The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France 0190058412, 9780190058418

Table of contents :
Dedication
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Virtues of Violence in Times of Social Disintegration
1. Regicide and Redemptive Violence in the French Revolution
2. From Glory to Total War in Algeria
3. From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune
4. Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War
Conclusion: Democracy Is a Social Revolution
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

The Virtues of Violence

The Virtues of Violence Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France K EV I N   DU O N G

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duong, Kevin, author. Title: The virtues of violence : democracy against disintegration in modern France / Kevin Duong. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019036448 (print) | LCCN 2019036449 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190058418 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190058425 (updf) | ISBN 9780190058432 (epub) | ISBN 9780190058449 (online) Subjects: LCSH: Political violence—France—History | Social conflict—France—History. | Democracy—Social aspects—France. | France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799. | Algeria—History—French Expedition, 1830. | Paris (France)—History—Commune, 1871. | World War, 1914–1918—France. Classification: LCC HN440. V5 D86 2020 (print) | LCC HN440. V5 (ebook) | DDC 303.60944—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036448 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036449 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

For my parents.

Illustrations 1.1 Jacques Bertaux, Prise du palais des Tuileries, 10 août 1792 27 1.2 Benjamin Duvivier, Medallion in memory of 10 August 1792 assault on the Tuileries

42

1.3 Allegory of the journée of 10 August 1792

44

1.4 “Sans Union Point de Force, Sans Force Point de Liberté”

45

1.5 Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Lightning from the Sky 46 1.6 P. Prieur, “Carte du château & jardin de Versailles, Plan géométral et descriptif ” 47 1.7 Sarcifu, “Fin tragique de Louis XVI”

50

1.8 Villeneuve, “Matiere à reflection pour les jongleurs couronnées”

51

2.1 Jacques Louis David, Léonidas aux Thermopyles 72 2.2 Pellerin Publishing House, Epinal Print, “Défense héroïque de Mazagran”

79

2.3 Félix Philippoteaux, “Défense de Mazagran, 2 au 6 février 1840”

80

3.1 Frédéric Sorrieu, “La République universelle démocratique et sociale”

91

3.2 Horace Vernet, La Bataille de Valmy 103 3.3 “The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792”

104

3.4 Decree for the Abolition of the Expiatory Chapel of Louis XVI

106

3.5 Barricade of the Paris Commune in the Rue de la Paix

119

4.1 “Jaurès assassiné”

124

4.2 Agathon, Les jeunes gens d’aujourdhui 126 4.3 “L’Antimilitariste et le Tambour-​Major”

127

4.4 “On écoute aux fenêtres le cours de M. Bergson”

136

Acknowledgments This book was not easy to write. I was able to finish it because of countless people who supported me, even when I did not want it or know it. It is an honor to acknowledge so much labor and kindness. I discovered political theory as an undergraduate student in the classroom of Brooke Ackerly. She and Lisa Guenther brought me into the world of political theory, philosophy, and feminism. Nothing has so transformed my life since, and I am grateful to them for welcoming me to the world of politics and ideas. Other teachers have offered their precious mentorship over the years. At the University of Chicago, Patchen Markell and Dipesh Chakrabarty graciously advised me. At Cornell University, a heroic team of teachers and role models supported me. Thanks to Jason Frank, who championed the project from the beginning; to Aziz Rana, for shaping my political voice; to Camille Robcis, who taught me so much French history; to Isaac Kramnick, for being my role model teacher; to Enzo Traverso, who skewered my arguments with such skill; to Paul Fleming, for always having his office door open; and to Jill Frank, who always crystallized my arguments like a miracle. During my time at Bard, I had terrific company with whom to kvetch about research, teaching, and rogue reimbursement checks:  Roger Berkowitz, Susan Blake, Katherine Boivin, Odile Chilton, Rob Cioffi, Lauren Curtis, Justin Dainer-​Best, Laura Ford, Simon Gilhooley, Pınar Kemerli, Peter Klein, Michael Martell, Chris Mcintosh, Allison McKim, Ani Mitra, Duff Morton, Michelle Murray, Dominique Townsend, Olga Touloumi, and Marina van Zuylen. A book manuscript workshop at Bard helped me refine the following chapters, and I thank the participants, including Lori Marso, Karuna Mantena, and Samuel Moyn. Innumerable comrades have traveled this path with me, supporting me in ways both large and small. Jennie Ikuta has made the profession of political theory a fun place to be. Aaron Gavin gave me time and space in New York to read, write, and argue with him. Vijay Phulwani and Ed Quish have kept me politically honest. Murad Idris has improved all of my arguments, and I’m thrilled to be finding a new home with him, Lawrie Balfour, Jennifer

xii Acknowledgments Rubenstein, Colin Bird, and George Klosko at the University of Virginia. For turning an isolating process into a shared, communal one, I also thank Ilil Benjamin, Michaela Brangan, Jane Glaubman, Michael Gorup, Sinja Graf, Nina Hagel, Ulas Ince, Colin Kielty, Lena Krian, Jon Masin-​Peters, Alison McQueen, William Pennington, Adam Schoene, Bécquer Seguín, Nathan Taylor, Alexis Turner, and Timothy Vasko. An additional call out to those who organized with Cornell Graduate Students United. They have taught me the supreme importance of solidarity. Three people need special acknowledgment. No one keeps me grounded more than Nolan Bennett, and this book would not exist without his friendship. He read more of it than anyone else. Avery Slater has been a constant source of inspiration and awe. Her intellectual generosity is unmatched. Finally, thanks to Éric Trudel for countless nights of bad movies and Chinese take-​out. I  would not have survived this book without his companionship. To everyone, I owe an immeasurable debt of support, inspiration, and affection. Angela Chnapko at Oxford University Press supported this book from the beginning with enthusiasm. She solicited two terrific anonymous reviewers, and their detailed reports improved the manuscript substantially. Parts of the book were published previously in earlier shapes. Chapter  1 appeared as “The People as a Natural Disaster:  Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought” (American Political Science Review 111, no.  4 (2017), pp.  786–​800). Chapter  2 appeared as “The Demands of Glory:  Tocqueville and Terror in Algeria” (The Review of Politics 80, no.  1 (2018), pp.  31–​55). A  small piece of the introduction is culled from “ ‘Does Democracy End in Terror?’ Transformations of Antitotalitarianism in Postwar France” (Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 2 (2017), pp. 537–​563). My parents left Vietnam for the United States in 1977 with no English, no community, and no money. In the forty years since, they have made unbelievable sacrifices. My father worked two full-​time jobs for decades, and it wore his body down without ever touching his spirit. My mother spent years stitching collars for low, piecemeal pay in the middle of the night after putting my sister, brother, and me to sleep. Her wrists are worn and injured to this day; the recurring pain interrupts her sleep. Both beam with pride that their children have found successful careers. But in a more equal world, they could have written books, too, or become scholars and teachers. They could have had vacations, or hobbies, or retirement accounts. Instead, they have

Acknowledgments  xiii spent their whole lives working for a pittance and taking on debt so that their children could become what they could not. Absurd as it is, I hope this book is a tiny piece of evidence that their sacrifices were not pointless, that the precious time stolen from them was not for nothing. This book is for my parents, but it is also theirs, too.

Introduction The Virtues of Violence in Times of Social Disintegration

How we think about violence tells us something about how we imagine the ties that bind us. As our ideas about violence evolve, so, too, do our accounts of social interdependence and the patterns of agency and vulnerability that we perceive. An image of violence as anarchy has particularly shaped the social contract tradition and its vision of the social bond. Since Thomas Hobbes, to talk about violence has been to talk about disorder and the ways the social bond snaps from injury or death. For John Locke, he who commits violence “declares himself to live by another Rule, than that of reason and of common Equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of Men, for their mutual security.”1 He therefore becomes a criminal, a threat to our peaceful coexistence. For Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, violence against a fellow citizen expels a person from the social body:  “Every evil-​doer who attacks social right becomes a rebel and a traitor to the fatherland . . . he ceases to be a member of it, and even enters into war with it.” Thus, Rousseau concludes, “he must be cut off from [society] either by exile as a violator of the treaty, or by death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral person, but a man.”2 In this tradition, violating the social compact designates oneself as an outlaw, an enemy of humanity.3 It invites the violence of organized society upon oneself, not as a type of counterviolence, but as justice. Within the revolutionary and republican political culture of modern France, a different, less familiar image of violence came to prominence: violence as social regeneration. French thinkers invoked this alternative image alongside its contractualist counterpart. But, according to this alternative image, violence was not a source or symptom of anarchy. It was its solution. Rather than something sublimated as men escaped nature into society, violence saved society from dissolution. This was especially true when the agent of violence was “the people.” Maximilien Robespierre The Virtues of Violence. Kevin Duong, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190058418.001.0001

2  The Virtues of Violence captured this image of violence in December 1793 when he argued that revolutionary terror had “nothing in common with anarchy or disorder.” On the contrary, it instituted the social bond, for it was “not [guided] by individual passions, but by the public interest.”4 That link to the public interest made the people’s violence unifying rather than anarchic. “Woe betide us,” Robespierre warned, if through violence they were to “break the bundle apart, instead of binding it.”5 This alternative image of violence reappeared after the Revolution by thinkers from right to left. General Robert Thomas Bugeaud would invoke it to justify the French conquest of Algeria in the 1840s. “It is a cruel extremity” to wage total war against native Arabs, “but a horrifying example was necessary to strike terror” into their hearts. In Bugeaud’s terror, the Abbé Jacques Suchet would see proof that “Soldiers of France, you have not degenerated.” On the contrary, French terror would make the desert “flower again.”6 The anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon appealed to this alternative image of violence in his 1861 La Guerre et la Paix: “War is divine, that is to say, it is primordial, essential to life and to the production of men and society.” That is because a man only emerged from “the primeval slime which served him as a womb” once “he stood over the body of an enemy he had slain.”7 Communards, too, found in their 1871 civil war against Versailles a similar vision: “Paris works and suffers for all of France, which it prepares through battles and sacrifices for its intellectual, moral, administrative and economic regeneration.”8 By the eve of the First World War, this image of violence saturated French political culture. Right-​wing intellectuals like Georges Valois promised, in a 1912 manifesto, to restore freedom “in the forms appropriate to the modern world, and which allow [the French] to live by working with the same satisfaction of honor as when they die in combat.”9 On the left, Georges Sorel made a similar point in his 1908 Reflections on Violence: “It is to violence that socialism owes those high ethical ideals by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.”10 This book tells the story of how political thinkers and intellectuals weaponized this image of violence in the struggle for democracy in nineteenth-​century France. It does so in the conviction that popular violence as social regeneration was not something niche or fringe, a phenomenon oblique to the history of French political thought. Instead, it was commonplace, and by understanding why that was the case, we gain a distinctive vantage point on modern democracy and the theoretical dilemmas its revolutionary emergence prompted.

Introduction  3 Of course, this image of violence was neither unique to the nineteenth century nor to France.11 Historians have traced its roots as far back as the Wars of Religion and medieval penal justice, and it persisted into twentieth-​ century political thought in France and elsewhere.12 It figured prominently in the context of American frontier expansion.13 Within conservative and counter-​revolutionary traditions, it was associated with writers like Joseph de Maistre, for whom the executioner’s killing axe was “both the horror and the bond of human association.”14 Revolutionaries of all stripes also invoked it, from futurists like Filippo Marinetti to anticolonial nationalists like Frantz Fanon.15 It was a promiscuous image of violence, one that Dominick LaCapra has usefully described as “redemptive violence.” Redemptive violence, LaCapra argues, aims to interrupt “a deadly compulsive cycle of repetition” or to introduce “a radical, even total, rupture with the past” through “purification, regeneration, or redemption.”16 It brings together a normative sociology of the human bond with a moral commitment to forging those bonds anew in an act of violence. This book builds on this previous work, but it focuses on moments when redemptive violence expressed the agency of “the people.” It turns to the historical theater of nineteenth-​century France because, more than most contexts, these decades saw a causal connection drawn between popular violence and social regeneration. If premodern thinkers conceived redemptive violence as an act of providential agency, writers during and after the French Revolution conceptualized redemptive violence in the context of an emerging self-​governing society. No longer heavenly destruction, redemptive violence in nineteenth-​century France expressed the collective agency of a society capable of ruling itself without the intercession of a superior, extra-​social power—​a democratic society. The sources of social cohesion and renewal were to be drawn, not from God or tradition, but from the activity of the people themselves. Immortalized in the language of “terror,” images of redemptive violence proliferated throughout the long nineteenth century at key moments in which the integrity of the national community entered into crisis and where political thinkers despaired over the fate of the social bond.17 It has not been my aim to write a history of redemptive violence, nor to offer a normative evaluation of it. Instead, I have tried to understand its polemical appeal because I am convinced that we do not properly understand modern democracy until we can understand why redemptive violence could be invoked on its behalf.

4  The Virtues of Violence

Redemptive Violence from the Great Revolution to the Great War Redemptive violence’s ubiquity in the history of political thought raises important questions for democratic theory. What did it offer that alternative vocabularies of democratic agency could not? What were the sources of its appeal? To answer these questions, the following chapters examine episodes in French history where figurations of the people’s violence as redemptive assuaged wider anxieties about a society on the brink of disintegration. These episodes span the long nineteenth century from the French Revolution to the First World War. They involve complex conjunctures ranging from civil war and revolution to industrialization, imperial conquest, and the institutionalization of parliamentary democracy. Each is further marked by different shapes of violence, from street insurrections and the levée en masse to total war and the cut of the guillotine. Yet these episodes are connected by a common pattern of thinking despite their heterogeneity:  political intellectuals warned that entropic forces unleashed by democratization threatened the French social body, and they sought to repair that social body by reawakening the people’s agency through violence. Whatever their ideological persuasion, these thinkers came to believe that the path leading from an anarchic multitude to an organized democratic society did not require violence’s prohibition but its virtuous expression by the people. The following chapters are designed to bring this persistent pattern of thinking to our attention. Chapter 1 turns to the French Revolution and the threat of social disintegration raised by the prospect of killing Louis XVI. Because royalist ideology identified the king’s mystical body as a transcendental guarantee of social cohesion, revolutionary regicide threatened to dissolve the French social body. The chapter shows how Jacobins sought to bypass this dilemma by redefining regicide as redemptive violence. They assimilated classical tyrannicide to new theories of natural disaster and ecological self-​regulation circulating in the scientific culture of the late eighteenth century. In so doing, Jacobins transformed regicide by the people into a naturalistic source of renewal and rebirth. Chapter 2 turns to the July Monarchy (1830–​1848) when France began its violent conquest of Algeria. During these years, liberals like Alexis de Tocqueville argued that commercialization and economic utilitarianism were threatening France with social disintegration. A democratic culture of “individualism” was leading to psychological withdrawal among citizens,

Introduction  5 isolating them from one another. This société en poussière—​an “atomized” society—​could not enjoy modern liberty because it had forfeit its taste for collective glorious endeavors. Tocqueville’s desire to save democracy from its own atomization, I suggest, shaped his apologies for colonial terror during the conquest of Algeria in the early 1840s. Chapter 3 analyzes the threat of social disintegration posed by industrialization and the social question. For French socialists writing in the 1840s, the merely “political” republicanism of the Revolution had privileged the individual rights of man at the expense of social solidarity and spiritual renewal. As a result, the social cohesion of the people had been dissolved by the punitive competition of market society. Setting their sights on a “social” Republic instead, Communards waging civil war against the French national government in 1871 were pushed to articulate their ideals of social cooperation and regeneration through the language of republican militarism. Only by reincarnating the fractured “electorate” as a unified “people in arms” could a “social society” be won. In Chapter 4, anxieties over disintegration were blamed on the positivistic intellectual culture of the Third Republic and the elite interest politics it justified. In unmooring French citizens from la France profonde, parliamentarism and positivism fostered what Maurice Barrès called a nation of uprooted (déracinées). The chapter reconstructs how Georges Sorel and his fellow travelers on both the left and right advocated for mythic proletarian violence to counteract that moral degeneration. Their arguments contributed to the mass war mobilization in the lead-​up to world war in 1914. An image of the people’s redemptive violence recurred across these historical conjunctures. In no case was it reducible to something simply destructive, a last resort, or a strategy for domination. Instead, it appeared productive in the paradoxical way that democratic theorists have demonstrated all claims on behalf of “the people” are paradoxically productive: “claims made in the name of the people always transcend the horizon of any given articulation, drawing their power from their own unrealized futurity.”18 The people names a transformative principle because it draws a gap between democracy’s “pragmatic” and “redemptive” faces.19 It is a description as well as an aspiration, and no appeal to historical grounding can definitively close that gap.20 As we will see, modern redemptive violence also presupposed the people as its agent and promised to bring them about as their own effect. The regeneration that redemptive violence promised was always self-​regeneration.

6  The Virtues of Violence That the people’s violence emerged in the nineteenth century as a catalyst for self-​regeneration announced an epochal shift away from redemptive agency’s historic attribution to divine power. It marked the emergence of modern humanism, the intellectuals’ dream that “Man” could be his own foundation. This dream was not a straightforward sign of secularization any more than the European passage to political modernity was a straightforward process of disenchantment.21 In his funeral oration for those killed on the 10 August 1792 insurrection, Cousin de Grainville broadcasted an image of the new world solicited by the people’s violence. It was a world in which “from dawn till sunset, the people will reign” as a power descended “from heaven to earth” to literally regenerate the world, to refertilize it.22 The poets of the revolutionary era, too, genuflected before the people’s new redemptive agency. Consider William Blake in 1791: “Hear, O Heavens of France! The voice of the people, arising from valley and hill, O’erclouded with power.”23 Consider, too, Friedrich Hölderlin’s 1801  “The Voice of the People”:  “You were the voice of God, so I used to think /​In my holy youth; yes, and I maintain this still.”24 If a measure of transcendence clung to the people’s power, what remains important is how they remained a worldly power.25 The power, even duty, to regenerate society belonged to them alone. As an expression of their autonomy, the people’s redemptive violence figured as something that could mitigate the dangers of democratization at the same time that it advanced democratization as a positive project. Indeed, democracy was both a problem to be solved and a horizon to be reached. It was, Christopher Meckstroth argues, historically self-​reflexive, capable of providing for its own immanent critique.26 This latter point can sometimes be difficult to see because of the idiosyncratic semantic itineraries of words like “democracy” and “the Republic.” Both held situational meanings and a dual signification: an institutional arrangement and a prescription for popular sovereignty which those arrangements could never definitively express. That was why the terms could be used interchangeably, as fellow travelers, or as a way to critique the other for not being democratic or republican enough. Robespierre treated them as synonyms, arguing that the French Republic was the world’s first “true democracy” because it entailed the people ruling themselves through their own laws as equals.27 Proudhon treated them as opposites: democracy meant representation, and the republic meant direct popular sovereignty. Never would the two meet.28 Sorel, for his part, agreed with Robespierre that they were synonyms—​but for parliamentary representation. So much the worse for both. Both were incompatible with the direct

Introduction  7 self-​rule of the people: “the activity of producing useful things in a purpose chosen by ourselves.”29 If we set aside linguistic positivism and search for the patterns of thinking amid the noise, we can detect what thinkers meant. And what they meant was clear enough: even as democratization had unleashed forces that were damaging society, the solution also lay in a deeper, more encompassing form of democratic society. Violence was productive for that purpose, because it unleashed the power of the people. And in the nineteenth century, Lucien Jaume reminds us, “the power of the people was above all a sociological and moral power, not an institutional one.”30 It was a redemptive power that could convey us from social disintegration toward a more positive democratic state. That positive democratic state involved, not a set of institutional prescriptions, but what communards like Louise Michel called a “revolt against social inequalities,” one that would bring “Art for all! Science for all! Bread for all!”31 Democracy was a millenarian horizon and a progressive scientific achievement even as it remained a reason for trepidation. “Democracy!” Tocqueville wrote in his preparatory notes for Democracy in America. “Don’t you notice that these are the waters of the flood? Don’t you see them advance constantly by a slow and irresistible effort? . . . Instead of wanting to raise impotent dikes, let us seek rather to build the holy ark that must carry the human species over this ocean without shores.”32 In the struggle for democracy in nineteenth-​century France, there was no going backward, no obstructing the flood. Democratization could only be survived by sailing through it, by activating at thresholds of crisis the power of the people.

Redemptive Violence’s Sources of Appeal: The Argument In analyzing the recurring role of redemptive violence, these chapters build an argument for rooting its appeal in French republicanism’s persistent demand for a concrete social body. By French republicanism, I mean the political culture that grew out of the historical experience of the Revolution rather than any specific set of normative prescriptions.33 Anglo-​American political theorists have grown accustomed to speaking of republicanism as a paradigm of normative reasoning, extractable from its historical context, and whose purpose is to develop and defend the Roman ideal of libertas as non-​domination.34 But in France, republicanism was never primarily

8  The Virtues of Violence a paradigm for normative reasoning. It was a kind of intellectual gravitational field consisting in a set of common motifs, symbols, scripts for collection action, and shared historical memory centered on the legacy of the Revolution. It resembled what Mark Greif calls a “maieutic discourse.” A maieutic discourse “has the form, ‘We must ask,’ ‘We must think,’ ‘We must answer’ ” and “yet does surprisingly little work of disputation, selection, and mutual destruction among the answers.” These discourses shape “the whole public space of thought” through “an unseen kind of principle of determination of historical thought” irreducible to a logic, principle, or concept.35 Maieutic discourses do not provide decisive answers. They shape our perception of what questions seem worth asking, what questions carry gravitas. Republicanism in France was this type of gravitational field. Hence it is not well understood as a prescriptive paradigm in normative competition with liberalism or socialism. Rather, French republicanism was the crucible within which liberalism and socialism developed in France: they named alternative paths to realizing the French republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.36 Explaining redemptive violence’s appeal by pointing to a specifically French republican desire for a concrete social body may nevertheless seem counterintuitive. After all, however internally contested nineteenth-​century French republicanism turned out to be, virtually all of its critics agreed that it was a modern language of abstraction. Ever since Edmund Burke developed this interpretation, scholars have denounced French republicanism’s aim for “abstract perfection” as a source of violence.37 De Maistre attributed the Revolution’s “satanic quality” to its “artificial” universalism, which was “a pure abstraction, an academic exercise made according to some hypothetical ideal.”38 What characterized French republicanism, he believed, was its absurd myth of an abstract man bereft of any social particularity: “I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.,” but “as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”39 Jules Michelet, otherwise sympathetic to the Revolution, would lament of its leaders, “Being logicians without metaphysics and jurists without law and history . . . these dreadful abstractors of ultimate essences armed themselves with five or six formulas which they used like so many guillotines to abstract men.”40 According to this familiar interpretation, French republicanism’s emphasis on abstraction distinguishes it from its classical antecedents.41 French republicanism inherited the traditional valorization of martial glory and civic virtue associated with the republics of antiquity. But the

Introduction  9 influence of the Enlightenment and the vicissitudes of national history also oriented French republicanism toward political rationalism and moral universalism, which became its cudgels against the inherited stratifications of the ancien régime. If peoplehood for Cicero or Machiavelli expresses our membership in a particular polity, peoplehood in French republicanism expresses our membership in a common but abstract body—​“the people”—​which we enter into by leaving behind our markers of social differentiation. In so doing, we ascend to become rights-​bearing citizens who stand free and equal to one another. The Count of Clermont-​Tonnerre invoked this procedure of abstraction when discussing Jewish emancipation in December 1789: “we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to them as individuals.”42 And it was this republican model that Karl Marx critiqued in “On the Jewish Question”: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen emancipated the individual by reducing him to a citizen, an “abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person” in false opposition to man as a concrete, “sensual” existence living as a particular member of civil society.43 Undeniably, there is a great deal of truth in this tradition of interpreting French republicanism as a culture enthralled with abstract universalism. Its history consists in a sequence of abstractions—​the People, the Nation, and the Empire—​negotiating the realities of political exclusion.44 However, interpreting the struggle for democracy in France through the prism of redemptive violence shows this interpretation to be one-​sided. From the Revolution onward, republicanism’s demands for political abstraction were always tethered to demands to reconstruct a concrete social body. We see this latter commitment expressed in the ways republicans insisted, time and again, that the people cannot be reduced to an aggregate of individuals living together under common laws. In terms more familiar to contemporary political theorists, “the people” were emphatically not adhered by what John Rawls called a modus vivendi, a “social consensus [which is] founded on self-​ or group interests, or on the outcome of political bargaining.” In a modus vivendi, “social unity is only apparent” because “its stability is contingent on circumstances remaining such as not to upset the fortunate convergence of interests.”45 In contrast, republicanism in France defined “the people” in terms of a qualitatively distinct form of social interdependence that pointed beyond the convergence of self-​interest. As Rousseau had argued, what is decisive for a people to become a people is the transmutation of natural individual freedom into a civil, moral freedom whose enjoyment is dependent

10  The Virtues of Violence on all others. This type of peoplehood is not the product of an equilibrium of factions or an aggregation of preferences, but collective moral reincarnation. Indeed, as this book will show, the moral reincarnation of the social body was a kind of idée fixe for French thinkers in the nineteenth century because the difficult experience of revolution had uncovered a paradox at the heart of democratization: where it required emancipating the abstract individual as free and equal to all others, democracy also atomized the very “people” whom it announced as sovereign. The price of achieving popular sovereignty was the disintegration of the people. This paradox led generations of political thinkers to sense, however inchoately, that founding a modern republic through democratic revolution required not only abstract individual citizenship, but also a concrete social body. These two requirements did not represent contradictory or incompatible demands. Instead, they worked in tandem to specify the terms of successful democratization. Meeting the demand for abstract political equality without satisfying the demand for a concrete social body would only produce a parliamentary and legalistic husk, what Charles Péguy denounced on the eve of the First World War as a de-​ republicanized Republic emptied of essence.46 This revolutionary demand for both abstract political equality and a cohesive social body made theorizing “the social” an intellectual priority for postrevolutionary French thought. Hence the new sciences of sociology, zoology, and social physics were tasked with explicating “the physiological constitution of the social body.”47 Hence, too, thinkers of all stripes adopted a social-​theoretic orientation toward political theory. They appropriated classical republicanism’s belief in virtue—​something that could mitigate the degenerative inclinations of time and human nature—​to draw new causal connections between moral improvement and social cohesion. Time and again, the thinkers in this book will insist that morality is what makes social cohesion something thicker than the fortuitous convergence of private interests or the quantitative accumulation of preferences. Time and again, they will conclude that lifting a disorganized multitude into a sovereign people requires reasserting the moral foundations of “the social.” And they will articulate that requirement through calls for a regenerated social body. Produced through fantasies of unity and anxieties over le corps morcelé, these conceptions of the social body will become “central to the internal coherence of French ideas about who did and who did not qualify as ‘French.’ ”48 In short, explaining redemptive violence’s appeal as a language of democratic agency requires foregrounding how democratization made “the

Introduction  11 social” into a problem to be solved. Robespierre intimated as much when he claimed that democratic revolution required men to “substitute morality for egoism . . . principles for practice . . . the rule of reason for the tyranny of fashion . . . the love of glory for the love of money . . . in short all of the virtues and miracles of the Republic for all the vices and absurdities of monarchy.”49 The point was formulated more elegantly by François Guizot, a man at best ambivalent about the Revolution but who nevertheless reached a similar conclusion to Robespierre in 1828: “the progress of society necessarily involves and carries with it the progress of morality. . . . They imply that in the spontaneous, instinctive conviction of mankind, the two elements of civilization, the social development and the moral development, are closely connected; that at the sight of the one, man at once looks forward to the other.”50 By the Third Republic, this connection between moral improvement and social cohesion became a defining feature of French social thought. In his 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, Emile Durkheim critiqued the contractualist conception of society promoted by English social theorists like Herbert Spencer. In Durkheim’s eyes, their vision of society as a spontaneous, self-​organizing product of free exchange (“contractual solidarity”) could not account for the objective forces of social causation that bound together modern societies (“organic solidarity”). In contrast to Spencer’s vision of society as a “vast system of particular contracts,” Durkheim described society as a supra-​individual moral organism. Taking direct aim at contractual solidarity’s explanatory sufficiency, Durkheim concluded that “We cooperate because we wish to, but our voluntary co-​operation creates duties for us that we did not desire” because “a contract is not sufficient unto itself, but is possible only thanks to a regulation of the contract which is originally social.”51 Men cannot live together without acknowledging, and, consequently, making mutual sacrifices, without tying themselves to one another with strong, durable bonds. Every society is a moral society. . . . Because the individual is not sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives everything necessary to him, as it is for society that he works.52

“Every society is a moral society”—​this claim could just as well serve as a credo, not only for Durkheim, but also for republican political culture in nineteenth-​century France. In identifying morality as the element that elevated abstract contractual solidarity to a genuine social bond, Durkheim formalized what had remained tacit in republican thought since the

12  The Virtues of Violence Revolution: social cohesion is not reducible to either a modus vivendi or a representational notion of peoplehood. A modern republic needs abstract, free citizens as well as a moral, concrete social body. Redemptive violence’s conceit was that it could incarnate the people in both these respects. Conceit it was, and conceit it remains. But grasping that conceit as the source of redemptive violence’s appeal underscores how republicanism in France was never simply an attack on monarchy on behalf of abstract equality. It was shaped as much by its hatred of hierarchical society as by its anxiety over social disintegration. Without a cohesive social body, one whose bonds transcended a modus vivendi, it was not possible to have a society sufficiently united to rule itself. It was not possible to have a democratic society.

A Critique of Antitotalitarianism The book offers this argument as a provocation for us to rethink the place of violence in democratic politics. If the story it recounts and the perspective it opens up looks jarring, that is partly because political theorists have avoided studying redemptive violence. For one, it fits uneasily into existing conceptual languages designed to explain violence. It is a deliberate act, and so it differs from the violence of impersonal structures or the cruelty of strategic necessity.53 The harm it inflicts is physical rather than symbolic, even if the wounding depends on its symbolic representation.54 It resembles founding violence in its aim to illegally constitute a new order, but it is the work of “the people” rather than of singular figures such as the lawgiver, prince, or conspiratorial elites.55 Moreover, twentieth-​ century intellectual historians have long associated redemptive violence with fascism or totalitarian ideology. Among its premier chroniclers from Mark Antliff to Zeev Sternhell, redemptive or “palingenetic” violence finds its sources in the late nineteenth century and blossoms in twentieth-​century fascist political theory.56 A  creature of the avant guerre years, this violence catalyzed the birth of “the new man,” personified variously as a youthful addict of technological velocity, a hybrid organic-​mechanical soldier, or “Homo Sovieticus” erecting the “radiant future.”57 I have leaned on this historiography for my own arguments, but the teleological association it draws between redemptive violence and fascism has encouraged political theorists to dismiss that violence as beyond rational analysis or so contemptible that it requires no detailed examination. The only

Introduction  13 appropriate response is moral repudiation. As Tracy Strong has complained, since 1945 “much of the political thought in the West has been devoted to developing theory that would keep ‘it’ from happening again.” Postwar academic political theory is governed by “a tacit question: ‘What is the relation of this thought to the Nazis?’ ”58 As a result, redemptive violence has typically occasioned, not theoretical understanding, but indignation. It is portrayed, not as a fraught solution to real political problems, but as the unique pathology of political traditions like the Counter-​Enlightenment,59 anti-​modernism,60 reactionary modernists,61 fascist blackshirts, and communist revolutionaries62—​ virtually anyone but contemporary liberals,63 whose violence is typically realist, a matter of “dirty hands,” and checked by either a skepticism of moral perfectionism or a commitment to constitutionalism.64 The consequence has been that the history of redemptive violence has frequently been reduced to a history of illiberalism.65 This latter interpretative tendency takes its most sophisticated shape in the democratic theory that developed during postwar France’s “antitotalitarian moment.”66 During the 1970s–​1980s, French intellectuals developed a belated theoretical critique of totalitarianism. European émigrés in the United States had been producing such criticism since the Second World War, but the postwar prestige of the French communist party (PCF) marginalized analogous theoretical developments domestically. The critique of totalitarianism in France would not flourish until the 1970s, when a confluence of contexts eroded the PCF’s intellectual credibility: its failure to criticize the Algerian War, its continuing subservience to Moscow, soixante-​huitard direct democratic critiques of the electoral left, the influence of Eastern European dissident literature, and wider liberal reorientations of French intellectual culture.67 These intersecting contexts rekindled interest in the origins of totalitarianism in France. Antitotalitarian critics from the Socialisme ou barbarie group sidelined during the late 1940s earned newfound public esteem after May 1968, especially Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis.68 Hannah Arendt’s section from The Origins of Totalitarianism on totalitarianism finally appeared in French in 1972. Beginning in 1977, the “New Philosophers” appeared on Apostrophes, Friday at nine-​thirty to broadcast moralizing critiques of communist totalitarianism to millions of television viewers: a perfect expression of France’s postwar dream of modernization.69 France’s “antitotalitarian moment” inspired a generation of democratic theorists and historians to invent a genetic, teleological link between democracy and totalitarianism. This teleological link was new. Prior to the 1970s,

14  The Virtues of Violence the few French thinkers who analyzed totalitarianism traced its origin to bureaucratic rationality. As Castoriadis had argued in 1947, it was the Soviet Union’s rule by an independent bureaucratic class that made totalitarianism a new historical formation, irreducible to either capitalism or socialism.70 By 1976, however, the seeds of twentieth-​century terror were not to be found in the contradictions of a bureaucratic mass society but in the political theory of Jacobinism and its discourse of political will. Antitotalitarian theorists “discovered” the democratic origins of totalitarianism.71 François Furet’s 1978 Penser la révolution française was the most famous example.72 His book quietly weaponized Lefort’s arguments to accuse Jacobinism of containing the seeds of totalitarianism past and present, making his book fatally “ambivalent about the democratic project itself.”73 Penser la révolution française identified an immanent “dynamic” or “logic” governing the revolution whereby “the political” liberated itself from “the social” only to dominate it. “The social” contained concrete relations sustained by habits, institutions, and corporate associations that secured social cohesion, whereas “the political” overlaid abstract relations of equality deliberately constructed by individuals constituting themselves as citizens. And in the French revolutionary dynamic, Furet argued, the latter sought to reengineer the former as it saw fit. Liberated from any social grounding, “democratic ideology” was “ever ready to place ideas above actual history, as if it were called upon to restructure a fragmented society by means of its own concepts.”74 As “the political” won its autonomy, however, it took on the burden of providing the principle of the new world from within itself, immanently, and to continuously assert that principle lest the community fall back into disarray. The consequence was terror: an insistence by democratic ideology that full discretion be given to “the will of the people” as the sole support for political order and cohesion. Independent and bereft of foundations except for itself, “the political” converted itself into its own foundation and in the image of absolute power. In his stunning conclusion, Furet believed that the Revolution therefore simply adopted, and inverted, the image of power in the absolute monarchy; namely, absolute power to the will of the people.75 This teleological argument about democracy and terror sidelined an earlier postwar consensus that totalitarianism presented an unprecedented metamorphosis of bureaucratic rationality. It also inspired a generation of French democratic theorists to elaborate on the democratic provenance of totalitarianism under Furet’s institutional leadership.76 This included Marcel Gauchet, Lefort’s former student at the University of Caen, participant of

Introduction  15 Furet’s political theory reading group at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in the mid-​1970s, and the current editor of Le Débat.77 In 1980, Gauchet concluded that “the European model of democracy inseparably carries with it the totalitarian menace” because democracy in Europe was not simply a political regime but “a mode of social being” that demanded the violent dismemberment and reconstruction of the social body.78 This generation also included Pierre Rosanvallon, successor to Furet at the Institut Raymond Aron and one of Lefort’s doctoral students. Rosanvallon concluded that the revolutionary proclamation of “the people” as sovereign fractured their existence into a symbolic and real existence—​a modern, democratic iteration of the king’s two bodies.79 The unity of the people was therefore always symbolic rather than real, and it depended on the continuous exercise of rational collective will to be sustained. Thus, “in this framework, political life found itself emancipated from all constraint and all form. It became pure action, unmediated expression of a directly palpable will”—​that is, terror.80 These antitotalitarian arguments left their fingerprints on Cold War democratic theory in powerful and lasting ways. They took redemptive violence seriously by situating it in a teleological history of illiberal democratic revolution run amok from the Terror to the Gulag and even May 1968.81 They further positioned liberal pluralism as the neglected antidote.82 Neither this teleological association of redemptive violence with totalitarianism nor the identification of its history as one of illiberalism have disappeared. We can still read how the “unity” of French revolutionary political culture—​its desire for political equality and emotional transparency—​contained an “intrinsic dynamic . . . independent of the principles proclaimed by revolutionaries” which led to terror.83 We can read how the idea of “revolution” evolved into “a form of authority” with a life of its own that solicited subsequent forms of violence and terror into the twentieth century.84 We can even see echoes of these arguments in contemporary anxieties about populism and other varieties of democratic “disfigurations.”85 Even if these antitotalitarian arguments now take different shapes and draw on different archives and languages of political theory, they still speak of a “logic” or “dynamic,” “embryonically” contained in the emergence of modern democratic politics. In the end, democracy turns out to be “a pathology waiting to happen.”86 This book shares the starting point of Furet and his followers, namely Lefort’s observation that the emergence of “the people” as sovereign heralded the disintegration of “the social.”87 It shares that point of departure, however, to show that we can and should draw something other than liberal

16  The Virtues of Violence antitotalitarian conclusions from it. At bottom, antitotalitarian arguments about redemptive violence are arguments that the origins of totalitarianism lie in the misguided pursuit of democratic social cohesion. They insinuate that there is something intrinsically proto-​totalitarian about the idea of social cohesion itself because it cannot be secured without political violence. In writing this book, however, I have come to the conclusion that associations of redemptive violence with totalitarianism have provided an alibi for many critics to evade fundamental questions about the shape of the social body in modern democracies. In making social cohesion a theoretical taboo, consideration of which sets us on a path to redemptive violence, the legacies of liberal antitotalitarianism have made us hesitant to think about the types of social bonds that democratic politics require. We would rather understand democracy as disagreement, as agonism, or as pluralism.88 Breaking the grip of these interpretations is therefore important because it also breaks the grip of the Cold War on our democratic imagination. It allows us to take up the task of reimagining fraternité anew, to ask after the kinds of social bonds we must create together to be free. That task, after all, was once the soul of the modern struggle for democracy. The point of understanding redemptive violence’s ubiquity is to intensify our concern with the problem of the democratic social bond, not to steer us away from it. On one hand, we have to appreciate how the myriad voices under study here shaded into one another on the importance of redemptive violence. Tocqueville’s remarks on French decadence and war’s vivifying moral effects are almost indistinguishable from Sorel, a thinker often considered the intellectual father of fascism. Parisian communards who dreamed of a federated horizontal society and denounced Jacobinism could be found invoking—​often literally—​the same image of violence as Robespierre and St. Just. To study these thinkers in isolation from one another, as is typically done, conceals the image of redemptive violence connecting them. On the other hand, we need to leave behind the ahistorical platitude that would group them together into a single “illiberal” or “exceptional” tradition propelled toward totalitarianism.89 We need to read redemptive violence’s ubiquity not as pathology but as a significant clue to understanding what democracy meant to those who struggled with it and for it. At any rate, those men and women hailed from different corners of French politics and disagreed, often profoundly, on the requirements of authentic democratic rule. They also expressed their fixation with the moral reincarnation of the French social body through different diagnostic languages. They decried

Introduction  17 atomization, disintegration, individualism, abstraction, and moral degeneration, and they demanded unity, harmony, social cohesion, concreteness, and moral improvement. The paths they took from social disintegration to social regeneration in the nineteenth century were too ad hoc, and the manifestations of redemptive violence they endorsed too polymorphous, to be explained by a “logic” of democracy. In fact, terror can never be the logical outcome of an “immanent dynamic” to revolutionary democracy for nobody can be propelled to violence by something like that. What we call the necessity or momentum imposed by the revolutionary course of events, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty reminds us, will never be anything but the necessary course of events as we see it.90 No single path conveyed French thinkers from social disintegration to redemptive violence because no such thing could exist. There were instead multiple paths, each of which had to be paved by men and women who did not know how to do such a thing, only that it was urgent—​ the experience, in other words, which often incites political theory. If I have therefore excavated a family resemblance beneath heterogeneity, it is not because these thinkers shared a hidden ideological filiation or were subject to an intrinsic dynamic immanent to democracy itself. Instead, they shared a common situation. And situations, to follow Merleau-​Ponty once more, are always equivocal. They do not elicit determinate responses from us, never mind a logic of action. They do, however, invite us to map out projected possibilities as probabilities, “to take sides from the very start” in the face of a future that is never “entirely forseeable”—​including the use of violence.91 It is the ambiguity, not the logic, of a historical situation that places violence on the table. The situation, first raised by the Revolution, was this: From what was the social bond to be forged in the age of democracy? If the elemental unit of democracy was the emancipated individual, then what was society? Despite everything that separated them, French thinkers in the long nineteenth century found themselves called to answer this question. It was the urgency of rethinking the social in an age of democracy that invited so many French thinkers to turn to redemptive violence. That is what this study hopes to reveal in clear, dramatic terms. Political theorists should reconsider our commonplace conviction that revolutionary violence—​especially terror—​is driven by abstract thinking run amok. These convictions acquiesce too much to Edmund Burke’s interpretation of the French Revolution: that political violence is essentially destructive, that it is antisocial, that it leaves behind only “the nakedness and

18  The Virtues of Violence solitude of metaphysical abstraction.”92 We need to account for the fact that virtually every modern proponent of redemptive violence critiqued political abstraction. They critiqued it because the Revolution, and the republican political culture which grew out of it, taught them that democratic self-​rule depended not only on winning abstract political citizenship, but also on regenerating the moral fiber of the social body. If the Republic were to limit itself to achieving abstract, individual political citizenship, it would win the sovereignty of the people at the cost of dissolving them back into a haphazard multitude of atomized individuals. Generations of French thinkers therefore sought to mitigate the disintegrating effects of the abstraction procedures so required. The formation of a democratic society in France could not be separated from attempts to forge the social body anew, to supplant the severed social bonds of the ancien régime with superior republican fraternity. It is also time we reconsider the conventional ways we narrate the role of violence in the history of political thought. It is simply not true that redemptive violence was a pathological deviation for European political development, and its inevitable telos was not totalitarianism.93 It was never simply a means for conquest and domination. Instead, it offered a flexible, productive vocabulary that answered genuine, even intractable paradoxes thrown up by attempts to create a modern republic through democratic revolution. Redemptive violence may be unsettling, even shocking to the conscience. We who have witnessed its use in the twentieth century have earned our right to be ambivalent about its use, even by “the people.” And even the most enthusiastic proponents of redemptive violence in the nineteenth century dimly sensed Max Weber’s subsequent warning, that the use of violence for political ends always “risks damaging our idols for generations to come.”94 Even so, ambivalence about redemptive violence must not obscure how it responded to real dilemmas raised by democratization. If fascists also appealed to it, that was because they, too, found themselves compelled to reimagine the social bond in an era in which democracy had called its nature into question. This is not an apology or an excuse for redemptive violence but the necessary starting point for understanding its widespread appeal. Redemptive violence promised to repair the fraying social bond. That promise captured the imagination of French thinkers as they struggled to construct a democratic republic amid the ruins of the past. The social contractualist image of violence as anarchy has long helped political theorists define the principles of a legitimate democratic society. But when it came to creating that democratic society in practice, political

Introduction  19 thinkers depended on an altogether different image of violence:  violence as productive of sociality itself. Redemptive violence took away life, but it did so while rebinding the social tie. It authorized murder, but not before transforming it into something more than death. If we are to understand democracy as an ongoing historical achievement rather than a normative theory of popular sovereignty, we ought to bring this alternative image of violence into focus. Doing so reminds us that democracy is never simply a claim about the source of right. It is also a battle cry for alternative visions of the social bond. In France, that cry invited its political thinkers to reassert republican peoplehood against the disintegrating forces which beset it from within and without. Time and again in the long nineteenth century, that also meant turning to the virtues of violence.

