’s, that God/Divine creation of humanity with free will was a mistake, because it allowed humans to Choose to Disobey God.
That is the same belief in Islam as well, that free will/democracy is evil, because INshallah is the only will that is right.
Robespierre’s beliefs came from Rousseau. You can view the subtext of all this, if you wish, as a neverending debate between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade. Rousseau’s Perfectability of Man and belief in the Noble Savage led us, at its least corrupted and cynical, to Robespierre, Pol Pot, the Taliban and ISIS. Sade believes that the judge sentencing us to the guillotine for lack of virtue masturbates while he watches the sentences carried out from his high window above the crowd. When the Taliban had women whipped before a stadium crowd of 30,000, how many of those in the audience had hard-ons and/or came in their djellabas?
ISIS makes no real secret of how sexy young males are meant to find the sadomasochistic holy war, the fatwa against the infidel flesh.
Neo: Good article, just a reminder at what point in our lives do we know “everything?” Yes, in our early 20’s after graduation.
Something similar happened in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. His successors, once they eliminated Beria, stopped the use of violence against each other. They didn’t object to Stalin’s murderous approach to those outside the party, but wanted to ensure an end to intraparty violence.
This also reminds me of the comment by Krylenko, Lenin’s Minister of Justice: “Execution of the guilty is not enough, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death.
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
miklos:
Here’s a post I wrote nearly ten years ago on Rousseau.
Nothing much has changed.
We tend to think of and point to the extremes in history that come from this tyranny of best intentions. But danger still lurks behind the lesser extremes.
Is this not what we see is behind the Trump “movement” – behind the “blow it all up” crowd?
I really want to believe that Trump won’t be so bad. It is seducing to want to be so, because the alternative is unthinkable for most decent people.
But … there … just … isn’t … evidence.
Many talk about there being “a chance” he might be much better than we imagine, but that is more wishful / faulty thinking, and definitely not a selling point.
People just don’t understand the size of the gamble with Trump, a man not even beholding to his own words, let alone a concept of governing in a free society.
A good many are probably assuming (hoping) that the rest of the GOP and Congress itself can contain Trump.
However, given the incentives to play along, and the pain they will receive from Trump if not, says we ought to not fall for that delusion.
Given the above, much more than Clinton, Trump’s “unpredictability” will surely set the stage for a Black Swan event.
The Left has always hated the American Revolution and always idealized the French Revolution.
“The Left has always hated the American Revolution and always idealized the French Revolution.”
It should seem evident by now that there are those on the “right” who are just as idealistic.
Danger exists on the right, just as it does on the left, and while we focus on the left, we ought to be vigilant on the right as well. It is not enough just to be against the left.
When a good portion of Trump’s supporters are advocating “blow it all up”, there isn’t much room for mis-interpretation.
Ultimately, the left and these folks are two sides to the same coin. They both want to use force to get their way – ends justifies the means.
Trump may not be a Robespierre zealot, but the fact that he is so malleable, and his commitments so mutable, voting for him is a HUGE bet. It is a wager on if Congress and the GOP party are able to keep him in line. What makes us think they can or would?
Consider this… if Trump can change so easily, backtrack at will, and have, at best, a poor track record on advocating conservative or even largely GOP issues (he’s looking more Dem everyday), what do you think this guy really wants?
Many hope he is benign, but what if he is not? What basis has he even given us to believe that he would be benign?
Do we have to wait until it is obvious (and too late) to see the full potential for an Authoritarian in office? Hasn’t he given us enough hints so far?
Does he have to walk and talk like any of history’s infamous, or dress in fatigues or uniform? Why would he make it obvious to us if that was his intention?
We’ve been so well programmed to automatically be against the left that we really don’t take seriously the threats within or amongst us, and that is part of the tragedy of the French Revolution. Many signed on thinking (absolutely convinced) they need to “blow it all up” only to find that the leaders they backed had their own agenda.
The sans-culottes never had a chance really to know. We have the internet and education to know the difference. Will we?
Folks are seriously under-rating the risk. If you cannot determine his intention, nor discern his governing philosophy, knowing what you know about his behavior and personality, the potential downside far outweighs potential upside with Trump.
Yet, we are willing to bet on the low odds upside, because the downside of the four more years of a Dem, because that Dem would be “corrupt”, because that Dem is “unlikable”?
All in the name of “changing DC” to “make America great again” – the definitions of which we have nothing consistent to go by, nothing but empty slogans?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/1f/64/f4/1f64f4e0be86c5fec3a84ae2c9e259a3.jpg
Book ordered!