1 Regicide and Redemptive Violence in the French Revolution On 30 May 1791, Maximilien Robespierre ascended the podium of the National Assembly to denounce the death penalty. Although capital punishment was defensible in a state of nature, he argued that it surrendered its rationale in society. “In society, when the force of all is armed against a single man, what principle of justice can authorize society to mete out death to him?” There could be none, Robespierre answered, for “A victor who kills his captive enemies is barbaric!” Indeed, “these scenes of death ordered with such aplomb are nothing but cowardly assassinations, solemn crimes, committed not by individuals but by whole nations with legal forms.” Given the chance of erring, societies ruled by justice could not commit an act as irrevocable as executing a “vanquished and powerless” prisoner, no matter how criminal. Robespierre’s conclusion was unequivocal: in societies where the death penalty was both acceptable and a national act, “the legislator is nothing but a master who commands slaves and, following his whim, punishes without pity.” Robespierre’s speech solicited a warm burst of applause.1 Thomas Paine later appealed to this speech “with infinite satisfaction” during the trial of Louis XVI to try to save the condemned king’s life.2 But he found himself brandishing it against Robespierre himself, whom Paine believed had reversed course in the intervening months. By the late summer of 1792, the French Revolution had radicalized into a democratic revolution. Louis had been arrested by the Assembly, imprisoned in an old stone tower called the Temple, and forced to eat without a knife to prevent him from taking his own life before the nation could. The former king now cut the figure of a vanquished prisoner facing capital punishment. And yet, ascending the podium once again on 3 December 1792, Robespierre not only demanded Louis’s execution, but also that the king die without a trial. He would not grant the king the protection of positive law: “Louis must die because the nation must live.”3 The Virtues of Violence. Kevin Duong, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190058418.001.0001

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  21 If Robespierre turned to extralegal capital punishment because of “the force of circumstance,” his arguments did not suggest it.4 Undoubtedly, the everyday demands of revolutionary politics often forced his idealism to cede to sober strategic maneuvering. Between abolishing the monarchy, founding the first French Republic amid continental war, drafting a constitution, and containing internecine social conflicts among revolutionaries, these months testified to the reality of historical constraint. However, in the face of the practical matter of Louis XVI’s fate, Robespierre did not appeal to tactical prerogatives to deny Louis a trial and endorse death. Instead, he reached for a special language of violence, one that identified the monarch’s swift, extralegal execution with popular redemption:  “the salvation of the people, the right to punish the tyrant,” he argued, “are all the same thing.”5 In his view, “the salutary terror of the justice of the people” served higher moral purposes; as he remarked at the Jacobin Club in February 1793, “the people must rise up, not to collect sugar, but to bring down the tyrants.”6 Nor was Robespierre alone in reaching for this moralizing language of extralegal violence. Warning fellow deputies that “the spirit in which the king is judged is also the spirit in which the Republic will be established,” Louis-​Antoine de Saint-​Just followed his older colleague’s lead: “I can see no mean: this man must reign or die.”7 The young deputy from Aisne had also once advocated for the death penalty’s abolition. The language infused the Parisian popular sections, at times becoming synonymous with their civic agency. “The holiest duty, the most cherished law /​Is to forget the law, to save the patrie,” the Mauconseil section announced to the Legislative Assembly on 4 August 1792.8 The Jacobins of Auxerre put it more starkly three months later: “Nations are awaiting the judgment you have rendered for Louis XVI’s crimes: that [this judgment] is terrible, that it is prompt, that it makes tyrants of the earth tremble, and that the blood of the most wicked conspirators expiate his crimes without delay.”9 Far from a capitulation to regicide’s necessity, revolutionaries everywhere were laying claim to its expiatory and redemptive power outside positive law. Why would revolutionaries claim redemptive violence as a vocabulary for popular agency? What did this violence provide that competing languages of agency could not? Scholars have often observed that this language during the trial signaled a new, heightened importance for violence in the revolution. Arno Mayer, for example, has claimed that it is here in the trial that we see Robespierre “shift from a ‘negative’ to a ‘positive’ construction of revolutionary terror,” while Dan Edelstein has suggested that Robespierre’s gradual

22  The Virtues of Violence acceptance of capital punishment “may well be read as a synecdoche of the French Revolution.”10 At the same time, understanding why this language of violence was attractive remains difficult.11 Ronald Schechter has recently shown that thinkers across the political spectrum cited “salutary terror” in positive ways before 1789, but there remains during the revolution what Arno Mayer calls “the ethical and epistemic difficulty of conceptualizing and theorizing violence without justifying, absolving, or condemning it.”12 Faced with this dilemma, many scholars have simply pathologized the violence as senseless, as containing “an element of irrationality,” a lamentable “interruption” in the more fundamental intellectual trajectory of the revolution.13 It is telling, for instance, that the only study of the trial and execution of Louis XVI by a political theorist—​Michael Walzer’s 1974 Regicide and Revolution—​concludes that Jacobin violence was philosophically impotent. In that text, Walzer identified the weakness in their violence: “Jacobin theory may serve to justify revolutionary action against the king,” he argued, “But when a helpless man is dragged to the scaffold and placed into the hands of the executioner, more arguments are required than the Jacobins provide.” That is because “it is not enough to say . . . that the people and the king fought, the king lost, and therefore he is a traitor.” Denying him a trial and killing him outright “leaves open the question of right.”14 And without settling the question of right, the Jacobin language of violence could not destroy its real target. In the absence of a legal trial, revolutionary violence forfeited the only instrument capable of reaching the deeper “mysteries of kingship” that lay behind the person of Louis Capet. Given the mysteries of kingship, the only way to bring Louis to justice was through adversary proceedings in which the whole court was in effect the adversary of the king or at least of kingship. For such a court, legality is no doubt only a form of self-​restraint, but it is important nonetheless because that restraint suggests as nothing else can do that the principles being established are at least potentially principles of justice . . . revolutionary justice is defensible whenever it points the way to everyday justice. That is the maxim that marks off morally legitimate trials from proscription and terror.15

Walzer’s argument stands as the most devastating critique of the Jacobin language of violence. It acknowledges that unless regicide was grounded in right, unless it was an act of justice, kingship would outlive Louis XVI’s death. And justice, in the end, was precisely what Jacobin violence would not provide.

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  23 At the same time, emphasizing Jacobin violence’s impotence on matters of right does not point the way toward understanding why their language was so compelling. Indeed, it only makes it more puzzling why political actors and thinkers believed the prospect of regicide demanded a moralizing conception of extralegal violence at all. This chapter returns to the trial and execution of Louis XVI to reconsider the purpose and meaning of revolutionary redemptive violence. It argues that Robespierre and others reached for this violence to answer a different question from that of right, one they believed was arguably more fundamental to founding a republic: How could the social body be reconstituted after its revolutionary disintegration and the execution of its unifying principle, the person of the king? References to violence as expiation, salvation, and regeneration provided a means for asking after the quality of the social bond in democracy, its specific vision of cohesion. Indeed, if the legalistic arguments of the Gironde more satisfyingly settled questions of right, they almost completely ignored this latter problem. It was a problem that took on urgency as the radicalization of the revolution made regicide increasingly plausible. Regicide raises, in ways few other political acts can do, the need to discover a new principle of national belonging, a vision of cohesion that can provide an account of why democratic citizens, not royal subjects, form a society. More than any others during the trial, Robespierre and his allies understood this fact. It was why they joined their revolutionary realism to a democratic language of redemptive violence. To make this argument, the chapter begins by analyzing Girondin interpretations of the philosophical problems raised in judging an inviolable king. It shows how beneath their disagreements over the proper judicial procedures for the occasion lay a common interpretation of the problem at hand; namely, locating the source of right. Emphasizing how the Gironde remained enthralled with the quest for the origin of right brings into focus the contrasting Jacobin interpretation of the trial and the problems it posed. For Robespierre and St. Just, the trial and execution of Louis XVI raised the urgent need to supplant the ancient corporatist vision of society with a new, republican alternative. The chapter then describes one of the solutions the Jacobins developed to create that new republican social body: regicide as redemptive violence. By lifting regicide out of classical theories of tyrannicide and reinscribing it in Enlightenment conceptions of natural disaster, this language imbued “the people” with nature’s own catastrophic, regenerative agency. It cast regicide as a site for repairing

24  The Virtues of Violence society’s moral fabric. Regicide as redemptive violence, Jacobins believed, could become a means of realigning the orders of nature and society, morality and law. Jacobin prescriptions would not carry the day. In the end, a trial was held, and the king was guillotined under the sign of positive law. Measured in terms of scale, his death was infinitesimal. Nearly a hundred Parisians died storming the Bastille, an “event” crowned with its own infamous executions of the Marquis de Launay and Jacques de Flesselles.16 Parisian crowds murdered more than a thousand people, from refractory priests to petty criminals, during the infamous September massacres of 1792.17 The Terror killed at least two thousand people in Paris, and up to fifty thousand died in prisons or were shot.18 Thousands were killed in unofficial executions like the drownings at Nantes, and hundreds of thousands more died in the civil war in the Vendée.19 Measured by sheer casualties, the single death of Louis XVI seems trivial. Yet the regicide remains significant because of the extent to which it was theoretically self-​aware. Other episodes of revolutionary violence erupted from tactical calculations, crucibles of cunning strategy, and personal ambition where the power of ideas receded.20 The regicide was driven by such calculations, too, but, more than any other act of violence, it was also a deliberate product of intense conceptualization and debate. It forced to self-​consciousness the epochal transformations unfolding underneath everyone’s feet. In the overheated room of the Manège, history was not being made behind the backs of men, but right in front of them and by their words. The king’s death was not the most extreme act of violence in the revolution, but it may have been its greatest achievement of political theory. Understanding it therefore helps us understand redemptive violence’s appeal for revolutionary democracy. Walzer may be right that “Proscription is final only with regard to its victim, but not with regard to the political community itself which still waits upon some determination of what is just and what is unjust.”21 But the killing of the king underscores for us that democratic revolutions do not only concern justice. To negate an existing form of society for an emancipated one, more than fidelity to right is needed. One must also remake the social bond. And, unlike constitutionalism or natural law theory, revolutionary, redemptive violence promised to do just that. That was the profound and difficult conclusion Jacobins reached on 21 January 1793.

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  25

The Debate over Royal Inviolability As the National Convention debated whether to put Louis on trial in the autumn of 1792, revolution had already been reshaping France for three years. A slew of decrees had destroyed feudalism and its society of orders. In an emotional legislative session on the night of 4 August 1789, deputies redefined property in individualist terms, abolished tithes and venal offices, and suppressed seigniorial privileges. In November, they nationalized church property and auctioned it off to support France’s first fiat currency, the assignat. In the following summer, in 1790, the Assembly adopted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a measure that subordinated the church to civil authority and compelled priests to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. The privileges of the nobility were abolished that same summer. Jews were emancipated in September 1791. Civil marriage and divorce were instituted in November. The corporate guild system, too, was broken with the adoption of the Loi Le Chapelier of 14 June 1791. These reforms rendered much of the old regime obsolete within the span of months. In place was now the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and, thanks to Jacques-​Pierre Brissot and the Gironde during the spring of 1792, continental war on its behalf.22 Among the features of the old regime under pressure, however, the figure of the king remained a confusing and stubborn problem. Many political leaders were reluctant to confront the question of the king directly, a fact notoriously dramatized in the wake of the king’s flight to Varennes on 20 June 1791. In one of the revolution’s first major crises, Louis fled Paris with his family toward the border with the hope of rallying the court and royalism from afar. Upon leaving Paris, he also left a written statement repudiating the revolution. The statement was discovered as he and the royal family were caught at Varennes the next day and escorted back to Paris. Radicals and republicans interpreted the flight as overt abdication by the monarchy. Larger segments of the population, too, increasingly questioned the viability of a constitutional monarchy.23 And yet political leaders chose to defer the problem: to explain the king’s treasonous flight, the legislature fabricated the fiction that Louis was kidnapped under an émigré’s plot. Louis, in return, accepted the new constitution and, with it, acquired inviolability and a suspensive veto. Many radicals and republicans found this course of action bewildering. As one petition circulated afterward put it, “A great crime is committed. Louis XVI flees. He shamefully abandons his post; the empire is on the verge of

26  The Virtues of Violence anarchy.” And yet, the petitioners complained, “you have decided in advance that he is innocent and inviolable . . . Legislators! This was not the wish of the people.”24 Why, critics wondered, should Louis be rewarded for betraying the revolution with the new office of constitutional monarch and royal inviolability? By the summer of 1792, the Parisian popular sections were prepared to take action into their own hands. “Representatives of the people, listen again to their cries of sorrow,” a deputation of fédérés pleaded to the legislative assembly in July. Weeks have passed since you declared the patrie in danger, and you indicate to us no means of saving it. Can it be that you still do not know the cause of our ills, or the remedies? Well then, legislators, we citizens of the 83 departments . . . we shall show you the remedy. We say to you that the source of our ills is in the abuse that the head of the executive power makes of his authority. . . . Spare your country a universal upheaval, use all the power confided to you, and save the patrie yourselves.25

The deputation warned that if legislators did not depose Louis, “There would only remain one recourse for the nation, that of deploying all of its force to crush all its tyrants.”26 Paris’s sections made good on their promise the next month. Cumulative frustrations over food, the perilous war situation, and the now widespread belief that Louis was conspiring against the revolution reached a climax on the morning of 10 August 1792 (Figure 1.1). In what observers called the “second” revolution, the armed sections of Paris attacked the Tuileries as the royal family fled to the nearby Legislative Assembly. Sheltered in the logographie room reserved for journalists, Louis was arrested by the Assembly and the municipal government, the Commune. The first French Republic was declared the next month. The question of what to do with the king could no longer be deferred. Three years after the revolution began, leaders would finally have to put the king on trial and judge him. * * * Convention members immediately confronted two obstacles in judging the king. First, no preexisting adversarial procedures existed for such a trial and, except for the English case of Charles I in 1649, few available scripts existed for regicide.27 As Jean-​Paul Marat had to remind his legalistic colleagues, “It is not at all here a question of an ordinary trial.”28 Second, Louis was

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  27

Figure 1.1  Jacques Bertaux, Prise du palais des Tuileries, 10 août 1792 (1793). Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.

legally inviolable, and not by dint of divine right but positive law. He received his schedule of legal immunities and privileges by virtue of the 1791 Constitution, and no trial would be possible until a way around that fact could be found. As the convention members searched for ways to circumvent royal inviolability from roughly 1 October to 6 December, Paris’s popular sections continued to experiment with new idioms of collective agency. And, to the displeasure of moderates, they leaned toward violence as their preferred vocabulary of popular agency. As Jean-​Marie Roland, Minister of the Interior, explained to Louis before the 10 August insurrection, “The revolution is achieved in their minds; it will be completed at the cost of blood, and will be cemented by it, if wisdom does not prevent misfortunes that can still be avoided.” If Louis continued blocking legislation with his suspensive veto, Roland warned, “the departments will be forced to substitute for it, as they do everywhere, with violent measures,” while “the angered people will supplement [the law’s] absence with excesses.”29 The people’s “violent measures” would be extralegal in the sense that they were not condoned by positive law; they were, however, concordant with the perceived lawfulness of nature. Although the sans-​culottes “never saw in their right to insurrection

28  The Virtues of Violence a theoretical or formal affirmation of their sovereignty,” Albert Soboul concedes, “they were naturally receptive to its exercise” as a kind of instinct after the August insurrection.30 The storming of the Bastille and the women’s march on Versailles further cemented the link between popular agency and violence. But it was the “September Massacres” that drove home the centrality of violence. These septembriseurs placed the trial against the backdrop of bloody extralegal popular violence. It was in these months that Jacobins discovered redemptive violence as a language of democratic agency. But before turning to the commitments which comprised that language, it is important to understand that it was neither the only one to be invoked during the trial nor the most persuasive. Some royal sympathizers, for example, took inviolability at face value and reasoned accordingly. After all, the law was not completely silent on Louis’s guilt. Inviolability was not invincibility. Because the king’s legal immunities were a provision of constitutional law, even if Louis exercised discretion in his executive power, it was still the case that, as the 1791 Constitution put it, “only in the name of the law may he exact obedience.”31 To be beyond the law was not to be a law unto oneself, and Louis was acutely aware of this fact. In response to Bertrand Barère’s opening prosecutorial statement on 11 December that “Louis, the French people accuse you of having committed a multitude of crimes, of establishing your tyranny by destroying their liberty,” Louis gave the careful reply: “There were no laws which stopped me.”32 His was a condition of legal inviolability along with clear conditions under which the throne could be abdicated: if Louis refused to take the oath to the constitution, if he led an army against the nation, or if refused to disavow foreign armies fighting against the nation in his name, then, as the Constitution specified, he would be stripped of inviolability, reduced to a citizen, and made culpable for any future treasonous actions. This legal context guided Charles-​François-​Gabriel Morrison when he asked in a 13 November speech, “Can Louis XVI be judged?” A  royalist deputy from the Vendée, he drew the most straightforward conclusion: under a strict interpretation of the constitution, a trial was impossible and unnecessary. Although “a sovereign people have no other rule than its supreme will,” there are intrinsic limitations to that will such as ex post facto justice. “When a nation has promulgated a law,” Morrison explained, “although that nation have the right to change the law at will, nevertheless, that changed law cannot have a retroactive effect.” To insist otherwise was to commit “injury to the most basic principles of justice,” to forfeit principles “unknown only to

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  29 tyrants.”33 Morrison concluded that the people could choose to abolish the monarchy, but they could not try Louis for crimes that were committed while inviolable. The revolution needed to “avoid a monstrous and interminable trial, perhaps with untoward results.”34 For his part, the Marquis de Condorcet, a philosophe and leader of the Gironde, tried to split the difference. Like Morrison, he accepted that Louis was inviolable. But unlike Morrison, Condorcet believed that inviolability did not prevent the king from being tried. “Even if one gives constitutional inviolability a force most contrary to reason and to justice,” Condorcet believed, “it remains true that the nation has the right to judge him.”35 But to reach this conclusion, Condorcet had to design a series of baroque legal distinctions. Among them, he decoupled the question of guilt from punishment. Inviolability, he wanted to say, protected Louis from punishment but not from guilt. The king could be legally condemned for his actions, but he could not be punished without committing ex post facto justice. Both Morrison’s and Condorcet’s arguments were powerful examples of constitutional reasoning. Neither bothered denying the king’s guilt, for the latter’s behavior already made that impossible. The discovery of incriminating documents in an iron safe in the Tuileries revealed that Louis was collaborating with foreign powers to subvert the revolution. The documents, signed by Louis and compiled into a dossier for the Convention by Dufriche-​ Valazé, made his guilt undeniable.36 And yet Morrison and Condorcet’s arguments persuaded few deputies. The victorious position was closer to that of Jean-​Baptiste Mailhe, a lawyer from Toulouse and one whose report to the Convention on royal inviolability opened up the trial in earnest. For Mailhe, a faithful application of the law led to counterintuitive conclusions about royal guilt and popular sovereignty. He admitted that “in no case could the king be judged by the other constituted authorities, since he was their superior.” “It did not follow,” however, that the king “could not be judged by the nation, since to come to such a conclusion would be to claim that by virtue of the Constitution, the king was superior to the nation or independent of the nation.”37 Such an inviolability, Mailhe claimed, would have entailed the nation alienating its sovereignty. As everyone who read Rousseau knew, that was impossible. Mailhe’s appeal to “the nation” drew on prerevolutionary precedents. By the late eighteenth century, the various parlements were already presenting themselves as the nation’s body. And, in the lead-​up to the Estates-​General in 1789, French leaders described the event as a meeting between the nation

30  The Virtues of Violence and its executive authority. In other words, the nation had already been invoked as a site of sovereignty distinguished from the executive branch of government. However, references to the nation prior to the revolution referred above all to a judicial entity. The parlements, after all, were courts, staffed by judges and comprised of judicial instruments meant to represent the nation to the king on behalf of the people. They represented the nation qua legal subject. It was not this juridical subject that Mailhe had in mind when he claimed that, “No, the nation was not bound by royal inviolability, nor could it be.” Whereas Louis received his inviolability from the constitution, “the nation was sovereign regardless of constitution or king. Its inalienable sovereignty proceeds from nature alone.”38 Mailhe’s appeal to nature is remarkable given that he was neither a radical nor a Jacobin. Although a revolutionary, he was associated in the Convention with the moderate majority. Nevertheless, he invoked the revolution’s most radical claim:  the nation named a sovereignty that preceded all positive legal forms. It resembled Sieyès’s famous doctrine of constituent power. Just as Sieyès’s constituent power was the source of legality itself, Mailhe spoke of the nation as a primordial sleeping sovereign. In his report, as the nation “awoke” to its sovereignty, it recovered its “instincts,” especially that of revenge and self-​defense. As a natural existence, it was governed by laws which preceded positive law and were “as old as society itself.” Indeed, “did not the nation itself have an undying right, rooted in nature, to call [tyrants] before its tribunals and to cause them to suffer the punishments due to oppressors or brigands?” The nation did not depend on positive laws because it was not a positive existence. Before its agency, “all the difficulties disappear: royal inviolability might never have been.”39 Since the nation bestowed on Louis his inviolability, it was within its powers to discard it and to judge Louis as a citizen before the law. Thus, because the Convention was a “perfect” representation of the nation, Mailhe believed it could judge the king. To say otherwise would be “to reject the nation.”40 These arguments of Morrison, Condorcet, and Mailhe were grounded in different threads of revolutionary political culture. Although they arrived at different conclusions about how best to engage royal inviolability, they each accepted the principle of popular sovereignty. The point is important because it suggests that regicide was not an intrinsic feature of revolutionary ideology nor entailed by the principle of popular sovereignty.41 Even as late as April 1792, Robespierre agreed. Writing in the opening editorial of his Le Défenseur de la Constitution, he skeptically asked, “It is in the words

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  31 republic or monarchy that an answer resides to the great social problem?”42 If Robespierre and his Jacobin allies subsequently charted a different path by advocating for extralegal regicide, it was, I want to argue now, because the prospect of regicide led them to adopt a different perspective on what was fundamentally at stake in founding a republic. For, despite all that divided Morrison, Mailhe, and Condorcet, these leaders actually shared a common interpretation of the problem inviolability posed:  the ultimate source of right. If Morrison denied there was a source of right higher than the constitution, Mailhe claimed to have found exactly that: “there is no Constitution which could prevent you from calling down upon [an enemy’s] head the censure of divine and human laws: rights and duties of nature are of an order higher than human institutions.”43 They both approached the question in terms of the final grounds of right and disagreed where that ground was located. It was also why Condorcet’s argument became so convoluted. He wanted a trial, but he refused to accept any higher extralegal authority with which to sanction it. He was thus compelled to decouple guilt from punishment to remain philosophically consistent. Despite his revolutionary ambitions, Condorcet always believed that “you [France] owe to yourselves, you owe to mankind, the first example of the impartial trial of a king” where the legal proceedings approximated as closely as possible ordinary justice.44 Jacobins found this struggle over the proper ground of right tedious. “Those who attach any importance to the just punishment of a king will never found a Republic,” St. Just argued in his first speech to the Convention.45 It all amounted to exasperating “constitutional logic-​chopping” as far as Robespierre was concerned.46 What frustrated these Jacobin leaders were not the details of their opponents’ legal reasoning. After all, like Mailhe, they, too, would appeal to the law of nations to circumvent inviolability.47 They did not object to lawfulness as such, whether that of positive or natural law. Instead, they were frustrated with the overriding presumption that, at bottom, the trial was about the final ground of legal right. It was as if monarchy was illegitimate merely because it placed those grounds in the wrong body. Indeed, if all it takes to found a republic is shifting the grounds of right from the court to the people, and if regicide is essentially supplanting a treasonous king with the rule of law, then we would have to concede to the Gironde leader Pierre-​Victurnien Vergniaud’s subsequent assertion that “the Constitution” could be the “basis of civil society,” or Condorcet’s belief that, suitably adjusted, positive law might be enough to bridge the

32  The Virtues of Violence revolutionary gap.48 That was a point even Marat conceded, and unlike the Jacobins, he defended a trial (although he was confident the outcome needed to be swift death). But Robespierre and his allies gradually discovered that affixing the source of legal right to “the people” was inadequate for founding a republic. Redefining the basis of right might curtail the arbitrary personal authority of the king. It might place ordinary justice within the reach of the people. But royalism in France was never primarily a doctrine about the nature of justice or the source of right. It was an entire account of “the social,” and to found a republic, a specifically republican vision of society had to take the place of the old regime. Without a persuasive democratic vision of society, France could achieve a republican regime in law, but not a republican people. And so when the Jacobins turned to the laws of nature to overcome inviolability, they did so for different reasons than their Girondin counterparts. Their appeal to the “terror of the justice of the people” sought to reframe regicide as an act of terror against an external enemy rather than the fulfillment of justice. If regicide could be construed as an act of redemptive violence, it could reassert the moral bases for social cohesion, enact “the people” as an agent capable of extralegal action, and pave the way for defining a new republican social body. * * * We can observe the Jacobin critique of the legalistic interpretation of regicide in at least two places. The first is in their insistence that the trial did not present a judicial proceeding but a scene of war. In his 13 November 1792 speech, St. Just attacked Morrison’s and Mailhe’s opinions as “equally false.” Rather than respecting inviolability (Morrison) or judging Louis as a regular citizen (Mailhe), “the king ought to be judged according to principles foreign to both.” Applying old ideas to a new situation, the two misconstrued the task at hand. “The single aim of [Mailhe’s] committee was to persuade you that the king should be judged as an ordinary citizen,” St. Just claimed. “And I say that the king should be judged as an enemy; that we must not so much judge him as combat him; that as he had no part in the contract which united the French people, the forms of judicial procedure here are not to be sought in positive law, but in the law of nations.”49 For St. Just, appealing to the law of nations did not mean appealing to a higher law to judge an inviolable king. This was not a recapitulation of the Girondin search for a higher source of right. Instead, St. Just appealed to the law of nations for the rules of combat.

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  33 The king was an enemy in an international arena, a “brigand,” “the lowest class of humanity,” “outlaw,” and a “rebel.” Some men search for a law which would allow the punishment of the king. But in the form of government from which we come, he was indeed inviolable with respect to each citizen. Between the people as a whole and the king, I do not however recognize any natural bond. . . . The social contract is between citizen and citizen, not between citizen and government. A contract affects only those whom it binds. As a consequence, Louis, who was not bound, cannot be judged in civil law. . . . All these reasons should lead you to judge Louis, not as a citizen, but as a rebel.50

Condorcet, Mailhe, and others had mistakenly applied domestic principles of law into a lawless relationship between a nation and its enemy. They sought to apply principles of justice to an enemy outside of the polity that sought to destroy that very justice. “To judge is to apply the law; law supposes a common share in justice; and what justice can be common to humanity and kings? What has Louis in common with the French people that they should treat him well after he betrayed them?” It was evidence of how poorly revolutionaries understood the nature of the revolutionary break, St. Just suggested, that French leaders believed legal justice was at stake. Robespierre agreed. He noted in early December, “Citizens, the Assembly has unwittingly been brought far from the true question. There is no trial to be conducted here.” That was because “Louis is not an accused man. You are not judges. You are, and you can only be, statesmen and representatives of the nation.” As representatives of the general will, “You do not have a verdict to give for or against a man, but a measure to take for the public safety.” And unfortunately, “the character of the deliberations hitherto goes directly against this latter aim.”51 As the king was an enemy of the people, not a fellow citizen, it would have been a sort of legal promotion to grant him a trial before his execution because it would have readmitted him into the political community in the form of citizenship. Such wayward logic, Robespierre insisted, underwrote the Gironde’s mistaken interpretation of the trial as a judicial proceeding rather than an act of war. The second place we see Jacobins object to the Girondin framing of the trial lay in their focus on repairing social cohesion. Rather than cite the law of nations, this argument reached into an alternative tradition of French thought that was concerned with questions of “the social.” Unlike political unity, the

34  The Virtues of Violence cohesion of “the social” referred to customary relations of interdependence. As Daniel Gordon has argued, eighteenth-​century French thinkers theorized “the social” in response to absolutism. Where court life in Versailles monopolized the sphere of politics, ordinary people were compelled to search for alternative, nonpolitical modes of association. “The invention of the social as a distinctive field of human experience,” however, “required a demonstration that some meaningful activities are self-​instituting; that in some situations human beings can hang together of their own accord; that humans, in short, are sociable creatures.”52 That demonstration could come from sources ranging from anthropological histories of non-​Western cultures to new archaeological studies on “the golden age,” the theme of natural sociabilité in Baron d’Holbach and Rousseau, or Condorcet’s new “social science” which promised to render “the social” in the new authoritative language of scientific appraisal.53 For ordinary people, however, the most immediate source for understanding the social was prerevolutionary France’s corporatist society, which consisted in overlapping bodies such as the family, the city, and the guild. Far from arrangements of convenience, each corps was understood to be an autonomous moral entity. Trade guilds, for example, had their own patron saints, holidays, mutual aid institutions, and rituals of moral improvement and economic cooperation.54 And just as every corps was adhered by its esprit de corps, société at large was bound together by la morale. As the Montesquieu enthusiast Louis de Jaucourt put it, morality did not involve “knowing the essence of real substances.” Instead, it concerned the relations between men and their conduct with one another. To see morality, Jaucourt explained, “it is only necessary to compare with care certain relations among human actions and a certain rule.” On this account, morality is about the collective activity of moral regulation as much as it is about maxims of conduct. La morale is what makes society more than a collection of individuals—​a corps—​and it is why “la Morale is the proper science of man; because it is a general knowledge proportioned to their natural capacity, and from which depends their greatest interest.”55 Although moral relations between men are fixed and unchanging, they are nevertheless relational rather than essential. They describe not natural, but social laws governing men of reason. And yet, part of the reason eighteenth-​century French thinkers theorized the social at all was because its cohesion was entering into crisis. Corporatism in particular came under attack from reform movements in the years leading up to the revolution. Led by ministers allied with the philosophes and the

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  35 physiocrats, these reformers sought to resolve the monarchy’s looming debt crisis by dismantling the corporate privileges which interfered with increasing taxation. Anne-​Robert-​Jacques Turgot led the attack on the corporatist conception of the social, explaining, “Public utility is the supreme law,” and before that law, “particular corporate bodies do not exist of themselves, or for themselves; they have been formed for society, and they must cease to exist immediately after they cease to be useful.” Reduced to a utilitarian arrangement, Turgot, a champion of the scientific reform of government and Condorcet’s idol, denied corporate bodies their moral standing in order to exalt the abstract individual and aggregate social utility: “Citizens have rights” which, he insisted, “exist independently of society.”56 It was a revolutionary stance that provoked outrage from the parlements, the nobility, and trade associations. After issuing a series of laissez-​faire reforms in 1776, his program finally lost the support of fellow ministers, and Louis dismissed him as Controller-​General of Finances. Turgot’s edicts were only a prelude to successive attempts at atomizing the French social body. Revolutionary leaders instituted civil marriage and divorce, thereby redefining kinship and the broader purpose of “association.”57 They denied political voice to any intermediary bodies between the nation and the king, giving the Third Estate exclusive power to “interpret and present the general will of the nation; there cannot exist between the throne and this assembly any veto, any negative power.”58 They repudiated the schedule of privileges allotted by corps in favor of abstract individual rights because those intermediary corps foreclosed the formation of a united body politic. After all, Sieyès wrote, if social ascriptions were not suppressed, forming a national representation would be futile: “They would still remain three types of heterogeneous matter [the three Estates] that it would be impossible to amalgamate.”59 Social atomization came to a point with the Loi Le Chapelier of 1791, which decreed “association” between workers to be “unconstitutional” and “in contempt of liberty and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” Indeed, any associations that obstructed “the free exercise of industry and labor” were to be criminalized as “seditious assemblies.”60 Underwriting this law, which remained in effect until its repeal during the Third Republic, was the revolutionary ideology that dissolving “the social” of the old regime was a prerequisite to founding a polity of independent free and equal citizens. As French thinkers across the spectrum constructed “the social” as a sphere of concern, it came to define a preexisting space where sociable humans (rather than abstract citizens) could be articulated into a nonpolitical

36  The Virtues of Violence order. The concept implied that although free and equal citizens might constitute a polity, as citizens they do not automatically constitute a society. As Montesquieu had taught, the latter requires concrete men and women, replete with their own customary means of affiliation and kinship, their own moral character shaped by the vicissitudes of geography, climate, and history. Society was irreducible to the individuals who made it up because it pointed to this underlying layer of association, one which bound people together in common life not by prudential considerations or historical contingency but by the moral thickness of their social bond.61 If social cohesion was emerging as a pressing problem in France, so, too, had the king presented a special type of solution to it, and for two reasons. Unlike the family or guild which presented an autonomous moral corps consisting in several persons, the king was a corps unto himself. And whereas the former mediated relations between the individual and the state, the corps of the latter was the state. (“L’état, c’est moi,” Louis XIV is to have famously proposed.) These attributes of royal embodiment partake in aspects of the well-​known doctrine of “the king’s two bodies,” a feature of royalism with origins in medieval jurisprudence and Christian thought (but with “a post-​Christian appeal,” Walzer adds).62 Better known in the context of English political thought, the doctrine portrays the king as possessing a temporal and an eternal body. When this ideology held sway in France under absolutism, the king was thought to incarnate in his person the eternal corpus mysticum, the essence of the real nation and from which the dispersed temporal instances of the body politic acquired a higher moral unity. Thanks to it, the king held in his person a transcendental guarantee of national unity, and the mere fact of his embodiment answered the problem of social cohesion. However, like corporatism generally, developments in French intellectual and political culture corroded this political theology by the time of the revolution. During Louis XVI’s reign, new theories of representation and decades of Enlightenment criticism had hollowed out the ideology of the king’s two bodies. The former was evident in what Paul Friedland has described as the shift from thinking about representation as making-​present to representation as approximation or delegation in mid–​eighteenth-​century France,63 and it was exemplified in the displacement of the royal corpus mysticum by the parlements of France, then the Estates-​General, and, finally, the National Assembly as the incarnation of the nation. Sieyès gave this transformation its canonical formulation in his pamphlet “What Is the Third Estate?”:  “a

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  37 nation is made one by virtue of a common system of law and a common representation.”64 Yet, despite royalism’s weakened grip, most French subjects still described the king as the lynchpin of the body politic. When the cahiers de doléances addressed Louis as the father of the French, it was a pious reaffirmation of the father-​king who clasped together the “real” national body with its myriad temporal instances. Even after the revolution began, most subjects still believed that what formed a nation was the unity of its will, and as a consequence, only the king could give to individuals the form of “the nation” by identifying the national will with his own. The king provided the transcendental organizing principle of society, a guarantee that society was more real and durable than the mortal individuals who made it up.65 So long as his royal body remained intact, France possessed moral unity even as its population and institutions changed. For that same reason, calling into question the royal body described an unprecedented act of violence, for it was a direct attack on the social body itself. This explains why St. Just and Robespierre returned, time and again, to the question of the moral foundation of the social body during and after the trial. In his 2 December 1792 speech on subsistence crisis in the Eure-​ et-​Loir, Robespierre argued that commodifying and hoarding bread violated “the first social law,” the moral right to life, because “subsistence is the blood of the people, and its free circulation is no less necessary to the social body than that of the blood to the life of the human body.”66 In his 13 November 1792 speech, St. Just attacked Mailhe’s report for succumbing to an amoral legalism: “The committee fell into forms without principles.”67 Robespierre echoed this exact point the next month: “We invoke forms because we lack principles.”68 By prioritizing procedures over morality, St. Just believed political leaders had forgotten that founding a republic entailed more than setting new legal standards of right. It also demanded “an example of virtue which would be a bond of public spirit and unity in the republic.”69 That “bond of public spirit” was morality itself. As St. Just put it later in December, “What do you call a Revolution? The fall of a throne, a few blows levied at a few abuses?” Although Girondin deputies carried on as if the answer was yes, for St. Just, the revolution posed the more demanding task of reconstructing the moral foundations of the social. “The moral order is like the physical,” he insisted, and so, even if “abuses disappear for an instant, as the dew dries in the morning, and as it falls again with the night, so the abuses will reappear.”70 Moral order is something that must be reconstituted for society’s

38  The Virtues of Violence rebirth. That is why “it is not sufficient to say that in order of eternal justice, sovereignty is independent of the existing form of government and thence to infer that the king should be tried”—​that is, Mailhe’s argument. “We will have no Republic,” St. Just explained, “without these distinctions which permit all the parts of the social order their natural movement, just as nature creates life from a union of elements.”71 To reforge the republican social body, there would need to be active coordination between morality, nature, and society. And for that, existing constitutional law was inadequate. After all, Robespierre explained, having entered into war with the king, “It is too great a contradiction to suppose that the Constitution might preside over this new order of things. That would be to suppose that it could outlive itself. What laws replace it? those of nature, which is the basis of society.”72 In short, unlike Turgot and Condorcet, Robespierre and St. Just’s vision of the republican social body was not reducible to individual consent and aggregate utility. Rather, it called for the corporatism of the old regime to be replaced by a society modeled on the normative patterns of nature. These two objections to the Girondin interpretation of the trial—​that it was an act of war, not a judicial proceeding, and that it needed to produce not “a few blows levied at a few abuses” but “moral order”—​amounted to a claim that if the revolution engaged Louis as a citizen rather than an enemy of mankind, there would only be a regime change rather than a revolution. “Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution?” Robespierre asked.73 “If you declare the king a citizen,” as Mailhe and Condorcet advocated, “he will slip from your grasp,” St. Just warned.74 The “he” in question did not refer only to the king’s person, but also to his mystical body and the corporatist vision of society which that body cohered. It was why Robespierre and St. Just demanded Convention leaders to go beyond redefining the ground of right. Jacobins hoped to strike Louis in both his person and as a representation. And executing that representative body required the revolution to posit an alternative account of social cohesion in place of the old corporatism. Leaving the moral bases for social cohesion unspecified was simply not an option. Citizens born into an established liberal political culture today might endorse legalistic or prudential considerations as the basis for the polity’s unity. They might even accept a type of “constitutional patriotism.”75 But such an orientation was simply unrealistic in 1792. Republican democracy was taking root among a people whose sense of collective belonging had never been construed as

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  39 essentially political, and it would have been—​and was—​utopian to insist that it suddenly be otherwise. The Jacobins, long vilified as blinded by “abstract” reasoning, were the ones most attentive to this concrete fact. Condorcet and Sieyès, on the other hand, vastly underestimated the importance of “the social” for republican democracy. (When Turgot was dismissed for attacking the corporate structure of the social in his edicts, Condorcet was shocked, evidently not understanding why Turgot’s edicts might have been so unpopular.) If the revolution was to yield a republican people, it would also need to produce a new type of social bond with which to supplant the royal corpus mysticum. That was why regicide had to do more than cancel the past. It was incumbent on it to produce a new social body cohered by moral principles which were not yet widely accepted. Therein lay the central challenge posed by the trial for revolutionary democracy.

From Tyrannicide to Redemptive Violence This interpretation of the trial’s challenge was itself revolutionary. It was therefore unclear how regicide was supposed to answer it. After all, earlier regicides did not believe they were forming new societies with their violence. As Albert Camus observed, “Kings were put to death long before January 21, 1793, and before the regicides of the nineteenth century.” But those earlier regicides “were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever.”76 As Robespierre himself reflected, “If we had not had a greater task to fulfill, if all that was at issue here were the interests of a faction or a new aristocracy, we might have been able to believe . . . that the plan for the French Revolution was clearly written in the works of Tacitus and Machiavelli.” 77 There was, however, a “greater task” at hand about which the classical texts of political theory remained silent: democratic revolution. And Louis was not just a tyrant. Thanks to royalist ideology, he was also the transcendental guarantee of social cohesion. If the Jacobins believed that at stake was nothing less than killing kingship itself and founding a new society, then how was regicide supposed to fulfill this unprecedented historical task? As the trial proceeded in spite of Jacobin protests, Robespierre and his allies adapted regicide to this task by reinscribing classical republican theories of

40  The Virtues of Violence tyrannicide into newer Enlightenment discourses of nature. Specifically, they employed two concurrent rhetorical strategies: they sacralized regicidal violence, and they naturalized democratic agency. Jacobins repeatedly described regicide in sacralized, expiatory, and redemptive terms. Regicide was not simply the removal of a king, but a “sacred cause” with a “sublime outcome.”78 It was analogized to biblical moments of absolution like the Great Flood.79 The blood shed by the revolution “is the expiation we offer the world,” the revolutionary “cause is holy,” and, indeed, in the case of regicide, “Honouring the Divinity and punishing kings are the same thing.”80 Spurning atheism as antirepublican, this language of redemptive violence affirmed the salvation of “the people” as “the holiest of all laws.”81 Indeed, it is worth recalling that the Jacobins were among the most consistent enemies to the revolution’s de-​Christianization efforts. Atheism was just as immoral as royalism. As Robespierre quipped, “The scapular-​ wearing fanatic and the fanatic preaching atheism have many similarities . . . sometimes red bonnets are closer to red high heels than one might think.”82 Societies, even secular ones, needed their own sources of the sacred. It would be misleading to interpret this redemptive rhetoric as a desire to return to the past. Undoubtedly, its Edenic sentimentality and allusions to the “golden age” resembled prerevolutionary conceptions of moral order, even a reactionary “deification of violence.”83 But in 1792–​1793, invocations of redemption functioned as claims to rupture. Calls to redeem mankind encouraged revolutionaries to leap as much into the future as to return to the past.84 Nor was violence’s sacralization a return to preceding cognates in prerevolutionary penal ideology. Since at least Michel Foucault, scholars have been familiar with the idea that capital punishment provides a restorative ritual of wounded sovereignty. “The public execution,” Foucault argued, was “a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular.”85 But it is unlikely that revolutionaries had this image of violence in mind because, decades before 1789, nearly all proponents of enlightened, reformed government—​including the future leaders of the revolution—​repudiated spectacular capital punishment as barbaric. Especially after Cesare Beccaria published his 1764 On Crimes and Punishment and the Abbé Morellet translated it into French, reforming or abolishing capital punishment became a widely agreed upon tenet of pre-​revolutionary political thought. Leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Catherine the Great, Marat, Brissot, Mably, and

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  41 Robespierre each turned the abolition of spectacular capital punishment into a cause célèbre. That was why Robespierre entered the revolution as a proud advocate of its abolition. It seems unlikely that the king’s execution was conceived in terms of an ideology of violence that virtually all significant political thinkers had repudiated for a generation.86 Robespierre for his part never recanted his arguments for the abolition of capital punishment. He insisted that its abolition was compatible with endorsing regicide, implying that the latter entailed an altogether new type of sacralized violence from the old regime’s ceremonial, spectacular killings. Naturalizing the agency behind regicide proved more challenging. It involved portraying the agent of regicide, “the people,” as an extension of nature’s agency rather than a lone assassin or a coup by a vanguard. Without doubt, Jacobins are notorious among students of revolutionary culture for naturalizing the revolution. After 1792, they would restructure the calendar around seasons and natural objects, plant liberty trees, organize festivals personifying Mother Nature, and forge a solar cult to connect the Republic to nature’s immanent moral authority.87 During the king’s trial, however, Jacobins specifically invoked images of nature to connect the will of the people to nature’s catastrophic agency and ecological self-​regulation. These naturalizing metaphors helped coordinate “the people” with the newly discovered immanent moral authority of nature, thereby naturalizing their agency and granting them nature’s unity and agency beyond positive law.88 The result was that the people’s violence pointed to something more than a negative veto on the past. It was also an active agent of moral reconstitution consistent with new scientific theories of nature as generative and regenerative. Jacobins were particularly keen to model democratic agency after natural disasters.89 “The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime force of virtue” was, according to Robespierre, “like the eruptions of a volcano.”90 Images of floods, earthquakes, and storms pervaded Jacobin depictions of popular assembly and insurrection. Particularly compelling was the image of the people’s agency as lightning, as in the medallion pressed to commemorate the August insurrection at the Tuileries (Figure 1.2). The medallion bears an image of Liberty crushing royalist symbols under her foot. In her raised hand is a dagger discharging lightning bolts. The illustration neatly visualizes Robespierre’s most important speech during the king’s trial:  on 3 December 1792, Robespierre described the people’s redemptive violence as an alternative to positive law: “A people does

42  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 1.2  Benjamin Duvivier. A medallion in memory of 10 August 1792 assault on the Tuileries and the fall of the monarchy. Wikimedia Commons.

not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss.”91 The people are not in the business of fussing about the origin of right but of incinerating enemies with lightning. It was a point Robespierre reiterated in his famous speech on political morality on 5 February 1794: “The revolution’s government is the despotism of liberty over tyranny. . . . And are not thunderbolts meant to strike vainglorious heads?”92 And again, he invoked lightning in his speech on the pedagogical purpose of republican festivals. The world has changed, it should change again. . . . Man has conquered lightning and diverted lightning from heaven. . . . Everything has changed in the physical order; everything should change in the moral and political order. Half the world’s revolution is already complete; the other half should be accomplished.93

Appreciating Robespierre’s claim requires connecting it to the special significance lightning acquired in late eighteenth-​century French scientific culture: lightning manifested nature’s simultaneous capacity for destruction and regeneration, not as metaphor but as natural fact. This was the position that emerged, for example, among revolutionary scientists like Jean-​Paul Marat.

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  43 Marat was a journalist and one of the legendary leaders of the revolution. Although he is primarily known for his bloodthirsty endorsement of discretionary popular violence, before the revolution, he researched lightning in a 1782 study entitled Recherches physiques sur l’électricité.94 In that text, Marat outlined the regenerative, purifying effects of lightning for the atmosphere. He built his analysis on the insights of popular naturalists like the Comte de Buffon, who had discussed lightning as a spontaneous manifestation of the earth’s universal heat and energy in his widely read Histoire naturelle.95 Marat was intervening in a fad sweeping Paris in the 1780s, what Robert Darnton has called the late eighteenth century’s “most serious explanation of Nature, of her wonderful, invisible forces, and even, in some cases, of the forces governing society and politics,” indeed a “camouflaged political theory”: mesmerism.96 Franz Mesmer, a popular pseudo-​scientist and spiritualist, had opened up clinics which were controversial for their healing practices. In addition to hypnotism, he was known for his claims about the “refreshing” power of electricity. According to Mesmer, lightning struck whenever the composition of the atmosphere was imbalanced. Its heat functioned to spontaneously restore atmospheric equilibrium. Lightning was part of nature’s self-​regulation, its destructive capacity for self-​correction. Mesmer tried to draw from his studies on lightning an account of social harmony and regeneration.97 Just as lightning manifested a spontaneous chemical reaction to restore atmospheric equilibrium, social upheavals occurred spontaneously to restore social harmony. The connection between lightning and social regeneration was a widespread motif of revolutionary political culture. For example, the infamous Jacobin deputy, the Marquis de Sade, featured it in his 1791 libertine novel Justine as an agent of moral providence.98 The mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, also appealed to it in March 1792, a few months before the king’s trial. There exists in the social order, as in the political order, laws whose imposing effect is felt only in memorable times. When the atmosphere that surrounds us is charged with wicked vapors, nature can only break free with a lightning bolt; in the same way, society can only purge itself from the excesses that trouble it with an impressive explosion; and after these great blows are struck, everything is reborn in hope and happiness.99

We can see these two rhetorical strategies—​violence’s sacralization and democratic agency’s naturalization—​intersect in an allegorical painting from

44  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 1.3  Allegory of the journée of 10 August 1792, unknown provenance. Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

1792 (Figure 1.3). In this tableau, a thunderbolt dissipates the obfuscating clouds from the interior of “the Mountain,” a metaphor for the Jacobins dissipating superstition and ushering in enlightenment. But the lightning is also a weapon: a mechanical structure conducts the electricity toward fleeing frogs and snakes, who represent “the Swamp”—​that is, Girondin moderates. Atop the mountain stands Zeus, who it turns out is a republican. His hand clutches a pike adorned with a Phrygian cap. It is telling that Jacobins not only naturalized democratic agency as lightning, but as lightning conducted. Consider an illustration from 1793, depicting a Jacobin conducting lightning from the sky to strike frogs and snakes (Figure 1.4). Consider, too, Benjamin Franklin (Figure 1.5). Every revolutionary knew Franklin had taught men how to conduct lightning. That included Robespierre:  before the revolution, Robespierre made his name as a lawyer in a case involving a lightning conductor.100 A  young lawyer based in Arras, Robespierre took on a widely watched case in nearby Saint-​Omer defending Charles Dominique de Vissery de Bois-​Valé. De Vissery had affixed a lightning rod to his home. Fellow townsmen asked it to be removed because they believed the rod summoned lightning into the

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  45

Figure 1.4  “Sans Union Point de Force, Sans Force Point de Liberté” (1793). Provided by the Stanford University Libraries.

village rather than directing it safely to the ground. Robespierre defended De Vissery with arguments for the progress of enlightenment, the eradication of superstition, and the cause of science. Importantly, he proclaimed the lightning rod a triumph for mankind because, with the conductor, man had learned to channel nature’s agency. Upon winning De Vissery’s case, Robespierre wrote to Franklin describing how the case “presented to me the occasion to plead . . . the cause of a sublime discovery, to which mankind is beholden to you.”101 Jacobin fascination with lightning conduction, both visual and biographical, provides a clue about their conception of revolutionary leadership. If Jacobins saw themselves as the voice of the people’s rage, they would do so, these images suggest, as a conducting instrument rather than as a vanguard. Similarly, these visual tropes measure the distance between Jacobin

46  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 1.5  Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Lightning from the Sky (c. 1816). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.

and absolutist approaches to nature. The latter is famously visualized at the outdoor gardens of Versailles (Figure 1.6). Its horticultural style beautifully illustrates eighteenth-​century absolutism’s vision of nature as raw material to be molded in conformity with rational, geometric patterns. In contrast to the domination of nature through geometric abstractions, the revolution would be more scientific. Instead of waging war on nature, it would wage war with nature’s agency. It would found a society that drew on nature’s moral unity and redemptive agency beyond positive law. This sustained involvement with eighteenth-​century scientific culture helps explain why Jacobins—​many of whom were “natural philosophers”

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  47

Figure 1.6  P. Prieur, “Carte du château & jardin de Versailles, Plan géométral et descriptif ” (1750). Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

themselves—​refused to accept regicide as the outcome of a legal trial. Revolutionary leaders were searching for a new vocabulary of collective, democratic agency, and they found one in the esteemed discourses of nature which saturated French scientific culture. These depictions of natural

48  The Virtues of Violence disasters captured the felt experience of popular sovereignty. From the storming of the Bastille, to the women’s March on Versailles, to the attack on the Tuileries, popular agency truly did appear like lightning: a flash of popular power that reasserted natural morality against social disequilibrium. Because the people’s agency extended that of nature’s, their agency naturally took the form of extrajudicial, spontaneous violence. Their will manifested, not through positive law, but as a regenerative natural disaster—​a flood, volcanic eruption, or thunderbolt. Those disasters possessed a temporality opposite to that of the law: immediate rather than prolonged, spontaneous rather than mediated. Hence, if the king were to die under the sign of the law, after the tarrying of a trial and an appeal to primary assemblies, it would be evidence that he was killed by something other than the people. The king’s trial was therefore also a drama about the nature of democratic agency. What does action by “the people” actually look like? What is its proper form of expression? Jacobins answered that the people’s redemptive agency manifested as a natural disaster. That belief shaped their approach to the king’s trial. Regicide as redemptive violence could satisfy the need for a new social body upon the death of the royal corpus mysticum. It would become the premier weapon of revolutionary democracy, the unique type of violence possessed by the people.

Conclusion On 11 December, Louis finally appeared before his prosecutors at the bar of the Convention. In preparation, the Commune was declared in permanent session. All of the popular sections took up arms. To communicate the world-​historical significance of the day’s proceedings, Barère addressed the audience as session president:  “Representatives, you are going to exercise the right of national justice. . . . Europe observes you. History records your thoughts, your actions. Incorruptible posterity judges you with an inflexible severity. . . . The dignity of your session must answer to the majesty of the French people. Through your body, it will give a great lesson to kings and a useful example for the liberation of nations.”102 Upon Louis’s seating, Jean-​Baptiste Robert Lindet read to him the acte énonciatif, or prosecutorial statement. Lindet’s statement, compiled with a committee of twenty-​one, described the king’s crimes committed at each of the revolution’s stages. It was a damning accusation. Rhetorically, it took the form of a history of the

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  49 revolution with “the people,” and not the Assembly or the Convention, as its protagonist. Louis was asked to comment on each charge. He denied them all. After the frustrating appearance, the Convention gave Louis and his lawyers—​two esteemed senior lawyers, Lamoignon de Malesherbes (great-​ grandfather to Alexis de Tocqueville) and François Denis Tronchet, as well as the young Raymond de Sèze—​two weeks to prepare his legal defense. When the vote was called on 15 January 1793, convention members were presented with three questions. The first concerned Louis’s culpability. It asked, “Louis Capet, former king of the French, is he guilty of conspiring against liberty and attacking the safety of the state? Yes or No.” Of 749 conventionnels present, 691 voted yes. Another 27 made various speeches which were tallied as abstentions. In the end, there was never any question as to Louis’s guilt and the sovereignty of “the nation.” The second question was more contentious, for it concerned the appeal to the people. It asked the following: “The judgment which will be rendered to Louis, will it undergo a ratification by the people united in their primary assemblies? Yes or No.” Whereas many convention members offered long qualifications or accounts of why they voted one way or another, St. Just said simply, “If I did not retain from the people the right to judge the tyrant, I would hold it from nature. No.”103 Of the conventionnels present, 287 voted in favor of the appeal to the people, 424 against, with 12 abstentions. In the end, the Convention chose to have the king punished immediately rather than have its judgment relitigated by primary assemblies around France. It was a major victory for the Jacobins and marked their triumphant ascendance in the Convention.104 The final question was tabled for the next day, and its resolution took so long that roll call voting lasted until the next morning of 17 January. The question asked, “What punishment will Louis, the former king of the French, receive?” Here, answers did not always observe party lines or ideological expectations. Marat answered “Death in 24 hours.” Robespierre and Danton simply said “Death,” but so did Girondins like Vergniaud. On the other hand, radicals like Paine voted against death, proposing instead that the former king be sent to America as punishment. The exact vote tally here has been a matter of dispute among historians because of the challenges with interpreting certain votes. However, there was a straightforward majority plus one who voted death with no qualifications or amendments. Vergniaud announced the results: “I declare, in the name of the national Convention . . . that the punishment that is pronounced against Louis Capet is that of death.”105

50  The Virtues of Violence Except for his two appearances before the Convention’s bar—​to hear the acte énonciatif and to observe De Sèze read his legal defense—​Louis had spent the entirety of the trial’s duration imprisoned in the Temple with his family. There, he gave his son daily geography lessons while keeping a copy of The Imitation of Christ at his bedside. But on 21 January 1793, he was marched to the scaffold where Sanson, the executioner of Paris, guillotined him. At the decapitation, the crowd shouted vive la nation and vive la république while a few cut their own throats. Depending on the account, the crowd either cheered or groaned as Louis the Last’s head plopped into the basket. Onlookers snatched up scraps of the king’s bloodied shroud, souvenirs of monarchy’s end (Figures 1.7 and 1.8). In the end, the Jacobin arguments failed. A trial was held, and Louis died under the sign of the law. But though they lost the battle, they would continue pursuing the regeneration of society through civic festivals, public education, the militarism of the wars of liberty, and the Terror. Moreover,

Figure 1.7  Sarcifu, “Fin tragique de Louis XVI” (1793). Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Regicide and Redemptive Violence  51

Figure 1.8  Villeneuve, “Matiere à reflection pour les jongleurs couronnées” (1793). The image of regeneration is clear in the caption, taken from the Marseillaise: “Let impure blood water our furrows.” Trustees of the British Museum.

their representation of revolutionary violence as redemptive would persist beyond the Revolution. As the remainder of this book shows, redemptive violence as a language of popular agency passes into the hands of engaged intellectuals across the spectrum throughout the nineteenth century and

52  The Virtues of Violence beyond. Liberals, socialists, Catholic intellectuals, and anarchists will draw a causal connection between popular violence and social regeneration as they search for their own paths to modern republican democracy. This longer view of redemptive violence underscores how the king’s trial was much more than a historical event. It raised a question that would become fundamental to modern democratic politics: How should we conceive the social bond in an age of democracy? Looking back on the long nineteenth century, Jean Jaurès put it this way:  “The blow that was delivered by the Revolution against monarchy, a profound and decisive blow, and the feelings of pity, the fleeting reappearances of counter-​revolution, would not prevail against the force of that sovereign act. Kings might briefly return, but they would henceforth be nothing but ghosts. France, their France, is eternally regicide.”106 We do not have to endorse Jacobin arguments to appreciate how they were among the first to understand this fact: democracy is as much a claim about sociality as it is a set of political institutions. It names not only a political regime, but a form of society. That is why democratic revolution cannot avoid regenerating the social bond.

2 From Glory to Total War in Algeria A diplomatic kerfuffle provided a pretext for the French to invade Algiers in 1830: two years earlier, the dey of Algiers had swiped the French ambassador with a flywhisk. Behind this flimsy excuse lay the fact that a powerful liberal opposition confronted the Restoration government. Legitimists hoped conquering Algiers would repair the monarchy’s reputation in time for national elections. The gamble failed. Within months, a revolution replaced the Restoration government with “Citizen-​ King” Louis-​ Philippe’s July Monarchy, a liberal regime which promised to synthesize popular sovereignty with royal rule. Despite its liberal credentials, the July Monarchy did not return Algiers. On the contrary, it appropriated the Bourbon conquest for itself.1 In 1840, the regime embarked on its quest for settler colonization in earnest. Political leaders appointed a new Governor-​General to Algiers, Thomas Robert Bugeaud. They also reorganized the army around light mobile columns, the better to terrorize the local population. French soldiers razed, pillaged, massacred, and raped the tribal communities. Thanks to Bugeaud’s new and controversial style of “total war,” the local population dwindled. During the next decade and a half, France’s celebrated Armée d’Afrique exterminated almost half of the local population. Their numbers fell from 4 million to 2.3 million. It would take a half century for the Algerian population to return to pre-​1830 levels.2 Alexis de Tocqueville met Bugeaud and his staff during his first visit to Algeria in the summer of 1841. During a lunch in Philippeville, Colonel Arsène d’Alphonse explained to the visitor that “Nothing but force and terror, Gentlemen, succeeds with these people. The other day a murder was committed on the road. An Arab who was suspected of it was brought to me. I interrogated him and then I had his head cut off. You can see his head on the Constantine gates.”3 Tocqueville expressed dismay with the Colonel’s candor toward terror, but, even so, he was keen to excuse it. Upon returning to France, Tocqueville would write, “I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, The Virtues of Violence. Kevin Duong, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190058418.001.0001

54  The Virtues of Violence that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children.” Although he found such actions regrettable, Tocqueville nevertheless insisted that, “For myself, I think that all means of desolating these tribes must be employed.”4 On occasion, Tocqueville’s excuses for Bugeaud’s terror extended beyond reluctant apologies to silent, tacit approval. In June 1845, the Armée d’Afrique chased hundreds of locals from the Oulad Riah tribe into the caves of Dahra. Fleeing families believed the caves offered divine sanctuary. Pressed for time, Colonel Aimable Pélissier commanded his soldiers to block the cave entrance with pyres, asphyxiating and melting the families inside with their livestock. Colonel Saint Arnaud mimicked these enfumades in the following months “on grounds that salutary terror would hasten the pacification” of locals.5 When the violence at Dahra publicly broke in France, it provoked widespread denunciation of Bugeaud’s tactics within the Chamber of Deputies and across Europe. Tocqueville—​France’s foremost expert on the Algerian question—​nevertheless remained silent in the Chamber and in his private letters.6 It is now commonplace to acknowledge Tocqueville’s support for the colonization of Algeria. Isaiah Berlin’s once proud claim that the paradigmatic French liberal “opposed paternalism and colonialism . . . no matter how benevolent” has yielded to a new consensus that, in Jennifer Pitts’s words, Tocqueville “embrace[d]‌imperialism as a kind of national salvation” because it provided a source of greatness, and for Tocqueville, “Greatness and liberty were mutually necessary.”7 Indeed, scholars now agree that if Tocqueville’s “susceptibility to the notion of national glory as a substitute for political virtue” contradicted other cardinal values he held, it was nevertheless consistent with the overriding importance he placed on politics.8 Colonialism offered a glorious political antidote to French society’s materialism and mediocrity. Its “higher politics of patriotic grandeur” helped vivify public interests and consolidate a democratic political culture at home.9 During the 1840s, Tocqueville would insist on these claims like a catechism. Given these frequent observations of Tocqueville’s desire for glory, however, it is surprising that scholars have yet to connect that attachment to the specific shape violence took in Algeria: total war. To be sure, there has been much debate on how to best characterize his apologies for violence. Early critics often took them to be evidence that Tocqueville’s “liberalism could not be squared with his colonialism” and that “he betrays his own analysis of

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  55 the dangers of war.”10 More recent studies have shown them to be consistent with the larger context in which his liberalism took shape, that “it would be a mistake to see the Algerian writings as merely an illiberal moment in Tocqueville’s thought.”11 Yet what is so striking about Tocqueville’s colonial writings is not only that he justified colonialism or even violence. A  wide range of strategic justifications were readily available for both. What calls for explanation is instead the deeper and more troubling problem of justifying colonial warfare’s escalation into total war. Given the excess of Bugeaud’s exterminationist “force and terror,” why would Tocqueville praise it in 1847 as “a war conducted ably and gloriously”?12 After all, even if colonialism was easily justified in the 1840s, defending exterminationist violence was not. The French initially preferred agrarian settlerism because it was designed to be a pacific alternative to colonialism based on violent chattel slavery. That was why Tocqueville saw no inconsistency in advocating for slavery’s abolition while defending colonization in North Africa. Even more, when settlerism turned out to require violence, it demanded an unfamiliar form of warfare at odds with the traditional type authorized by the laws of nations: two armies fighting on behalf of sovereigns equipped with equivalent claims to right. That classical image of warfare insisted on “humanizing combat as much as possible, minimizing its destructive force, and treating the defenseless—​women, children, and disarmed enemy combatants—​generously.”13 But as Tocqueville was well aware, French military leaders discarded these familiar conventions in the African war theater. From the outset of his program of total domination in 1841, Bugeaud implemented “a new theory of war”—​total war—​in which the antagonist was no longer an enemy army, but the foreign population itself.14 There was nothing obviously defensible about this type of violence, no intuitive method for defending its scope and reach. Its novelty demanded new arguments. This essay aims to unearth Tocqueville’s contributions to those arguments. It tries to understand how he could not only defend colonialism but also the specific shape colonial violence took in Algeria—​environmental, terroristic, and exterminationist.15 In what follows, I argue that Tocqueville’s justification of Bugeaud’s total war was shaped by his desire for modern national glory. Premodern glory was often associated with the legislator, statesmen, or God. Its archetypes included warriors like Achilles or great founders like Lycurgus. But for those who came of age during and after Napoleon, modern glory was exemplified by everyday citizens defending the nation. It belonged to the people. Glory’s

56  The Virtues of Violence democratization was rooted in the historical memory of the revolutionary wars of liberty (1792–​1802), which were imagined to be defensive wars by soldats-​citoyens on behalf of a persecuted republican universalism. It reached its apotheosis in Bonapartist militarism, which defined the glory of citizens in terms of what Sudhir Hazareesingh has called “defensive patriotism.”16 In this revolutionary imaginary, there could be no greater glory than when “the people” rose up in mighty defense of the patrie en danger. Indeed, such defensive moments were opportunities for what Thomas Hippler describes as the people’s immanent self-​creation.17 Tocqueville developed a surprising appreciation for this model of national glory. This appreciation, as we will see, was sourced in his enduring fear of democratic social disintegration. Tocqueville feared democratization was creating a société en poussière, an “atomized” society. The equality of conditions had not only dispersed land and power; it was also turning citizens inward, away from one another and the public realm. National glory offered a method for mitigating this because, as Robert Morrissey has argued, “the emotion and enthusiasm kindled by glory were seen as generators of social bonds, even of fraternity.”18 This passion for national glory, in turn, shaped Tocqueville’s attitude toward colonial warfare. Tocqueville’s approach to settlerism evolved over the course of the July Monarchy, and, as it did so, he brought colonial warfare closer to these Bonapartist representations of glorious, defensive violence. Patrick Wolfe has argued that settlerism can either “integrate” or “exterminate” native populations. Rather than describing competing strategies of colonial governance, both articulate a common “logic of elimination” that racializes indigenous populations in ways that undercut their title to the land.19 Tocqueville, indeed, had been an early advocate of peaceful integration between the French and “Moslem civilization” in Africa. Before his first trip to Algeria, he argued that French colonialism ought “to form a single people from two races.”20 However, after 1841, he abandoned integration for extermination by designing culturalist explanations of why integration would fail: “the Arab tribes’ passions of religion and depredation always lead them to wage war on us.”21 These explanations attributed integration’s failures to the intransigent hostility of the Muslim social state rather than the limited universality of French values. They also made Arabs culpable for undermining the prospects of peaceful integration. The consequence was not only a shift in colonial

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  57 policy from integration to extermination, but also a deflection of responsibility for colonial war to native society. Once native society was blamed for integration’s failures, settlerism’s violence could be brought closer to familiar images of defensive war. Bugeaud could defend his terrifying “seas of fire” as strategically compulsory: “Gentlemen, you don’t make war with philanthropic sentiments. If you want the end, you have to want the means.”22 The Armée d’Afrique could be praised as defenders of a patrie en danger, even a glorious reincarnation of the Spartans besieged at Thermopylae. Just as Republicans and Bonapartists had once imagined imperial expansion as a defensive battle against monarchical Europe, Algiers could be reimagined as an oasis of civilized liberty caught in a defensive battle against a hostile Muslim culture. Despite all of its shortcomings—​and Tocqueville believed there were many—​Algerian colonization could become an occasion to erect a “monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.”23 Heightening our focus on African total war therefore reveals the proper context for understanding Tocqueville’s colonial writings: not just the normative contradictions of his liberalism, but also his anxieties over democratic social disintegration. Indeed, it shifts our attention more broadly to the psychic dimensions of democratization and the ways French thinkers diagnosed and responded to its fragmentation of self and society. If scholars have long appreciated the role of national glory in Tocqueville’s colonial writings, it is still important to see how that glory answered social disintegration and, in turn, shaped the type of violence Tocqueville was prepared to endorse: a defensive war against native society itself. And if exterminationist violence was never anything like a necessary solution to democratic social disintegration, it was at least enabled by the terms in which the problem was posed. After all, excess beyond instrumental reason is one of the “basic components” of glory.24 For both Tocqueville and the political culture of which he was a part, colonial aggression could be assimilated to Napoleonic fantasies of imperial expansion as public-​spirited self-​defense. Patrick Wolfe may be right that empires are driven to total war by settlerism’s implacable “logic of elimination,” but what allowed Tocqueville to make peace with that war was his passion for modern glory. It was a passion, Tocqueville had argued, without which the forces of social disintegration in France could not be checked.

58  The Virtues of Violence

The Psychology of Social Disintegration Tocqueville’s fixation on glory grew out of a liberal republican tradition forged in a post-​Terror France anxious about social disintegration. Like their English counterparts, French liberals from Benjamin Constant to the Doctrinaires prioritized “the liberty of the moderns.” Constant had immortalized the term, and it was vulgarized in François Guizot’s infamous prescription, enrichissez-​vous! Andrew Jainchill explains that such a commitment entailed “the conviction that ‘the social’ took precedence over ‘the political.’ ‘Society,’ ‘commerce,’ ‘public opinion,’ or some other such figuration of the social would come first, and thus politics would reflect, rather than shape, a prior social reality.”25 Thanks to the revolution, however, liberals in France were also preoccupied with mitigating society’s dissolution in the age of democracy. In their view, the revolution had bequeathed to France the twin legacies of political centralization and social atomization. In abolishing the society of orders, the revolution emancipated individuals from the hierarchical bonds of the ancien régime. But it also left citizens with no bonds with which to cohere other than the state. Thus, as Larry Siedentop has argued, French liberals believed that “the growth of state power was intrinsically connected with the atomisation of society.”26 Indeed, Pierre-​Paul Royer-​ Collard, a leading Doctrinaire and mentor to Tocqueville, explicitly named this problem as the “atomization” of society in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies in 1822.27 Postrevolutionary anxieties over social disintegration meant that, unlike many Anglo-​American liberals who imagined society to be an equilibrium of conflicting private interests, liberals in France maintained that there could be no “people” without a common interest to unite them. It was why the liberal paper Le National could complain that “Deprived of all moral unity, profoundly indifferent to the general interest, broken up and reduced to powder like the sand of the seas by the most narrow egoism, the French people is a people in name only.”28 In the French political tradition, peoplehood depended on individuals identifying with the general interest. At times, that belief would lead liberals to endorse nationalism. Constant would, in fact, become an early supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte; Sieyès would help engineer the latter’s coup d’état. The anxiety over social disintegration also led French liberals to the latest currents of social scientific thinking: the rise of sociological and anthropological theories of kinship, the ascendance of the comparative historical method, new organic conceptions of society which

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  59 displaced the probabilistic conceptions of the eighteenth century, and the displacement of natural law theory by psychology and political economy as the premier sciences of society. In other words, it was no accident that the postrevolutionary origins of French liberalism intersected with the invention of modern social theory.29 For all they obviously disagreed with the Jacobins, French liberals were also responding to the democratization of the social, making them arguably “the first truly sociological idiom” of political theory.30 Like others of his generation, Tocqueville was anxious about the democratization of the social. His visit to America with Gustave de Beaumont in 1831 provided him his first major occasion to diagnose its causes and consequences. In Democracy in America, he joined Royer-​ Collard in observing that equality of conditions brought with it individualisme or la société en poussière. Since the Restoration, socialists like Saint-​Simon had identified individualism as an antisocial, acquisitive disposition fostered by market competition. Tocqueville agreed that material forces were partly responsible for contemporary atomization. He was especially preoccupied with the abolition of primogeniture which fragmented the social in observable ways (DA 55–​57, 484).31 At the same time, Tocqueville’s investigations in America revealed that the French Revolution could not be exclusively responsible for la société en poussière. French revolutionaries may have abolished seigniorial privileges for individualistic private property on the night of 4 August 1789. They may have passed the Loi Le Chapelier in 1791, which proscribed voluntary associations as unconstitutional, seditious, and in violation of the rights of man. But, unlike France, America had not undergone a social revolution, and it, too, showed symptoms of individualisme. In the clarity of its democratic experience, Tocqueville believed he could glean atomization’s deeper causes and which connected France and America in a common, providential pattern of history: the equality of conditions and the ascendance of middle class values like materialism, petty self-​interest, and diffidence to politics and public ventures—​in a word, embourgeoisement. It is noteworthy, for example, that Tocqueville’s portrait of atomization in America placed the accent on its psychological aspects. For all the analytical importance he assigned to power and property’s centrifugal dispersion, it was its impact on the psyche that captured his attention. He worried that man had “withdrawn into himself ” and was living “virtually [as] a stranger to that of all others.” In such a state, citizens had become isolated, adrift, and

60  The Virtues of Violence deprived of the inner fortitude that genuine moral conviction conferred. Self-​interest was reduced from a vector for public concern (“self-​interest rightly understood”) to atomizing “petty and vulgar pleasures.” With the ties between private and public interests snapped, man may live “alongside [his fellow citizens] but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them.” Led only by narrow self-​interest, “He exists only in himself and for himself ” (DA 818). His mind becomes “nothing more than intellectual dust, blown about by every wind and unable to coalesce into any fixed shape” (DA 487) or, alternately, the “shifting, impalpable dust, on which democracy rests” (DA 54). Nor was Tocqueville immune to these effects himself. He complained bitterly about his loneliness and isolation and believed himself born “too late,” having missed the era of great statesmanship.32 The heights of political passion, such as they were known in the age of Robespierre and Napoleon, had been supplanted by trivial commercial interests. Political life under the July Monarchy had been reduced to a “game in which each person seeks only to win.”33 For all its benefits, the equality of conditions had cheapened the meaning of politics. The measure of individualism’s danger depended on context. In his published writing and private correspondence, Tocqueville observed that the consequences of equality in France differed from those he witnessed in America. Tocqueville’s discussion of individualism in Democracy in America had been surprisingly qualified. He lamented the atomizing effects of citizen withdrawal into their private spheres but believed social mediocrity for all was preferable to excellence for the few. Although the equality of conditions enabled two unprecedented forms of domination—​the tyranny of public opinion and democratic despotism by “an immense tutelary power”—​he also suggested that, in America at least, equality’s effects were self-​limiting in practice. Americans were led by self-​seeking legislators, but those legislators were mediocre and less dangerous; there was less cultural genius but more overall education to help cultivate the practical arts; religious passion was attenuated, but its importance to American social life was axiomatic. Yet when his eyes turned to France, Tocqueville’s evaluation darkened. If individualism presented a self-​moderating condition in America, it was leading to national degeneration in France. Thus, in an 1837 letter to Royer-​ Collard, Tocqueville despaired of “the sorry intrigues to which our society is delivered in our day, the despicable charlatans who exploit it, the almost universal pettiness that reigns over it and above all the astonishing absence of disinterestedness and even of personal interest.”34 In an 1841 letter to John

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  61 Stuart Mill written while France was embroiled in the Eastern Question, Tocqueville bemoaned French impotence and degeneration: I do not have to tell you, my dear Mill, that the greatest malady that threatens a people organized as we are is the gradual softening of mores, the abasement of the mind, the mediocrity of tastes; that is where the great dangers of the future lie. One cannot let a nation that is democratically constituted like ours and in which the natural vices of the race unfortunately coincide with the natural vices of the social state, one cannot let this nation take up easily the habit of sacrificing what it believes to be its grandeur to its repose, great matters to petty ones; it is not healthy to allow such a nation to believe that its place in the world is smaller, that it is fallen from the level on which its ancestors had put it, but that it must console itself by making railroads and by making prosper in the bosom of this peace, under whatever condition this peace is obtained, the well-​being of each private individual. It is necessary that those who march at the head of such a nation should always keep a proud attitude, if they do not wish to allow the level of national mores to fall very low.35

Readers familiar with the traditional portrait of Tocqueville as a moderate liberal, keen on protecting individual liberty from the extremes of revolution and nationalist chauvinism, may be surprised to read such bellicose words. Mill was certainly caught off guard. He chided the Frenchman for his immature attachments to inflated notions of national pride. Yet in his private correspondence, Tocqueville was a consistent advocate for nationalism. “National pride,” Tocqueville wrote to Royer-​Collard in 1840, may be “puerile and boastful,” but it “is still the greatest sentiment that we have and the strongest tie that holds this nation together.”36 The traditional ennobling valuation of great action had yielded to trivial concerns about security and well-​ being in France. Individualistic interests had displaced the passion for the common good. Tocqueville’s choice to attribute atomization to democratic embourgeoisement at large rather than the revolution in particular had roots in a wider French revolt against the sensationalist psychology of John Locke.37 That fact has not yet received the attention it deserves, even though it helps explain why French liberals departed from their Anglophone colleagues in repudiating the latter’s vision of society as an ensemble of private interests.38 Locke had critiqued the existence of “innate ideas” in An Essay Concerning

62  The Virtues of Violence Human Understanding (1690). He claimed that all knowledge derived from sensory experience, which language organized and indexed for the purposes of drawing logically consistent inferences. Although Locke’s argument would ground British empiricism, its impact was different in France. Whereas the British (and Voltaire) viewed the Essay’s argument as a triumph of reason over prejudice, in the 1730s, a Lockean-​inspired Newtonianism appeared in the French academies that interpreted the critique of innate ideas differently: if all knowledge derives from sense perception, sensation rather than reason grounds knowledge. This doctrine was called “sensationalism” in France.39 Tocqueville was involved with the critique of sensationalism by both temperament and personal filiation. He was acquainted with Victor Cousin, the foremost French philosopher of the mid-​ nineteenth century and sensationalism’s greatest critic. A normalien, Cousin had been recruited to the circle of Doctrinaires by Royer-​Collard. He later succeeded the latter as a philosophy professor at the University of Paris. Cousin also served on the Restoration’s Council of Public Instruction and shaped the philosophical curriculum for generations of students. His lectures on the history of philosophy were considered major events among the educated public.40 Cousin criticized Locke’s sensationalism for portraying the psyche as something passive and fragmented. A tabula rasa, the Lockean self was limited to reproducing within the mind fragmentary sensations impinging from without. “It is certain,” Cousin conceded, that “upon the first examination of consciousness, we perceive a succession of phenomena which, decomposed into their elements, may be traced back to sensation.” However, “if everything in man is reduced to sensation, then everything is reduced to enjoyment and suffering; avoiding pain and seeking pleasure would be the sole rule of our conduct. . . . This system is that of the Sensual school.”41 Criticizing sensationalism was no mere philosophical quibble. Its account of the psyche as fragmented and ruled by sensations paralleled the atomization brought about the equality of conditions. There was a reciprocal relation, in other words, between the psychic and the social: sensationalism was a philosophy of mind symptomatic of an age of democratic disintegration. For these reasons, mitigating atomism required replacing the Lockean subject.42 Cousin sought to provide that new postrevolutionary self by “showing that personality, the ‘me’ is at bottom free and voluntary activity.”43 He encouraged citizens to rediscover voluntarism by remembering that experiences like the inner will “clearly had no source in perception.” They were instead “volitional facts,” essentially psychological, and “which

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  63 sensation by no mean explains.”44 By discovering this voluntarist self as the starting point of psychology, philosophy could offer a new psychic anchor for modern society. Liberty itself was at stake. As Cousin explained, “To place ourselves beyond the conditions of sense, to will, without regard for its consequences . . . this is true liberty.” If a person could “hold the will within himself ” and “let it act without outward manifestation,” if a person could avoid “marking [their] will with sensual effects,” then he or she would “be completely emancipated from the material world.”45 Tocqueville was acquainted with Cousin’s work. He was only a degree removed from Cousin and his associates. He also held Cousin’s writing in high esteem. Years later, he would chastise Arthur de Gobineau for not appreciating his contemporaries, asking, “what better writer than Cousin” was there in France? 46 It is thus not surprising that Tocqueville dedicates several sections in Democracy in America to explaining skepticism’s deleterious consequences for social cohesion. After all, besides defending the voluntarist personalité, Cousin was preoccupied with denouncing the ways sensationalism led to skepticism (“To limit philosophy to observation [of sensations] is, whether we know it or not, to place it in the path to skepticism.”)47 In those sections, Tocqueville claimed the sensationalist epistemology of the eighteenth century “destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the master” (DA 485). If individuals believed only what their senses conveyed, they would lose access to “a certain number of ready-​made beliefs” without which “men may still exist, but they will not constitute a social body.” For the social body to cohere, it needed to be “held together by certain leading ideas” that were drawn “from the same source” (DA 489–​90). Readers of Democracy in America would have had little trouble connecting Tocqueville’s discussion of skepticism to wider debates over sensationalism’s socially disintegrating effects. Alongside Cousin, François Guizot taught Tocqueville that the psychic and the social were interdependent.48 Guizot was an esteemed historian, Doctrinaire, and Minister of the Interior under Louis-​Philippe. Known for advocating “liberalism through the state,” Guizot and Cousin were close.49 Together with Royer-​Collard, the two intellectuals were involved in the circle of Maine de Biran, a philosopher dedicated to theorizing voluntarism.50 They worked together as the principal voices of the journal Le Globe before it transferred to Saint-​Simonians. Importantly, Guizot also taught Tocqueville. Beginning in 1828—​the same year as Cousin’s famous Sorbonne lectures on the history of philosophy—​Guizot offered lectures on the history

64  The Virtues of Violence of civilization. For two years, Tocqueville travelled from Versailles to Paris each week to attend the historian’s lectures. Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe was the only book Tocqueville requested upon landing in America. He and Beaumont carried it with them as they travelled, using its categories to frame their observations. In these lectures, Guizot claimed that civilization was much more than a collection of social facts. It consisted, rather, in “two elements”: inner moral development and external social progress. Civilization existed at the intersection of these two domains, just as men, according to Cousin, “live . . . on the confines of two separate kingdoms [inner freedom and outward necessity], of which we form the mysterious union.”51 The subjective moral life and objective social conditions of peoples were linked such that “Wherever the external condition of man extends itself, vivifies, ameliorates itself; wherever the internal nature of man displays itself with lustre, with grandeur; at these two signs, and often despite the profound imperfection of the social state, mankind with loud applause proclaims civilization.”52 Guizot was at pains to emphasize that the “social development and the moral development” of Europe must be seen as “closely connected together,” as possessing “so intimate and necessary a relation between them” that they “reciprocally produce” one another. Indeed, that interplay made regeneration possible. Just as Christianity had “regenerated the moral man,” equality of conditions had “changed and regenerated society” by altering “his external condition.”53 To a French intellectual listening to Cousin and Guizot in the late 1820s, two related implications would have stood out. First, as Guizot argued, if moral and social regeneration “reciprocally produced” one another, then social regeneration would have to pass through the regeneration of the people’s inner moral life. Second, as Cousin claimed, if that inner life was not the passive subject of sensationalism but a unified volitional power, then moral regeneration would require engineering contexts in which that volitional moi could be cultivated. The people would need to relearn how “to will, without regard for its consequences.” Put simply, in the intellectual context in which Tocqueville entered politics, if a psychological antidote to la société en poussière suggested itself, it was the pursuit of glory. * * * Tocqueville’s taste for glory, greatness, and grandeur were well known. In an 1837 letter to Royer-​Collard, Tocqueville condemned the “almost universal

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  65 pettiness” that robbed France of its “grandeur” and “brilliance.”54 In an 1840 letter to Gustave de Beaumont, he reminded his friend, “You know what a taste I have for great events and how tired I am of our little democratic and bourgeois pot of soup.”55 Fifteen years later, he was still complaining that however “wealthy, sophisticated, attractive, even impressive” a democracy might be, without an active citizenry, it would not have “great citizens, still less a great nation.”56 Tocqueville was so keen on greatness that, despite his antipathy to Napoleon’s despotism, he respected him. Guizot had already nominated glory as a countermeasure to social etiolation in his lectures, yet his appreciation of national grandeur had done nothing to allay his animosity toward the emperor’s legacy, and, undoubtedly, Tocqueville shared that hostility to “the nonliberal side of [Napoleon’s] institutions.” But that hostility did not prevent Tocqueville from appealing to the passions the general inspired to revivify the French psyche. He extoled to Paul Clamorgan the emperor’s grandeur, calling him “the most extraordinary being . . . who has appeared in the world for many centuries.”57 In an unfinished study of the French Revolution, he would add in praise that Napoleon knew how “to direct enthusiasm” to “[make] people die in battle.” Unlike Tocqueville’s effete generation, Napoleon understood that “high passion [was] always needed to revivify the human spirit, which otherwise decays and rots. It would have never occurred to [Napoleon] to make hearts and spirits concentrate merely on their individual welfare.”58 At least two reasons explain why Tocqueville comfortably invoked the Napoleonic legacy. First, the American solution to atomization—​ associational politics—​ was not available to the French. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville showed that associational activity curbed individualisme by providing citizens concrete ways of exercising political participation and self-​rule (DA 67–​78). Civic associations like local townships conveyed self-​seeking individuals toward public affairs so that, in pursuing their own concerns, Americans would naturally link their private interests to that of the public, political realm. In contrast, townships in France mitigated individualism by crushing it with a statist vision of the good. Devoid of the American impulse toward limited government, French municipal politics had become centralized, leading citizens to a dull administrative obedience rather than active participatory citizenship (DA 75, 98–​100). Indeed, associations served altogether different functions in Europe. “[If] there are peoples among whom the freedom to unite is purely beneficial and a source of

66  The Virtues of Violence prosperity,” Tocqueville explained, “there are others who pervert it through abuse.” He meant the French, who “still look upon associations as weapons of war.” Where American associations offered “schools of liberty,” the French saw “freedom of association as nothing more than the right to make war on the government” (DA 220–​222). The second reason Tocqueville could turn to the Napoleonic legacy was that its nationalism counteracted the embourgeoisement that afflicted French culture. Unlike the realities of imperial rule, Bonapartism’s popular legacy idealized voluntarism and public-​spiritedness. As Hazareesingh has explained, “Restoration Bonapartism represented a collective French yearning for political unity and social cohesion.  .  .  . But it also expressed something more subversive: the desire for greater public involvement in the collective life of the nation.”59 Depending on how it was understood, Richard Boyd continues, Bonapartism could “simultaneously appear as anathema and apotheosis of liberalism.”60 Forged from the historical memories of the wars of liberty, popular Bonapartism had grown into a generic language of political dissent that foregrounded voluntarism, virtue, egalitarianism, and selfless sacrifice for the patrie. It became “a left-​wing code word,” even “a manifesto for political freedom and the elimination of privileges associated with the Ancien Régime.”61 Thus, even if Bonapartism continued to name a specific party affiliation, its normative representation of democratic violence appealed across ideological divides because it offered something much more: “a renewable legacy and the basis of a truly national culture.”62 Far from conflicting with liberal republican thought, many like Tocqueville found something to appreciate in popular Bonapartism. Underlining Bonapartism’s novelty is important. Tocqueville’s praise of glory has often been interpreted as an aristocratic “corrective” to his liberalism, even anachronistic. Scholars like Robert Morrissey, for example, have emphasized glory as a cardinal value of aristocratic, old-​regime political culture.63 Hence Tocqueville’s idealization of it is characterized by critics like Roger Boesche and Lucien Jaume as a kind of aristocratic supplement.64 Yet Tocqueville’s appreciation of the Napoleonic legacy urges us to appreciate how modern and liberal love of glory could be. In Machiavelli, love of gloria was typically bound up with the “one man ordinatore.”65 In Hobbes, glory belonged to God. In the hands of citizens, it was a source of anarchy, not social cohesion.66 And glory was typically the possession of heroic individuals in Greek antiquity.67 But the glory celebrated in revolutionary republicanism and extended by Bonapartist militarism was different. Neither the possession

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  67 of the prince, legislator, or God, it could now be the property of citizens defending the nation. Battles like Valmy in September 1792 had proved that the people had earned their own idiom of glory. Even Morrissey, who characterizes Bonapartism as a continuation of old regime values, concludes that it appealed to modern thinkers because it transcended the opposition between virtue and interest. “Here we are in a world not of contracts, but of exuberance and enthusiasm,” he suggests. “In this world there was no longer a need to think about the Revolution in rational, contractual terms; what mattered was to accomplish it by acting in according with man’s fundamental nature, at the heart of which were freedom and the potential for grandeur.” Indeed, glory’s intrinsic connection to voluntarism, to the triumph of spiritual freedom over physical determinism, made it for many French thinkers “the ontological center of a regenerated man.” It allowed the Moderns to triumph over the Ancients by transcending their rational, contractual model of the social bond to a moral, experiential one.68 Tocqueville was forthright on the modernity of national glory. Comparing the public monuments of old Europe with those in America, he observed that American monuments differed from the former in both form and function. Where aristocratic monuments drew attention to the heroic individual or courtly grandeur, democratic monuments praised the greatness of the people qua the state. That was why Americans who were otherwise individualistic and self-​seeking nevertheless “nurse[d]‌gigantic ambitions when they turn[ed] their attention to public monuments” (DA 536). If public monuments were decorative or ornamental accoutrements to royal power under absolutism, in democracies, they were essentially pedagogical instruments of self-​awareness. They provided a means for the people to glory in their own agency. In memorializing the state, the people paid homage to themselves. Tocqueville acknowledged that expansive, public, and collective glory could threaten the local liberties he prized. A culture of public monumentality is only a short step away from unfettered statism. Yet Tocqueville believed the risk for democratic glory had to be taken. As he reiterated in his marginalia on public monuments in America: “in democracies the State must take charge of large and costly works not only because these large works are beautiful, but also in order to sustain the taste for what is great.”69 Tocqueville convinced himself that French liberals could fulfill this pedagogical project. The coming of democracy was like a great biblical flood. The task of modern liberalism was not to dam that flood but to navigate through and

68  The Virtues of Violence beyond it. “Democracy!” he wrote in his preparatory notes for Democracy in America, “Don’t you notice that these are the waters of the flood? Don’t you see them advance constantly by a slow and irresistible effort? . . . Instead of wanting to raise impotent dikes, let us seek rather to build the holy ark that must carry the human species over this ocean without shores.”70 Tocqueville therefore did not pursue glory because he was an aristocrat (though he was). He pursued it because he was a liberal. He detested French socialism’s “rehabilitation of the flesh,” which amounted to Lockean sensationalism run amok.71 He complained of utilitarianism, writing “Is it not obvious to you that belief everywhere is giving way to reasoning and sentiment to calculation?” (DA 274). Speaking of slavery’s abolition, he called for it to “be seen as the product of passion and not the result of calculation.”72 He fulminated to Royer-​Collard that “Reason has always been for me like a cage that keeps me from acting, but not from gnashing my teeth behind the bars.”73 This was the voice not of an aristocrat but of a modern liberal: a thinker eminently preoccupied with the psychological and social bases of modern liberty. If France’s citizens were to overcome psychological withdrawal, the state would need to foster a taste for glory, even if doing so was economically imprudent, maybe even because it was economically imprudent. It needed to encourage its citizens’ utilitarian self-​interest to grow into a voluntarist self capable of great public acts. How, then, to “sustain the taste for what is great”? How to seize glory to attach citizens to the public interest? In between the publication of Democracy in America’s two volumes, Tocqueville nominated one opportunity: “The future seems to me to be in our hands, and I shall tell you sincerely that with time, perseverance, ability, and justice, I have no doubt that we shall be able to raise a great monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.”74

The Glory of the Armée d’Afrique There were already hints that Tocqueville might turn to colonization for glory. Discussing the difficulties in finding proper statesmen to stand for election, Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that the greatest public monument to the people was the one illuminated by the fires of war and combat. a man facing urgent danger rarely remains as he was: he will either rise well above his habitual level or sink well below it. The same thing happens to

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  69 peoples. Extreme peril does not always impel a nation to rise to meet it; it is sometimes fatal. . . . In nations as well as individuals, however, it is more common to see the very imminence of danger act as midwife to extraordinary virtues. At such times great characters stand out as a monument hidden by the dark of night will stand out in the illumination of a blaze. (DA 228)

War, Tocqueville suggested, was one place where citizens could undergo the “inner moral regeneration” Guizot argued to be necessary for civilization. Perhaps if the French were “struck by the perils they face,” they could awaken to the public interest seemingly forgotten in the face of decadent economic self-​satisfaction. The year 1840 provided just that opportunity. That year, France commenced the domination of Algeria. Tocqueville and Beaumont immediately made plans to visit Africa to study its society. After some initial delays, Tocqueville left for Algiers with Beaumont from Toulon on 4 May 1841, landing in Algiers three days later. The two travelled the region for a month, interviewing General Bugeaud, his subordinates, and local Arabists.75 Already before the trip, Tocqueville had drafted a raft of essays criticizing contemporary anticolonial arguments and defending peaceful racial integration in the regency. In 1837, for example, he pondered, “how easy it is for the French, who are richer and more industrious than the Arabs, to occupy a large part of the soil without violence. . . . It is easy to predict a time in the near future when the two races will be intermixed in this way throughout much of the regency.”76 Settlerism based on nonviolent integration was plausible because Arabs were nearly civilized: “These, you will agree, are singular savages. What do they lack . . . to resemble civilized men entirely . . . ?” They even already possessed the institution of private property.77 After his trip with Beaumont to Algeria in 1841, however, Tocqueville’s attitude toward colonization hardened. Where he had once advocated for settlerism qua integration “to form a single people from two races,” Tocqueville now proposed differentiated legal systems and the violent conquest of indigenous populations.78 He turned his visit’s notes into a series of effective reports justifying his new position. Instead of opting for the British strategy of indirect rule in India, Tocqueville now recommended France “replace the former inhabitants with the conquering race.”79 The effort would be two-​pronged: domination and colonization. Domination entailed systematic violence, the destruction of indigenous homes and harvest, and systematic

70  The Virtues of Violence raids on Arab communities. Colonization named settlerism’s “constructive” prong. Spearheaded by institutions like the bureaux arabes, the French state would consolidate the rule of law, centralize government, offer language instruction and professional advancement for civil administrators, regulate property titles, and provide capital for new settler families to plow their land. Where other politicians recommended each prong separately or in sequence, Tocqueville insisted the two be pursued concurrently. “Colonization and war . . . must proceed together.”80 It was a stance he defended, albeit in varying degrees of ardor, even after his second trip to Algeria in 1846 as part of the Chamber of Deputies’ delegation. Tocqueville’s evolution from defending integration to domination can be partly explained by settlerism’s imperative for territorial expropriation. As Wolfe has argued, “territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”81 Whatever else settlerism is about, it is about access to land. Thus Tocqueville admitted that, however disquieting domination may be, settling French citizens required the expropriation of land and that meant “domination is the necessary means we must use.” Tocqueville conceded, almost as an aside, that he was “quite hostile to violent measures” but reminded his readers that “we must recognize that we shall never manage to possess the land around Algiers without the aid of a series of such measures.”82 Even so, Tocqueville’s justification for abandoning integration went beyond acknowledging the requirements of territorial conquest. Specifically, he defended domination by appealing to the demands of glory, which he believed to be the overriding principle of French geopolitical expansion. Glory, national grandeur, and international prestige were first principles. They expressed values superior to and independent of economic desiderata, “great in themselves.”83 The first sentences of Tocqueville’s 1841 memorandum on Algeria were unequivocal on this point: “I do not think France can think seriously of leaving Algeria. In the eyes of the world, such an abandonment would be the clear indication of our decline. . . . Any people that easily gives up what it has taken and chooses to retire peacefully to its original borders proclaims that its age of greatness is over. It visibly enters the period of its decline.”84 France could not abandon Algeria without jeopardizing its prospects for grandeur. Tocqueville was unambiguous in declaring this reason the “foremost in [his] view” for African colonization. Consistent with his claim that “it would never have occurred to [Napoleon] to make hearts and spirits concentrate merely on their individual welfare,” Tocqueville even

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  71 conceded that if Algeria flourished, it would hurt metropolitan markets. So much the worse, then, for domestic bourgeois interests. I know that metropolitan commerce and industry will protest that we are sacrificing them; that the principal advantage of a colony is to provide an advantageous market for the mother country and not to compete with it. All this may be true in itself, but I am not moved by it. In the current state of things, Algeria should not be considered from the commercial, industrial, or colonial point of view: we must take an even higher perspective to consider this great question. There is in effect a great political interest that dominates all others.85

Glory was that “great political interest that dominates all others.” This conviction characterized Tocqueville’s entire approach to Algeria. France needed “a great theatre for her glory,” whatever the economic cost.86 It was a commitment so unconditional that France could only abandon Algeria “at a moment when she is seen to be undertaking great things in Europe.”87 She could find glory in the African or European theater, but under no circumstance was she to surrender the search altogether. By conquering Algeria at whatever cost, France would partake in the greatest source of glory in democratic modernity: “the enslavement of four parts of the world by the fifth.”88 Like the monuments in America, French citizens would be able to discover “self-​ interest rightly understood” in the monument that was Algiers, its glistening white edifices reflected in the coastal skyline. * * * Tocqueville’s hardened approach to settlerism raised an obvious problem for transforming Algeria into a theater for French glory: there was nothing glorious about exterminating indigenous peoples. Tocqueville admitted as much, in both Democracy in America when he decried the extermination of Native Americans and in 1847, after Algeria’s conquest was an accomplished fact: “Let us not, in the middle of the nineteenth century, begin the history of the conquest of America over again.”89 Indeed, Tocqueville was well aware that the notion of glory exemplified by Bonapartist militarism placed specific demands on war; namely, that it be waged for national defense and on behalf of persecuted liberty. Bonapartist culture bound glory indissolubly to the spirit of self-​defense because, more than anything else, self-​defense expressed

72  The Virtues of Violence the superiority of public virtue over private interest.90 The expansionary wars of liberty were consistently misremembered in France not as a “quest for world domination, although this was its result, but the revitalization of the national defense force.”91 That was why the Napoleonic armies could be analogized to the example of the defending Spartans at Thermopylae, as in Jacques Louis David’s Léonidas aux Thermopyles from 1814 (Figure 2.1). David was a Jacobin, then a Bonapartist, and in his painting, he depicted Leonidas and the 300 with Napoleonic visual motifs to suggest a world-​ historic filiation between ancient Sparta and imperial France.92 From this perspective, however, colonial warfare in Africa was anything but glorious. Even the Armée d’Afrique acknowledged this fact. In the years following Bugeaud’s appointment as Marshal, many soldiers died from malnutrition, alcoholism, and exhaustion, but only upward to a hundred or so soldiers died in combat in any given year. In contrast, the number of Algerians killed, often directly through massacres like those at Dahra, exceeded tens of thousands. The sheer mismatch in violence was so indisputable that even the label of a “war” seemed farcical.93 Thanks in part to the normalization of

Figure 2.1  Jacques Louis David, Léonidas aux Thermopyles (1814). Musée de Louvre. Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  73 slaughter, rape, and looting, the Armée d’Afrique developed problems with suicide. Jean-​de-​Dieu Soult, the French Minister of War and Guizot’s colleague, became sufficiently concerned with the poor optics of French terror in Africa that he worked diligently, if to futility, to redact the violence from the regular military bulletins published in metropolitan newspapers.94 In such a context, how could colonial total war be squared with the demands of glory? How could Tocqueville describe Bugeaud’s terror in 1847 as an example of “a war conducted ably and gloriously”? The Restoration government had solved this dilemma by analogizing the conquest of Algeria to the evangelism of the Christian Crusades. According to Charles X and ecclesiastical leaders, conquering Algiers would be a victory for enlightened Christendom against oriental despotism, a Crusade against infidels.95 Tocqueville was unsympathetic to these royalist strategies. In Democracy in America, he had already criticized the proactive pursuit of military glory as an example of “the coldest, most calculating” spirit (DA 320). Thus, Tocqueville came to square the realities of colonial terror with the demands of glory in a different way: he brought it closer to the normative representation of violence inherited from Bonapartist militarism by blurring the lines between colonial aggression and national defense. Specifically, he shifted culpability for the war onto the indigenous population by fundamentally revising his characterization of native society from the late 1830s. Where he had earlier minimized the differences between French and Arab civilization by emphasizing Arabs as industrious owners of private property, he now invoked what Karuna Mantena has called “culturalist alibis” to exaggerate the differences between the two.96 No longer a civilized people ready to cohabitate with the French in a peaceful vivre ensemble, Tocqueville now believed indigenous society was incompatible with French values and responsible for compromising France’s best efforts at nonviolent integration. In other words, Tocqueville’s shift from integration to extermination turned on a new understanding of native society that transformed total war into a defensive engagement against native society itself. We can see Tocqueville shift culpability for total war to natives in at least two places. The first is in his treatment of Abd-​el-​Kader, the local emir leading the resistance to French settlement. According to Tocqueville, Algerian society should be capable in principle of peaceful coexistence with the French. Ottoman rule left Algerian society fragmented, and some local tribes appeared receptive to cultivating shared commercial interests with the French. The Kabyles in particular were “a prosaic and interested race who

74  The Virtues of Violence worry far more about this world than the other, and that it would be much easier to conquer them with our luxuries than with our cannon.”97 However, Abd-​ el-​ Kader—​ “a sort of Muslim Cromwell”—​ had undermined the prospects for peaceful integration. As Tocqueville explained, he was “convinced that before Abd-​el-​Kader’s power developed, it was possible” for the French to rule the region “without exactly waging war but only stirring up the Arabs’ passions and setting them against one another.”98 However, Abd-​ el-​Kader was using Machiavellian means to unite the warring tribes to undermine French efforts at settlement.99 Having manipulated native religious enthusiasm and local networks of power, the emir now “stands at the head of a united army that can fall on those who would betray him, at any moment and upon the least suspicion.”100 Even if a native tribe had wanted to peacefully cohabitate with the French, Abd-​el-​Kader’s new army could coerce and conscript them into the war of resistance. Thus, by unifying native tribes, Abd-​el-​Kader’s Machiavellianism was responsible for dashing the prospects of peaceful cohabitation. France now had no choice but to defeat Abd-​el-​Kader through total war, for only a war that indiscriminately attacked the civilian population and the land that fed them could raise the costs of allegiance to Abd-​el-​Kader to prohibitive thresholds: “We shall never destroy Abd-​el-​Kader’s power unless we make the position of the tribes who support him so intolerable that they abandon him. This is an obvious truth.”101 In blaming Abd-​el-​Kader for integration’s failures, Tocqueville was at pains to compare the Muslim Cromwell and French society. But where these comparisons had once served to draw the two societies closer together, they now served to measure the distance between them. For example, in his 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” Tocqueville suggested that Abd-​el-​Kader’s centralization resembled not only that of Muhammad and the first caliphs, but also of Europe—​yet from several centuries earlier. Such is the secret of his power; it is not difficult to understand, for what Abd-​el-​Kader is attempting is not new in the world. These half-​savage African countries are now undergoing a social development very much like that which took place in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Abd-​ el-​Kader, who has probably never heard of what happened in fifteenth-​ century France, is acting toward the tribes precisely as our kings, and in particular Charles VII, acted toward feudalism.102

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  75 Abd-​el-​Kader’s European semblance was one of Tocqueville leitmotifs. The emir “gave [his] battalions a European organization, an organization powerless against our own, but that made him master of his countrymen.” His method of nation building was “quite new among the Arabs . . . he is the first who took from his contact with Europe the ideas that would make his own enterprise similarly durable.” Yet this semblance no longer proved that Arab society was a society of “singular savages” so proximate to French civilization that integration was possible. Instead, it now provided evidence of “half-​savage African countries.” This denigration from “singular savages” (1837) to “half-​savages” (1841) provided an alibi for total war. This reconsideration of the nature of native society is the second place we see Tocqueville deflect culpability for total war from the French. The French could have colonized Algeria peacefully through racial integration, Tocqueville insisted, were they not conquering a population intractably predisposed to violence for cultural reasons. In this argument, total war was provoked, not only by a Muslim Cromwell, but also by indigenous “culture” itself, which was “something we can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever.”103 As he explained, If, from the beginning, we had said convincingly that we aimed only at government and not at land, it might have been easy to get them to recognize our authority. But that moment has passed. Now, the prejudices that we have brought about are so powerful that we would have trouble making them believe in a change of the system, however real and sincere it were on our part.104

If France had deceived indigenous leaders into believing that they sought only peaceful governance, perhaps war could have been avoided. But now that land had been taken, native “prejudices” had been awakened. Even if France wanted a peaceful settler society, Algerians would refuse it because of their warrior ethos. Tocqueville insisted that this warrior ethos was no context-​dependent feature of native society but a defining quality virtually impossible to eradicate. That was why any indigenous leader would find himself compelled to wage war against the French. If not Abd-​el-​Kader, Algerians would conscript someone else.

76  The Virtues of Violence Unlike the Kings of Europe, an emir does not rule over individuals who can be kept down by the social force at the prince’s disposal. Rather, he governs tribes that are completely organized little nations, which cannot normally be guided except in the direction their passions lead. But the Arab tribes’ passions of religion and depredation always lead them to wage war on us . . . such is the natural taste of the populations that surround us.105

Thus, the French were not only forced into waging total war because of Abd-​ el-​Kader’s machinations, but also because of something intrinsic to the Arab social state. Their zealotry placed them beyond reasonable discourse. Even if France sincerely sought governance rather than land, Arabs would never permit a French presence. For them, war against the French was expressivist rather than strategic. It articulated their values and religious orientation. Indeed, Arabs were not even retaliating against a French invasion. They were simply playing out their cultural esprit. As Tocqueville forced himself to conclude, “To flatter ourselves that we could ever establish a solid peace with an Arab prince of the interior would, in my view, be a manifest error.” That was because “the permanent state of such a sovereign would be war with us, whatever his personal inclinations might otherwise be, and whether he were as pacific by nature or as fanatical in his religion as one could imagine.”106 Algerian leaders were personifications of culture. They expressed, but could not alter, the social state of those they ruled. And that social state was intractable hostility to France. Ergo, the French had to wage total war for, as a matter of culture, Arabs were unlikely to ever surrender voluntarily. Since their barbarism stemmed from something below the level of politics or institutions, it was a fact of culture the French could not undo. As Tocqueville admitted, “Domination over semi-​barbarous nomadic tribes, such as those around us, can never be so complete that a civilized, sedentary population could settle nearby without any fear or precaution. Armed marauding will long outlast war itself.”107 These argumentative strategies transferred culpability for colonial war onto Abd-​el-​Kadar and native society, blurring the lines between imperial aggression and national defense. They therefore resemble the “deflection strategies” Jeanne Morefield argues are typical of imperial ideological politics. With deflection strategies, Morefield argues, liberal empires alienate themselves from their own colonial violence, becoming instead the victims of the necessity to use it. Hence imperial violence never tarnishes the empires which employ it; instead, its use verifies the barbarism of its victims.108

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  77 Tocqueville, too, understood that France conquered Algiers, but responsibility for total war lay with the intractable features of the Muslim social state. In these wayward paths of colonial ideology, he invited his readers to reimagine colonial aggression as national self-​defense. And so his prescription was domination without end, a burden demanded by Algerian native society rather than by French values. Bugeaud’s total war could be praised as “a war conducted ably and gloriously.”109

Total War, Real and Imagined In the 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” Tocqueville asked, “What type of war we can and must wage on the Arabs”? Known for his defense of local liberties and critique of despotism, he answered: total war. Since “the war cannot be won at one blow,” no choice remained but to undermine the conditions of life for indigenous communities.110 France must “ravage the country,” and “we must do it, either by destroying harvests during the harvest season, or year-​round by making those rapid incursions called razes, whose purpose is to seize men or herds.”111 These razzia not only starved Abd-​el-​Kader’s army, but also robbed locals of their means of subsistence. Together with the enfumades, the Armée d’Afrique would overwhelm resisting tribes and strike salutary terror into their hearts. In this war, civilians were fair game because native society itself was the enemy, and all natives were potential allies of Abd-​el-​ Kader. Tocqueville admitted that his answer might shock European sensibilities, but he insisted that “If we do not burn harvests in Europe, it is because in general we wage war on governments and not on peoples.”112 In the history of political thought, this is an incredible admission. Although it may be cynically familiar to contemporary critics, in early nineteenth-​century France, waging war on entire peoples stood outside the accepted conventions of combat. Tocqueville was justifying a new application of terror, one forged in the crucible of the African theater, and one that made war on entire peoples not only strategically compulsory, but glorious. Here, in the colonial theaters of Africa, in other words, lay a precedent for the subsequent “total wars” of Europe’s twentieth century.113 The realities of total war were not at all life-​affirming for French soldiers. Between the suicide, alcoholism, and crushing environmental conditions, these men certainly did not feel regenerated by their violence. Bugeaud’s new methods of violence demoralized and exhausted. To combat the

78  The Virtues of Violence dispersed organization of indigenous tribes, the general organized his army around “flying” mobile columns. These columns contrasted sharply with Napoleon’s slow-​moving infantry units which depended on complex supply chains. Bugeaud’s units were mobile, fast, and deadly. They did not need traditional supply lines because they subsisted on the spoils of razzias against indigenous encampments.114 This was guerilla war, and, as effective as its violence was, it was neither particularly glorious nor rejuvenating for those responsible for enacting it on the ground. Tocqueville believed permanent officers in Algeria formed a regenerated breed of men, “ardent, ambitious, full of energy,” but that belief was sheer aspirational projection.115 The French public, however, consumed representations of the colonial violence with fervor. Through that consumption, they vicariously enjoyed the moral and psychic uplift denied to soldiers in the Maghreb. As Jennifer Sessions has emphasized, the conquest of Algiers was celebrated at home with splendid state celebrations, including parades of the Armée d’Afrique, public masses commemorating those fallen, and the 1845 establishment of the Louvre’s Musée algérien. Consumption of colonial warfare at home also included popular prints, songs, poetry, and plays which “portrayed the Armée d’Afrique as the reincarnation of Napoleon’s Grande Armée . . . proof that French men were still animated by the virile, patriotic spirit of their forefathers in arms.”116 Tocqueville understood better than most that such public monumentality provided an occasion for the people to revel in themselves as a people. Representations of colonial war consumed domestically looked nothing like the reality of total war. Instead, they explicitly figured colonial war as a version of Napoleonic, glorious defensive warfare. Consider, for example, the so-​called “Siege of Mazagran.”117 In February 1840, hundreds of assailants laid “siege” to a small detachment of 123 French soldiers defending a small outpost of Mazagran. Miraculously, the soldiers successfully defended their post for four days until a sortie from nearby Mostaganem rescued them. The incident was minor by any strategic account, but the French press turned it into a sensational craze in the metropole. Mazagran became exemplary evidence of the glorious, defensive nature of colonial total war. A popular 1840 Epinal print, for example, described it as the “Heroic Defense of Mazagran” (Figure 2.2). A  flying tricolor flag in the distance hailed by cannon fire makes it clear that it is liberty that is under siege. The 123 soldiers are its glorious defenders. According to one historian at the time, that flag became a

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  79

Figure 2.2  Pellerin Publishing House, Epinal Print, “Défense héroïque de Mazagran” (1840). Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

commemorative artifact: “An order of the day authorized the 10th company of the 1st battalion of Africa to preserve the flag which floated on the walls of Mazagran as a glorious trophy.”118 The print’s visual composition also centers the numerical difference between the two armies: a “horde” of Arabs attack a single outpost protected by a single battalion of French soldiers. This lopsided representation both exaggerates and inverts the reality of French colonial warfare, one in which a thousands-​strong Armée d’Afrique raided relatively small Arab civilian settlements. The same visual exaggeration and inversions are employed at a higher level in Félix Philippoteaux’s 1841 “Défense de Mazagran” (Figure 2.3). In that painting, Philippoteaux features French soldiers so committed to defending a pierced and persecuted tricolor flag that they are ready to use elbows and pavement stones to protect it. Both the Epinal print and Philippoteaux’s painting analogize Captain Lelièvre and his 123 soldiers to the Spartans at Thermopylae, a small contingent of 300 defending against thousands of Persian invaders. Glory in both cases is won by surrendering one’s “natural” instinct for well-​being to the sacrificial, “social” law of civic salvation. These images depict a civilizational

80  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 2.3  Félix Philippoteaux, “Défense de Mazagran, 2 au 6 février 1840” (1841). Château de Versailles. Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.

mythology connecting Sparta to France, Leonidas to Napoleon—​and the Armée d’Afrique. Imperial fantasies of glorious self-​defense on behalf of persecuted liberty divided the public. For many, the contradiction between the realities of colonial warfare and its aspirational purpose were too flagrant.119 Yet these images also confirm what Yves Winter has stressed: “Practices of violence do not speak for themselves. Like other political practices, they intervene in the political realm by signifying, and these significations are central to how violence functions.” Acts of political violence, in other words, “produce political effects not by physically compelling agents but by appealing to an audience.”120 In the case of African total war, its promise to revitalize a nation on the brink of psychic and social disintegration was contained, not in the brute physicality of its soldiers, but in the national chauvinism it was meant to inspire at home. Beholding these images, French citizens would be able to conceive themselves, not in relation to a contractual image of society, but in relation to themselves idealized as unified and glorious. What makes modern glory distinctive from ancient glory, Morrissey observes, is that it is self-​reflexive. Desire for modern glory expresses “a need to show

From Glory to Total War in Algeria  81 oneself always worthy of the example one has set up for oneself.”121 It is as Tocqueville said: “In nations as well as individuals . . . it is more common to see the very imminence of danger act as midwife to extraordinary virtues. At such times great characters stand out as a monument hidden by the dark of night will stand out in the illumination of a blaze” (DA 228). What the people see in images of glorious warfare is an illuminated image of themselves as they hope to become.

Conclusion Five years after Tocqueville first visited Algeria, Tocqueville’s position on colonial violence softened. France had largely crushed Abd-​el-​Kader’s power in the intervening years. Although resistance to French settlerism would continue for generations, by 1846–​1847, Tocqueville believed Bugeaud’s war had been successful. Thus, he raised anew the prospect of an integrated colony with the caveat that “It is not along the road of our European civilization that they must, for the present, be pushed, but in the direction proper to them.”122 In a prophetic turn of events, France even fulfilled Tocqueville’s call to “raise a great monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.” To commemorate the “Siege of Mazagran,” the city of Algiers and Louis-​Philippe’s press collected funds for the construction of a commemorative monument. A commission led by Marshall Gérard, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, suggested the monument be built on the Champs-Élysées to complement other Napoleonic monuments like the Arc de Triomphe. Funding shortages compelled the state to forego this grand scheme in favor of a smaller construction, and the result was a commemorative monument in Algeria:  a column on top of which stood Victory.123 Looking back with a measure of pride in 1847, Tocqueville tried to summarize France’s accomplishments since his first visit. Today we can say that war in Africa is a science whose laws are known to everyone and that can be applied almost with certainty. . . . First, we came to understand that we faced not a real army, but the population itself . . . given that this population would be as hostile to us as they are today, in order for us to remain in such a country, our troops would have to be almost as numerous in times of peace as in times of war, for it was less a matter of defeating a government than of subjugating a people.124

82  The Virtues of Violence “War in Africa is a science,” Tocqueville wrote. The reader is reminded of his proclamation in Democracy in America that “A world that is totally new demands a new political science” (DA 7). It is as if the political science Tocqueville had been searching for since 1831 to mitigate la société en poussière had reached its conclusion in Bugeaud’s total war. The French had learned how to subdue not “a real army, but the population itself.”125 They had learned how to “subjugate a people” with a continuous application of violence that would not cease even in times of peace. David Bell has remarked that an unexpected discovery occurs in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerning “western attitudes towards war”: namely, that “the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other.” Tocqueville’s Algerian writings suggest that their complex interdependency was no anomaly in the history of liberalism but instead rooted in their confrontation with the wider experience of the democratization of the social. In Europe, as elsewhere, a link persisted between liberalism’s anxieties over political centralization and an enthrallment with total war, or what Bell calls the “powerful tendency to characterize the conflicts that do arise as apocalyptic struggles that must be fought until the complete destruction of the enemy and that might have a purifying, even redemptive effect on its participants.”126 It has been easy for liberal historians of political thought to portray such inclinations as the exclusive possession of the left or of twentieth-​century totalitarianism. And yet, under the July Monarchy, France’s most prominent liberal succumbed to just that vision of war. Tocqueville was prepared to appeal to republican and Bonapartist tropes of glory to answer the central dilemma posed by the Revolution to French liberals: How to mitigate individualism and repair the psychic and social bases of modern liberty? As he translated the demands of glory into politics, he found himself an apologist for force and terror.

3 From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune On 2 September 1870, Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussian army at the Battle of Sedan. The emperor’s defeat toppled the Second Empire and, for conservatives like Edmond de Goncourt, marked “the end of the greatness of France.”1 Liberal politicians like Léon Gambetta and Jules Favre proclaimed the Third Republic in the ensuing vacuum of sovereignty. Constituting a provisional “government of national defense,” they promised to continue the war. However, they organized an ineffective defense, and, within weeks, Bismarck’s army laid siege to Paris, starving the city. By February, Prussian forces compelled the French government to capitulate and agree to humiliating concessions. To compound matters, national elections that month populated the new assembly with an overwhelming conservative majority, threatening the fledgling republic. Stung by the shame of national defeat and unpersuaded by the republican credentials of its newly elected government, radical republicans and socialists declared Paris independent on 18 March by proclaiming the Paris Commune. Adolphe Thiers, head of the national government, withdrew municipal functionaries from the city. For the next two months, Paris engaged in an extraordinary social experiment while waging civil war with the national government. The Commune empowered workers’ associations, replaced economic competition with social cooperation, separated church and state, legislated equal pay for teachers of both sexes, and reinstated divorce. It put a moratorium on uncollected rent during the Prussian siege and abolished interest on outstanding debts. In the name of the Universal Republic, it opened its communal council to election by foreigners and fostered a culture of direct, participatory governance. Yet, after two months, this experiment in emancipation ended in mass graves. Led by Patrice de MacMahon, a man trained to exterminate in the Armée d’Afrique, the Versaillais army invaded Paris and killed upward to 20,000 workers.2 Thousands more were imprisoned or exiled. The Virtues of Violence. Kevin Duong, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190058418.001.0001

84  The Virtues of Violence Like all events of its kind, the Commune meant different things to different people: the greatest monument to working class radicalism in the nineteenth century, a founding myth of subsequent communist revolutions, a criminal riot instigated by foreigners, even a modern recapitulation of the fall of Rome by proletarian barbarians.3 Its example opened several conflicting trajectories for political thought on the left, “a kind of afterlife” that Kristin Ross argues is “part and parcel of the event itself.”4 Participants like Louise Michel claimed the Commune “could have belonged to allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people. It was the people’s.”5 She would defend its democratic achievement against liberal attempts to pathologize the Commune for decades.6 Zéphirin Camélinat, the Commune’s director of the mint, would become a leader of the future Parti communiste français and its presidential candidate in 1924.7 Other communards carried their radicalism abroad as exiles. Armand Roussel, police captain for the district of Père Lachaise, went to London to preach socialism, whereas Adrien Lejeune, “the last communard,” traveled to the Soviet Union to offer the Commune’s imprimatur to the home of the October Revolution.8 Friedrich Engels forecast the most well-​ known trajectory opened by the Commune: “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”9 If the Commune’s example opened up new revolutionary vistas, its demise nevertheless closed others. For whatever else it was, the Commune was also the culmination of socialists’ long-​standing ambition to regenerate the French social body. It is often observed that “the French Revolution’s heroic and epic struggle to regenerate society had resonance with the Communards.”10 Indeed, the Commune’s 19 April 1871 declaration to the French people proclaimed that their “combats and sacrifices” would prepare France for its “intellectual, moral, administrative and economic regeneration.”11 Since the July Monarchy, however, French socialists had also articulated this aspiration in new, distinctive terms: la République démocratique et sociale. Under these watchwords, socialists called for a regeneration of everyday life—​the family, the workplace, the neighborhood—​that would counteract market competition’s disintegrating effects on the social body. They dreamed of going beyond 1792’s political republic by founding a “social republic,” the incarnation of une société sociale and a redeemed Humanity. As the journalist Jules Vallès saw it, Napoleon’s defeat provided the occasion to finally create “the Social Fatherland, the only possible salvation for the Classical Fatherland.”12 The Commune’s massacre all but extinguished such hopes. Afterwards, republicanism in France would be reshaped into an

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  85 elitist, state-​driven ideology organized around parliamentary politics and official repudiation of the Commune.13 Mainstream French socialism would shed its utopian attachment to “revolutionary temporality,” underline its scientific commitments, and enter the parliamentary system.14 The National Guard, that exemplary incarnation of popular redemptive violence since the French Revolution, would be permanently abolished.15 This chapter analyzes socialist aspirations for social regeneration as they evolved from the 1840s to the Commune. It aims to show that, like Jacobins and liberals before them, many Communards grafted their hopes for a regenerated society onto an image of popular redemptive violence. This point might seem intuitive. Nineteenth-​century French socialism has long been recalled as an insurrectionary tradition, both in its commemoration and in its historiography.16 Its memory is summoned in shorthand through dates like 1792, 1830, 1848, and 1871. Its mission is recalled in personalities from Gracchus Babeuf to Auguste Blanqui, protagonists of what Patrick Hutton calls the “cult of the revolutionary tradition.”17 That tradition continues to be venerated by Paris’s municipal council, which since 1908 has honored slain communards in Père Lachaise and Montparnasse each year.18 Yet, as we will see, many socialists were not convinced that insurrectionary violence could bring social regeneration during the first half of the nineteenth century. In fact, many socialists before 1848 were steadfast pacifists. They believed the route to a new humanism passed not through insurrectionary violence but through the peaceful reorganization of work and universal manhood suffrage. “Violent methods are good for overturning, for destroying,” Henri de Saint-​Simon preached in the 1820s, “but that is all they are good for. Peaceful methods are the only ones which can be used to build, to construct, in a word, to establish solid constitutions.”19 Attachments to pacific methods persisted into the 1870–​1871 siege of Paris. Demanding a Commune in September 1870 meant demanding a municipal government elected by universal manhood suffrage. And as late as 20 March 1871, the newspaper La Commune identified the communal revolution with “the age of violent revolutions closed and civil war rendered impossible.”20 There was nothing self-​evident about André Léo’s ode to redemptive violence in April: “No, humanity is not degenerate. . . . This generous blood which flows today, the blood of a popular martyr impoverished by misery but rich in impalpable elements . . . fertilizes the furrow of the great harvest.”21 If the Commune’s bloody end led its defenders like Louise Michel to believe that “the songs of the new epoch were war songs,” such a conclusion had been

86  The Virtues of Violence anything but forgone.22 Viewed through the wider aperture of midcentury socialist pursuits of social regeneration, communard appeals to a language of redemptive violence were a contingent concession. This chapter therefore shows Communards achieving their own image of popular redemptive violence, but it also underscores how that violence was only one possible answer to their anxiety over social disintegration. Communards did not turn to redemptive violence as a logical entailment to their dream of social regeneration or a catechistic recapitulation of Jacobinism. They did so as a response to the real failures of electoral democracy to deliver on the promise of a redeemed Humanity. To defend these claims, this chapter draws our attention to a conceptual mutation within midcentury French socialism:  redemptive violence displaced what we might call a redemptive image of the ballot. Two kinds of defeat produced this displacement: a longue durée context involving socialists’ disenchantment with universal male suffrage and the immediate difficulties of creating the Commune through elections in 1870–​1871.23 Before the Commune, revolutionaries in 1848 had already attempted to found a social republic. Their efforts failed when Napoleon III weaponized universal male suffrage to abolish the republic in 1852: French citizens elevated Napoleon to emperor in a plebiscitary referendum by almost ten to one. The democratic death of this “democratic and social republic” undercut republican and socialist beliefs in the transformative power of electoral democracy. The shadow of 1848 intersected with a more immediate problem for Communards:  they were the first “minoritarian” revolution in the French republican tradition. Previous revolutions, like those in 1789 and 1848, tacitly spoke for a downtrodden national consensus against an aristocratic and economically powerful elite. But in the months following the September 1870 proclamation of the Third Republic, a numerical majority of Parisians withheld support for the communal movement and the revolutionary socialist organizations which led it. Even as Paris radicalized under the siege, the city’s revolutionary movements were defeated in elections, time and again, between September and March. In this context, Paris’s revolutionary socialist movements could not presume to speak on behalf of the people. Their democratic credentials had to be earned rather than presumed. To claim the mantle of democracy after being denied electoral legitimation, many Communards redefined who the people were: the true people were not “the electorate,” but “the people in arms.” Participants like Prosper-​Olivier Lissagaray, Louise Michel, and Jules Vallès turned to the moral significance

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  87 of spontaneous popular violence to compete with the state’s authority—​ indeed to embody the people’s will even more directly than the latter’s elections. Cannons, chassepots, and petrol conveyed the will of the people in ways the ballot could never do. This image of the people in arms was rooted in both classical republicanism and the revolutionary wars of liberty, and Communards put it to work to secure their own democratic credentials.24 In so doing, they transformed the Commune from an elected body to one that Gustave Tridon declared “revolutionary, illegal, and violent.”25 This redefinition, however earnest, exacted a price:  it bonded socialist dreams of a regenerated, cooperative society to a language of republican militarism. Aspirations for communal freedom moved away from dreams of perpetual peace and merged with heroic images of the Garde nationale and francs-​tireurs. Civil war between Paris and Versailles became, not a war between democracy and its critics, but a conflict between two conceptions of the democratic social body: the electorate and the people in arms. Civil wars, David Armitage reminds us, always turn out to be “conceptually generative.”26 Thus it was with the Paris Commune. Its conflict with Versailles led its best thinkers to sever the resolution of the social question from the expansion of the suffrage. The agent of social regeneration would henceforth be the people armed rather than the people enfranchised. In short, the dialectics of struggle and defeat torqued communard thought into a language of redemptive violence. To insist on that fact is not to criticize it. Instead, it is to try to think together two things which the historiography has recently pried apart: the Commune as an experiment in equality and the Commune as a war measure.27 The former cannot be quarantined from the latter for the two came to be understood as a common project. Communards understood the all-​important lesson of the French Revolution: democratic authority is rooted not in right, but action. As they struggled to regenerate society, they put that lesson to work. Lissagaray conceded afterward that the Commune “was a barricade, not a government,” but that had been the point.28

The Rise of the Social Question French industrialization proceeded more gradually than its Western European counterparts, especially Great Britain. Popular classes in mid–​ nineteenth-​century France resisted full-​scale industrialization by defending

88  The Virtues of Violence traditional forms of employment. Urban trade guilds continued to export luxury goods rather than invest in modern production techniques.29 Agriculture remained the vital sector of the economy, and most people did not enjoy the increasing consumer purchasing power typical of industrializing societies until the 1880s.30 Nevertheless, it was already obvious during the July Monarchy that the nature of work in France was moving in new directions. The rise of urban markets and the expansion of wage labor were redrawing the country’s demographic landscape. Male workers migrated to cities for seasonal employment.31 The construction of thousands of miles of canals accelerated the migration of peoples and commodities. In 1822, France was connected to England by steamship. It built its first short railway in 1828.32 The rise of mechanization led social critics to coin the term révolution industrielle to analogize these broader trends to the French Revolution.33 Workers responded to these changes. Gathered in cities like Paris and Lyon, they formed voluntary associations.34 They created journals such as Le Globe, La Phalange, and La Démocratie pacifique which were read by an increasingly literate male working class. They organized mutual aid societies to protest wage suppression and demand price controls. Lyonnais silk workers rose up in the “Canut revolts” of 1831 and 1834.35 In 1833, a strike wave hit all of France, with at least 54 between September and December alone.36 These large-​scale patterns of migration and social dislocation were also thought to be causally linked to urban squalor, sexual immorality, and poverty. “The social question,” in other words, had come to France.37 How can the poor be integrated into the social contract? How can the damage of economic competition be mitigated? Like similar questions in the nineteenth century, the social question in France subsumed discrete phenomena under a single sign and imperative mood. Holly Case has argued that such questions are best viewed as a “structuring tendency,” the formulation of which compels its querists to choose between progress and reaction, science and tradition, community and individual in an era where equality ruled in theory but was violated in practice.38 This was certainly true in the 1840s. The phrase linked social problems like inequality, pauperism, alcoholism, and commercial competition under a single framework. Answering the social question became something more than resolving a technical problem of governance. It pointed the way to a new society and the resolution of some of modernity’s fundamental antinomies.39

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  89 French intellectuals in the July Monarchy gave competing accounts of the origins of the social question: psychic breakdown, distributive injustice, the repression of human desire, atheistic materialism, too much state centralization, or too little state centralization.40 Yet most agreed that it involved social disintegration. Henri de Saint-​Simon, father of utopian socialism, provides a case in point. A wealthy aristocrat and avid social reformer, he believed “the social question” arose from atomizing economic competition, and he advocated economic planning to restore social solidarity. Modern social theory, Saint-​Simon believed, had shown English liberalism’s atomized conception of society to be empirically mistaken. The latter had misrecognized society’s essentially corporate nature, which Christianity correctly grasped. “In every good national government,” he explained, “the patriotism which is part of each individual changes into an esprit de corps or corporate will the moment the individual becomes a member of it.” Ideally, “this corporate will” provided “the soul of government, which unifies all its actions and harmonizes all its movements.”41 The social question was never reducible to economics for Saint-​Simon. Industrialization was at bottom a moral disorder rooted in the social body’s disintegration. It called for answers at once scientific and religious. Violence would have to be disavowed.42 Educated elites would need to seize the reins of government—​finances, law, the military, and public functions. These elites would employ their expertise while also attending to “the part played by religious sentiment in society,” to acknowledge “the predominance of morality over the law,” and to proclaim “the great aim” of social policy to be “improving as quickly as possible the condition of the poorest class.”43 Rather than repudiate Christianity, Saint-​Simon insisted that mending the social bond depended on a religious reawakening. The more society progresses morally and physically, the more subdivision of intellectual and manual labour takes places. . . . The result is that, the more society progresses, the more necessary it is that the form of worship should be improved; for the purpose of the form of worship is to remind men, when they assemble periodically on the day of rest, of the interests common to all members of society, of the common interests of the human race.44

Saint-​Simon concluded that morality was the queen of the sciences: “there is a science much more important for the community than physical and mathematical science—​the science on which society is founded, namely ethics.”45

90  The Virtues of Violence Younger socialists influenced by Saint-​Simon continued to emphasize the social question’s moral dimensions We see this in their continued use of a heterodox Christianity, like Pierre Leroux’s “Doctrine of Humanity,” Pierre-​ Joseph Proudhon’s early Christian socialism, and popular representations of Jesus as a worker.46 We see it in Auguste Comte, usually remembered as the father of positivism and a crass scientism, but who demanded a “New Religion of Humanity” for an age of atomistic materialism.47 We see it, too, in Victor Considerant, one of the best known utopian socialists and whose work decried “free competition” as a form of “industrial feudalism.” Economic competition did not lead to mass freedom but mass servitude; it was a “negative and abstract” democracy. Socialism’s task, Considerant believed, was to complete 1789, establish a “concrete” democracy based on “rational, equitable, Christian industrial organization,” and “joining all members of the human species.”48 True to their positivist inclinations, most socialists were not content to abstractly demand social regeneration. They also mapped out paths to it through stadial social theories. For Charles Fourier, answering the social question required evolving from “Civilization” to “Harmony” as outlined in his “Table of the Progression of Social Movement, Succession and Relation of its 4 Phases and 32 Periods.” For Comte, “disorganization” needed to yield to the sacralization of society, “Humanity as the True Supreme Being,” and the Positivist Church.49 For Louis Blanc, the task was to transcend “concurrence” into “cooperation” under centralized expert leadership. In Pierre Leroux’s eyes, the transition from egoism to social harmony entailed an acknowledgment of the progressive interrelatedness of all life forms, achieved as each person was reincarnated 405 times throughout history. Still others appealed to new visions of technological vitalism: steam power, energy conversion, printing presses, energetic matter and nature worship, and (again) mesmerism. Michel Chavelier, the Saint-​Simonian most involved with setting French commercial policy abroad, crooned that “the railroad [was] the most perfect symbol of universal association.”50 He spoke on behalf of a generation: industrial progress could repair the moral, associative bases of social cohesion. These twin goals of social equality and moral regeneration gave the 1848 revolution its distinctive political culture, its “euphoric sympathy” with the people.51 The 1848 revolutions were the high point of nineteenth-​century democracy, a “springtime of peoples” that touched the whole European continent.52 Dreams of national independence, international cooperation, universal solidarity, and the social question’s resolution inspired utopian beliefs that the world was undergoing a renovation as fundamental as that

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  91 of the French Revolution.53 The editors of Le Peuple captured this millenarianism in their 2 September 1848 manifesto. For them, 1848 in France was more than a regime change. It also uncovered the transcendent within man and the sacred within society. Yes, we want revolution: but make no mistake. Religion, for us, is not symbolic: it contains within it the symbolic word. To discover the true religion, it is necessary to begin our exegesis, to show philosophically and with the aid of new social data, the supernaturalism in nature, heaven in society, God in man. That is when civilization will appear to us as a perpetual apocalypse, and history as a miracle without end.54

Frédéric Sorrieu captured this “perpetual apocalypse” and “miracle without end” at the level of visual culture in his 1848 tableau dedicated to the “Universal Democratic and Social Republic” (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1  Frédéric Sorrieu, “La République universelle démocratique et sociale” (1848). Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

92  The Virtues of Violence Europe’s nations march together toward a socialist and republican future. France leads the way as Christ surveys humanity’s progress, proclaiming “FRATERNITY” a cosmological law. Underneath the people’s feet lie smashed the accoutrements of monarchy. Sorrieu’s tableau captures 1848’s polyvalent significations:  peaceful, internationalist, republican, and millenarian. Divine grace infused the march of socialism as it progressively abolished the divisions between classes and forged anew the bonds of a united, redeemed Humanity. These apocalyptic visions of disintegration and redemption paralleled earlier Jacobin and liberal anxieties. As in 1789, the social bond appeared on the cusp of dissolution, this time threatened by the abstraction inherent in contractualist economic citizenship. As Michael Behrent has argued, socialist thinkers “occupied a distinct ideological space on the French left, defined by the conviction that republicanism required a far denser conception of society than that which could be elicited from the social contract or individual rights alone.”55 Leroux, who coined the term socialisme, put it thus: “We wanted it [the new government] to stand at the head of progress; and not to let society, momentarily united in heroic sympathy, scatter and dissolve again.”56

Regenerating the People as the Electorate Critics defined the social question as a problem of social disintegration, so it should be no surprise that many reformers turned to associational answers. Traditional artisans protected their mutual aid societies and voluntary associations.57 Utopian socialists like Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin formed intentional communities that promoted free love, social minimums, and emotional harmony.58 Others, like Flora Tristan, took the first bold steps toward working class internationalism, “the universal union of working men and women.”59 What is more surprising is how many reformers turned to universal manhood suffrage. It is surprising, because the expansion of the franchise seems to exemplify the atomism socialists decried:  a single vote for a single citizen. “The citizen, endowed with one vote,” Pierre Rosanvallon observes, is often seen as “a pure individual, symmetrical with all other individuals and stripped of all specific characteristics.”60 Today, that view is commonplace.61 Yet, during the July Monarchy and Second Republic, socialists across the

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  93 spectrum conscripted universal manhood suffrage into their programs for moral regeneration and social cohesion. They did so, I argue, because they viewed the suffrage in light of a redemptive vision of the ballot. We see pieces of this redemptive vision in Alexandre Ledru-​Rollin. Editor of La Réforme and a visible leader of the left, Ledru-​Rollin spent the 1840s advocating for the right to work and universal manhood suffrage. He believed both were key to creating the social republic. In his 1844 “Manifeste aux travailleurs,” he argued that “every citizen must be an elector; the deputy must be a man of the nation rather than fortune.”62 During his political campaigns, he repeatedly insisted that universal suffrage would invite an era of perpetual peace. “Why [civil war],” he argued, “when you have in your hand, by the suffrage, the means to make your will prevail?”63 His persistent advocacy for universal suffrage anchored his reputation as the “father of universal suffrage.” We see aspects of this redemptive vision among ordinary workers, too. At an afternoon banquet on 17 October 1848, a worker, Citoyen Charpentier, gave the following toast to universal suffrage: Citizens, friends and enemies know that the day when the right to the vote was acquired by all [men] was a grand day on earth and in the heavens. It was as if a divine trumpet had announced to tyrants that their reign had come to an end, and that the reign of God had begun. . . . Brothers, let us be united; tighten our ranks; the end of the great drama approaches! . . . To the universal vote, the image of heavenly lightning placed into the hands of men to pulverize and reduce all aristocrats into nothing! To the universal vote, a living whip that servants have seized to hunt down their incapable and indignant masters! To the universal vote, which permits us to clutch to our breasts this cry, symbol of the future: Vive la République démocratique et sociale!64

An “image of heavenly lightning,” a “living whip,” a call for tightened ranks and universal brotherhood: this was an image of universal suffrage as social revolution. According to this redemptive vision, voting incorporated a person into a common body. After all, in the nineteenth century, voting occurred publicly in assemblies rather than privately in a booth.65 Presiding officers were nominated and selected, often by popular acclamation, at the beginning of electoral assemblies.66 The public character of voting, and

94  The Virtues of Violence the assembly context in which it was conducted, gave voting a corporatist meaning. It did not present an individualistic form of political participation but bound a person to an assembly’s esprit de corps. Voting, in other words, was an activity of association.67 This redemptive vision of the ballot was compelling enough to touch thinkers on opposite ends of the French left. Consider, for example, Louis Blanc. The decade’s most important republican socialist, Blanc’s 1840 Organization of Work attacked competition for bringing society “to the point of dissolution,” namely familial breakdown and civil war.68 “Competition” was “for the people a system of extermination” and an “anti-​social education.”69 Hence Blanc proposed “double reform.” Double reform involved “a profound moral revolution,” one that would “bring about in one day more conversions than all sermons of preachers and all speeches of moralists could in a century.”70 It also involved handing the reins of governance to state technocrats. The government ought to be considered as the supreme regulator of production and endowed for this duty with great power. This task would consist of fighting competition and of finally overcoming it. . . . [In] our system, the State would constitute itself, by and by, as a master of industry and in place of monopoly we have obtained, as the result of success, the subversion of competition: association.71

Blanc’s prescriptions have led some historians to recall him as an unabashed Jacobin statist indifferent to participatory democracy or individual rights.72 And, indeed, he pressed hard for top-​down associational solutions to the social question. Yet Blanc, technocratic by temperament, nevertheless accorded universal suffrage a place in his vision of reform. In the Organization of Work, he believed there was nothing to fear in “questions of universal suffrage, of the real sovereignty of the people.”73 In an 1850 letter, he took his stand: “Universal Suffrage or civil war: we must choose.”74 Consider also Louis Auguste Blanqui. The nineteenth century’s personification of “the art of insurrection,” Blanqui spent his life conspiring to overthrow the government or sitting in jail for doing so.75 His goal was nothing less than the revolutionary implementation of equality, which “unites and brings men together,” “kills selfishness,” and “[heals] the hideous wounds inflicted by privilege,” which “produces nothing but hatred and isolation.”76 To this end, he preferred secret societies to “the dull buffoonery that is

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  95 pompously called our institutions” because he believed secret societies could spark revolution: “a people does not make revolution without a great purpose. A powerful lever is needed for it to arise.”77 The “powerful lever” of a secret conspiracy rather than “the dull buffoonery” of institutions, Blanqui says. So much the more conspicuous, then, that he can be found defending universal suffrage as a means for social revolution. At his trial in 1832, he called for the “French people to choose the form of their government . . . through universal suffrage.”78 In 1835, he wrote, “we have in mind less a political change than a refoundation of society.” From that perspective, “the extension of political rights, electoral reform and universal suffrage may be excellent things, but only as means, not as ends.”79 If Blanqui sees universal suffrage as a means, what is important is that he can consider it an “excellent thing” for creating “unity and fraternity” at all. Universal suffrage did not produce atomism or function as a handmaiden to the laissez-​faire economy. Rather, it could convey us to the reign of equality, understood as the supersession of “hatred and isolation.” Even if it happened in different ways and to different degrees, social critics across the spectrum invested the ballot with the hopes of the age: perpetual peace, moral improvement, social cohesion, unity and harmony, political and social equality. In this way, the ballot acquired regenerative powers usually ascribed to the people’s redemptive violence. “The Republic, which excludes none of its sons, summons you to political life,” the Bulletin de la République wrote of universal suffrage in April 1848. “This will be for you a new birth, a baptism, a regeneration.”80 With the redemptive vision of the ballot, universal suffrage became one possible solution to the social question. It manifested the unity of a people ready to seize the reins of society from those who sought to divide and impoverish it. Armed with the vote, the multitudes would be reborn as an electorate, conceived not as a quantitative aggregate of competing preferences but instead as a qualitative unity bound by a common power capable of remaking society itself. * * * The fate of the 1848 revolution is well known. Throughout January and February, Louis-​ Philippe’s government sought to ban public banquets because they offered fora for critics like Ledru-​ Rollin to demand reform. The cancellation of the 21 February banquet provoked fierce street demonstrations and barricades. Louis-​Philippe abdicated three days later.

96  The Virtues of Violence His July Monarchy yielded to the Second Republic, and universal manhood suffrage was implemented the next month. With the franchise enlarged, the republic elected its first and only president, Louis Napoleon. The electorate handed him an enormous popular mandate. Immediately, Napoleon’s political repression of the left began: the President banned the “Marseillaise,” invited the clergy back into secondary education with the Falloux Laws, and intensified press censorship. Blanqui was jailed, and both Blanc and Ledru-​ Rollin went into exile. To break the power of the left, the President briefly restricted the franchise again in May 1851, only to restore it with his coup d’état on 2 December. Twelve days after he restored universal manhood suffrage, the President organized a national plebiscite which returned support for his government by ten to one. The following year, the Republic would officially be replaced by the Second Empire upon the president’s crowning as Emperor, to popular acclamation. A democratic revolution was defeated by the politics of democracy itself.81 The philosophical defeat that Bonapartist plebiscitary dictatorship presented for French democracy is difficult to understate.82 As Marx bitterly remarked, “Universal manhood suffrage seems to have lasted just long enough to make its own testament in the eyes of the world and to declare in the very name of the people: ‘What’s worth building is worth demolishing.’ ”83 Given the redemptive power ascribed to the suffrage, Napoleon’s coup could only appear as a direct expression of popular sovereignty. His election appeared to transcend the mediations of political representation itself. As Marx put it, unlike individual representatives who “merely represents this or that party, this or that city, this or that outpost . . . He is the elect of the nation, and electing him is the trump card which the sovereign people plays once every four years.” As a result, his election embodied the height of direct democracy. Unlike the elected assembly which “stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation,” Marx lamented, “the elected president stands in a personal one . . . the president is the spirit of the nation incarnate. As opposed to the assembly, he has a kind of divine right, he is president by the people’s grace.”84 Marx understood that Bonapartism was a crisis for the left precisely because it was democratic, even revolutionary. Its world-​historic precondition was the belief in the people as the ultimate source of public authority. Bonapartist plebiscitary democracy tarnished the redemptive promise of universal manhood suffrage. It disoriented the left, and progressive thinkers drew widely different conclusions from the defeat. Some

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  97 abandoned the terrain of electoral politics to focus on social solutions to the social question. Blanc spent his exile years in London developing his theory of the “social individual” and rediscovering the sources of change in social contexts rather than top-​down political engineering.85 For Blanqui, the experience encouraged him to temper his commitment to spontaneous revolution and increase his focus on nonviolent means of social revolution. The revolution failed, Blanqui believed, because the masses had not yet received sufficient “enlightenment.” The task of revolutionary socialism therefore involved educating the masses so that they would be prepared next time.86 Proudhon drew the most influential lesson: the left must abandon electoral politics and “the mystification of universal suffrage” altogether.87 In places like his 1848 “Solution of the Social Problem,” he attacked the suffrage, or democracy—​for Proudhon, the two were the same thing.88 His objections to universal suffrage were manifold and haphazardly expressed. Broadly, he was concerned to show that socialists were mistaken to believe universal manhood suffrage voiced the will of the people. For one, since the people do not literally have a mouth, voting was an act of representation rather than immediate voice. It could only approximate the vox populi by producing a “personification, symbol or fiction of national sovereignty,” incarnated as the state.89 For another, the decisions reached by universal manhood suffrage were not universal at all, but majoritarian, a “disguised aristocracy.” Even worse, because most elections concerned representative offices, the suffrage actually amplified the voice not of the people but of those socially powerful enough to get elected. Thus, “There is not and never can be,” Proudhon concluded, “legitimate representation of the People. All electoral systems are mechanisms for deceit.”90 None of these critiques was as devastating, however, as his objection that the suffrage recapitulated the atomism socialists were trying to ameliorate. The objection held a special persuasive power in light of ongoing anxieties over social disintegration. According to Proudhon, voting was neither associational nor incorporating. Instead, it individuated. Universal manhood suffrage merely aggregated preferences. It could never voice the qualitatively distinct will of the people, because that was indivisible. Universal suffrage is a kind of atomism through which legislators, who cannot make the People speak as a unit about their essence, invite citizens to express their opinions one-​by-​one. . . . It is political atheism in the worst

98  The Virtues of Violence meaning of the word. As if adding up some quantity of votes could ever produce unified thought!91

Like most socialists of his generation, Proudhon believed the moral bases of social cohesion had to be reasserted against the fractured conception of peoplehood normalized by economic competition. Yet Proudhon denied the suffrage a place in his program of regeneration. Universal manhood suffrage was not evil because it expressed a misguided will of the people—​say, because they were uneducated or misled by oppression. Instead, universal suffrage was dangerous because it gave voice to the wrong conception of peoplehood in the first place: the electorate. “The individual vote, with regard to government, as a means of observing the national will, is exactly the same thing as a new division of land would be in the political economy,” he explained. “It is the agrarian law transported from the soil to authority.”92 Universal manhood suffrage reproduced politically what was occurring economically: individual private enclosure. It was not a solution to social disintegration, but symptomatic of it. For Proudhon, a better solution to the social question than “democracy” was its opposite: the Republic. In the republic, everyone reigns and governs; the People think and act as one person. Representatives are plenipotentiaries with the imperative mandate and are recallable at will. The law is the expression of the unanimous will: there is no other hierarchy besides solidarity of functions, no other aristocracy besides labour’s, no other initiative besides the citizens’. Here is the republic! Here is the People’s sovereignty!

The problem with electoral representation, Proudhon wants to say, is that the subject of representation is a self-​interested individual. Where universal suffrage aggregated individual preferences, republicanism articulated the unified will of the people. Where the former voiced a fragmented people in subjection to the state, the latter expressed “the People . . . as one person” legislating for itself. The former produced a social body abstractly represented through the calculus of votes; the latter produced a social body incarnated through the “solidarity of functions.” Just as the complementary cooperation between husband and wife, artisan and peasant, or merchant and banker threaded together a thick social fabric, the republic organically generated its unity out of the social division of labor. That was why the

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  99 Republic incarnated a unified people concretely rather than abstractly or quantitatively. The Second Republic’s demise seemed to vindicate Proudhon’s arguments. Future communards echoed his prescriptions. In 1871, they repudiated the general will by reimplementing the mandat impératif. They endorsed the idea that popular sovereignty expressed “unity in power” achieved through complementary social differentiation. And they denounced any gap between representative and represented. Unlike the democratic atomism of merely adding up votes, in the Republic, everything had be “thinking and acting as a single man.”93 It had to be a concrete rather than symbolic or “insubstantial” collective subject.94 And, in contrast to representative democracy, the Social Republic had to incarnate a society ruling itself without the state’s mediation. As the editors of Le Peuple reminded their readers in September 1848, “Socialism is a science, politics is an art; Socialism has principles, politics has only fantasies; Socialism knows only humanity, politics knows only individuals.”95 So much the worse, then, for political answers to the social question.

From the Electorate to the People-​in-​Arms Imperial censorship drove debates over the social question underground after 1852. Booming economic modernization bolstered Napoleon’s prestige. This was the time of Paris as “the capital of the nineteenth century,” an era when French cultural expression defined European intellectual life.96 In a context of imperial economic and cultural supremacy, it was up to underground networks of Blanquists and freemasons to preserve the memory of 1793 and 1848.97 The social question would not return to public prominence in France until the 1860s, when economic contraction forced France into a depression. The glamor of Haussmanization, gas lamps, arcades, and bourgeois boutiques lining the Champs-​Élysées appeared in unacceptable contrast to urban working men and women scraping by on five-​sous dinner specials, purchased on credit. Together with press censorship, the economic contraction turned liberals against the Empire.98 Napoleon responded by liberalizing his rule, expanding the right to strike, freedom for the press, and legislative power for parliamentary bodies. But these reforms backfired. The partial restoration of the right to association and a free press empowered opposition groups instead of consolidating support for his regime. In particular, the relaxation of

100  The Virtues of Violence laws on public assembly in the late 1860s gave birth to a flourishing “public meetings” movement.99 The social question resurfaced in this environment. However, engaged workers and intellectuals did not return to the political culture of 1848 uncritically. Exaltation of work, technological utopianism, and faith in positivism all reappeared, but much of the revolutionary left now appeared indifferent toward the suffrage and the political process. Within the vocabularies of dissent that prevailed in the Empire’s final days, Citoyen Charpentier’s heavenly lightning of universal suffrage no longer offered a compelling weapon of revolutionary democracy. This disillusionment pointed to a real conceptual mutation in midcentury socialist thought. Universal manhood suffrage existed under the Second Empire, but everyone knew its existence was de jure and constrained to a preordained plebiscitary function. Suffrage under the Empire did not amount to the fullness of electoral popular sovereignty. Yet, rather than reclaim the redemptive vision of the ballot against plebiscitary dictatorship, many socialists abandoned it wholesale. When the conservative publisher Edouard Dentu surveyed the public meetings of 1870, he found “heroes of barricades, professors of social science, doctors of communism and the parceling of property, blue-​stockings from the womens’ clubs . . . all of the personnel of the Terror” advocating for total moral anarchy. Here was the “wreckage of 1848” demanding “atheism, regicide, civil war, spoliation, the communalization of property, the abolition of the family.”100 Yet Dentu’s list of the wreckage of 1848 contains a conspicuous absence: electoral popular sovereignty. Every progressive shibboleth appeared, but there was no mention at all of voting, elections, or the suffrage.101 This absence was the point. Louise Michel worked as a schoolteacher in Paris during the public meetings movement. Her memoirs recount men and women prophesizing a post-​scarcity utopia of communal plenty. On the other side of history, they believed the downtrodden would enjoy “chemical mixtures containing more iron and nutrients than the blood and meat we now absorb” from the “putrefied flesh we are accustomed to eating.” After the social revolution, men and women would be regenerated as sensual, self-​ making creatures. “We were all poets, a little,” even if imperial rule tried to erase that fact.102 Yet, for Michel, electoral politics had little, if any, role in the coming utopia. Amid talk of engineered food, public art, and educational reform, she accorded no place for elections. As she put it, “politics is a form of that stupidity” which causes worldly evils. It is thus “incapable of ennobling

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  101 the race.”103 Indeed, “the issue of political rights is dead.”104 Revolutionaries had learned that “the attempt to work through parliaments has been going on for a long while, but parliaments, standing as they do in the midst of rottenness, can no longer produce anything worthwhile.”105 Disaffection persisted deep into the siege of Paris. At the Club démocratique des Batignolles on 9 December 1870, clubists denounced a report in which a reactionary “openly announce[d]‌his plan to confiscate the Republic by means of universal suffrage.”106 During a debate on the social question at the Club de l’école de médecine on 28 December, a citizen Armand Levy proposed reestablishing corporatism and reorganizing it on the basis of universal suffrage. Some audience members were skeptical. One clubist replied, “it is true that you introduce universal suffrage; but have you thought carefully about the consequences of applying universal suffrage to industry?” Indeed, “was not the Empire the government of universal suffrage par excellence?”107 Michel and other future communards were resuscitating 1848’s dream of a redeemed humanity in 1870, but they were leaving behind the redemptive vision of the ballot. The fall and winter of 1870–​ 1871 eroded whatever remaining faith socialists held in elections. On 31 October, Blanquists led an insurrection which failed, and four days later the provisional government held a plebiscite. Jacobins and Blanquists campaigned hard to convince Paris to support revolutionary socialist organizations. Yet, out of more than 300,000 voting Parisians, only about 54,000 voted in favor of the communal movement. In February, elections to the new National Assembly propelled monarchists and conservatives into power with the sanction of a national majority. Paris was virtually alone in electing radicals into the government, and, even there, the left’s victory was uneven, concentrated in working class neighborhoods.108 If the people were the electorate, it was simply impossible for Parisian revolutionary socialist movements to speak on their behalf. Michel bitterly remarked that the “unthinking crowds” of Paris behaved like “the great herd that bares its back for the whip and holds out its neck to the knife.”109 These electoral defeats compounded the shadow of 1848, and they pushed revolutionary communards toward a minoritarian model of revolution. At the end of December 1870, one future communard argued that “the revolutionary method is the only one which could today be put at the disposition of the people. Governed for a long time by conspiratorial monarchic minorities, we must today be guided by a minority devoted to the interests of the people.”110 As organizers prepared the Red Poster campaign in early January,

102  The Virtues of Violence Arthur Perion announced that “This time we will go to the Hôtel de Ville and we will install the Commune. For that, we will not have recourse to universal suffrage.” That was because “even though democrats are in the minority, we must try to establish the Commune, because for too long we have let ourselves be disunited by the Bourgeoisie.”111 A few days later, on 10 January, at the Club de la Reine-​Blanche, another speaker pressed the same point again. The debate concerned the proposition that “the Republic cannot be separated from universal suffrage without becoming an oligarchy or dictatorship.” This revolutionary insisted, Well, then, let us proclaim the Commune; we don’t have a day, an hour to lose. We’re told about elections, about universal suffrage. . . . Universal suffrage will be good when France will have stopped being raised by petits frères, when everyone will have received free and obligatory education; but where we are now, what we need to save ourselves is the revolutionary Commune.112

In the eyes of many clubists, universal suffrage had forfeited its decisive role in replacing the Empire with a Republic. This retreat announced a break in the chain of identifications between the Republic, democracy, and universal manhood suffrage that prevailed in the 1840s. Those who did not have the vote still valued it, but Napoleon’s plebiscitary methods and the left’s electoral defeats persuaded many of its impotence. Another solution would be needed for realizing the regenerated society they craved. The situation was dire: “France, suffering for centuries, has arrived at this last period of the malady, where it is necessary that the patient recover or die,” Odilon Delimal warned in La Commune. “If the soul of the people still has enough energy, if the social body has the power to resist the embraces of corruption, that is salvation. But if the will weakens, if the body staggers, that is death.”113 Either France could die of the social question, or it could be reborn. But to find salvation, a new language of democratic agency would be needed, something other than the ballot. * * * The image of “the people in arms” possessed a long republican pedigree. Machiavelli praised the popular armies of the Roman consuls, arguing that, unlike foreign mercenaries, citizen armies were empowered by glory and

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  103 love of country.114 Rousseau insisted in Considerations on the Government of Poland that every citizen should be a soldier, not by trade but by duty.115 After Year II of the Revolution, the people in arms became one of French republicanism’s most enduring motifs.116 They came to name the people in their most concrete, virtuous, and felicitous personality. The battle of Valmy on 20 September 1792 immortalized them as an invincible power, capable of throwing back the united armies of monarchical Europe against all odds.117 At Valmy, the people had been armed with the true source of military might—​ not numbers, but republican unity and morality (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). The people in arms functioned as a revolutionary image in at least three ways. First, it symbolized universalism. It crystallized the dream of a people taking responsibility for its self-​defense directly rather than a section of society doing so on its behalf. “This not only gave moral force to what the armies were required to do,” Alan Forrest argues, but also helped define “the wider project of revolutionising society.”118 It enacted equality in the arena of violence. Second, the image signified voluntarism. In practice, conscription into the revolutionary armies had sometimes been compulsory. Military difficulties, for example, had forced Jacobins to forfeit the idea of a volunteer army for a proportionate quotas system in the spring of 1793. In theory, however, the people

Figure 3.2  Horace Vernet, La Bataille de Valmy (1826). The National Gallery.

104  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 3.3  François Rude, “The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792,” Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France.

in arms were volontaires, citizens who expressed their freedom and equality by answering the lévee en masse. Their voluntarism made their violence a powerful reagent of moral regeneration; it expressed virtue.119 Third, the people in arms contributed to the idea of a continuous revolutionary tradition stretching

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  105 from 1792 to 1871, because it blurred different types of violence and actors into iterations of a single democratic phenomenon. The volunteers at Valmy became the same people responsible for striking down the king’s tyranny on 10 August with a thunderous flash of their unmediated, catastrophic agency. Both groups of actors participated in a single collective subject that happened to incarnate across different bodies. The people in arms therefore never named a brute fact. It interpellated heterogeneous acts and agents into a single living symbol, one which reappeared across generations in a way that seemed to be genetically French (Figure 3.4).120 Their image comes into sharper focus when contrasted to the imperial standing army. In 1868, the Empire extended active service for the imperial army to five years. The reform sought to improve the wartime viability of conscripts, but it confirmed that the imperial army stood apart from civil society as a hierarchical professional cadre.121 In contrast, the people in arms were ordinary citizens culled from the commercial classes or skilled trades. They were one another’s equals, regardless of trade, class, social standing—​ and sometimes sex. The contrast also signified an opposition between the organic and the inorganic. “The people in arms was,” Arthur Waldron observes, “a natural phenomenon. It was what society would do if freed from artificial, inorganic constraints” like bureaucratic rules for conscription and promotion.122 They were, Daniel Moran argues, imagined as a literal “force of nature.”123 That was why they expressed an altogether different conception of collective agency than the Empire’s standing army: not the careerist ambitions of professional soldiers, but the natural instinct for republican citizenship among ordinary people. Communards appropriated this mythical image to become the government of the true people:  the people in arms rather than an electorate. It allowed them to claim the mantle of the people even when the majority did not side with them in elections. Appreciating this fact underscores why it is a mistake to construe, as many critics have done, the Commune’s minoritarian revolutionary model as “betraying” its deeper, “plebeian” democratic ambitions.124 It is a mistake because it naturalizes the electorate as the true body of the people at a moment when the proper shape of that body was under dispute. It also makes it more difficult to explain the central, overriding feature of communard thought:  though they waged a minoritarian revolution, they still believed they waged a democratic revolution. To understand how that was possible, we have to appreciate how communards drew their authority from an alternative incarnation of the people’s body than the one underwriting the French state.

106  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 3.4  Decree for the abolition of the Expiatory Chapel of Louis XVI by the Paris Commune’s Committee on Public Safety. The broadside is dated for the Year 79 of the Revolution. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

We can see this redefinition of the people from an electorate to a people in arms in three participant accounts of the Commune:  Prosper-​Olivier Lissagaray’s L’histoire de la Commune de 1871, Louise Michel’s Mémoires, and Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé. These authors belonged to different organizations

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  107 within Paris, and their accounts provide different vantage points on the Commune’s history. Yet all fought on the barricades, and all dramatized the same point: the Commune was self-​government by the people in arms. Lissagaray published L’histoire de la Commune de 1871 five years after the Commune. Karl and Eleanor Marx helped him translate it into English in 1886, after he escaped to London. In this book, Lissagaray did not seek the meaning of the Commune in his first personal experience of it. He sought it in its history. And for Lissagaray, the Commune’s history was above all a story concerning Paris’s passage from military passivity and moral weakness to insurrectionary politics and moral enthusiasm—​a story, in other words, of redemptive violence. Lissagaray’s history opens with a charge:  the provisional government never intended to activate the people in arms to save France. The Empire collapsed with Napoleon III’s military defeat to Prussian forces at the battle at Sedan on 2 September 1870. In Paris, a confused but enthusiastic republican movement seized the Hôtel de Ville and proclaimed the Republic as a war measure. At first, that provisional government invoked the people in arms and Valmy’s example. On 5 September, Louis Arago, the mayor of Paris, exhorted that “Just as our fathers did in 1792, so I call on you today: Citizens, the fatherland is in danger!” “The Republic was victorious in 1792,” and today “the Republic has once more been proclaimed. . . . Citizens, watch over the polity that is confided in you: tomorrow, with the army, you will avenge the patrie.” Gambetta, now Minister of the Interior, echoed the mayor’s allusions to Valmy. “Today is 21 September,” he wrote. “Sixty-​eight years ago on this day our fathers founded the Republic and took an oath, faced with a foreign invader who defiled the sacred soil of the fatherland, that they would live in freedom or die in combat.”125 These appeals to Valmy and the people in arms encouraged leaders of the extraparliamentary left to cooperate with the provisional government. On 6 September, Blanqui joined his fellow conspirators Gustave Tridon and Émile Eudes in declaring his support. He encouraged others to do the same in the first issue of La Patrie en danger. Hindsight lets Lissagaray see the blustering parliamentary rhetoric as merely that. “The people instinctively offered their help to render the nation unto herself ” after Napoleon’s defeat. Yet “the Left repulsed them, refused to save the country by a riot,” thereby allowing “the fettered nation [to sink] into the abyss in the face of its motionless governing classes.”126 Echoing familiar denunciations of parliamentary politics as mere chatter, Lissagaray reports that the parliamentary left “exhausts itself in exclamations.” Gambetta cries,

108  The Virtues of Violence “We must wage Republican war,” and then promptly “sits down again,” unmoving.127 Jules Favre demands a Committee of Defense; he is rebuffed and concedes without argument. Prussian forces defeat the French army at Metz—​something the government denies but newspapers are reporting—​ but no deputy asks after the discrepancy. Prussian armies rapidly approach Paris, but no evacuation is implemented, no casting of cannon and ammunition systematically initiated, no earthworks and defense fortifications built.128 Readers must conclude, Lissagaray insists, that the provisional government intended to capitulate from the beginning. There was never a sincere effort to call the people to arms. In Lissagaray’s view, the provisional government’s true sin lay in this inaction. The people in arms laid dormant within the bodies of Paris, but they were not invoked. “In every Parisian mechanic there is the stuff of a gunner. . . . Paris swarmed with engineers, overseers, foremen, who might have been drilled as officers. There lying wasted were all the materials for a victorious army.”129 Napoleon’s defeat represented a defeat of a professional corps standing independently from society. It did not signify the defeat of the French people. Rather than draw out the latent “victorious army” in Paris, however, the national government “up to the last hour refused to utilize it.”130 “Were they to give in,” Lissagaray cried, “their arms intact?”131 Apparently so. On 28 January, Paris capitulated to Prussian forces. According to Lissagaray, the politicians of the left were not the only culpable men. Paris, too, was guilty. Communards believed Paris held a right to self-​defense, but Parisians apparently did not want to exercise it. Lissagaray had already observed to his dismay that when Blanquists earlier marched through Belleville to the cries of Vive la République! Death to the Prussians! “No one joined them. The crowd looked on from affair, astonished, motionless.”132 During the winter, mass demobilization persisted. As the provisional government refused the levée en masse and fumbled in its defensive maneuvers, Parisian everyday life under the siege was characterized above all by inertia. All is silent. Save the faubourgs, Paris was a vast sick chamber, where no one dared to speak above his breath. This moral abdication is the true psychological phenomenon of the siege. . . . If they [the parliamentary left] dread the giddy-​headed, the fanatics, or compromising collaborators, why do they not take control of the movement into their own hands? But they confine themselves to crying, “No riots now we are faced with the enemy!

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  109 No fanatics!” as though capitulation were better than an insurrection; as though 10th August 1792 and 31st May 1793 had not been insurrections in the face of the enemy threat. . . . And you, citizens of the old sections of 1792–​94 who supplied ideas to the Convention and the Commune, who dictated to them the means of safety . . . do you recognize your offspring in these gulls, weaklings, jealous of the people, prostrating before the Left like devotees before the host?133

France needed the memory of 1792–​1794 more than ever, but Paris remained inert. The “true psychological phenomenon of the siege,” Lissagaray emphasized, was the people’s “moral abdication,” their reluctance to exercise their own power. Etiolated, degenerated, and exhausted, Paris was a shadow of its revolutionary self. For Lissagaray, 18 March provided a turning point. That morning, the French national government tried to disarm Paris by seizing its cannons, paid for by the subscriptions of the National Guard. It dispatched soldiers under Generals Clément-​Thomas and Lecomte to reclaim artillery from neighborhoods like Belleville and Montmartre. Short on horses, the soldiers struggled to cart the cannons away. The neighborhood women rang the tocsin and shielded the cannons by climbing atop them or obstructing the path. Platoon leaders ordered their soldiers to shoot the gathering crowds, but they turned their rifle butts up. In the afternoon’s chaos, the National Guard arrested Lecomte. An angry crowd soon executed him. Minutes later, crowds identified and killed Clément-​Thomas as well. Adolphe Thiers responded to these executions by ordering the city abandoned. He withdrew Paris’s functionaries from its markets, telegraphs, and hospitals. Upon the government’s withdrawal of the city’s logistical infrastructure, the cannons’ defenders in the streets filled the vacuum of authority. When members of the parliamentary left tried to ensure that General Lecomte was given a military trial, the crowds murdered him on the spot instead. When officers of the National Guard asked the people to “Wait for the Committee! Constitute a court-​martial!” for Clément-​Thomas, they were answered with his immediate execution:  “Twenty muskets levelled at him battered him down.”134 In short, on 18 March, “the people, so long standing on the defensive, had begun to move.”135 The Commune was born, and its violence had not waited for legal niceties. Hayden White reminds us that histories are never just chronological records. Their explanatory power depends on their emplotment.

110  The Virtues of Violence “Significance” and “explanation” are formal effects of establishing hierarchies among events and the sequences used to connect them.136 From this point of view, what is telling about Lissagaray’s emplotment is how he plots the Commune’s origins on 18 March—​and not its official election on 26 March. The latter could have been invoked to provide an origin for the Commune. Yet it is rarely, if ever, invoked as its founding date, by either Lissagaray or any other historian of the Paris Commune. Indeed, when Lissagaray discusses 26 March, it is as an episode in a military campaign, “a life and death struggle.” On election day, Lissagaray writes, “a hundred battalions thronged the square, and piled their bayonets, lit up by the sun, in front of the Hôtel-​de-​ Ville.” Battalions lined the streets, and red banners “[symbolized] the advent of the people.” In the square, bands trumpeted the “Marseillaise” and the “Chant du départ”—​songs commemorating the volontaires of 1792—​while “the cannon of the Commune of 1792 thundered on the riverside.”137 The festival’s occasion may have been the Commune’s election, but its results were not at center stage. It was the festival itself, visual proof that “the people has the right to convoke itself ” directly and “in moments of great peril.” Paris had “restored the circulation to her paralysed limbs,” “resuscitated” with a “new life.” She was ready “to begin a new existence with the regenerated Communes of France” in her wake, earning “a youthful aspect,” happy to have “escaped from death or great peril.” “Those who had despaired a month before,” Lissagaray observed, “were now full of enthusiasm.” Indeed, the contagious enthusiasm abolished the space between citizens and fused them together with a common humanity, “for indeed we were not strangers, but bound together by the same faith and the same aspirations.”138 The porcelain decorator Gabriel Ranvier proclaimed the Commune’s election, and “the quick reports of the cannon, the bands, the drums, blended in one formidable vibration.”139 One formidable vibration of artillery and drums, the cannon of the 1792 Commune thundering on the riverside:  that was the “magnificent spectacle of a people recovering their sovereignty.” The undivided sovereignty of the people is an abstract axiom, to be sure. Yet on 26 March, just as on 18 March or 21 January 1793, it became possible to believe that it was something seen and heard, experienced in the harmonizing vibration of drums and cannon. “This lightning would have made the blind see,” Lissagaray boasted. The meaning of the Commune’s election was not gleaned from its election results, its quantitative ratio of the tallied ballots. What mattered was the candescence of common power, that “invaluable force in this time of universal

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  111 anaemia,” “one of those great historical turning-​points when a people may be remoulded.”140 Lissagaray’s portrayal of the Commune’s election day was not a stylistic quirk. Vallès did not even bother calling 26 March a victory for an electorate. It belonged to a “victorious republican army”: “This clear, warm sun gilding the mouth of the cannon, this smell of bouquets, the ripple of the flags . . . these lights, these brass fanfares, these bronze reflections,” Vallès wrote, are “all intoxicating the victorious republican army with pride and joy.”141 In that day’s Le Cri du peuple, Vallès requested the National Guard be organized as Paris’s sole armed force. After all, it was thanks to their “spontaneous and courageous effort” that the revolution of 18 March was successful.142 Three days later, the newly elected Commune abolished the professional standing army in favor of the National Guard, to which all French men were now asked to join. Vallès responded, “The act of popular sovereignty was accomplished in a city bristling with men in arms. . . . In the midst of this military paraphernalia it voted, serene and threatening, deposing its cannonballs in the ballot box.”143 On 30 March, he summed up his interpretation: “The Commune is proclaimed. She leaves the ballot box triumphant, sovereign and armed.”144 In the hands of both Lissagaray and Vallès, 26 March became victory fanfare for 18 March. Its purpose was not to announce election results but to crown the violent creation of the Commune. Lissagaray in particular plots the day as consummating the supremacy of the National Guard. And it is worth recalling that virtually every document demanding the Commune made that request. When broadsides like the “Red Poster” of 6 January itemized the French state’s wrongs, they did not focus “on the national” government’s suppression of Paris’s participatory political culture. They objected, instead, to the government’s refusal of the levée en masse, its failure to mobilize the National Guard, its hesitation to throw the full brunt of popular power against the enemy. The government failed to call the people in arms into being. That was why proclaiming the Commune was a war measure. Its willingness to call for armed insurrection became the basis of its competing claim to popular sovereignty against the French state. Lissagaray’s response to the Commune’s recreation of the Committee on Public Safety underlines this point best. At the end of a council meeting on 28 April 1871, Jules Miot, a veteran of 1848, called for the committee’s creation. Communard sorties were disorganized and ended in embarrassing retreat. Paris lost Fort Issy to Versailles at the end of April, opening the city to imminent invasion. For Miot, it was time to recreate the Committee on Public

112  The Virtues of Violence Safety. The Commune needed an organ that could wield executive authority over its scattered, decentralized commissions. It needed a source of energy, initiative, and centralized action in place of paralyzing deliberation. The Council’s majority voted in favor of Miot’s proposal on the first of May, but not before acrimonious debate. Gustave Courbet worried that “We are reproducing to our detriment a terror that does not belong to our times.”145 Creating a new Committee on Public Safety trapped the communal revolution in the shadow of Robespierre, St. Just, Hébert, and Babeuf. Raoul Rigault, in contrast, insisted that working within that shadow was the point. Infamous head of the Commune’s Prefecture of the Police, Rigault already styled himself the reincarnation of Hébert; the Commune, a reincarnation of its regicidal 1793 antecedent.146 The Council’s dispute turned on the nature of republican dictatorship. In his recounting of it, Lissagaray chastised “the minority” like Courbet and Tridon for voting against the Committee on Public Safety. Though sympathetic to them on philosophical grounds, Lissagaray believed “these men could never understand that the Commune was a barricade, not a government.” These men “strained the reaction against the principle of authority to the verge of suicide,” jeopardizing the Commune’s survival with their unconditional antiauthoritarianism.147 Lissagaray’s assessment is revealing. A Commune that was afraid of authority was not a commune at all because communalism was never just an anti-​authoritarian experiment. Its mission was to reconstitute democratic authority outside the state. And if the authority of the state was conferred from elections, the authority of the Commune would be conferred from elsewhere: by the people armed. For Lissagaray, “the minority” protesting the Committee on Public Safety misunderstood the matter at hand. The Commune was a democracy because it was at war. Lissagaray was thus relieved to report that, despite the divisive debate, members reunited over the most important value of all:  “no one, even in the thick of the peril dared to utter the word capitulation.”148 Capitulation was more than a military concession. It was the defeat of the Social Republic and its dream of social regeneration. In the end, if one was to find the “social society” of which socialists dreamed, one had only to look at the “smoking ramparts” of Paris rather than the halls of representative government. Do you at least recognize this Paris, seven times shot down since 1789, and always ready to rise for the salvation of France? Where is her programme,

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  113 say you? Why, seek it before you, and not at the faltering Hôtel-​de-​Ville. These smoking ramparts, these explosions of heroism, these women, these men of all professions united  .  .  .  do they not speak loudly enough our common thought, and that all of us are fighting for equality, the enfranchisement of labour, the advent of a social society?149

* * * Louise Michel was a combatant of the Commune and an active participant in the public meetings movement. She was also a member of the Commune’s Union de Femmes and the Eighteenth Arrondissement’s vigilance committee. Like Lissagaray, she loathed Paris’s passivity after the Second Empire’s collapse: “the city should have cleansed itself by bathing in the blood of the Empire.”150 On 18 March, she protected the cannons with the crowds of Montmartre. In her Mémoires, Michel echoed Lissagaray’s choice to plot the insurrection as the Commune’s origins. On this day, the eighteenth of March, the people wakened. If they had not, it would have been the triumph of some king; instead it was a triumph of the people. The eighteenth of March could have belonged to the allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people. It was the people’s.151

Michel knew first hand that 18 March could not self-​evidently speak for the people, either of France or Paris. She participated in the failed popular insurrections prior to March, including the 30 October takeover of the Hôtel de Ville (in response to the Government of National Defense’s announcement of negotiations with Prussians) and the 22 January insurrection with the National Guard. The failure of the first led to Blanqui’s arrest; the second saw Breton mobile guards kill several protesters in a crowd much too small to threaten the provisional government. These failures of popular action led Michel to distinguish between two collective subjects in her memoir: a demobilized, unarmed crowd and “the people.” Recounting her indignation at Paris’s refusal to spontaneously rise up, she wrote, One holiday I was going to Julie’s when I encountered a vast multitude of people on the boulevard. With the hopes I held, I believed the hour had come, but it was a carnival, in the midst of which the old republican Miot

114  The Virtues of Violence was being taken to prison. . . . It was a joyous crowd on a day of mourning, but they weren’t really the people. They were the same crowd you see at public executions, but which you can never find when you need to rip up paving stones to build barricades. They are the same unthinking crowd that bolsters up tyrannies and cuts the throats of people trying to save them.152

Michel’s claim that a demobilized crowd “weren’t really the people” goes beyond distinguishing a pacific people with an armed one. By excluding a demobilized crowd from “the people” at all, Michel was suggesting that armed mobilization was essential rather than accidental to peoplehood. It was not one among many activities the people could engage in; it was the people’s defining activity. One was simply a “useless mouth” otherwise.153 “The people,” Michel implies, emerge through a special kind of collective agency—​insurrectionary violence—​and that is what differentiates them from Bonapartism’s “electorate,” “the same unthinking crowd that bolsters up tyrannies.” True popular agency is expressed not through the ballot but at the barricade. For Michel, the people in arms is the true subject of history. Individual lives are simply segments of its larger impersonal existence, one particular instantiation of its life in a specific time and place. The people in arms is a collective subject transcending any particular body because its body is that of the Revolution itself. Michel directly participated in Bloody Week; she defended the barricades of Montmartre. Yet her memoirs disavow her own agency and that of her comrades. Time and again, the memoirs describe the Commune as the work of a supra-​personal agency. Lecomte and Clément-​ Thomas were not killed by any one person but by the Revolution itself, which “will strike for many others, without the Revolution pausing in its course.”154 Again, at the barricades, her violence is not her own. Some people say I’m brave. Not really. There is no heroism; people are simply entranced by events. What happens is that in the face of danger my perceptions are submerged in my artistic sense, which is seized and charmed. Tableaux of the dangers overwhelm my thoughts, and the horrors of the struggle become poetry. It wasn’t bravery. . . . It was beautiful, that’s all. Barbarian that I am, I love cannon, the smell of powder, machine-​gun bullets in the air.155

Her courage at the barricade was not sourced in personal will or moral conviction but in her being “entranced” or “submerged” in the arresting aesthetic

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  115 experience of combat, “the smell of powder, machine-​gun bullets in the air.” If Michel’s account is autobiographical, she is not its protagonist. Individually, they were “nothing,” but in taking up weapons, they entered into a larger revolutionary drama, not as themselves, but as the latest instantiation of a collective subject that predated their individual biological births. “My life is not mine to live,” she insisted like a catechism. “One person is nothing and yet part of that which is everything—​the Revolution.”156 For Michel, part of the regenerative power of the people in arms lay in the fact that it included women. “Louise Michel is a woman,” she wrote of herself, and as a woman, she “has the villainy to insist” that “All inequalities . . . will collapse when men and women engage in the common battle together.”157 “Beware of [women]!” for “when they are sickened by all that is around them and rise up against the old world,” Michel warned, “On that day the new world will begin.”158 Michel was articulating a view common among the most radical women of the Commune. “For the citizen who defends his right and his home,” André Léo argued, “the presence of the woman is a joy, a force . . . she doubles his courage and enthusiasm.” Indeed, “The woman on the field of battle . . . is the soul of the city saying to the soldier: I am with you. Do it right.”159 Enfranchised women may be good, but armed women are even better. That is the real transgression, the proof that a new society and new equality has arrived. Consider again how 18 March was an insurrection of women, just like the 1789 March on Versailles. Michel writes elsewhere of her rush to protect the cannons that day, Montmartre awoke, the rappel beat. . . . In the dawn that was rising, we heard the tocsin, we ascended quickly. . . . We thought of dying for liberty. It was as if we were lifted from the earth. We die, Paris lifts itself up. At certain times, the crowds are the avant-​garde of the human ocean.160

To face death, she says, is to feel one’s feet lift off from the earth, indeed to lift oneself up. The reader is reminded of Edmund Burke’s portrait of Marie Antoinette: “surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—​glittering like the morning star.”161 Marie Antoinette hovers above the ground because she comes from above; she is power devolved from the majesty of the state, a gift from on high. Michel hovers, too, but she is Marie Antoinette inverted. She is

116  The Virtues of Violence “lifted from the earth,” not descended from heaven. Her transcendence is not that of power dignified, but the elation of those “dying for liberty.” She does not live “above the horizon,” but belongs to this “human ocean” answering the tocsin, the call to arms. To convoke the people, Michel wants to say, “prose and verse and music”—​the warp and weft of utopian socialism—​is not enough. Economic cooperation is not enough. Women have to be seized and charmed by the whistle of bullets. Michel is echoing Lissagaray on the form of the true people. When it comes to social revolution, the redemptive vision of the ballot needs to make way for the people in arms. As in 1789, that includes women. Free lectures on physics, chemistry, law, music, and pedagogy might be liberating, but, as the new dawn approaches, it is violence that women must take up. “The Revolution was rising, so what good were dramas? The true drama was in the streets, so what good were orchestras? We had cannon.”162 The last two years before 1871, the rue Hautefeuille was a hotbed of intellectual women. . . . But prose and verse and music disappeared because we felt so near the drama coming from the street, the true drama, the drama of humanity. The songs of the new epoch were war songs, and there was no room for anything else.163

However much an associational political culture can make life under capitalism more livable, it does not make a people sovereign. Orchestras are beautiful, but not as beautiful as war songs. What the Social Republic needs, what “the drama of humanity” requires, are women with guns. * * * Jules Vallès was a combatant of the Commune like Lissagaray and Michel. A  familiar critic of the Second Empire and editor of Le Cri du peuple, Vallès was also a member of the Communal Council. His autobiographical recounting of the event, L’Insurgé, actually bills itself as a novel. However, except for naming the main character Jacques Vingtras, the novel is barely fictionalized. L’Insurgé recounts Vallès’s life (as Vingtras) from the Second Empire to the fall of the Commune. Unlike Lissagaray and Michel, Vallès plots the Commune’s origin a bit earlier than 18 March—​although, like them, that origin will be violent. According to Vallès, the incipient spirit of the Commune was discovered at the funeral of Victor Noir on 20 January

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  117 1870. Noir had been shot and killed in a duel with Napoleon’s cousin, and his funeral became the focal point of a Blanquist conspiracy to instigate an uprising against the Second Empire. Unfortunately, armed soldiers dissolved the procession. Despite the insurrection’s failure, Vallès tells the reader that Noir’s funeral showed the people to be on the cusp of reincarnating as the people in arms. Procession members were “fragments of an army seeking other fragments, shreds of a Republic stuck together by a dead man’s blood . . . all held to the body by a single idea.” Under the cloak of each worker was a weapon at the ready: “Their hearts were swollen with the hope of battle—​their pockets were swollen as well.”164 They moved as an absorptive, organic unity. During the procession, a fellow journalist came to Vallès, presuming him the leader. Vallès rebuked him. “No one’s in command, get that straight! Not even Rochefort and Delescluze, who would soon be completely forgotten if some street orator produced a dazzling flash of lightning, even if he just made the sun break through the cloudy sky.” The Empire received its dazzling warning. In the face of the people’s reawakening, the Empire “better hurry if they want . . . to drown the fire of the mob as the sound of thunder is a signal that the murderous electricity has died in the earth.”165 Once the Empire heard the thunderclap of the people, it would already be too late. Of course, Napoleon threatened to dupe the people once more. He declared war against the Prussians, redirecting the people’s ire away from himself. Vallès despaired. “But can’t you hear the ‘Marseillaise’?” someone asked him. “I am appalled by your ‘Marseillaise’ and what you have made of it. It has become a State Hymn. It does not inspire volunteers, it leads flocks of sheep.”166 (Michel: “Have you ever seen sheep lift their throats to the knife?”)167 The juxtaposition ought to be read as a juxtaposition between the people in arms, free and spontaneous, and the imperial army, hierarchical and professional. Vallès stumbles on a group of soldiers preparing for the war and a drill sergeant shouting “Left, Right, Left, Right!” and he seethes. “Do you think that men maintain the proper distance and wield bayonets like those metronomes when, after suddenly meeting the enemy, they find themselves in the heat of battle in some meadow, field or cemetery?”168 The imperial army was a machine that moved without will or consciousness. “Left, Right, Left, Right!” To Vallès’s euphoria, the Empire’s collapse lifted the ideological fog, and the people instinctively sought the Social Republic. The day after the Third Republic was proclaimed, Vallès observed that “Everyone had come there

118  The Virtues of Violence out of instinct, no plans had been made.” In the rain, he and other artisans “[wandered] about, looking for one another and talking of the Social Fatherland.”169 Vallès came to agree with Lissagaray and Michel that the Social Fatherland could not be founded through elections. Communards were learning that authority could not be generated through institutional channels or bestowed from above. It was generated spontaneously from below through readiness to fight. The Commune appointed Vallès a commander to a battalion of the National Guard, and he was given a military coat with epaulets to symbolize his authority. The guard members rebuffed him. The occasion taught Vallès that conferral of an official rank in the guard diminished rather than bestowed authority. Vallès tore off his epaulets. I quickly ripped off my four pitiful little stripes, faded, pinkish, cruddy . . . and I was free! Now I could be the real leader of the battalion. Oh, you must never accept regular commands in the revolutionary army! I thought rank conferred authority—​it removes it. You’re nothing but a cipher before the companies. You truly become a hero only in combat, when you’re the first to leap into danger. Then, since you’re in front, the others follow. And for that the baptism of the ballot is useless. All that counts is the baptism of fire.170

Stripped of the symbols of rank, “he presided over the deliberations of every group without being the president of any.”171 This scene repudiates the redemptive vision of the ballot. Historically, officers of the National Guard were elected, not appointed. Yet those elections, Vallès understood, were not appropriate means for distributing authority. Authority had to be distributed by participation in collective armed struggle. The scene points to the extraordinary distance travelled between 1848 and 1871. According to Ledru-​Rollin, universal manhood suffrage was the heart of revolutionary democracy’s arsenal. But, in 1871, Vallès confronted an altered theoretical terrain. On one side now stood the state, the electorate, and the political republic built on bourgeois rights; on the other lay antistatism, the people in arms, and the social republic built on the primacy of society. In the context of these conceptual realignments, it was futile for Gambetta, Favre, and other leaders of the Provisional Government to reassert parliamentary authority. They were nothing but false prophets, men “who wanted to play the thundering Jupiter.”172

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  119 In the weeks connecting the funeral of Noir to 18 March, Vallès would discover the violent sources of democratic authority time and again. In between jail stints and reading Proudhon, Vallès remarked, “I could feel the storm brewing nonetheless, I could see the horizon darkening. Let the people be made to lose patience—​and let the first thunderbolt explode!”173 Just like Lissagaray and Michel, that thunderbolt exploded for Vallès on 18 March: “two generals had their brains blown out this morning.” Upon hearing the news, Vallès shouts, “Well! It’s the Revolution! So here it is, the moment hoped for and awaited.”174 Vallès regretted ever doubting that the people would take up arms. “Cowards that we were,” he lamented, “we were already talking of leaving you and going far away from your streets, which we considered dead. Forgive us! Fatherland of honor, city of salvation, bivouac of the Revolution! No matter what happens, even if we are to be conquered once more, even if we die tomorrow, our generation will have been consoled.”175 The events of 18 March redeemed their generation. Like their forefathers, they, too, would incarnate the legendary collective subject of the Year II. As the Versaillais breached Paris’s gates, Vallès observed the spectacle of the people in arms building barricades (Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5  Barricade of the Paris Commune in the Rue de la Paix (1871). Alamy.

120  The Virtues of Violence Where was my head! I thought the city was going to play dead before being killed, and now women and children are doing their part. . . . Fever everywhere, or rather health. No one shouting, no one drinking. Just from time to time a trip to the bar, and, quickly, lips are wiped with the back of the hand, and man gets back to business. “We’re going to do our damnedest to put in a good day’s work,” one of this morning’s whiners tell me. “You had doubts about us a while ago, comrade. Drop by when things get hot, you’ll see who’s a coward!” The poppy harvest is waving in the wind . . . they can die now.176

Here at the barricade was Proudhon’s “Republic.” The social division of labor added up to an organic unity in combat. Fraternity and equality materialized as citizen-​defenders cooperated on the barricade. Men, women, children, and workers of all trades worked together in unison to prepare for battle. This was the legendary people in arms whose agency had a restorative, regenerative effect on the social body. Not “fever,” but “health,” “a good day’s work,” everyone “doing their part.” The moral language of the shop floor had been transposed to the barricade. The French state had orders for systematic murder. Veterans of the colonial theater led the invading forces; Joseph Vinoy and MacMahon had both participated in the capture of Algiers. Vallès, however, looked back on the Commune’s final hours and believed he glimpsed something immortal: its redemptive image of spontaneous insurrection, “an invincible weapon . . . the tool no one can break, the tool rebels will from this moment pass on from hand to hand along the road to civil wars.”177 So long as the future inherited this language of violence, the people in arms could be reincarnated time and again.

Conclusion Choosing to ground popular sovereignty in republican war rather than universal suffrage was a constrained choice. Revolutionary republicanism passed down few alternative languages of popular sovereignty. Even if political thinkers had tried to invent a new idiom, it probably would have been unconvincing to a population whose pride and self-​definition had become so entangled with the historical memory of its military achievements. Nor was more liberalism an option. After all, it was liberalism’s shortcomings—​its

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune  121 unconvincing account of the social, its economic attacks on the moral economy, its normalization of individualism—​that motivated the generations of 1848 and 1871 to pursue the Social Republic in the first place. Constrained as it was, the choice to privilege republican war was more than an inherited habit or a strategic response to necessity. I have tried to plot the path that led communards to commit to a specific personification of popular agency. But however much context and circumstance might have been responsible for turning communards away from the suffrage, communards found in insurrectionary violence something more than a necessary tactic. It was a vocabulary of action that incarnated the very form of the people they had pursued since 1848. Barricades were not only obstructions. Actually, they were generally ineffective on that front.178 Instead, they became the objects around which a cohesive people formed. It was a place where one’s sense of individuality could be subsumed under an absorptive aesthetic of violence (Michel); it was the fiery site out of which a “social society” could emerge (Lissagaray); its construction elevated Parisians from sickness to health, passivity to unified cooperation (Vallès). In short, insurrectionary violence was not a means to the end of a social republic—​or at least not only that. It was the activity by which the democratic subject of the social republic was created. It can be tempting to view the people in arms as a rhetorical figure. But in this age of positivism, they were viewed as the most concrete and natural manifestation of the people possible. Their activity of violence enacted their sovereignty. The “concreteness” of this conception of the people was not grounded in any demographic characteristics, but in the activity of insurrection itself. It was not bound by a physiological conception of the social body, but demarcated by participation in a language of redemptive violence. Redefining the people from an electorate to the people in arms imposed real costs on communards. Substituting war for the suffrage meant forfeiting the commitment to nonviolent revolution that characterized many social republicans of the 1840s. It also placed communards in a uniquely disadvantageous position to respond to popular demobilization. When a political tradition designs its commitments to sovereignty around the moral authority of spontaneous collective action, it earns the right to claim popular sovereignty against the state’s channels of legitimation. That is its weapon when it is speaking from the margins. At the same time, it compels its thinkers to grow dependent on the fact of continuous mobilization when in power. As Lissagaray conceded, popular demobilization becomes interpreted not as a

122  The Virtues of Violence lull in popular sovereignty but its “moral abdication” altogether. It was for this reason that French thinkers once again found their aspirations for everyday egalitarianism creating room for instruments like the Committee on Public Safety, which appeared as a means to institutionalize popular insurrection in the face of spontaneity’s inevitable exhaustion. Only a tradition that places a premium on spontaneity makes demobilization a crisis of popular sovereignty itself. In this way, the Paris Commune hewed closely to the postrevolutionary French tradition of identifying the republic as both an experiment in social regeneration and a democracy at war with its enemies. Circumstances helped braid the two facets together, but the outcome was a familiar theoretical language. To usurp the authority of the state, the Commune needed the language of redemptive violence. However important the ballot had come to be, more than universal suffrage was needed to make a people. What was needed, Michel said, were “war songs.” Posterity remembers how seriously the Communards took up that prescription; it was the Communard Eugène Pottier who gave us the “Internationale.” Let us wipe out the past. Crowd of slaves, arise! Arise! The world is changing its foundations, We are nothing, let us be everything!  .  .  .  It’s the final struggle, Keep together, and tomorrow, the International will be the human race . . . There are no supreme saviors, Neither God, nor Caesar, nor Tribune, Producers, let’s save ourselves! Let’s decree salvation for all!179

4 Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War On 22 January 1914, just months before the onset of the First World War, Jean Jaurès exhorted to an audience of students and workers, You are told today’s anthem is:  let us act! But what is action without thought? It is the brutality of inertia. You are told: brush aside the party of peace which saps your courage! And we, we say today that standing for peace is the greatest battle . . . Be wary of those who warn you against so-​called systems, who encourage you to abdicate your intelligence in the name of a philosophy of instinct or intuition!1

Jaurès would spend the next six months organizing to prevent war’s outbreak. He fought a losing battle. Fellow leaders across the political spectrum were increasingly convinced of the virtues of war against the German “hereditary” enemy, with the more bellicose seeking recompense for the Franco-​Prussian war. Jaurès could not undo this overwhelming compulsion for revenge: on 31 July, he was assassinated at a cafe by Raoul Villain, a revanchiste (Figure 4.1).2 Jaurès was warning students of those who “advise you to abdicate your intelligence” for war, just as leading French intellectuals were encouraging them to do precisely that.3 On the right, Charles Maurras’s royalist Action Française summoned the country to battle in the name of a Catholic “integral nationalism.” Maurice Barrès’s sentimental hymns to “rootedness” and “the soil and the dead” invited young men to vindicate their moral selves in combat. They were joined on the left by the poet Charles Péguy who, having once dismissed the Third Republic in 1910 as incarnating “the sterility of modern times,” enthusiastically volunteered to march for the republic in 1914.4 To the astonishment of many, Gustave Hervé could also be found pleading with authorities to conscript him after 1914. Hervé was the leader of the French antimilitarist movement, the largest and most powerful of its The Virtues of Violence. Kevin Duong, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190058418.001.0001

124  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 4.1  “Jaurès assassiné,” L’Humanité, 1 August 1914. Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

kind in prewar Europe. Yet after defiantly announcing in his 1906 Leur patrie that if faced with war, “we [the working class] shall not march, whoever be the aggressor,” the committed pacifist and socialist was reborn a nationalist, renaming his magazine La Guerre sociale to La Victoire.5

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  125 The trouble with “the generation of 1914” went beyond the fact that left and right rallied together in the face of impending war.6 Jaurès was a historian of the French Revolution, and he would have been familiar with the ways war could bridge domestic political cleavages. What alarmed him, instead, was how French intellectuals folded something unusual into their war songs: a preoccupation with irrational “instinct and intuition.” Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, writing pseudonymously as “Agathon,” had just called for a rejection of “intellectualism” and “rationalism” in favor of a “cult of action,” “national energy,” and the “classical spirit” in their 1913 pamphlet, “Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui” (Figure 4.2). Others were contrasting the experience of war with the cowardly self-​interest of antimilitarism (Figure 4.3). Péguy gave this generation a voice in his 1913 poem “Ève”: “Blessed are those who die in great battles /​Lying beneath the sun in the sight of God’s face. /​ Blessed are those who die in a high place /​Surrounded by the trappings of great funerals.”7 What was this image of irrationalist violence that Jaurès observed, and why was it uniting otherwise conflicting political programs on the eve of war? What problems did this violence—​imbued with moral, life-​affirming qualities—​promise to solve? Critics have long observed that the meaning of violence seemed to be evolving in these years. Images of irrationalist violence proliferated, not only among intellectuals in France, but also those in Germany, Italy, and Britain.8 Cold War political theorists interpreted this generational fixation with irrationalist violence as a romantic escape into antidemocratic chauvinism. The “mystique of violence” found in fin de siècle Europe, according to Raymond Aron, amounted to “invectives against democracy” in the name of an “aesthetic of existence” and a “degraded romanticism.”9 Judith Shklar agreed: it was the product of “the romantic mood of that time,” the desperate search for a “substitute religion.”10 Intellectual historians of the period have offered similar lines of interpretation, with some deeming it a “romantic anti-​capitalism” and an “alternative political tradition” to republican democracy altogether.11 For this reason, they have often identified in the fin de siècle denigration of reason, especially in France, a seed for twentieth-​century fascist political thought. Zeev Sternhell has given this thesis its most forceful articulation: “It was in France that the radical right soonest acquired the essential characteristics of fascism, and it was in France, also, that this process was most rapidly completed—​on the eve of the outbreak of the Great War.”12 Undoubtedly, these irrationalist images of violence announced new mutations in European ideas. The prewar years witnessed virtually every

126  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 4.2 Agathon, Les jeunes gens d’aujourdhui, 11th Edition. “Agathon” was the collective pseudonym for Alfred de Tarde and Henri Massis, and this pamphlet, originally published 1913, defended the renascent nationalism and Catholic faith among young men. It stressed a rejection of “rationalism” and offered an ode to Barrès’s cult of “national energy.” Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

major intellectual program on the continent moving to investigate reason’s outer bounds. The study of crowd psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, vitalism, and “collective effervescence” all originated between 1885 and 1914. Intellectuals across the human sciences were rediscovering reason’s insufficiency as a foundation for social order. So widespread was this collective

Figure 4.3  “L’Antimilitariste et le Tambour-​Major,” Le Petit Journal, Supplément illustré. 11 April 1909. The paper depicts an “antimilitarist” mocked by a crowd, a hooligan when compared to the nationalist drum major. Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

128  The Virtues of Violence cultural “crisis of reason,” a “revolt against reason,” or an “embrace of unreason,” that one scholar has concluded that, by 1914, “nothing remained of the proud structure of European certainties. The demolition was systematic, and covered almost every field of culture.”13 It was therefore no accident that Jaurès discerned in nationalists’ calls for war an invitation “to abdicate your intelligence in the name of a philosophy of instinct or intuition.” For many French youth and engaged critics, marching for war meant participating in this generational intellectual reorientation. It provided a way of affirming the value of feeling and intuition, everything that had been pathologized by the Third Republic’s culture of rationalism, positivism, secularism, and progress. Romain Rolland was to recall, “do not tell us now that the war of 1914 had been imposed on us against our will. Be honest! Know and dare to admit . . . that a whole young French generation marched joyously.”14 This chapter argues that as much as these images of irrationalist violence after 1900 appeared new, we nevertheless misunderstand them if we characterize them primarily as seeds for forthcoming strands of fascist political theory. We misunderstand them because, however true it is that they anticipate figurations of violence in the interwar period, their appeal lay in the way they echoed a familiar motif of nineteenth-​century thought: the language of redemptive violence.15 Appeals to irrationalist violence may have been crafted and credentialed by new philosophical critiques of reason, but their purpose was to answer an enduring problem of French politics, indeed of nineteenth-​century modernity: democratization as an experience of social disintegration. For this reason, despite their apparent antidemocratic cast, these images of irrationalist violence held a more ambivalent and complex relationship to democracy. They did not simply express an illiberal “escapist motivation” whose telos was fascism. Instead, they can and ought to be understood as an attack on the Third Republic’s parliamentary form, the better to revitalize the experiential and moral bases of democratic politics. The Third Republic oversaw the creation of France’s first mass political parties. But, far from hailing the parliamentary party system as an unequivocal step forward for democracy, many thinkers believed it signaled its degeneration. They hoped instead to assert a more concrete and felicitous peoplehood against a corrupt and bureaucratic French state. However perverse, Maurras, Barrès, and Péguy understood the nationalist revival of the 1900s as a continuation of the “populism”—​the term is theirs—​of the Boulanger Affair of the late 1880s.16 The masses and disinherited, Barrès argued, were “dreaming with

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  129 melancholy of heroic times.”17 The most conservative of these men aspired for an organic people grounded in tradition and blood against the elitist cosmopolitanism of the Third Republic. Yet even the socialist Péguy pined that theirs was a generation in search of “the marrow” of France, everything that made up “the tissue of the people”—​a regenerated social bond.18 Irrationalist violence therefore articulated something else, or something more, than illiberal disaffection from parliamentary democracy. The cathexis of war in 1914 radicalized available arguments about the people’s redemptive violence from the preceding century. Those arguments identified in popular violence something irreducible to utilitarian calculation or raison d’état: a morality. That was why a great war could repair “the tissue of the people” in the face of parliamentary politics and moral entropy. To make this argument, this chapter analyzes the most visible theorist of violence before the Great War, Georges Sorel. Admired by Carl Schmitt and Benito Mussolini and retroactively mythologized as the “father of fascism,” Sorel moved between the intellectual circles that fostered enthusiasm for irrationalist violence.19 His work particularly influenced intellectuals in France and Italy. In ways that echoed Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1840s and Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon in the 1850s, Sorel searched for a way to counteract moral decadence, especially as it manifest in French culture’s relentless “positivism” and “scientism.” Like those before him, he would find an answer in redemptive violence. The chapter focuses on Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908) because, more than any of his other texts, it formalized the reasons why Sorel believed proletarian violence could renew the moral bases of society. Leading social theorists of the Third Republic labored under the sign of Emile Durkheim to design statist, technocratic approaches to social progress and moral improvement. Sorel and his friends, however, came together under the sign of Henri Bergson to search for the sources of moral improvement and social regeneration in “immediate experience.” Rather than repudiating the aims of republicanism wholesale, Bergson’s account of immediate experience helped them develop an anti-​statist alternative for achieving similar ends: mythic proletarian violence. Workers’ violence was sourced in the preconceptual, mythic dimensions of class struggle. It therefore possessed morally productive powers absent in the instrumental “force” of the state. Indeed, it offered a remedy for familiar problems with French republican citizenship: that it was atomizing rather than associating and that it was leading France into moral decadence. In ways even more forthright than earlier nineteenth-​century

130  The Virtues of Violence thinkers, Sorel identified a causal relationship between political violence and moral renewal. With violence, workers could generate a new morality for a world dying from utilitarian reason. Sorel argued that proletarians held exclusive possession of redemptive violence, but his argument was reinterpreted in national terms as it travelled from text to context. Hence, Sorel’s writings came to offer a conceptual alibi for the reorganization of strands of socialist and Catholic thought into an irrationalist nationalism by 1914—​what Sternhell calls a political synthesis “neither right nor left.” Sorel was not culpable for that synthesis, but his place within the landscape of fin de siècle radicalism makes his writings a unique point of observation with which to bring into focus this wider vision of redemptive violence saturating prewar French political culture. Sorel’s conclusion that a decadent France could only be redeemed by either “a great extension of proletarian violence” or “a great foreign war, which might reinvigorate lost energies” and induce “disgust with the humanitarian platitudes with which Jaurès lulls [the bourgeoisie] to sleep” forecast broader reorientations of French thought at the end of the long nineteenth century.20 What is at stake is showing how neither Sorel nor the vision of irrationalist violence that his Reflections represented should be dismissed as aberrations from the democratic political culture of the Third Republic. Instead, claims to irrational violence responded to a real contradiction contained within the latter’s republicanism: its abstract vision of the social body could not bridge its conflicting commitments to political individualism and social cohesion. If the Third Republic sought to contain that contradiction through a modernizing state and a positivistic belief in progress, it nevertheless opened up the conceptual space for its supposed opposite: a militant nationalism based on a return to “concrete experience,” a “real” non-​abstract people, and eventually a one-​sided particularism. Irrationalist redemptive violence promised to convey us to the moral society that the French republican tradition had stipulated as a requirement for peoplehood. That was one reason why the leading lights of French thought, like so many in the fall of 1914, could find in world war an occasion for spiritual salvation.

The Unlikely Bergsonian Alliance Sorel published Reflections on Violence at an inflection point in oppositional politics under the Third Republic. Since the Third Republic’s origins,

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  131 socialists and republicans had clashed with their Catholic and royalist counterparts over the proper form of French government. Pope Leo XIII’s 1892 encyclical, “Au milieu des solicitudes,” called for Catholics to reconcile with republicanism, but, even so, the division between the two sides widened.21 These were the years that the Ferry Laws passed, establishing free, compulsory, and secular education in France.22 The traditional study of Latin, Greek, and classical thought was replaced with a new emphasis on science and modern languages.23 These were also the years of the Dreyfus Affair, a watershed controversy concerning a Jewish military captain falsely accused of treason and which exploded into a fundamental dispute over the meaning of France itself. The affair’s fallout culminated in the official separation of church and state in 1905, cementing an equation connecting republicanism, modernization, and anticlericalism. Increasing anticlericalism coincided with escalating working class radicalism. Waldeck-​Rousseau’s government finally repealed the Loi Le Chapelier in 1884, legalizing trade unionism for the first time in almost a century. Working class militancy and anarchist violence swept through Paris, leading to the bombing of several judges and the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894.24 Workers repeatedly went on strike, intensifying anxiety over a revolutionary general strike around the earliest May Days.25 By the early 1900s, when Sorel joined revolutionary syndicalism, working class militancy had been growing for almost two decades. The year that the Reflections came out in Italy—​1906—​the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) adopted the Charter of Amiens announcing the dominance of revolutionary syndicalism within the workers’ movement.26 Socialism and anticlerical republicanism’s alignment against Catholic and royalist reaction seemed secure. And yet, almost immediately after publishing Reflections, Sorel and his syndicalist companions began to be solicited by the Catholic right. First George Valois (future founder of the ultra-​nationalist Cercle Proudhon and then the Faisceau) and then Maurras (leader of Action française) approached Sorel about the latent filiation they detected between revolutionary syndicalism and the royalist, nationalist movement. Paul Bourget, famed playwright and a member of the Action Française, helped introduce Sorel’s work to the broader right: his 1910 play La Barricade is based on the Reflections. The overtures were not left unreciprocated. In a letter to Maurras on 6 July 1909, Sorel thanked him for a copy of his Enquête sur la monarchie, writing, “It appears to me certain that your critique of contemporary experience well

132  The Virtues of Violence justifies that which you’ve wanted to establish. . . . I have long been struck by the madness of our contemporary authors who ask democracy to do work that none but royalists, full of the sentiment of their mission, could approach.”27 The reasons for this nascent alliance were not reducible to political convenience. To be sure, Maurras and the Catholic right needed labor’s support to continue challenging the liberal republican establishment; for their part, the Sorelian and syndicalist left had adopted a position of irreconcilability with Jaurès’s parliamentary socialism. Yet, even if by 1908 the parliamentary left had definitively broken with the revolutionary working class movement, that was by no means an obvious invitation for the far right to court the latter.28 The hinge, rather, was philosophical. It involved shared interest in a new idiom of social criticism, one that critiqued the Third Republic, not only by calling on traditional platitudes of church and family, but also on contemporary work in French philosophy concerned with intuition, immediate experience, and the will. Observers usually consider these years as the triumphant era of positivism. The Third Republic elevated it to an “underlying philosophical support” and something of its “semiofficial creed.”29 Its emphasis on empirical observation, generalizable laws, scientific progress, and causal analysis dominated the curriculum of France’s elite educational institutions like the École Polytechnique. Positivism’s prestige was well earned. Mathematics and the natural sciences enjoyed extraordinary progress in these decades. Louis Pasteur’s microbacterial revolution, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics coincided with Paris’s electrification and the Eiffel Tower’s construction. Thomas Huxley and Ernest Haeckel were proclaiming a radical materialism which denied the existence of anything that could not be empirically or mathematically described.30 Literary “naturalism” transformed the novelist into the biologist of society. Ernest Renan proclaimed in his 1889 The Future of Science that “Science is a religion, science alone will henceforth make the creeds, science alone can solve for men the eternal problems, the solution of which nature imperatively demands.”31 In this age of positivism, the analytical methods of scientific inquiry promised to reveal the mechanical, materialist bases of all phenomena. Yet, in the 1900s, French intellectual life was also being swept up in the charismatic influence of a philosopher of intuition, experience, and the will: Henri Bergson. Since the 1880s, Bergson had been developing a powerful critique of just this positivistic intellectual culture. As one historian has put

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  133 it, Bergson set out to explain “what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations and anticipations.”32 His ambition was to challenge “scientism” and all forms of mechanistic determinism through heightened attention to experience. In his 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, for example, Bergson argued that our habitual Cartesian modes of perception distorted reality. When we speak about time, we imagine it as a continuous succession of discrete units. Each second follows the next, just as real integers follow one another on a number line. Or, when our hand traces a surface, we reflect upon it as the touching of a succession of elements, a congruent aggregation of discrete points. But, Bergson argued in the Essai, these images are infelicitous to reality. They break up the original unity of immediate perception by retrospectively imposing on it quantitative, spatial categories. In truth, we experience time as a qualitative flow of multiplicitous elements, each of which shades and colors one another; we apprehend time retrospectively with language, as a quantitative sequence of homogenous empty containers like “seconds.” By allowing “the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of pure consciousness,” by describing in space what is experienced as unfolding in time, the Cartesianism of French thought obscured how “there is no common measure between mind and language.”33 Its ambition may have been to mirror reality, but reality is prelinguistic and dynamic. It can only be arrested in language at the cost of its symbolization in space. The implications of Bergson’s distinction between two modes of cognitive comportments—​intuitive/​temporal versus reflective/​spatial—​went beyond methodological problems in metaphysics. Once we realized that there were “two aspects of conscious life,” once we recalled that “below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states,” there is “qualitative multiplicity,” “a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another,” and the “forming of an organic whole,” we could grasp that at stake was the structure of the self: Is it unified or fragmented?34 Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.35

In contrast to the self “broken to pieces” by language, the “fundamental self ” is an organic whole. By “organic whole,” Bergson meant the opposite of what

134  The Virtues of Violence could be produced from the quantitative aggregation of discrete elements. The unity of ten “seconds” of time is purely formal. It represents no more than an aggregation of discrete containers that do not interpenetrate one another. It therefore does not capture the kind of integral unity Bergson finds specific to the “fundamental self,” what Donna Jones has helpfully described as an “inclusive” unity which “cannot be mathematically represented but only intuited.”36 Unlike the fragmented self we grasp intellectually, this unified self cannot be represented in language, only felt in time. Thus, like Cousin decades earlier, Bergson might be said to register in metaphysical terms an anxiety rooted in his specific historical conjuncture; namely, the ongoing disintegration of the self.37 Like Cousin, too, Bergson believed that salvaging modern freedom depended on retrieving this true self. Cartesianism rendered freedom illusory because of its vision of a deterministic world, a world as a Newtonian machine. It could only grasp the experience of our freedom by translating it into a spatial exercise where we “choose” between two paths and yet whose choice was in any case predetermined by the sum of physical and psychic vectors making up the decision situation. In reality, however, Bergson believed “there are not two tendencies, or even two directions, but a self which lives and develops by means of which its very hesitations, until the free action drops from it like an over-​ripe fruit.”38 To rediscover the fact of our freedom therefore required returning from the symbolization of reality to reality itself, to delve below the registers of language to the creativity of immediate experience. Bergson would develop these ideas through the 1890s and 1900s, adding to his critique of positivism ever more sophisticated portraits of reality and “life.” In his 1896 Matière et mémoire, Bergson would show how intuition depended on an immersion into a strata of deep memory at a distance from the practical exigencies of action. In his 1907 L’évolution créatrice, life would be defined, not as a machine governed by Newtonian principles of action and reaction, but as something governed by an élan vital, conceived as a principle of creation transforming and transcending mere matter. In a powerful 1911 lecture “The Perception of Change,” he would show that while practical action requires us to relate the world in static subject–​object relations, reality was itself processual and integrated, like a melody. By 1914, he would tether his philosophical vitalism to voluntarism, and the self itself would be defined by its willing activity.39 These elaborations and refinements were not just academic milestones, but achievements of public culture. In 1904, Bergson replaced Gabriel Tarde

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  135 as the Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France. His subsequent lectures were popular society events, attracting both professional intellectuals and the educated public.40 He frequently turned out hundreds, sometimes thousands of students at speaking engagements. These lectures appealed to intellectuals of all persuasions intrigued by the limits of reason. Attending them was, Alice Kaplan quips, “the traditional activity of the aspiring French intellectual.”41 R. C. Grogin concludes that, by 1914, Bergson was “the most controversial philosopher in the world and the first in the twentieth century to become an international celebrity” (Figure 4.4).42 Particularly in the Latin Quarter, a critical mass of literary critics, artists, and political thinkers frustrated with the reigning positivism found in Bergson a reprieve and an inspiration. Bourget, the playwright who helped introduced Sorel to the far right, despaired of “the final bankruptcy of hope to which science is leading us.”43 Anatole France lamented, “Why are we sad? . . . We have eaten the fruit of the tree of science and the taste of ashes remains in our mouths.”44 Artists involved with the Symbolists, Cubism, and later Futurism, all of whom were committed to undoing the damage of literary naturalism, avowedly based their aesthetic philosophy on Bergson.45 The popularity of Bergson’s philosophy brought into view, as few events could, the cleavages dividing prewar France: not simply that of left and right, but what François Azouvi has described as “two Frances,” a Cartesian France and a Bergsonian France. The former identified with reason, objectivity, science, republicanism, and anticlericalism; the latter opposed to it unmediated experience, classicism, anti-​parliamentarism, and a Catholic spiritualism (if not always official Catholicism).46 Bergson himself did not translate his philosophical critique into a sustained language of social criticism. Hisashi Fujita is right that whether the left or right correctly interpreted Bergson’s philosophy is the wrong question to ask, and Shklar herself suspected that Bergson’s philosophy did “not have any direct political implications.”47 And yet Bergson’s admirers weaponized his arguments for their own purposes. “For the half-​decade before the First World War,” H.  Stuart Hughes observes, “ ‘Bergsonism’ was living a life of its own, almost independent of its founder.”48 In the distinctions Bergson drew between vitality and inertia, creativity and the “ready-​made,” time and space, experience and language, organic and mechanical unity, writers across the spectrum found abundant resources to develop what we might call a “political Bergsonism.” Political Bergsonism questioned whether the Third Republic’s commitments to positivism and

136  The Virtues of Violence

Figure 4.4  “On écoute aux fenêtres le cours de M. Bergson,” Excelsior 14 February 1914. Source: gallica.bnf.fr /​Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

abstract universalism could successfully hold together the French social body. It mounted, in the high language of metaphysics, an assault on the emergence of parliamentary democracy and mass party politics. Beyond tactical considerations, it was this Bergsonian idiom of social criticism that

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  137 helped bridge segments of anarcho-​syndicalism with sections of the royalist, nationalist movement. * * * Two groups in particular contributed to the development of political Bergsonism: Hubert Lagardelle’s Le Mouvement socialiste and Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine. In 1899, Lagardelle founded Le Mouvement socialiste, and it served as the premier venue for elaborating revolutionary syndicalism’s political theory in France until it terminated in 1914.49 Its readership was comparatively small, but despite the role its contributors would play in the rise of French fascism in the coming decades, even its scholarly critics admit Le Mouvement socialiste was “one of the best [journals] that had ever existed in Europe, and the influence of its contributors on the development of the syndicalist left was considerable.”50 Sorel joined the journal at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. He saw in the Affair the morality that he believed formed socialism’s essence. However, after Dreyfusards succumbed to petty electoral politics and anticlericalism, especially with “l’affaire des fiches” and the separation of church and state, Sorel abandoned it and parliamentary democracy generally.51 Le Mouvement socialiste’s core included Lagardelle, Sorel, and writers like Daniel Halévy, Marcel Mauss, and Victor Griffuelhes. Together, they became known as the “new school” of socialism. It was in the pages of Le Mouvement socialiste that Sorel first serialized Reflections in French before Halévy encouraged him to assemble it into a book in 1908.52 Under Lagardelle’s direction, the journal called for a rescue of the spirit of Marx from parliamentary socialism and an autonomous workers’ movement independent of the party system.53 Their inaugural declaration in 1899 announced two enemies: on one hand, abstract socialist theoreticians for whom class struggle was “made to appear as facts of abstract formulas, and not as the action of the masses working for their emancipation,” and, on the other hand, the brute empiricists who “disoriented in the face of the complexity of capitalist society, become embroiled in their groping and conservative reformism.” Neither dogmatists nor empiricists, their journal would instead unite the “general tendencies” of socialism grounded in real proletarian militancy.54 Lagardelle and the “new school” sought to intervene in the ongoing “crisis of Marxism” in European thought: Can or should we modify Marx’s arguments in light of present conditions? Is social democracy entailed by or contradictory to Marxism?55 In France, Jules Guesde put forward a

138  The Virtues of Violence positivistic interpretation of Marxian science. Guesde encouraged socialists to find power in the electoral arena in the pages of L’Égalité: a republic in the hands of the bourgeoisie was repressive, but in the hands of workers, it had promise.56 Against Guesde, Lagardelle’s “new school” maintained a position of irreconcilability to the state, emphasizing instead the direct organizational activities of militant workers. Pierre Rosanvallon describes them as endorsing a “sociological socialism, derived directly from the activities of labor groups” distinct from socialisms “founded on a philosophical theory.”57 For his part, Lagardelle debated Durkheim over the compatibility between syndicalism and parliamentary socialism. He insisted that working-​ class consciousness was incompatible with support for the latter. Durkheim accused Lagardelle and his colleagues of leading an antisocial movement that threatened to abort any gains socialism might gradually achieve through institutional reform.58 The intellectual circle at Le Mouvement socialiste repudiated parliamentary politics, in part because they considered themselves the “ ‘gauche bergsonienne,’ just as Marx and his friends were once the ‘gauche hégélienne.’ ” Le Mouvement socialiste has a particular reason to be interested in the influence of Bergson’s philosophy. . . . It seems to us that our attitude vis-​à-​vis the dogmas of traditional socialism are similar to the Bergsonian attitude vis-​à-​vis the intellectualist philosophy; that we find in both a desire to attend to reality and the same mistrust of formulas.59

Contributors’ critiques of parliamentary democracy indeed reveal a Bergsonian accent. Take Edouard Berth, regular contributor to Le Mouvement socialiste and future co-​founder of the Cercle Proudhon. His articles railed against the state “as an immense abstraction,” described parliamentary democracy as “individualist, atomistic,” and that in modern life, “Abstraction has destroyed reality—​the abstract State, abstract morals, abstract law, abstract education: everything is abstract in the modern world.”60 Consider, too, Lagardelle’s accusation that parliamentary democracy erred in only seeing “abstract men,” whereas socialism concerned itself with “real men.” (Neither cared much for women.) “The economic organization of the proletariat,” he argued, “knows only real men, workers who group with and consult each other in defense of their material and moral interests.” That is why with socialism, “We are no longer in the presence of abstract notions,

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  139 but of definite concrete relations. There is nothing in common between the political milieu and the proletarian one.”61 Modern French democracy won its conception of the citizen by abstracting away all social ascriptions. Socialism, in contrast, meant descending from “abstract man” to “real man” as he was embedded in concrete economic arrangements and from which he derived his interests. Hence, as Jeremy Jennings has put it, for Le Mouvement socialiste, “syndicalism represented the victory of l’homme réel over l’homme abstrait of 1789.”62 In fact, Lagardelle later declared the opposition between the abstract and the concrete to be his foremost methodological concern.63 As Sorel was publishing Reflections in Le Mouvement socialiste, he was also holding court as the “Socrates of the Latin Quarter” in the bookstore of the poet and essayist Charles Péguy, editor of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. The Cahiers was a vibrant, financially precarious publication that gathered together strands of Catholic and socialist thought. Some of its members overlapped with Lagardelle’s journal. Péguy started the Cahiers after failing his agrégation at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and opening up his bookstore on the rue de la Sorbonne. The intellectuals and writers who gathered there—​Sorel, Péguy, Halévy, Berth, Rolland, and others—​helped formulate an alternative political program to the official parliamentary socialism of Jaurès and Lucien Herr, the influential librarian at the ENS. Halévy joked that Péguy’s bookstore became known as “a haunt of old Normale students more or less denormalized.”64 The Cahiers was more politically heterogeneous than Le Mouvement socialiste. Many involved began as Dreyfusards, but their paths diverged after disillusionment with its parliamentary cooptation. They each resented the anticlerical direction of establishment republicanism, but their relationship with the Catholic right was never straightforward. Péguy’s spiritual conversion to Catholicism after 1908, for example, alienated traditional readers and fellow contributors. His moral Puritanism put him on friendly terms with Catholic intellectuals, including members of Action française. He exchanged books with Maurras out of mutual admiration. And with his subsequent reconciliation with Catholicism, the Cahiers assumed an idiosyncratic place among the French right, a Bergsonian conservatism nudged between the integral nationalism of Maurras’s Action française and the lyrical antimodernism promoted by Barrès in the Echo de Paris.65 Like so many others, Péguy adored Bergson. Each Friday afternoon, he attended Bergson’s lectures together with Sorel.66 “Bergsonism,” Péguy extolled, “is not at all a geography, but a geology.”67 Never content to map

140  The Virtues of Violence out space and surface, Bergson plumbed reality’s depth. The admiration was mutual. “He had a marvelous gift for stepping beyond the materiality of beings . . . and penetrating to the soul,” Bergson wrote of Péguy after the war. “He knew my most secret thought, such as I have never expressed it, such as I would have wished to express it.”68 There is no question that Péguy’s political theory mobilized Bergson to attack the Third Republic’s parliamentary democracy. A  master dichotomy between “mystique” and “politique” governed his thought. The distinction reinterpreted Bergson’s contrast between the unified and elevating qualities of “immediate experience” and its deadening by language. All events, Péguy argued, began as “mystique,” spiritually radiant and abundant in significance, and eventually deadened into mere “politique,” which was flat, rationalistic, self-​interested, and unexalting. Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique. Everything begins with la mystique, in mysticism, with its own mystique, and everything ends in politics, in la politique, in a policy. The important point is not that such and such a politique should triumph. . . . The whole point (what matters), the essential thing, is that in each order, in each system, the mystique should not be devoured by the politique to which it gave birth.69

This dichotomy empowered Péguy to criticize the exploitation of the Dreyfus Affair:  its original “mystique,” its spiritual struggle for justice, had been cheapened, “devoured,” by petty parliamentary maneuvering for anticlerical ambitions.70 Péguy, in other words, adapted Bergson’s metaphysical distinctions between reality and language, the vital and the inert, into a political theory of decadence and degeneration.71 This point is important. Between Le Mouvement socialiste and the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, the extraparliamentary left was creatively reimagining Bergson’s philosophy into a political theory. In Lagardelle’s hatred of “merely political” democracy’s “abstract man,” in Péguy’s protest against the deadening of “mystique” into “politique,” we can hear echoes of Bergson’s dogged belief—​so at odds with Hegel—​that abstraction impoverished rather than enriched reality. We hear, too, Bergson’s metaphysical critique of linguistic or quantitative representation reinvented into a critique of political representation and the quantitative atomism of political citizenship. For this “Bergsonian left,” Guesde’s positivistic Marxism and Jaurès’s parliamentary socialism shared something fundamental: a vision of politics as a machine, a game of balancing and calculation, an activity deprived of moral

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  141 aspect. In this way, they, too, were symptomatic of Cartesianism and its decadence. After all, Sorel argued, Cartesianism was antithetical to the moral and epistemic worldview of producers. Like the bourgeois intellectuals who promulgated it, Cartesianism could reduce the world to an object of rational contemplation because it knew no pain. The lived experiences of workers, however, entailed pain and forbearance. For that reason, a contemplative stance toward the world was out of the question. Workers were instead inclined toward philosophical naturalism.72 It would never occur to a worker to wonder aloud whether the external world “really” existed—​the givenness of labor’s pain proved that beyond doubt. The fact that Cartesians wondered about such questions proved their decadence. It was the historical mission of the productive classes to clear this ideological clutter away, to furnish a new value system for a modern industrial France. By embodying the virtues of men living “concretely” and involved in “industry,” Sorel believed producers provided a superior template for republican citizenship.73 In short, many intellectuals of the extraparliamentary left opposed parliamentary socialism and a deterministic Marxism, and not only because they each tended to reformism. Both were also symptoms of a moral and experiential depletion in modern life. Socialism, in turn, had to involve more than the socialization of the means of production and exchange. It had to also furnish a morality, one rooted in deep conviction and the concrete experiences of producers. Le Mouvement socialiste was clear on this point: socialism was both an “economic and moral necessity,” it involved both “economic development and moral evolution,” and its end was “to activate this evolution towards organic unity” within the proletarian struggle.74 Lagardelle, Sorel, and Péguy concluded that not only the terms of economic arrangement, but also the proper moral bases for a modernizing industrial society were at stake. Positivism could not provide them. “In vain are these philosophies adorned with a grand scientific apparatus,” Sorel wrote, “for they offer no help in constituting the morals of society.”75 * * * Lagardelle, Péguy, Sorel, and the extraparliamentary left came to hate the Third Republic. That did not mean, however, that they were straightforwardly antidemocratic. Undoubtedly, they despised parliamentary politics after the Dreyfus Affair, and some briefly allied with conservative royalists after 1907. Closer examination, however, helps us see that their political itinerary was the

142  The Virtues of Violence outcome of an immanent critique: these critics denounced the “democracy” of the Third Republic because its republican interpretation of “abstract” or “political” democracy betrayed democracy as a moral and spiritual principle. Péguy, for example, despised the Third Republic because it betrayed the mystique of republicanism. “The Republic, it was not always a pack of politicians,” Péguy bemoaned in his 1910 Notre jeunesse. “Behind it there is a mystique . . . behind it lies a glorious past, an honourable past, and what is more important still, nearer the essence, there is a whole race behind it, heroism and perhaps sanctity.” Before the Third Republic, “Republicans were republicans, and the Republic was the republic.” Alas, the parliamentary and secular form of the Republic robbed it of its essence. “Today, we prove and demonstrate the Republic” as if it were a math equation. Yet “when [the republic] was alive no one proved it. One lived it.” The true meaning of the republic lay not in its institutional rules, but in its reality as a type of lived experience. Hence, “the de-​republicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-​Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound de-​mystification.” Péguy believed that French youth needed to rediscover the sacred mystique of the Republic which its parliamentary form murdered. “What we want to know is the tissue of the people in that heroic age . . . the marrow of our race, the cellular tissue. . . . All that we no longer see, all that we don’t see nowadays.” “There are,” Péguy believed, “deeper forces and realities” to which we moderns have lost access.76 Lagardelle was even more explicit. On one hand, his criticisms of republican democracy were unsparing. “Political democracy only considers the abstract man, the citizen,” Lagardelle argued. It focused its attention exclusively on “the citizen, the ‘political’ man, detached from the social category to which he belongs.” In so doing, actually existing French democracy “ignores the differentiations that material life introduces among men and groups of men.” It obscured class conflict. This was deliberate:  rather than “pronouncing the words ‘class struggle,’ ” republican politicians “profusely replace it with the word ‘democracy’ ” to insist on class reconciliation instead.77 On the other hand, Lagardelle argued that we can distinguish between democracy as a principle and as an institution. “What does democracy mean? It is both a principle and a form of government.” As a principle, it “proclaims the equal rights of all citizens” and expresses “spiritual ends.” That is why there can be “both agreement and contradiction between socialism and democracy.” They contradict each other economically, but they are “on the spiritual

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  143 side of social life in agreement.” That is also why Lagardelle conceded that no matter how counterproductive political democracy was in practice, “the democratic principle—​even more than democratic government—​is dear to the socialist proletariat.” “It has rightly been said,” he admitted, “that the democratic atmosphere is the only one wherein socialist lungs can breathe.”78 Like Péguy and Lagardelle, Sorel attacked “democracy” in the Reflections and elsewhere. As Richard Vernon has argued, however, that did not mean he abandoned democratic citizenship altogether. Instead, he transposed it to industrial organization and the syndicates.79 It would be in organized, militant workshops, and not in the parliamentary arena, that ordinary workers enjoyed something like collective autonomy. “Law, as it is formulated by liberal codes, hardly recognizes anyone but the isolated worker,” Sorel complained. It was abstract and atomizing. But “For syndicalists these propositions are false. The sum of workers forms a body,” and, through their own agitation, they engaged in the “transformation of the people by itself.” Syndicates were spaces where ordinary people self-​reflexively transformed who they were by taking themselves as the object of deliberate craftsmanship. Hence “the whole future of socialism rests on the autonomous development of the workers’ syndicates.”80 Sorel even hoped that syndicates could become crucibles of a future self-​ governing society. In the syndicates, solidarity overcame social isolation and pointed the way to “the formation of a new juridical philosophy,” including a new understanding of freedom. “Our century has acquired the true meaning of liberty . . . it is the activity of producing useful things in a purpose chosen by ourselves.” This is real, concrete autonomy. “There is nothing less abstract than that.”81 For all of Sorel’s hatred of “democracy,” he was committed to a vision of self-​governance made concrete in everyday productive life. Interpreting these criticisms as a type of immanent critique underscores how their hatred was directed not at democracy or the Republic as such, but at the Third Republic’s statist and rationalist vision of democratic modernization. In pinpointing the conflict this way, we also bring back into view the important theoretical proximity these critics shared with their erstwhile opponents like Durkheim. As Eric Brandom has demonstrated, however sharply syndicalists disagreed with establishment republicans, the two camps actually had “a great deal in common, particularly concerning the generation of la morale from social practice.”82 It was Durkheim, after all, who argued that society was a moral phenomenon. It was he who tabulated in Suicide modernity’s anemic spiritual condition, its proliferating anomie.

144  The Virtues of Violence Establishment republicans fully agreed with the extraparliamentary left that democratization in France required the regeneration of the moral bases of society. Morality regulated men in society, not man in nature, and to engineer a new society, they had to engineer a new morality, too. The crux of the disagreement between the extraparliamentary left and establishment republicans lay elsewhere: in their relative assessments of the value of social conflict and, in particular, the state’s role in moral improvement. Theorists like Durkheim, Frederic Le Play, and Hippolyte Taine gravitated toward state leadership in reconstructing morality for a democratizing France. They endorsed “top-​down” instruments of integration like education, civic nationalism, the standardization of a common language, and the creation of social security.83 These new architects of liberal republicanism reconceptualized the state as an agent of progress in the name of which it could “produce the social.” “Established elites, steeped in a liberalism that counted Tocqueville and Guizot among its progenitors,” Philip Nord explains, had finally “shucked off the Jacobin legacy,” its moral naturalism.84 They forged in its place a republicanism that viewed “the social” as an artifact of state-​sponsored instruments of cohesion, cementing together discrete social formations and transforming the state from a site of political sovereignty into an instrument of economic improvement and social harmony. The effect was that, as Jacques Donzelot has argued, the state was gradually redefined in terms of its role as guardian of social progress rather than an expression of popular sovereignty.85 Lagardelle, Péguy, and Sorel pressed back. The society these social theorists manufactured was mechanical and superficial. Its approach to “producing the social” actually magnified atomization and statism. As Tocqueville and Proudhon both argued, state centralization and the atomization of society went hand in hand. Sorel cited both writers repeatedly to complain of the “egoism” that the Third Republic had unleashed: “Egoism of the basest kind shamelessly breaks the sacred bonds of the family and friendship in every case in which these oppose its desire” (RV 188). Indeed, because of that egoism, Sorel feared that “France has lost its morals” (RV 216). No wonder that some writers involved with Le Mouvement socialiste and the Cahiers affiliated with the Catholic right. The latter, too, found its pulse quickened by an apocalyptic view of a morally emaciated France. Barrès’s Les Déracinés or “The Uprooted” (1897), part of a trilogy on “national energy,” related the story of young Frenchmen from Alsace and Lorraine alienated from the patrie by the pernicious influence of a Kantian professor. Kant was

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  145 a convenient stand-​in for the political culture of the Third Republic: rational, cosmopolitan, universalistic, homogenous, an allergic-​reaction—​so Barrès thought—​to life, instinct, immediate experience, individuality, and everything “lived” and “concrete”: namely, la France profonde.86 Péguy was equally melodramatic. Influenced by Sorel’s studies on the social origins of morality, he ached for a return to French republicanism “before the professors crushed it,” to recover “what a people was like before it was obliterated” by positivism.87 The republican mystique (Péguy), the lived experience of the patrie (Barrès), the “most noble sentiments” of concrete morality (Sorel):  each thinker in his own way related a story of morality driven toward egoism and utilitarianism by the regime’s positivistic intellectual culture. Hence why Sorel asserted with confidence that socialism would counteract these trends by “recognizing the necessity of the improvement of morals” (RV 223). Looking back at the eve of world war, what stands out now is how the pursuit of moral regeneration lurked beneath the surface of vicious political antagonisms. No ideological camp, no tradition of political thought monopolized that concern, for it was rooted in the conflictual experience of democratization they all shared. Revolutionary syndicalists, Catholic royalists, and republican elites all struggled to find moral bases adequate to their historical conjuncture. If royalists did so by turning backward to corporatism and Catholicism, syndicalists turned to the lived experience of producers and proletarian struggle. Both disputed the Third Republic’s claim to have found a statist, scientific answer to it. It is the peculiar mark of these prewar years that virtually every ideological current found itself increasingly compressed into the same conceptual field, the same problem-​space. The experiential bases of modern France needed to be reinvented. Modern men and women could not live by clocks, cogs, and conveyor belts alone. And if a potent “anti-​ materialist” intellectual synthesis was becoming viable, it was because a common culprit for moral degeneration had been found: the parliamentary form of democracy.88 What remained to be determined was how the moral foundations of society could be reconstructed. All of this diagnostic work did not yet offer an ameliorative practice that could enact and bring forth morality from within a relativistic, Cartesian, and utilitarian political culture. The political thinker who most vigorously worked out a solution was Sorel. His Reflections on Violence, which finally appeared in book form in 1908, was to make the case that proletarian violence, organized by syndicates, could produce a new morality precisely when it was sourced in registers of consciousness below that

146  The Virtues of Violence of reason and language. “The danger which threatens the future of the world may be avoided”; indeed, proletarian redemptive violence “may save the world from barbarism” (RV 85).

The Cunning of Violence The world needed a new system of moral valuation. Socialism’s future depended on it: “revolutionary syndicalism would be impossible if the world of the workers were under the influence of such a morality of the weak,” namely “an ethic adapted to consumers” inherited “from those of Greece in its time of decadence.” This decadent ethics prioritized philosophy over war, cleverness over violence, and social conciliation over revolution. It was the ethics of parliamentary socialism (RV 236, 238). Sorel sought this new morality through proletarian violence. Despite the fact that Reflections aimed to reconceive proletarian violence, however, there are few in-​depth analyses of what Sorel meant by it. The Reflections’s canonical stature has led recent scholars to focus on his minor writings, particularly in the philosophy of science, to provide a more global portrait of his thought.89 These studies have rectified one-​sided interpretations of Sorel as a protofascist, but they have deflected exegetical attention from his conceptualization of violence. Its meaning seems settled: violence, it is assumed, is something Sorel valued for its own sake. We see this classic interpretation in Hannah Arendt. She concedes that Sorel’s readers exaggerate the scale of violence he endorsed, but she nevertheless considers him among “the authors of rank” who “glorified violence for violence’s sake.”90 Dominick LaCapra describes Sorelian violence “as a regenerative or redemptive force that will transfigure civilization” because its power comes from being “utterly void of content,” even a “blank utopia.”91 Judith Shklar spoke for an entire generation when she concluded that “what distinguishes [Sorel] from most other revolutionaries was that he was not at all concerned with a better future, or indeed with improving society in any way.”92 His violence was apolitical and pointless. This view persists among contemporary readers.93 George Ciccariello-​Maher has recently resisted these canonical interpretations of Sorelian violence as “for its own sake” by successfully drawing out its latent dialectical character.94 Ciccariello-​Maher argues that Sorel was hostile to the teleological versions of dialectics articulated by parliamentary socialists because those versions aimed at social consensus. Yet Sorel

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  147 remained a dialectician in practice. He underscored the productive role of conflict rather than consensus in revolutionary social transformation. Even so, Ciccariello-​Maher’s recovery of Sorel’s dialectics insists on a substantial break between the Reflections and Sorel’s earlier work. Where Sorel once concerned himself with social harmony, in the Reflections he defends the productivity of social antagonism. Reflections did, indeed, break in many respects with Sorel’s earlier work, but he never forfeited his fixation on moral regeneration. This underlying continuity comes into focus if we highlight his remarks on the conjugal couple. The conjugal couple, Judith Surkis shows, offered the exemplary model for “the social” in the Third Republic. In marriage, individuals were “theoretically independent and articulated to the social order.”95 Surkis stresses conjugality’s importance to Durkheim, but the same applies to Sorel as well. In his conservative 1889 The Trial of Socrates, Sorel blames Athenian decline on the attenuation of its culture of war and its homosexuality.96 In an 1898 lecture on the ethics of socialism, Sorel argued that Marxists needed to study the family more closely because conjugal love proves “the deep separation between law and morality,” that society is more than a cheap contract or a set of legal agreements. It teaches us “that the notion of virtue is identified with the absolute submission to free engagements.”97 For its part, Reflections contains scores of passages that croon how “Love, by the enthusiasm it begets, can produce that sublimity without which there would be no effective morality” (RV 236). Conjugal love is “the obscure part of morality . . . not easily expressed in formulas,” yet “the fundamental part” for “when it is known, the whole psychology of a people is understood.” Indeed, “The mysterious region” of morality “is the family, whose organization influences all social relationships.” That is what the “little science” of positivism obsessed with “logical simplicity” will never understand, tending as it does to reduce sexual morality “to the equitable relations between contracting parties” (RV 136–​39). Ciccariello-​Maher is right that Sorel abandons social harmony for violent conflict because he saw violence as productive rather than aimless or therapeutic. Yet that shift unfolded against the backdrop of his continuous fixation on morality and its sources.98 And it was to rekindle morality that Sorel not only turned from harmony to conflict, but also, as Jeremy Jennings argues, after 1900, from a “deterministic notion of the economic collapse of capitalism” to a “voluntaristic conception of a moral catastrophe facing bourgeois society.”99 To understand the power of the Reflections in its historical conjuncture, in other words, we need to understand how Sorel’s discontinuous

148  The Virtues of Violence political commitments served an unbroken, continuous commitment to moral regeneration. To link voluntaristic proletarian violence and moral regeneration, Sorel formulates what I call the “cunning of violence” as a motor for historical and moral development. Reflections describes violence from two perspectives. Violence, for Sorel, can be choiceworthy in itself but only when viewed first personally. For violence can also be grasped from a functionalist, third-​ personal perspective. From that latter perspective, proletarian violence redraws lines of class conflict at a time when parliamentary democracy is mixing everything into a “democratic morass” through “social legislation” (RV 78). Into that morass, proletarian violence injects social differentiation, for only through intractable conflict can a new morality be born. This is proletarian violence’s objective function. Yet for violence to accomplish this objective task, those who engage in it must do so in subjective ignorance of its overall purpose. They cannot hold in their mind’s eye this instrumental goal. To engage in violence for calculated reasons would debase their morality by falling into the same utilitarian reasoning that characterizes raison d’état, or what Sorel calls “force.” Rather than differentiating the classes, calculated proletarian violence would simply remake proletarians into the image of their bourgeois enemies. Neither class would be morally generative. Sorel therefore theorizes in redemptive proletarian violence a distinction between its subjective and objective aspects. Disavowing its function is how it fulfills its function: “the striving towards excellence, which exists in the absence of any personal, immediate or proportional reward, constitutes the secret virtue that assures the continued progress of the world” (RV 248). Like Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” this “cunning of violence” connects the subjectivism of violence to the objective development of morality. Social conflict does not weaken the social body, but saves it. Sorel identifies the cunning of violence in light of his own diagnosis of France’s political situation, which also consists in an “objective” and “subjective” aspect: it tended toward decadence, and it extinguished the will. Formalizing Sorel’s cunning of violence helps us see why proletarian violence was capable of “the birth of a virtue . . . a virtue which has the power to save civilization” (RV 228). * * * Viewed objectively, proletarian violence counteracts the decadence that parliamentary democracy brings about. Traditionally, Sorel claims, French

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  149 republicanism has been hostile to class struggle because of the rights of man: “Judging all things from the abstract point of view of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme, they said that the legislation of 1789 had been created in order to abolish all distinction of class in law.” For this reason, many republicans opposed “social legislation” tailored to the working class because it enshrined in law an illegitimate sociological distinction. Under the Third Republic, however, progressive politicians made social legislation palatable by recasting it as republican, a means of integrating disenfranchised classes into modern citizenship and resolving “the social question” in universal terms. In particular, Léon Bourgeois’s “solidarism” helped create a state-​run system of social security and insurance that could fulfill the demands of “social right,” enact a “social economics,” and secure cross-​class solidarity in the name of progress while regulating anomie via the family and the workplace.100 Sorel criticizes these efforts to republicanize class conflict as a misguided pursuit of “social peace.” For one, the pursuit of social peace recapitulates asymmetries of power. This point is important, for Sorel is arguing that what we understand to be rational deliberation aimed at generating consensus on questions of public good can, in practice, rarely realize the political freedom of the dispossessed. Liberal democratic politics, in a situation of unequal social relations, will stage social conflict as tacitly organized by the question of what concessions are needed from the bourgeoisie: “Such a discussion presupposes that it is possible to ascertain the exact extent of social duty and what sacrifices an employer must continue to make in order to maintain his position” (RV 56). It is thus reformist in essence. Negotiations turn on questions of social “duty,” where fulfillment of duty allows bourgeois benefactors to feel a “supposed heroism,” one that is identified more accurately by its beneficiaries as barely concealed “shameful exploitation.” By making the class struggle a question of the proper relation between the classes, of what the ruling class owes the poor and what social legislation is therefore required by the state, class struggle is reduced to special pleading. At its worst, the pursuit of social peace moralizes reformist politics so that its revolutionary counterpart appears not only practically unfeasible but morally repugnant, a violation of one’s duty to cultivate a national consensus enjoyable by all democratic citizens. Hence why “parliamentary socialists no longer believe in insurrection . . . they teach that the ballot-​box has replaced the gun” (RV 49–​50). By framing class struggle around civic harmony and duty, parliamentary

150  The Virtues of Violence socialism has affirmed exploitative social relations and is to be rejected as counter-​revolutionary (RV 55–​62, 107). Above all, Sorel believes that violent class warfare’s displacement by the pursuit of social peace is not only counter-​revolutionary, but decadent. Remade as realists, parliamentarians subject their moral convictions to strategic calculations. They no longer even fight for what they believe in. “Parliamentary socialism,” Sorel observes with loathing, “feels a certain embarrassment from the fact that, at its origin, socialism took its stand on absolute principles” (RV 68). Undoubtedly, his claims about decadence were not new. The concern with decline and decadence was a fixture of late nineteenth-​century European intellectual culture. Between conservative disciplines like crowd psychology and criminal anthropology, “decadence” and “degeneration” were concepts in widespread use, organizing an array of social ills like the declining birth rate, alcohol consumption, criminality, and sexual pathology within a common framework that analogized the compulsive repetition of France’s revolutionary history to the intergenerational reproduction of the social body.101 Decadence linked biology and history together in a common national narrative of depletion, of vital life thwarted or suppressed. Sorel was intimately familiar with this discourse.102 Yet, like Tocqueville, his understanding of decadence was psychosocial, not physiological. Drawing on Vico and Proudhon, Reflections portrays decadence as a moral condition whose outstanding symptom is heroism’s degeneration into intellectualism, physical violence into cleverness (RV 184–​89, 211–​12).103 The ruling classes in France were once like the captains of industry in America, muscular in their pursuit of collective self-​interest. But now there is only “bourgeois cowardice” (RV 62). The ruling classes have surrendered their historical mission as “creators of productive forces” for the pacific “noble profession of educators of the proletariat.” The result is state-​sanctioned social peace and the devaluation of moral conviction. In the pursuit of social equilibrium, balance, and compromise, parliamentary democracy has demoralized democratic politics itself. Subjectively, this decadent condition is experienced as an amputation of our faculty of willing (RV 25). Rationalism and its belief in progress, born in the Enlightenment and now the credo of the Republic, denigrates the practical bases of knowledge and privileges abstract reasoning. Like Péguy’s claim that all things begin as a “mystique” and are debased into a “politique,” Sorel sees political modernity as a fall from intuition into prediction, passion into

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  151 reasonableness. It amounts to “probabilism,” a people’s habituation into utilitarianism. This degeneration of the will—​its deformity into prediction and calculation—​disempowers actors because it substitutes for the unconditional will a form of cognitive and moral reasoning fit for deadened workers in capitalism, not citizens in a free society. Why would people participate in a revolution if they predicted their actions would probably fail, particularly if their opponent held the might of the state? Success was unlikely. “Theoreticians of democracy,” with their subsequent calls for reasonable and calculated action, “greatly restricted the field upon which this absolute man may extend the action of his free will” (RV 262). According to Sorel, Marx already grasped the consequences of this degeneration. A  collection of free individuals maximizing self-​interest will produce, in the aggregate, laws of social tendency, thereby dialectically transforming the sum of free actions into a determinate system governed by social compulsion. As Marx teaches us, When we reach the last historical stage, the action of independent wills disappears and the whole of society resembles an organized body, working automatically; observers can then establish an economic science which appears to them as exact as the sciences of physical nature. The error of many economists consisted in their ignorance of the fact that this system, which seemed natural and primitive to them, is the result of a series of transformations that might not have taken place, and which always remains a very unstable structure, for it could be destroyed by force, as it had been created by the intervention of force. 104 (RV 168)

Nineteenth-​century thinkers were familiar enough with this phenomenon, but at the end of the century it stirred profound anxiety over human alienation. Sorel wrote Reflections as Weber was formulating his “iron cage” thesis. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so,” he lamented in 1905, for the desire for economic well-​being was “now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with irresistible force.”105 The disenchantment of the world, Weber and Marx understood, went hand-​in-​hand with the dialectical reversal of individual freedom into structural compulsion. For all of his dissatisfaction with French republicanism, Sorel is at his most republican when he defines decadence as a disease of the will. Sorel’s

152  The Virtues of Violence work in the philosophy of science once led him to understand determinism as something distinct from fatalism. Determinism was a simple statement about the regularity of natural phenomena under conditions held constant. It therefore expanded the jurisdiction of man’s will:  determinism guaranteed the natural world’s experimental manipulability by industry and technology.106 The more we understood the determinate regularity of natural phenomena, the more we could subject nature to our will. But in modern democracies populated with deadened citizens predicting rather than willing, humans resemble automatons rather than creative experimentalists. They behave like spineless politicians rather than heroic engineers or producers manufacturing a world for themselves. In the end, parliamentary democracy transforms democratic politics into another version of the Stock Exchange (RV 221–​22). Modern citizens therefore need to rekindle their collective faculty of willing, something prior to both language and utilitarian reasoning. They need a will so primordial that it cannot be captured by the utilitarian morality of bourgeois society. Man “must have in himself a powerful motive, a conviction which must dominate his whole consciousness, and act before the calculations of reflection have time to enter his mind” (RV 206). Or, as Sorel put it in the preface to Ferdinand Pelloutier’s Histoire des bourses du travail (1902), “Teaching the proletariat to will, instructing it by action—​ this is the whole secret of the socialist education of the people.”107 * * * “It is here,” Sorel announces, “that the role of violence in history appears as of utmost importance.” Proletarian violence, “a very fine and heroic thing,” something “at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization,” appears “upon the scene at the very moment when the conception of social peace claims to moderate disputes” (RV 77–​78, 85). Sorel presents his turn to violence as an empirical discovery. The second half of the Reflections “tests” whether proletarian violence, an accomplished fact, can ameliorate France’s moral crisis. In fact, Sorel rewrites proletarian violence into a type of redemptive violence. For Sorel agrees with Durkheim, whom he cites time and again, that society cannot cohere through reason alone. It is a moral, customary achievement. Like Durkheim, too, Sorel is convinced that contractual solidarity is an impoverished vision of the social bond. It is morally emaciated.

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  153 Sorel differs from Durkheim in seeing, with Bergson, liberty in ineffably voluntarist terms. Indeed, Bergson’s quiet presence in Reflections helps us account for the way Reflections departs from Durkheim’s framework. Citing Bergson’s Essai, Sorel writes, Bergson, on the contrary, invites us to consider the inner depths of the mind and what happens during a creative moment. “There are,” he says, “two different selves, one which is, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation. We reach the former by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly in a process of becoming, as states not amenable to measure. . . . But the moments when we grasp ourselves are rare, and this is why we are rarely free. . . . To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration.” (RV 26)

Sorel weaponizes this argument for politics. If proletarian violence could draw upon a “myth,” a powerful visual memory, it could reactivate our shared powers of self-​compulsion. For Sorel, these myths are “a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments” of “war . . . against modern society.” They visualize an “artificial world” that is irrefutable, not because there is no evidence against it, but because it is not something to which epistemic procedures of refutation are relevant: “A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group . . . unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.” Sorel therefore claims that “People who are living in this world of myths are secure from all refutation.” That is because myths are not “descriptions of things,” like historical and sociological theses, “but expressions of a will to act.” It was as Péguy said: when the republic was a mystique, it was something to be experienced rather than proved. After all, the falsity of myths “does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions,” to revolt on their behalf (RV 28–​30, 116–​18). According to Sorel, myths have long empowered French socialism. Its reliance on myths has “led many to assert that socialism is a kind of religion” (RV 30). Myths do not have to be religious, but Sorel believes they remind us of the unbridgeable chasm separating religion and science. The mythic element gives religion its unconditional quality, its capacity for inspiring greatness and heroic action. Modern positivistic reasoning and its withering skepticism will never have that. Nobody stakes their life for social science.

154  The Virtues of Violence Nobody dies for a hypothesis. This was something neither Durkheim nor Renan seemed to grasp, no matter how much they sought to demystify and humble religion by studying it positively. “The poetic fictions that we substitute for reality exert a much greater influence on our mind than does scientific knowledge,” Sorel wrote elsewhere. “If scientific truths hardly affect men, we have the faculty of substituting for them an imaginary world that we populate with plastic creations. . . . It is these idols that are penetrated by our wills and are the sisters of our souls.”108 Marxism contains a mythic aspect, too. Because creative production is a mystery of the interior life, it makes sense that socialism has mythic elements since it is a doctrine of producers and creators (RV 139–​40). In Sorel’s view, Marxist revisionism needs to recover this mythic core from its disenchantment by the “scientific” Marxists of his day (RV 122-​9). The souls of workers are set ablaze not by a deterministic science of history but by Marxism’s mythic heart. What is important to Sorel is not the true but banal claim that humans can be motivated by the irrational or the fictitious. At stake is the more fundamental issue of knowing whether we are free at all. When we act on mythic grounds, “our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible” (RV 27). To act independently of utilitarian considerations is to come to know the deep psychology of our inner life, “our willing activity” and its “creative moment” that rationalist sciences obscure by viewing our actions retrospectively from the standpoint of completion (RV 25–​27). Violence in the name of absolute values, visualized as myth, engenders the “sublime,” the moral and aesthetic quality of action that is proof of our freedom. As he put it elsewhere, “to organize does not consist in placing automatons on boxes! Organization is the passage from order which is mechanical, blind and determined from the outside, to organic, intelligent and fully accepted differentiation; in a word, it is a moral development.”109 The moral regeneration of society requires wrestling a politics of will out of a utilitarian social order striving towards equilibrium. The classic myths, according to Sorel, were the myths of deliverance that motivated Greek soldiers, the Jews and Christians of antiquity, and the leaders of the Protestant reformation (RV 115–​16). In each case, images of imminent catastrophe and redemption motivated the will of the persecuted, and no amount of empirical and worldly persuasion could touch their conviction. These myths exaggerated every conflict, so that every struggle bore world-​historic weight (RV 58–​63). The history of social movements teaches that all great historical transformations are motivated by such myths, and,

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  155 even if no myth has been realized to its detail, it does not alter the fact that, moved by such myths, political actors have reshaped the world. It is no accident that Sorel finds Christian martyrs as paradigmatic. Not any memory or motivating image becomes mythic. What makes a memory mythic is that action in its name produces a morality. If it were simply a matter of motivating men beyond their reason, then we would have to agree with Hobbes that “the Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear.”110 Turning from Bergson to Nietzsche and Proudhon, Sorel puts the problem thus: At the beginning of any enquiry on modern ethics this question must be asked: under what conditions is regeneration possible? . . . And if the contemporary world does not contain the roots of a new ethic, what will happen to it? The sighs of a whimpering bourgeoisie will not save it if it has forever lost its morality. (RV 224)

If political actors are not only to regain their “willing activity,” but also ameliorate degeneration and decline, they must be guided by myths which can furnish the world a new system of valuation. They need myths that can let them act in ways exonerated from the demands of base self-​interest or instrumental necessity. They need myths that can inspire “sublime” action, for “When working-​class circles are reasonable, as the professional sociologists wish them to be,” Sorel scornfully remarks, “there is no more opportunity for the sublime than when agricultural unions discuss the subject of the price of guano with manure merchants” (RV 210). Indeed, Sorel chokes with rage at the prospect of politicians joining a social movement, as happened in the Dreyfusard movement: “no more heroic characters, no more sublimity, no more convictions!” (RV 213). Sublime violence is morally generative, guided by myths of catastrophe and redemption. It is everything opposite to what parliamentary democracy encourages on behalf of “social peace,” realism, compromise, and reasonable debate. During the nineteenth century, Sorel believed that the revolutionary wars of liberty offered the most powerful myth. That myth, a memory of a newly sovereign people resisting the persecution of a jealous Europe, emboldened generations of soldiers and protected them from petty utilitarian considerations. Indeed, Sorel was struck by the contrast between the “automatons of the royal armies” and the revolutionary army, a “collection of heroic exploits by individuals who drew the motives of their conduct from their enthusiasm” (RV 240–​41). The soldat-​citoyen was not a machine

156  The Virtues of Violence following orders. He was not a utilitarian, a rational skeptic, a positivist, or an intellectual. Instead, he was empowered by absolute moral conviction. And, like the Christians of antiquity, he fought and died independently of the outcome: win or lose, his soul would be saved. It was as Jules Vallès said of the Paris Commune: “No matter what happens, even if we are to be conquered once more, even if we die tomorrow, our generation will have been consoled.”111 But, alas, the historians of the Third Republic—​especially Jaurès and Taine—​have disenchanted the French Revolution. By writing its history in positive terms, by rendering the Revolution as if it were any other event, they have abolished its mythic element, revealing the revolution for what it was in fact: a “superstitious cult of the State” (RV 99). These historians have “contributed a great deal to taking all the romance out of these events.” “The prestige of the revolutionary days” has been badly damaged (RV 91). Its myth can no longer sustain free action. With the revolutionary mythology disenchanted, contemporary French workers needed a new myth to reignite their collective volition. That myth, Sorel argues, can be the catastrophic general strike, the modern heir to the mystique of the French Revolution (RV 243). For modern workers, “the war of conquest interests them no longer. Instead of thinking of battles, they now think of strikes; instead of setting up their ideal as a battle against the armies of Europe, they now set it up as the general strike in which the capitalist regime will be destroyed” (RV 63). The myth of the general strike “awakens in the depth of the soul a sentiment of the sublime,” it inspires action undaunted by victory’s implausibility and thus “brings to the fore the pride of free men” (RV 159). It brings together the need for a collective will with a new system of values that repudiates the intellectualism and decadence of a dying France.112 From its violence will arise an “ethic of the producers for the future” (RV 224). The dialectical structure of Sorelian violence comes into focus when we formalize the argument this way. Proletarian redemptive violence possesses an instrumental aim: the moral development of France. It is useful because of the decadent condition in which the French find themselves. But that aim cannot be realized if those who engage in violence do so for that reason because it would make their violence a strategic calculation rather than a spontaneous expression of absolute moral belief. Above all else, Sorel wrote the Reflections in the conviction that instrumental activity could not yield genuine conviction. Imposing a uniform language on the provinces, abolishing local traditions, separating church and state, fostering a national culture

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  157 obsessed with Paris—​all of that modernization by the Third Republic could create social cohesion, but only a mechanical type. Instrumental moral engineering from on high did not foster deep conviction, but cynicism. That is what republican politicians seemed incapable of understanding. They could never manufacture a new morality for a democratizing France because they did not understand the nature of morality in the first place. Sorel hoped that by delving beneath instrumental considerations, proletarian violence motivated by myths could introduce behind its back a new morality for a decadent bourgeois society. This violence was moral, not because it was justified, but because it produced a morality. The normative content of morality was unimportant to Sorel compared to the fact of its emergence. “It is not a matter of knowing what is the best morality,” Sorel explained, “but only of determining if there exists a mechanism capable of guaranteeing the development of morality.”113 In the 1900s, proletarian redemptive violence seemed to be that mechanism. It emancipated men from utilitarian calculations to pursue convictions as ends in themselves. Citing Nietzsche and Renan freely, Sorel believed his Reflections had exposed the true value of violence. No longer destructive, violence could be productive; not nihilistic, it could be value creating; the opposite of selfishness, it was a means of suppressing egoism for collective moral improvement. “The strike is a phenomenon of war . . . in undertaking a serious, formidable, and sublime work, the socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world” (RV 279–​81). For a generation of Frenchmen in search of a new moral basis for a democratizing society, this vision of redemptive violence was more than an idiosyncratic intellectual synthesis. It provided the most sophisticated argument for why popular, proletarian violence could be a fountain of “concrete” or communal values with which to repair a mechanical society dying from abstractions.

Conclusion Sorel articulated proletarian violence with the latest philosophical theories of the day, but no matter how new that patina was, its essence was older and familiar. Sorel never concealed that fact. Besides Bergson and Marx, Reflections cited Tocqueville and Proudhon repeatedly. In the end, Sorel was still solving a problem that all his sources tried to resolve: From what was the social bond

158  The Virtues of Violence to be made in an age of democracy? Sorel was always clear, in Reflections and elsewhere, that democratic modernity was an age of social disintegration. “Once again,” Sorel complained, “ideologues set to work to destroy all social relationships; once again, they made use of a dry and erroneous logic in dissolving ideas which could only be given a mythical expression; in this manner, they paved the way . . . for the death of society and for anarchy.”114 Sorel’s reconceptualization of proletarian violence as a mythic, war-​like activity impressed readers within and outside of France. Among enthusiasts, however, there was a clear pattern of displacing the revolutionary role of the working class with that of “the nation”—​by Sorel himself included. Members of Action française, for example, invited Sorel and Berth to create the magazine La Cité française. Its opening declaration called for men to “liberate French intelligence” from the “ideologies which have taken over in Europe for the past century.” To combat France’s democratic malaise, “It is necessary to awaken the proper virtues of each class, and without which each will not be able to accomplish its historical mission.”115 Sorel signed the manifesto, adding a personal addendum that asked men “to restore to the French a spirit of independence” by taking the “noble paths opened by the great figures of national thought.”116 La Cité française floundered, but its participants took their “Sorelian royalism” into several splinter tendencies.117 Berth would help found the Cercle Proudhon. Founded by Valois of Action française’s Sorelian and Bergsonian factions, the Cercle was an ultra-​nationalist league whose 1912 manifesto declared democracy the greatest threat to the modern world. Democracy, the Cercle claimed, substituted “abstract” liberties for “concrete” ones. In doing so, it endangered the individual, the family, and society. The group was charged with “reawakening the spirit,” to defeat “the false science” underlying democracy and capitalism, and to resuscitate the patrie and its “laws of blood.”118 In its pages and in Valois’s speeches, Sorel was repeatedly referred to as “our master.” Sorel, for his part, moved on to Jean Variot’s L’Independence, where he published anti-​ Semitic essays that alienated many of his former allies on the left while winning him new followers on the right.119 The former Dreyfusard now suggested the whole thing was a Jewish conspiracy, repeating xenophobic platitudes long associated with the French right. He even contributed two essays to L’Action française. His review of Péguy’s book on Joan of Arc praised it for its nationalism.120 Sorel’s friends shared this move toward nationalism. Lagardelle, disillusioned by revolutionary syndicalism’s failures, abandoned his antipatriotism

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  159 and eventually became the minister of labor under Petain’s Vichy. Hervé gave up his antimilitarism, discovered in nationalism a remedy for social fragmentation, and became a Mussolini enthusiast. Péguy’s fate was short-​lived. As literary types are wont to do, he performed his own theory. Increasingly enchanted with death as a form of spiritual redemption, he rushed into war in August 1914 only to die on 4 September from a bullet to the head. Bergson provides the most shocking example. On 12 December 1914, Bergson explained the war’s philosophical meaning at the annual public meeting of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. His lecture weaponized his own philosophy to justify the war in epic, vitalist terms. German political development, Bergson argued, had once pursued “organic self-​development.” But Prussian influence—​“a people with whom every process tended to take a mechanical form”—​perverted its spirit. Under Bismarck’s tutelage, Germany came to incarnate every type of modern barbaric mechanism. Prussian militarism, now turned into German militarism, had become one with industrialism. . . . Such is the explanation of the spectacle before us. “Scientific barbarism,” “systematic barbarism,” are phrases we have heard. Yes, barbarism reinforced by the capture of civilization. Throughout the course of [German] history we have been following there is, as it were, the continuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, of debased moral materialism.121

Thus Germans had become a people working “to produce the mechanization of spirit instead of the spiritualization of matter . . . marching forward in mechanical order.”122 They had become the dupes of their own industrial development. Bergson called on his audience to see that life and creativity themselves were at stake in the Great War. “On one side,” there was Germany, avatar of “mechanism, the manufactured article which cannot repair its own injuries.” “On the other,” there stood heroic France, manifestation of “life, the power of creation which makes and remakes itself at every instant.” France had become the manifestation of the élan vital itself. Thus it was no surprise to Bergson that “in a nation thought to be mortally divided against itself, all became brothers in the space of a day” when war broke out. The French instinctively understood the war’s stakes: the triumph of life, will, creativity, organic development, everything opposed to “debased moral materialism.”123

160  The Virtues of Violence Outside of France, the same nationalistic reinterpretations occurred. In Italy, “Sorelismo” encouraged the reorganization of working class energy into nationalist forms of collectivism. Filippo Marinetti, who also called Sorel “our master,” published his infamous “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. It was a screed against history and the past, both deeply anti-​establishment and ultranationalist. It exalted the existential rebirth of the “new man” into the rebellious masses: “We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure, or by rebellion; of the many-​hued, many-​voiced tides of revolution in our modern capitals.”124 Touched by Sorelismo, he would later claim that war was “the sole cleanser of the world” and that “I believe that a people has to pursue a continuous hygiene of heroism and every century take a glorious shower of blood.”125 Marinetti was only the most bombastic of those influenced by Sorelismo.126 As Shlomo Sand explains, “Sorel’s presence in Italian culture from the end of the nineteenth century onward was too important to be ignored. The French friend of [leading Italian intellectuals] was known as an important philosopher, not only in syndicalist circles and not just on the political fringes, but also among an entire generation of university graduates in the second decade of the twentieth century.”127 Sorel’s canonization as a member of fascism’s intellectual pantheon was assured with Mussolini’s proclamation that “Who I am, I owe to Georges Sorel.” Finally, despite the fact that Sorel’s engagement with the far right actually only lasted a few years, he was nevertheless mythologized as one of the intellectual forebears of fascism in France, too. Sorel was included by Vichy’s Information Services in a 1941 list of the political thinkers who constituted its pedigree: Sorel and Péguy stood beside Barrès, Maurras, and Joseph de Maistre.128 The easy displacement of the working class by the nation helps bring into view how, rather than representing incommensurate programs, the irrationalist antirepublicanism of the mid-​1900s and the nationalist republicanism on the eve of war might be theoretically continuous. They shared a common way of thinking about how violence might inspire men to transcend their decadent, narrow self-​interests and reach toward values as ends in themselves. Sorel himself approved of this “discovery” of the exchangeability between the social and the national. An early enthusiast for Mussolini, Sorel wrote that the latter’s genius consisted in discovering “the union of the national and the social, which I studied but which I never fathomed.”129 War’s reconceptualization as an answer to French republicanism’s contradictions transformed the meaning of the Republic. No longer the guardian of social

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War  161 harmony and economic progress, it could now become a mythic source of authority, in the name of which a higher (and inward) freedom could be experienced. In obedience to the myth of the Nation, men would fight not for instrumental considerations, but for civilization, morality, and “life” itself. For those swayed by Sorel’s arguments, to defend mythologized authority in war was the condition of modern freedom. It was as if, for Sorel and his generation, the Third Republic had suffocated the freedom of the will at the moment that republicanism had finally triumphed over monarchism. If only the utilitarianism of French political culture could be overcome, we could finally have in our possession the proof of our freedom. That was the desire that the turn to violent self-​renewal intended to gratify. What violence supplied was not factual datum but psychological conviction in our freedom that the empirical world refused to yield through “rational” reflection.

 Conclusion Democracy Is a Social Revolution

With two world wars and the waves of violence that defined the twentieth century, European political development unraveled. The unprecedented scale of violence in the first half of the century—​its trenches, its firebombing, its camps—​seemed to defeat nineteenth-​century notions of humanism, civilization, and progress in irreversible ways. An estimated 1,400 people died at the height of the Jacobin Terror in the spring of 1794. But in the trenches of Verdun in 1916, more than seventy thousand soldiers were dying each month, with almost a million casualties by the year’s end. The violence was of such a scale that observers in and beyond Europe openly doubted whether the political thought of the preceding century could grasp it. How could thought so blind to this coming historical mutation explain its significance?1 In other words, many twentieth-​century observers surmised that the experience of world war not only introduced a break in the history of European political development, but also in its history of political thought. As George Kateb has recently put it, such are the “awful events” of the twentieth century that our inherited canon of political theory may not be able to “take in and comprehend” its dizzying catastrophe, comprised as it is of “World War I, World War II, the use twice of atomic weapons, their repeated threatened use by the United States, the theories of nuclear deterrence, the gulags, the Holocaust, induced famines, such American wars as the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and numerous massive massacres.”2 Before so much death, what can political theory say? It was a state of confusion shared by a generation of European thinkers. From the Frankfurt School to Cold War liberals, postwar journalists to newspaper critics, intellectuals everywhere cast the two world wars as a rupture in the nature of knowledge itself. Where there was once light and perspicacity in the Age of Enlightenment, after 1914, Ira Katznelson observes, there seemed to be only darkness and mystery.3 At the heart of this perceived rupture in European political thought lay political violence, for it, too, appeared to have evolved into something The Virtues of Violence. Kevin Duong, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190058418.001.0001

Conclusion  163 unrecognizable from the perspective of a St. Just, a Michel, or a Péguy. To be sure, political violence in the twentieth century continued to borrow the redemptive terms of its predecessors. It even continued to borrow the authority of the peuple and patrie to authorize its illegality. But that all seemed to be beside the point. Technological transformations of violence had rendered these qualities accidental rather than essential. However regenerative Hitler viewed German expansion to be, it was its blitzkriegs and its gas chambers that made it what it was. Napoleonic France may have invented the theory of total war, but it was in the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe where fourteen million people died between 1933 and 1945 that theory became practice.4 The Franco-​Prussian war may have witnessed the ascendance of the mitrailleuse, but its gunpowder was nothing compared to the tanks, aerial strafing, and atomic bombs of the Second World War. It was the changed character of violence in the twentieth century that, above all else, broke the chains of tradition connecting nineteenth-​century political theory to its twentieth-​century successors. Confronted with that divide, what can a study of redemptive violence in nineteenth-​century France teach us? It teaches us that there was a reason French revolutionaries in 1789 made fraternité as important to modern democracy as liberté and égalité. Democracy has never simply been a regime-​type, a set of laws or institutions, or a more just social order—​although it has been all of those things, too. “Democracy,” or “the Republic” in the case of France, has also named a battle for solidarity, a fight to create a set of social bonds that could make us collectively free. What democratic social bonds ought to look like has been contested, and how they could be forged has been equally controversial: spontaneous insurrection, the pursuit of glory, general strikes, total war, the guillotine, or the barricade. But the history of popular redemptive violence only makes sense if we bring this original, fundamental meaning of democracy back into view. Indeed, my aim in analyzing pieces of that history has been to remind us of that original meaning. As these previous chapters have shown, democracy was perceived as a series of abstraction procedures imposed upon society: first, the procedures which produced the individual as the bearer of the rights of man, and later those which underlay the market, the electorate, and representative parliamentary politics. These procedures of abstraction were indispensable to the struggle for democracy in France because they eroded the hierarchical corporatism of the ancien régime and pointed the way to a national sovereignty. At the same time, these procedures were unable to satisfy a second, equally

164  The Virtues of Violence important demand of revolutionary democracy: the demand for a new type of social bond capable of binding together a self-​governing people. Hence, generations of thinkers fretted over the fact that France seemed to be realizing the ideal of “the people rule” at the cost of dissolving the people back into a fragmented multitude of atomized individuals. Without a social cohesion that transcended a modus vivendi, France could have a democratic regime, but not a society of equals. Even if this dilemma had to be confronted in specific times and places, it was at bottom a theoretical impasse rooted in the wider historical experience of democratization. If the customary bases of association are no longer valid, then from what is the social bond made? How can a society of equals be created that transcends a quantitative aggregation of individuals? These questions were raised everywhere touched by democratic revolution, but it became especially acute in modern France. That was why the French struggle for democracy was never simply about replacing monarchy with republican government, subjects with citizens. It was also about rethinking the social bond. French political thinkers quickly discovered that not all forms of violence were capable of reconstituting a social body. On the contrary, violence motivated by instrumental calculations exacerbated social disintegration. Nineteenth-​century thinkers often perceived a tight connection between the atomized individual and utilitarian reasoning. It is hard to understate how much modern French thought developed its concern with the social in opposition to English liberal utilitarianism. Because of that defining opposition, French thinkers believed that instrumental perspectives on violence conformed to rather than resisted contemporary forces of disintegration. What could reinstitute social cohesion, they believed, were expressivist and noninstrumental acts of violence which escaped the cut and thrust of interest politics or means-​end rationality. Unlike the superficial opportunism of power politics or raison d’état, redemptive violence manifested the concrete moral principles that bind us together in society. In contrast to the mediated agency of the law, it expressed the spontaneous unity and agency of the people. With their violence, the people entered into history not as an abstract ground of public authority but as a concrete agent of moral redemption. It can be tempting to see this constellation of ideas as anachronistic on our side of the twentieth and twenty-​first century. But representations of revolutionary violence as redemptive circulated both beyond France and the nineteenth century. It was invoked by the Russian terrorist group Narodnaia Volia

Conclusion  165 (People’s Will) when they assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881.5 It figured in the writings of Italian futurists, as when Filippo Marinetti claimed, in 1915, that “we believe that only a love of danger and heroism can purify and regenerate our nation.”6 Even Frantz Fanon appealed, in 1961, to the regenerative power of anticolonial violence, writing “violence . . . binds them together as a whole . . . a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction.”7 Today, sectors of the American far right have made a credo out of Thomas Jefferson’s remark that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Brandishing this quotation like a catechism, conservative nationalists have posited a causal relation between violence by “the people” and national renewal. Bringing this longue durée of revolutionary, redemptive violence into view provides a better vantage point for understanding its enduring appeal. It has been, and continues to be, easy to condemn these claims as antidemocratic deviations from a democratic political culture. But situating these twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century claims within a wider historical aperture reveals that they are symptomatic of a familiar problem that has dogged democratic politics since the French Revolution:  How to make a people? As troubling as it may be, contemporary allusions to redemptive violence should be grasped as continuous with, rather than deviations from, the most prominent tendencies within modern political thought—​and not just conservativism. After all, American democratic thought has long nurtured its own idiom of redemptive violence. Developed in dialogue with its French counterpart, the American idiom was grafted onto a mythology of westward expansion’s regenerative effects.8 And it was turn of the century liberals like Theodore Roosevelt in “The Strenuous Life” and “The Winning of the West” who, upon the closing of the frontier, recast military service and imperial expansion as a source of regeneration. These liberals, together with American revolutionaries, French Jacobins, Russian anarchists, Italian fascists, and anticolonial nationalists, may be seen as antecedents for present invocations of redemptive violence. The point is not to group them all into a homogenous “illiberal” tradition to be condemned; it is to situate the contemporary trope of redemptive violence in its proper context, which was always transatlantic and modern rather than national or simply reactionary: the ongoing conflictual and socially disintegrating experience of democratization. Grasping this fact brings into focus why contemporary solutions to the problem of social cohesion put forward by liberal political theorists have not fared well. The case of “constitutional patriotism” is a case in point. Designed

166  The Virtues of Violence by German intellectuals as a secular and postnational basis for postwar reunification, constitutional patriotism has come to attract the attention of liberals everywhere concerned with reinventing the normative bases for European integration. It promises to supply an alternative to racial or religious sources of social cohesion by emphasizing our shared attachments to procedural and institutional principles, often enshrined in a constitutional document.9 It holds out, Jan-​Werner Müller explains, the hope that “another form of social cohesion is possible,” one nourished by a minimal moral universalism instead of the exclusionary national or ethnic creeds which marred the twentieth century.10 The past decade of European politics is a sobering reminder that constitutional patriotism has been unable to provide an effective source of social cohesion for postwar democracy. Where its vision of integration has proved successful, it has been in national contexts that have enjoyed demonstrable economic prosperity. Otherwise, the social cohesion forged through continental constitutional democracy has shown itself too fragile to withstand the combined assault of demographic diversification, economic crisis and dispossession, and suspicions that popular sovereignty has been usurped by impersonal technocratic rule. The ascendance of international governance has not fostered a transnational attachment to core constitutional procedures, but the resurgence of chauvinistic nationalisms that constitutional patriotism promised to make obsolete. The beneficiary of the new European order has not been a minimalist moral universalism, but reassertions of “the people” that resemble the “blood and soil” of Barrèsian conservatism.11 It does no good, either, to insist that the problem of the social bond is a false problem, one we are better off leaving behind. Fraternity is justifiably criticized in contemporary political theory. It is always gendered, even when women want it for themselves. When Louise Michel or André Léo demand fraternity, they demand the right to shoot and kill reactionaries alongside other men. They want to share the battlefield. Moreover, universal fraternity has never existed, and there are good reasons to think it never will. As feminist critics have pointed out time and again, universalisms are always particularisms; they will always come with constitutive exclusions across multiple axes of social ascription.12 Even more, the ideal of political fraternity tends to exaggerate commonality by drawing attention away from conflict, which is itself a technique for bracketing out voices challenging the boundaries of the demos. Michaele Ferguson rightly argues that it tends to pathologize diversity and can invite a passive, even antidemocratic view of

Conclusion  167 democracy.13 In a cutting recent essay, Jacob Levy has gone so far as to say that “When it comes to the fraternal solidarity aspired to by many theorists, we can’t have it, and we shouldn’t want it; and those aren’t truly problems, because we don’t need it.”14 These are powerful criticisms, and many seem true enough. Nevertheless, this book asks skeptics of fraternal solidarity to recall that there is nothing maximalist or supererogatory about expecting fraternity in democratic politics, just as there is nothing minimalist about arguing that we should not want it. For people who have traditionally seen themselves as parts of communities, and for people whose memberships in social bodies seem primary, there is nothing “minimalist” about the claim, as Levy puts it, that at bottom, “the inhabitants of a political community are more like strangers . . . locked in a very large room together than they are like an extended family or a voluntary association united in pursuit of a common purpose.”15 In fact, that self-​evident “moral truth” will appear as an extraordinary, maximalist act of social reengineering—​because it was. Liberal individualism is only minimalist in an established liberal political culture; namely, when its worldview has been naturalized (and gendered) as simply “moral psychology.” But in places where the struggle for democracy sought to replace an old social body with a new one—​say, modern France—​nothing could be stranger than the idea that, at bottom, we were strangers to one other. When Jacobins created a cult of fraternity after 1793, they did not do so as utopian social engineers imposing insuperable demands. They did so as revolutionaries who understood that democracy was being forged among people, many of whom had never understood their relations with one another as primarily individualistic or civic. From their point of view, as a matter of simple “moral truth,” they were members of society. It would have been incomprehensible to insist otherwise by normative fiat. Neither the importance of fraternity nor the contemporary difficulties of constitutional patriotism would have surprised the thinkers studied here. Indeed, it was their keen appreciation of the role of “the social” that drove them toward redemptive violence. As French revolutionaries understood, neither constitutionalism nor natural law theory offered persuasive answers for why democratic citizens ought to share a life together. They may have provided a common source of right, but they offered unconvincing visions of the social bond. Even liberals in nineteenth-​century France accepted that fact, despite contemporary liberal disavowals of social cohesion as a proto-​totalitarian expectation.16 Third Republic liberals devoted decades to

168  The Virtues of Violence creating social cohesion by inventing a new republican political culture: the creation of a national education system, the standardization of the French language, the construction of modern railway networks, the expansion of the civil service, and the implementation of laïcité.17 This liberal pursuit of social cohesion was no more minimalist or nonviolent than that of the Jacobins and their mocked Festival of the Supreme Being. The Mur des Fédérés in Père-​Lachaise ought to remind us of that fact. Adolphe Thiers was deluding himself when he conceded that “the Republic is the form of government that divides us the least.” As Sorel and Péguy soon countered (and the enthusiasm of war mobilization in 1914 confirmed), the Republic could never be reduced to a modus vivendi. If twentieth-​century liberals like John Rawls believed that “the hope of political community must indeed be abandoned,” that is only because historical amnesia concealed how hard they once had to work for it.18 Studying redemptive violence in France’s long nineteenth century underscores how democratic politics has never been reducible to a competition between principles of right. It has also involved, and will continue to involve, reimagining the social bond. Agreement on that fact connected liberals, socialists, Jacobins, anarchists, and even some Catholics in nineteenth-​century France as they each searched for a path to modern republican democracy. Once we appreciate the crucial role of the social in modern republican democracy, we can better appreciate the situation confronting contemporary critics: the point is not to abandon fraternal solidarity as too demanding, but to fight for it to mean something better than it has. Instead of signifying prepolitical or natural grounds of filiation, it can name the struggle for common life and common power.19 Jacques Lacan, it is said, teaches us to never give up on our desire. He did not mean desire for a specific object, but desire itself: an analysand should never give up on her desire for desire.20 We, too, should not give up wanting to want democratic social bonds. The contemporary tide of nationalism will not be resisted by discrediting the desire for fraternal solidarity as irredeemably illiberal, utopian, or totalitarian, but by putting forth a convincing democratic and egalitarian alternative. We do not need to endorse redemptive violence to appreciate how its history clarifies for us this demand left by the age of democratic revolutions and which modern democratic politics must still answer.

Notes Introduction 1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 272. 2. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Politics Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64–​65. 3. Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18–​20. 4. Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Revolutionary Government” (25 December 1793), in Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2007), 98–​107, at 100. 5. Ibid., 102. 6. Bugeaud to Saint-​Arnaud (24 June 1845)  and Suchet to Monseigneur l’Evêque d’Algérie (17 February 1853), cited in Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace:  The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 23, 88–​89. Brower describes Suchet’s remarks as expressing an “apocalyptic-​redemptive paradigm.” 7. Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, “War and Peace,” in Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings of Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969), 202–​14, at 202–​03. 8. “Déclaration au Peuple Français” (19 April 1871), Journal Officiel de la Commune, April 20, 1871; reprinted in Victor Bunel, ed., Réimpression du Journal Official de la République française sous la Commune, du 19 mars au 24 mai 1871 (Paris: Bunel, 1871). 9. Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, “Déclaration,” Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon 1 (1912), 1–​2, at 2. 10. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1908]), 251. 11. Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2000); Lucien Jaume, Le religieux et le politique dans la Révolution française: l’idée de régénération (Paris: PUF, 2015); Jesse Goldhammer, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Richard Bernstein, Violence: Thinking Without Banisters (New  York:  Polity, 2013); Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Redemptive Power of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens,” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 1–​22; Emilio Gentile, “Fascism As Political Religion,” Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 2/​3 (1990): 229–​51.

170 Notes 12. Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done:  The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013 [1991]), 95–​177; David William Bates, States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment:  Avant-​ Garde, Avant-​ Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996 [1983]); Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–​1942 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014); Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2003). 13. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence:  The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–​1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Matthew Rainbow Hale, “Regenerating the World: The French Revolution, Civic Festivals, and the Forging of American Democracy, 1793–​1795,” Journal of American History 103, no. 4 (2017): 891–​920. 14. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues:  Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal:  McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1993 [1821]), 30. 15. Filippo Marinetti, “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1915) in Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New  York:  Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006), 60–​74, at 62; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 93. 16. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 92. 17. On how the French Revolution altered preexisting meanings of “terror” and bound it to the experience of revolution, see George Armstrong Kelly, “Conceptual Sources of the Terror,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 18–​36; Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-​Century France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 18. Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5–​6. 19. Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 2–​16. 20. Melvin L. Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect:  On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (2012):  188–​203; Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question:  Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2003); Sofia Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” Political Theory 35, no. 5 (2007): 624–​58. 21. Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–​1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988 [1976]), 441–​ 74; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 22. Jean-​Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, “Oraison funèbre des citoyens morts dans la journée du dix août” (1792), in Le Dernier Homme (Paris: Payot, 2010), 189–​204, at 202.

Notes  171 23. William Blake, “The French Revolution” (1791), in The Selected Poems of William Blake (Herfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2000), 209–​23, at 219. 24. Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Voice of the People” (1801), in Odes and Elegies, trans. Nick Hoff (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 37. 25. Hervé Drévillon speaks of a “military humanism,” in which war comes to name a terrain devised by human agency rather than the “just wars” of divine providence, in L’individu et la guerre:  du chevalier Bayard au Soldat inconnu (Paris:  Belin, 2013),  15–​22. 26. Christopher Meckstroth, The Struggle for Democracy: Paradoxes of Progress and the Politics of Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 27. Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic, 5 February 1794,” in Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, 108–​25, at 110–​12. 28. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, “Solution of the Social Problem” (1848), in Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Property Is Theft! A Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon Anthology, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Publishing, 2011), 257–​80. 29. Georges Sorel, “Science and Morals” (1900), in Georges Sorel, From Georges Sorel: Vol. 2, Hermeneutics and the Sciences, ed. John L. Stanley, trans. John and Charlotte Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 1990), 136. 30. Lucien Jaume, Tocqueville:  The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013 [2008]), 16–​17, 64. 31. Louise Michel, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. and trans. Built Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1981 [1886]), 28, 30. 32. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:  Historical-​ Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, 4  vols., ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010 [1835, 1840]), 12. 33. Historians disagree on how to periodize the emergence of French republican political culture. Keith Baker has argued that it emerges in transformations in classical republicanism in the eighteenth century. These arguments are defended by Johnson Kent Wright’s study of Mably. More recently, Andrew Jainchill has argued that France’s version of the “Machiavellian Moment” came under the Directory. Pierre Rosanvallon locates its emergence squarely in the political culture formed between 1789 and 1794. And Patrice Guennifey has tried to distinguish between two distinct currents of French republicanism after 1789, one associated with the Cordeliers club and one with the Girondins. This book remains agnostic on the question of French republicanism’s “origins.” What concerns me is its overall effect on political thought. See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth Century France:  The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics After the Terror:  The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2008); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français:  la société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours

172 Notes (Paris: Seuil, 2004); Patrice Gueniffey, La politique de la Terreur: essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789–​1794 (Paris: Fayard, 2000). 34. The classic statement is Philip Pettit, Republicanism:  A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997), which formalized in normative language the historical insights of J. G.  A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:  Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975) and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 35. Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–​1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), xi, 24. 36. Jainchill, Reimagining Politics After the Terror; K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Naomi J. Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2006); Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 37. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Oxford, 1993), 60. 38. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1797]), 41, 53. 39. Ibid.,  53. 40. Jules Michelet, The People, trans. John P. McKay (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973 [1846]), 198. 41. The relationship between “French” and “Classical” republicanism continues to befuddle. Philip Pettit has recently glossed it as the distinction between a Rousseau-​inspired, “continental” republicanism and an Italian-​Atlantic “classical” republicanism. Whereas the former emphasizes popular sovereignty, universalism, and political rationalism, the latter emphasizes mixed constitutionalism and political contestation. Keith Baker has drawn it in opposite ways. For him, the French/​Rousseauian republicanism is closer to the classical tradition, whereas the constitutionalism of Condorcet points to a “republicanism of the moderns.” See Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms:  A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11–​18; Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republi­ canism in Eighteenth-​Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001): 32–​53. My own position is closer to that of Cécile Laborde’s since one of the distinctive features of French republicanism that I identify is its antipathy to constitutionalism and its emphasis on the social. In both these features, republicanism in modern France is at odds with its civic Roman variety; see Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism:  The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008) and Joan Wallach Scott, Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For other statements on the matter, see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek, “Radicalism, Republicanism and Revolution: From the Principles of ’89 to the Origins of Modern Terrorism,” in The

Notes  173 Cambridge History of Nineteenth-​Century Political Thought, eds. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), 200–​54, at 212–​15; Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right; Jennings, Revolution and the Republic. 42. Count de Clermont Tonnerre, “Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions (23 December 1789),” in Lynn Hunt, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights:  A Brief Documentary History (Boston and New  York:  Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 1996), 86–​88. 43. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28–​56, at 49. 44. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-​State:  Negritude & Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer:  French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1996); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–​1920 (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2006); Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship:  Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2013); Carolyn Dean, The Frail Social Body:  Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 45. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 [1993]), 147; see also his comparison of a modus vivendi with an overlapping consensus in John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 192–​95. 46. Charles Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958 [1932]), 22–​25. 47. Claude Blanckaert, La nature de la société: organicisme et sciences sociales au XIXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 48. Dean, The Frail Social Body, 14; Michael C. Behrent, “The Mystical Body of Society: Religion and Association in Nineteenth-​Century French Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 219–​43. 49. Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality,” 110. 50. François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, trans. William Hazlitt (New York: Penguin, 1997 [1828]), 19–​20. 51. Emile Durkheim, “Organic Solidarity and Contractual Solidarity,” in On Morality and Society: Selected Writings, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 86–​113, at 99–​100. 52. Ibid.,  112. 53. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Andrew Dilts, “Revisiting Johan Galtung’s Concept of Structural Violence,” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 191–​94.

174 Notes 54. Robert M. Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601–​629; Goldhammer, The Headless Republic; Yves Winter, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 55. Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991):  97–​ 113; Melissa M. Matthes, The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics (University Park:  The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Bonnie Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation:  Political Paradox in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 1 (2007):  1–​ 17; Joan Cocks, “The Violence of Structures and the Violence of Foundings,” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 221–​27; Angélica Maria Bernal, Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 56. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left; Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Ashéri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1994); Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality:  Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jack J. Roth, “The Roots of Italian Fascism:  Sorel and Sorelismo,” The Journal of Modern History 39, no. 1 (1967):  30–​45; Mark Antliff, Avant-​Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–​ 1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 57. Perloff, The Futurist Moment; Ernst Jünger, On Pain, trans. David C. Durst (Candor, NY:  Telos Press, 2008); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism:  Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 77–​100. 58. Tracy Strong, Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4. 59. Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-​ Enlightenment,” in Against the Current:  Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2001),  1–​24. 60. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left; Judith Shklar, “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition,” The Review of Politics 20, no. 4 (1958): 634–​56. 61. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 62. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London:  Secker and Warburg, 1952); François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999 [1983]). 63. Unlike in the American context, contemporary French intellectuals do not call themselves liberals but are often considered either “liberal republicans” or “neo-​ Republicans.” See Emile Chabal, “Writing the French National Narrative in the Twenty-​First Century,” The Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 495–​516. 64. A classic statement is Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 160–​80; for more contemporary examples of realism against perfectionism, see William A. Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 385–​411.

Notes  175 65. The classic statement of this position is the “immunity” thesis of René Rémond, The Right Wing in France:  From 1815 to de Gaulle, trans. James M. Laux (Philadelpha: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), but the tendency to narrate French republican history as a gradual perfection of universalism continues in Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 66. Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 108–​20; Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New  York:  Bergahn Books, 2004); Anson Rabinbach, “Moments of Totalitarianism,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 72–​100; James Chappel, “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (2011): 561–​90; Enzo Traverso, “Totalitarianism Between History and Theory,” History and Theory 56, no. 4 (2017): 97–​118. 67. Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 17–​21, 113–​47; Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2007), 37–​ 38, 247–​ 52; Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity:  Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 76, no. 1 (2004): 107–​54; Stephen S. Sawyer and Iain Stewart, eds., In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-​Totalitarianism, and Intellectual Politics in France Since the 1950s (New York: Palgrave-​Macmillan, 2016). 68. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics,  37–​38. 69. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 1994); Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind:  French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2007). 70. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Problem of the USSR and the Possibility of a Third Historical Solution” (1947) in Political and Social Writings, Vol. 1, 1946–​1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 49–​52. 71. Kevin Duong, “‘Does Democracy End in Terror?’ Transformations of Antitotalitarianism in Postwar France,” Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 2 (2017): 537–​63. 72. Christophe Prochasson has argued that Furet’s relation to antitotalitarianism has been overblown, although both Moyn and Christofferson have made a case otherwise; Christophe Prochasson, François Furet:  les chemins de la mélancolie (Paris:  Stock, 2013); Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 229–​66; Michael Scott Christofferson, “A Mind of the Left?”, New Left Review 88 (2014), 131–​37; Samuel Moyn, “On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet’s Masterpiece,” The Tocqueville Review/​La Revue Tocqueville 29, no. 2 (2008): 59–​78. 73. Jainchill and Moyn, “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity,” 107; by the 1970s, Lefort had turned away from defining totalitarianism as a type

176 Notes of bureaucratic rule and toward seeing it as an attempt to “fill” the “empty place” of power in democracy, to overcome its “dissolution of the markers of certainty.” See Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988 [1983]), 9–​20, at 17, 19; Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 1986), 292–​306; Claude Lefort, “Reflections on the Present,” in Claude Lefort, Writing:  The Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2000 [1991]), 252–​79. Samuel Moyn has argued that Furet’s appropriation of Lefort was motivated and idiosyncratic. See Moyn, “On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet’s Masterpiece.” 74. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 [1978]), 25. 75. Ibid.,  38–​39. 76. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1995 [1987]); Marcel Gauchet, “Préface:  Benjamin Constant:  l’illusion lucide du libéralisme,” in Benjamin Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes (Paris: Livre de poche, 1980), 11–​91; Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Serge Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé:  genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillean français (Paris:  Vrin, 2004); Emile Chabal, A Divided Nation:  Nation, State, and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 135–​85. 77. Prochasson, François Furet, 251–​304. 78. Marcel Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” Libre, 7 (1980), 43–​76; I  have quoted here from the English version, reprinted as “Tocqueville,” in Mark Lilla, ed, New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 91–​111, at 91–​92. 79. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Revolutionary Democracy,” in Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 79–​97, at  82–​83. 80. Ibid., 90, 93. 81. Iain Stewart, “France’s Anti-​68 Liberal Revival,” in France Since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in the Age of Uncertainty, ed. Emile Chabal (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 199–​223. 82. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect:  French Intellectuals, 1944–​1956 (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2011). 83. Gueniffey, La politique de la Terreur, 231. 84. Dan Edelstein, “Do We Want a Revolution Without Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 2 (2012): 269–​89. 85. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 86. Jainchill and Moyn, “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity,” 110. 87. Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” 18–​19.

Notes  177 88. It is stunning now to see how much democratic theory focuses on division, pluralism, and disagreement in opposition to homogeneity, uniformity, or bureaucracy. This is the basic orientation of radical democracy; see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:  Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New  York:  Verso, 1985); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-​ Marxism Without Apologies,” in Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New  York:  Verso, 1990), 97–​132. It is true of those, like Jacques Rancière or Bonnig Honig, who identify democratic contestation with politics tout court; see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement:  Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1995]); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). It is an article of faith for theorists of pluralism like William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). There is plenty to defend in these theories, but their emphases on democracy as contestation leaves to the side what Sheldon Wolin always remembered to honor alongside democracy’s transgressive acts:  the experience of democracy as “the self-​discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them,” in “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 11–​25, at 11. 89. Enzo Traverso, “Intellectuals and Anti-​Fascism: For a Critical Historicization,” New Politics 9, no. 4 (2004): 91–​101. 90. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), 64. 91. Merleau-​Ponty writes of “the real tragedy of historical contingency” in the context of the 1938 Moscow Trials: “Whatever his goodwill, man undertakes to act without being able to appreciate exactly the objective sense of his action; he constructs his own image of the future which has only a probable basis and in reality solicits that future so that he can be condemned for it because the event in itself is not unequivocal. A dialectic whose course is not entirely foreseeable can transform a man’s intentions into their opposite and yet one has to take sides from the very start. In brief . . . ‘fate is politics,’—​destiny here not being a fatum already written down unbeknown to us, but the collision in the very heart of history between contingency and the event, between the multiplicity of the eventual and the uniqueness of the necessity in which we find ourselves when acting to treat one of the possibilities as a reality, to regard one of the futures as present. Man can neither suppress his nature as freedom and judgment—​ what he calls the course of events is never anything but its course as he sees it—​nor question the competence of history’s tribunal, since in acting he has engaged others and more and more the fate of humanity,” in Humanism and Terror, 64. 92. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France,  7–​8. 93. I join contemporary critics of the revisionist school even as I refuse to conclude that violence was a “contamination” of the language of democratic politics or reducible to alibis for private acts of vengeance or approbation, as in Jean-​Clément Martin, Violence et révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 94. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong, trans. Rodney Livingston (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), 91–​92.

178 Notes

Chapter 1 1. Maximilien Robespierre, Speech to the Assembly, 30 May 1791, in Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860, première série (1787 à 1799), eds. M. J. Mavidal and M. E. Laurent, 82 vols. (Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–​1913), vol. 26, 622–​23. Archives parlementaires henceforth cited by volume and page number. 2. Thomas Paine, Speech to the Convention, 7 January 1793, in Michael Walzer, ed. Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, trans. Marian Rothstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 208–​14, at 213. 3. Maximilien Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 130–​38, at 138. 4. John Laurence Carr, Robespierre: The Force of Circumstance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). 5. Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 133. 6. Ibid.; Peter McPhee, Robespierre:  A Revolutionary Life (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2012), 146. 7. Louis-​Antoine de Saint-​Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 120–​26, at 125, 123. 8. Archives parlementaires 47:458. This unattributed couplet, which opens the section’s address to the Assembly, is originally Voltaire’s. 9. Albert Soboul, Le procès de Louis XVI (Paris: Julliard, 1966), 87. 10. Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 102; Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 128. 11. Another common trope is to construe regicide as “sacrificial violence,” as in Jesse Goldhammer, The Headless Republic:  Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2005); Antoine de Baecque, Glory and Terror:  Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Routledge, 2001 [1997]); Richard D. E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–​1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 12. Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-​Century France (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018); Mayer, The Furies, 73. 13. Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36; Patrice Gueniffey, “Cordeliers and Girondins: the prehistory of the republic?” trans. Laura Mason, in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86–​106, at 93; Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas:  An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 27. 14. Walzer, Regicide and Revolution,  70–​71. 15. Ibid.,  78–​79. 16. Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille:  July 14, 1789, trans. Jean Stewart (New  York:  Scribners, 1970); William H. Sewell, Jr., “Historical Events as

Notes  179 Transformations of Structures:  Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 841–​81. 17. Timothy Tackett, “Rumor and Revolution: The Case of the September Massacres,” French History and Civilization 4 (2011): 54–​64. 18. The classic figures are from Donald Greer, The Incidents of the Terror During the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935). 19. Given the conflictual place of the Vendée in the historiography, Jean-​Clément Martin has urged us to “humbly acknowledge the limits of historical writing,” especially when it comes to assessing the facts of the civil war and the number of deaths, in “La Vendée et sa guerre, les logiques de l’événement,” Annales ESC 40, no. 5 (1985): 1067–​85, at 1082; see also Jean-​Clément Martin, “Est-​il possible de compter les morts de la Vendée?” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 38, no. 1 (1991): 105–​21. 20. Jean-​Clément Martin, Violence et révolution:  essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 123–​53. 21. Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 71. 22. Invoking what would become a long-​standing motif of nineteenth-​century French thought, Brissot defended it thus: “War is actually a national benefit,” and indeed “our salvation lies that way, for strong doses of poison remain in the body of France, and strong measures are necessary to expel them.” Quoted in David P. Jordan, The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 30. 23. Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 179–​202. 24. “Petition to the National Assembly, Drawn Up on the Altar of the Patrie (17 July 1791),” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 275–​76. 25. Archives parlementaires 47:69–​70. 26. Ibid.,  47:70. 27. As Patrice Guenniffey has observed, from the beginning, the English precedent made French counter-​revolutionaries worried that their own revolution was fated to destroy the monarchy, in Patrice Guenniffey, La politique de la Terreur: essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789–​1794 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 46–​47. 28. Archives parlementaires 55:15. 29. Ibid., 45:163–​64. 30. Soboul, Le procès,  18–​19. 31. “The Constitution of 1791” (3 September 1791), in John Hall Stewart, ed. A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 230–​62, at 240. 32. Quoted from Soboul, Le procès, 114–​15. 33. Charles-​François-​Gabriel Morrison, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 110–​20, at 111–​13. 34. Ibid.,  119.

180 Notes 35. From a pamphlet of the Marquis de Condorcet appended to the Convention records on 3 December 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 139–​58, at 140, 146, 148. 36. Soboul, Le procès,  83–​87. 37. Jean-​Baptiste Mailhe, Speech to the Convention, 7 November 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 93–​110, at 98. 38. Mailhe, Speech to the Convention, 7 November 1792, 98. 39. Ibid., 97, 100–​01. 40. Ibid.,  107. 41. This cuts against interpretations like those of Richard Burton, who adopts a commonplace position when he argues that “the premises of the trial ultimately permitted one verdict and one punishment only,” in Burton, Blood in the City, 43. 42. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, Tome IV, ed. Gustave Laurent (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1939), 9. 43. Mailhe, Speech to the Convention, 7 November 1792, 103. 44. Condorcet, 3 December 1792 pamphlet, 156. 45. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 122. 46. Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 135. 47. In his first speech to the Convention, St. Just argued that “The forms of judicial procedure here are not to be sought in positive law, but in the law of nations.” Robespierre later followed suit, arguing “You confuse the rules of positive and civil law with those of the law of nations.” See St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 121; Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 132. 48. Pierre-​Victurnien Vergniaud, Speech to the Convention, 31 December 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 194–​208, at 195. 49. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 121. 50. Ibid.,  123. 51. Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 131. 52. Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty:  Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–​1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4–​5. 53. Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet:  From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1975); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 56–​88; Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right, 109. 54. William Sewell, Work & Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 34–​39. 55. Louis de Jaucourt, “Morale (Science des moeurs),” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, ed. Robert Morrisey, Vol. 10, 699–​700. 56. Jacques Turgot, “On Foundations,” in Baker, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 89–​97, at 96; Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007), 283–​90.

Notes  181 57. Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998), 521–​ 22; Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 20–​25. 58. Archives parlementaires 8:127. 59. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?,” in Political Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003 [1789]), 92–​162, at 128. 60. “The ‘Chapelier’ Law” (14 June 1791), in Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, 165–​66; for a description of the law’s reception, see Sewell, Work & Revolution in France,  90–​91. 61. Jean Terrier, Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–​1950 (Leidsen: Brill, 2011). 62. Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 22. 63. Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 47–​50; see also Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-​ Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001), 32–​53. 64. Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” 99. 65. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution:  Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 227–​51. 66. Maximilien Robespierre, “On Subsistence,” (2 December 1792)  in Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2007), 49–​56, at 51, 53. 67. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 121. 68. Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 133. 69. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 122. 70. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 27 December 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 166–​77, at 176. 71. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 126. 72. Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 133. 73. Maximilien Robespierre, “Answer to Louvet’s Accusation” (5 November 1792), in Virtue and Terror, 39–​48, at 43. 74. St. Just, Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792, 125. 75. Jürgen Habermas, “Constitutional Democracy:  A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” Political Theory 29, no. 6 (2001):  766–​81; Jan-​Werner Müller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 76. Albert Camus, The Rebel:  An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 112. 77. Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic” (5 February 1794), in Virtue and Terror, 108–​25, at 109. 78. Robespierre, “Answer to Louvet’s Accusation,” 44.

182 Notes 79. Maximilien Robespierre, “Report on the Political Situation of the Republic” (17 November 1793) in Virtue and Terror, 80–​90, at 88–​89. 80. Robespierre, “Response of the National Convention to the Manifesto of the Kings,” in Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, 90–​97, at 93, 95, 97. 81. Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Revolutionary Government” (25 December 1793), in Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, 98–​107, at 100. 82. Ibid., 100; see also McPhee, Robespierre, 174–​75. 83. Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right; Ferenc Fehér, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 84. Mona Ozouf, L’homme régénéré: essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Lucien Jaume, Le religieux et le politique dans la Révolution française: l’ idée de régénération (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2015). 85. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1975]), 48. 86. Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done:  The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204–​17. 87. Ernst Hans Gombrich, “The Dream of Reason: Symbolism of the French Revolution,” Journal of 18th-​Century Studies 2, no. 3 (1979):  187–​205; Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–​1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); Marie-​Hélene Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2004 [1984]); Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right. 88. Lorraine Daston, “The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea,” and “II. Nature’s Customs versus Nature’s Laws,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 24, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2004), 371–​411. 89. Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of the Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–​1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 72–​103. 90. Robespierre, Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792, 132. 91. Ibid.,  133. 92. Robespierre, “On the Principles of Morality,” 115. 93. Maximilien Robespierre, “Report on Religious Ideas and Moral Principles and Republican Principles” (7 May 1794), quoted in Miller, A Natural History, 73. 94. Many biographies of Marat exist that discuss his political career, such as Olivier Coquard, Jean-​Paul Marat (Paris: Fayard, 1993), but the only one that I know which fully treats Marat the scientist is Clifford D. Connor, Jean Paul Marat: Scientist and Revolutionary (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998). Connor argues that Marat belonged to the group of scientists holding a “materialist” theory of heat; namely, that it was a fluid that moved between objects and that lightning was one particularly pure and visible expression of the general phenomenon of material heat. It is also on the topic of electricity, Connor concludes, that “Marat the scientist most resembled the revolutionary politician” (114). Louis Jacob has argued that Marat’s scientific writing

Notes  183 was considered the work of “a fool, decried and ridiculed,” in Louis Jacob, “Marat Physicien,” Revue du Nord 29, no. 114 (1947):  81–​86, at 85, but Connor believes Marat’s ideas were taken seriously by many scientists despite being controversial. 95. Miller, A Natural History,  77–​78. 96. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), vii, 3. Mesmerism was not only popular in France; see Tim Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57–​78. 97. Darnton, Mesmerism, 106–​25. 98. Madame de Lorsange cries after Justine has been struck down by a “flash of lightning” whose “thunderbolt has entered her right breast,”: “Oh, my friend! The prosperity of crime is but a trial that Providence wishes virtue to undergo. It is like a thunderbolt whose deceptive fires embellish the skies for an instant, merely to plunge the wretch they have dazzled into the chasms of death,” in Marquis de Sade, Justine:  or the Misfortunes of Virtue (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2012 [1791]), 263. 99. Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, séance du 11 mars 1792, quoted in Le Moniteur, ou la Gazette Universel (14 March 1792), cited in Miller, A Natural History, 86. 100. Jessica Riskin, “The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod,” Science in Context 12, no. 1 (1999): 61–​99; McPhee, Robespierre,  35–​36. 101. Maximilien Robespierre, “Letter to Benjamin Franklin, 1 October 1783” in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 41, ed. Ellen R. Cohn (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2014), 61. 102. Soboul, Le procès, 113. 103. Archives parlementaires 57:90. 104. Jordan, The King’s Trial, 178–​92. 105. Quoted in Soboul, Le procès, 216. 106. Jean Jaurès, A Socialist History of the French Revolution, trans. Mitchell Abidor (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 138–​39.

Chapter 2 1. Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 47–​65. 2. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, “Guerre coloniale: guerre totale? Brèves remarques sur la conquête de l’Algérie,” Drôle d’epoque 12 (2003): 59–​73; Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–​1987:  Colonial Upheavals and Post-​ independence Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 41–​42. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Notes on the Voyage to Algeria in 1841,” in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 36–​58, at 56. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria (October 1841),” in Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 59–​116, at 71.

184 Notes 5. Cheryl B. Welch, “Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion:  Tocqueville on Algeria,” Political Theory 31, no. 2 (2003): 235–​64, at 237. 6. Ibid., 253–​54; Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” The Review of Politics 25, no. 3 (1963): 362–​98, at 390. 7. Isaiah Berlin, “The Thought of de Tocqueville,” History 50, no. 169 (1965): 199–​206, at 204; Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 295–​318, at 297, 311. 8. Ibid., 298; Cheryl B. Welch, “Tocqueville’s Resistance to the Social,” History of European Ideas 30, no. 1 (2004): 83–​107. 9. Ibid., 247. 10. Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” 396; Roger Boesche, “The Dark Side of Tocqueville: On War and Empire,” The Review of Politics 67, no. 4 (2005): 737–​52, at 739. 11. Pitts, “Empire and Democracy,” 316; Margaret Kohn, “Empire’s Law:  Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 2 (2008): 255–​78. 12. Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria” (1847), in Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 129–​73, at 129. 13. Jennifer Sessions, “‘Unfortunate Necessities’:  Violence and Civilization in the Conquest of Algeria,” in France and Its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image, eds. Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Daniel Brewer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 29–​44, at 39. 14. Thomas Rid, “Razzia: A Turning Point in Modern Strategy,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 4 (2009): 617–​35; William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 15. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l’État colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 16. Sudhir Hazareesingh, “Memory, Legend and Politics: Napoleonic Patriotism in the Restoration Era,” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006): 71–​84; Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-​Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-​Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 17. Thomas Hippler, Soldats et citoyens:  naissance du service militaire en France et en Prusse (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006), 75–​176. 18. Robert Morrissey, The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014 [2010]), 89. 19. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–​409. 20. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria (22 August 1837),” in Writings on Empire and Slavery, 14–​26, at 25. 21. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 63. 22. Rid, “Razzia,” 621. 23. Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria,” 24. 24. Morrissey, The Economy of Glory, 84.

Notes  185 25. Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics After the Terror:  The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 12. 26. Larry Siedentop, “Two Traditions of Liberalism,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 153–​74, at 166. 27. Aurelian Craiutu, “Rethinking Political Power: The Case of the French Doctrinaires,” European Journal of Political Theory 2, no. 2 (2003): 125–​55, at 135. 28. Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 46. 29. Karuna Mantena, “Social Theory in the Age of Empire,” in Sankar Muthu, ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 324–​50; Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire:  Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 56–​61; Robert A. Nisbet, “The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France,” American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 2 (1943): 156–​64; Lorraine J. Daston, “Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics,” in The Probabilistic Revolution, Vol. 1: Ideas in History, ed. Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 295–​304. 30. Siedentop, “Two Traditions of Liberalism,” 160; Michael C. Behrent, “Liberal Dispositions:  Recent Scholarship on French Liberalism,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 (2016):  447–​77; Jainchill, Reimagining Politics After the Terror, 108–​40. Accounts of “the social” in nineteenth-​century French liberalism abound. See Pierre Rosanvallon, “Political Rationalism and Democracy in France,” in Democracy Past and Future, ed. Sam Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 127–​43; Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism Under Siege:  The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2003); Cheryl Welch, Liberty and Utility:  The French Idéologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Welch, “Tocqueville’s Resistance to the Social”; Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1984); both Rosanvallon and Jacques Donzelot distinguish the French liberal program by its commitment to “produce the social,” in Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990) and Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social: essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1984). 31. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004 [1835, 1840]). Future citations to this edition abbreviated as DA. 32. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, 27. 33. “Letter to Gustave de Beaumont, December 14, 1846,” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 177–​83, at 181–​82. 34. “Letter to Pierre-​Paul Royer-​Collard, August 20, 1837,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 118.

186 Notes 35. “Letter to John Stuart Mill, March 18, 1841,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 150–​51. 36. “Letter to Pierre-​Paul Royer-​Collard, August 15, 1840,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 144. 37. Michael Drolet, “Carrying the Banner of the Bourgeoisie: Democracy, Self and the Philosophical Foundations to François Guizot’s Historical and Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 32, no. 4 (2011):  645–​90; Michael Drolet, “Manners, Method, and Psychology:  The Enduring Relevance of Tocqueville’s Reflections on Democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory 11, no. 4 (2012): 487–​98. 38. Jaume has traced the roots of Tocqueville’s analysis not to French debates in psychology, but to Lamennais. For Tocqueville’s analysis of the symbiosis between democracy and capitalism, see Laura Janara, “Commercial Capitalism and the Democratic Psyche:  The Threat to Tocquevillean Citizenship,” History of Political Thought 22, no. 2 (2001): 317–​50. 39. Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility:  Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–​1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 11–​16, 162–​86, 387–​420; John C. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (University Park:  The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 40. Jan Goldstein, The Post-​Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 21–​102, 182–​232. 41. Victor Cousin, Fragmens philosophiques, Seconde Edition (Paris: Ladrange Libraire, 1833), xiii. 42. Goldstein, The Post-​Revolutionary Self,  8–​11. 43. Cousin, Fragmens philosophique, xvii. 44. Ibid., xii–​xiv. 45. Ibid.,  210. 46. “Letter to Gobineau, September 16, 1858,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 374–​76, at 376. 47. Cousin, Fragmens philosophique, vii–​viii. 48. Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville and Guizot on Democracy: From a Type of Society to a Political Regime,” History of European Ideas 30 (2004): 61–​82. 49. Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé. Ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 50. François Azouvi, Maine de Biran: la science de l’homme (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 174, 294–​ 98; Drolet, “Carrying the Banner.” 51. Cousin, Fragmens philosophiques, 209. 52. François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, trans. William Hazlitt (New York: Penguin, 1997 [1828]), 18. 53. Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, 18–​19, 21. 54. “Letter to Pierre-​Paul Royer Collard, August 20, 1837,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 117–​23, at 118. 55. “Letter to Gustave de Beaumont, August 9, 1840,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 142. 56. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2008 [1856]), 14.

Notes  187 57. “Letter to Paul Clamorgan, April 17, 1842,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 157–​58 at 158. 58. Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution & Correspondence with Gobineau, trans. John Lukacs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 149–​50. 59. Sudhir Hazareesingh, “Memory and Political Imagination: The Legend of Napoleon Revisited,” French History 18, no. 4 (2004):  463–​83, at 481; see also Nancy L. Rosenblum, “Romantic Militarism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no. 2 (1982): 249–​68. 60. Richard Boyd, “Tocqueville and the Napoleonic Legend,” in Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, eds. Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 264–​87, at 265. 61. Barbara Ann Day-​Hickman, Napoleonic Art: Nationalism and the Spirit of Rebellion in France (1815–​1848) (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 116. 62. Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–​ 1836 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7. 63. Morrissey, The Economy of Glory,  7–​8. 64. Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” 364; Boesche, “The Dark Side of Tocqueville”; Jaume, Tocqueville; Pitts, “Empire and Democracy.” 65. David Owen, “Machiavelli’s Il Principe and the Politics of Glory,” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 1 (2017): 41–​60. 66. Tracy Strong, “Glory and the Law in Hobbes,” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 1 (2017): 61–​76. 67. For a brief description of glory’s decline after the Renaissance, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013 [1977]), 9–​12. 68. Morrissey, The Economy of Glory, 84–​85, 91. 69. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:  Historical-​ Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, 4  vols., ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010 [1835, 1840]), 795, fn. c. 70. Ibid.,  12. 71. “Letter to Arthur de Gobineau, October 2, 1843,” in Tocqueville, The European Revolution & Correspondence with Gobineau, 207. 72. Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Emancipation of Slaves (1843),” in Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 199–​226, at 209. 73. “Letter to Pierre-​Paul Royer-​Collard, September 27, 1841,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 157. 74. Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria,” 24. 75. André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988 [1984]), 321–​24. 76. Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria,” 25. 77. Tocqueville, “First Letter on Algeria (23 June 1837),” in Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 5–​13, at 7; Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria,” 140, 144–​45. 78. Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria,” 25. 79. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 61.

188 Notes

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Ibid., 81. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 388. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 65, 87. Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria,” 167. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 59. Ibid., 71. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Intervention in the Debate Over the Appropriation of Special Funding (1846),” in Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 117–​28, at 127–​28. 87. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 59. 88. Tocqueville, “Letter to Henry Reeve, April 12, 1840,” in Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 141–​42, at 142. 89. Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria,” 146. 90. Alan Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars:  The Nation-​in-​Arms in French Republican Memory (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); Hazareesingh, “Memory and Political Imagination.” 91. Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 154. 92. Nina Athanassoglou, “Under the Sign of Leonidas:  The Political and Ideological Fortune of David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae under the Restoration,” The Art Bulletin 63, no. 4 (1981): 633–​49. 93. Gallois, A History of Violence, 14; William Gallois, “Dahra and the History of Violence in Early Colonial Algeria,” in The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 3–​25. 94. Jennifer Sessions, “ ‘Unfortunate Necessities,’ ” at 33–​34. 95. Kim Munholland, “Michaud’s History of the Crusades and the French Crusade in Algeria under Louis-​Philippe,” in The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, eds. Petra ten-​Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1994), 144–​65, at 154; Sessions, By Sword and Plow,  32–​40. 96. Mantena, Alibis of Empire. 97. Tocqueville, “First Letter on Algeria,” 7. 98. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 69. 99. Ibid., 64, 100. Ibid., 67, 69. 101. Ibid., 71. 102. Ibid., 67. 103. Ibid., 62. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 63. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 81. 108. Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-​American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Notes  189 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria” 129. Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 68. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 70. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2003), 47–​75. 114. Rid, “Razzia,” 620, 624. 115. As Tocqueville put it, “Nothing struck me more in Algeria than to see the difference in bearing and language between the officers living in Algeria permanently and those belonging to regiments that were merely passing through. It is said that both are equally brave on the battlefield. I would like to believe it. But, for all the rest, they differ so much that one would think they formed two distinct races. The first are ardent, ambitious, full of energy; they love the country and are passionate about its conquest. The others are sad, mournful, sickly, and disheartened; they think and speak only of France. In truth, the first wage war, the second endure it,” in Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 76. 116. Jennifer E. Sessions, “Ambiguous Glory: The Algerian Conquest and the Politics of Colonial Commemoration in Post-​Revolutionary France,” Outre-​Mers 94, no. 350–​351 (2006): 91–​102, at 93–​94; see also Hazareesingh, “Memory, Legend, and Politics.” 117. Mazagran has been well studied, both in its place in historical memory and in literature and arts. See Charles Dejob, “La défense de Mazagran dans la littérature et les arts du dessin,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 19, no. 2 (1912): 318–​40; Bethany S. Oberst, “Algeria and the Algerians in the French Theater: 1800–​1850,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 8 (1985): 70–​78; Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 125–​73; Xavier Guégan, “Transmissable Sites:  Monuments, Memorials and Their Visibility on the Metropole and Periphery,” in Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, eds. Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015), 21–​38, at 32–​33. 118. Paul de Mont Rond, Histoire de la conquête de l’Algérie de 1830 à 1847. Tome 2 (Paris: Marc-​Aurel, 1847), 46. 119. Alison McQueen, “Politics and Public Sculpture in Nineteenth-​Century Colonial French Algeria,” Sculpture Journal 28, no. 1 (2019): 7–​34. 120. Yves Winter, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018), 194. 121. Morrissey, The Economy of Glory, 107. 122. Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria,” 142. 123. Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 166–​68. 124. Tocqueville, “First Report on Algeria,” 135. 125. Ibid., 135–​36. 126. David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 3.

190 Notes

Chapter 3 1. Edmond Goncourt, “Monday, 30 January,” in Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Pages From the Goncourt Journals, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 183. 2. This number has been the object of ongoing revision and dispute. Originally, the number of casualties reached more than twenty thousand, as in Jacques Rougerie, “Composition d’une population insurgée:  L’exemple de la Commune,” Mouvement social 48 (1964): 31–​47. Robert Tombs has tried to modify that number down to as few as six thousand. See Robert Tombs, “How Bloody Was La Semaine Sanglante of 1871? A Revision,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 679–​704. Others have pressed back on his method of counting, for example, Karine Varley, “Reassessing the Paris Commune of 1871: A Response to Robert Tombs,” H-​France Salon 3, no. 1 (2011): 20–​25. 3. Those who see it as the greatest monument to working class radicalism typically belong to the canonical, Marxist tradition of social history. This view is well represented in Jean Bruhat, Jean Dautry, and Emile Tersen, who write in their magisterial book that the Commune’s splendor lies in its emphasis on communal autonomy, “effective democracy,” and abolition of the separation of powers; La Commune de 1871 (Paris: Editions sociales, 1960), 187–​88. Others who see it as a riot, anarchy, and disorder include military historians like Alan Forrest, who sees in communard violence “disorder,” “a loss of political control,” “lack of discipline and marked taste for violence,” which “helped to increase levels of disorder in Paris and added to the sense of anarchy in the city.” See Alan Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-​in-​Arms in French Republican Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 128. In a contemporary antitotalitarian idiom, Adam Gopnik has denounced the Commune, associating it with the naïvety of the American New Left, the Terror, and the Bolshevik Revolution; Adam Gopnik, “The Fires of Paris,” The New Yorker, 15 December 2014. 4. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury:  The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (New York: Verso, 2015), 6. 5. Louise Michel, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. and trans. Bullit Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1981 [1886]), 64. 6. Dominique Desanti, Visages de femmes (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1955), 9–​67; Edith Thomas, Louise Michel ou La Velléda de l’anarchie (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 7. Michel Cordillot, Aux origines du socialisme moderne: la Première Internationale, la Commune de Paris, l’exil. Recherches et travaux. (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2010), 71–​116. 8. Gavin Bowd, The Last Communard:  Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 2016). 9. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 22. 10. David A. Shafer, The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture, and Society at the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism (New  York:  Palgrave, 2005), 187.

Notes  191 11. “Déclaration au Peuple Français” (19 April 1871), Journal officiel de la Commune de Paris, 20 April 1871. 12. Jules Vallès, The Insurrectionist, trans. Sandy Petrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971 [1886]), 118. 13. Stanley Hoffman, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” in In Search of France, ed. Stanley Hoffman et al, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1–​117, at 3–​21; Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 14. Julian Wright, “Socialism and Political Identity: Eugène Fournière and Intellectual Militancy in the Third Republic,” French Historical Studies 36, no. 3 (2013):  449–​ 78; Julian Wright, Socialism and the Experience of Time: Idealism and the Present in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 15. Serge Bianchi and Roger Dupuy, eds., La Garde nationale entre nation et peuple en armes: mythes et réalités, 1789–​1871 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006); Roger Dupuy, Le Garde nationale, 1789–​1872 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 16. Benoît Malon, La troisième défaite du proletariat français (Neuchâtel:  Guillaume Fils, 1871); Jeanne Gaillard, Communes de province, Commune de Paris, 1870–​ 1871 (Paris:  Flammarion, 1971); Samuel Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971); Eugene Schulkind, The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Maurice Paz, “Le mythe de la Commune:  les deux reproches majeurs,” Est et Ouest 482 (1972):  23–​28; David Barry, Women and Political Insurgency:  France in the Mid-​ Nineteenth Century (New York: St Martin’s, 1996); Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades:  Women in the Paris Commune (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2004); Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space:  Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (New  York:  Verso, 2008 [1988]); Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre 1871 (Paris: Seuil, 2004). 17. Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864–​1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Ian H. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 18. Madelaine Rebérioux, “Le mur des Fédérés:  rouge ‘sang craché,’” in Les lieux de mémoire, tome 1: La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 626–​37. 19. Henri de Saint-​Simon, “The Catechism of the Industrialists” (1823–​6), in The Political Thought of Saint-​Simon, ed. Ghita Ionescu (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 182–​203, at 184. 20. “Déclaration,” La Commune, 20 March 1871. 21. André Léo, “Les soldats de l’idée,” La sociale, 28 April 1871. 22. Michel, The Red Virgin, 51. 23. Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of Association:  Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of 1871 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996). 24. Richard D. Challener, The French Theory of the Nation in Arms, 1866–​ 1939 (New York: Russel & Russel, 1965). 25. Johnson, The Paradise of Association, 34.

192 Notes 26. David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Vintage, 2017), 12. 27. Robert Tombs describes the Commune’s plan “to build a democratic political system” as something “pushed into the background by military events,” therefore analytically separating them as essentially different; see Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 6. Kristin Ross has made the most magnificent effort to reconstruct the communard achievements in emancipation, but she does so by separating those achievements from the Commune’s nationalist and republican dimensions in Communal Luxury. Martin Breaugh, for his part, describes the military centralization of the Commune as a “betrayal” of its democratic promise in The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom, trans. Lazer Lederhendler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 [2007]), 173–​200. 28. Prosper-​Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, trans. Eleanor Marx (New York: Verso, 2012 [1876]), 194–​95. 29. Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Berg, 1990 [1986]), 33–​35, 247. 30. Rosalind H. Williams, Dreamworlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-​Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 7–​14. 31. Noiriel, Workers in French Society,  40–​41. 32. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–​1848 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 44, 168–​72. 33. Claude Fohlen, Qu’est-​ ce que la révolution industrielle? (Paris:  Robert Laffont, 1971),  16–​20. 34. Noiriel, Workers in French Society, 40–​41,  64–​65. 35. Robert Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 36. William Sewell, Work & Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 208. 37. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration:  A European Disorder, c.  1848–​c.  1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Andrew R. Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the ‘Social Question’ in Nineteenth-​Century France (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1999); Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx:  Workers, Women and the Social Question in France (Montreal and Kingston:  McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2000); Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (London: Macmillan-​Palgrave,  1988). 38. Holly Case, “The ‘Social Question,’ 1820–​1920,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 3 (2016): 747–​75. 39. Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–​1852 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 6–​9; Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 40. Frank E. Manuel’s The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Naomi J. Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of

Notes  193 French Romantic Socialism (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2006); John Tresch, The Romantic Machine:  Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–​1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1984); Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx; Sewell, Work & Revolution. 41. Henri de Saint-​Simon, “On the Reorganization of European Society” (1814), in The Political Thought of Saint-​Simon, 83–​98, at 89. 42. Saint-​Simon, “The Catechism of the Industrialists” (1823–​6), in The Political Thought of Saint-​Simon, 182–​203, at 184. 43. Henri de Saint-​Simon, “New Christianity” (1825), in Henri de Saint-​Simon, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. F. M.  H. Markham (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1952), 81–​116, at 81–​82,  87. 44. Ibid.,  103. 45. Ibid.,  114. 46. Andrews, Socialism’s Muse, 6–​ 7; Leo Loubére, “Intellectual Origins of Jacobin Socialism,” International Review of Social History 4, no. 3 (1959): 415–​31; Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx, 15–​20; Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2001). 47. Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity:  The Post-​Theistic Program of French Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 48. Joan Roelofs and Victor Considerant, “Considerant’s ‘Principes du socialisme,’” Science & Society 74, no. 1 (2010): 114–​27. 49. Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity. 50. Cited in Tresch, The Romantic Machine, 208. 51. Maurice Agulhon, “Le problème de la culture populaire en France autour de 1848,” Romantisme 9 (1975): 50–​64, at 57. 52. R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe 1848–​1849:  From Reform to Reaction (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000); Maurice Agulhon, Les Quarante-​huitards (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 53. Douglass Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 54. “Manifeste du peuple,” Le Peuple, no. 1 (2 September 1848). 55. Michael C. Behrent, “The Mystical Body of Society:  Religion and Association in Nineteenth-​Century French Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 219–​43, at 220. 56. Andrews, Socialism’s Muse, 3. 57. Sewell, Work & Revolution, 163–​68. 58. Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 59. Flora Tristan, The Workers’ Union, trans. Beverly Livingston (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007 [1843]), 38.

194 Notes 60. Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 35; see also Michel Offerlé, Un homme, une voix? Histoire du suffrage universel (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 61. Adam Przeworski, “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense,” in Democracy’s Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-​Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–​55. 62. Alexandre-​Auguste Ledru-​Rollin, “Manifeste aux travailleurs” (1844) in Discours politiques et écrits divers, tome premier (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1879), 117–​24, at 117. 63. Alexandre-​Auguste Ledru-​Rollin, Discours prononcé par le Citoyen Ledru-​Rollin au banquet du Mans (Bourdeaux: Impr. des ouvrièrs-​associés, 1849), 2. 64. “Banquet de la République démocratique et sociale du mardi 17 octobre 1848.” Paris: Imprimerie de Schneider, 1848. 65. Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals,  37–​40. 66. Florence Faucher and Colin Hay, “Les rituels de vote en France et au Royaume-​ Uni,” Revue française de science politique 65, no. 2 (2015): 213–​36, at 219–​20; Olivier Ihl, “Une autre représentation. Sur les pratiques d’acclamatio dans la France de la seconde à la troisième république,” Revue française de science politique 65, no. 3 (2015): 381–​403. 67. Kevin Duong, “What Was Universal Suffrage?” Theory & Event, forthcoming. 68. Louis Blanc, Organization of Work, trans. Marie Paula Dickoré (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 1911 [1840]), 46. 69. Ibid., 2, 51. 70. Ibid.,  57. 71. Ibid., 51, 53. 72. Lucien Jaume has characterized Blanc as a typical Jacobin statist in Le discours Jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1989). David Shafer arrives at a similar conclusion when studying Blanc’s conflictual relationship with Proudhon in The Paris Commune. Stephen Sawyer, however, has argued that such characterizations misunderstand Blanc’s project, which is better described as an attempt to theorize the democratic state as a site for articulating the social nature of individual pursuits, not as a bureaucratic means of repressing individual interests. See Stephen W. Sawyer, “Louis Blanc’s Theory of the Liberal Democratic State,” The Tocqueville Review/​La revue Tocqueville 33, no. 2 (2012): 141–​63. 73. Blanc, Organization of Work, 49. 74. Louis Blanc, Letter to M.  Marie Escudier, 22 September 1850. Gustave Gimon Collection, Stanford University, Misc 482. 75. Maurice Dommanget, Auguste Blanqui et la Révolution de 1848 (Paris:  Mouton, 1972); Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection. 76. Auguste Blanqui, “Equality Is Our Flag” (2 February 1834), in Louis Auguste Blanqui, The Blanqui Reader:  Political Writings, 1830–​1880, ed. Philippe Le Goff and Peter Hallward, trans. Philippe Le Goff, Peter Hallward, and Mitchell Abidor (New York: Verso, 2018), 36–​41, at 38. 77. Auguste Blanqui, “Report to the Society of the Friends of the People” (2 February 1832), in The Blanqui Reader, 20–​35, at 33; Blanqui, “Equality is Our Flag,” 37.

Notes  195 78. Auguste Blanqui, “Defense Speech at the ‘Trial of the Fifteen,’ ” (12 January 1832) in Blanqui, The Blanqui Reader, 8–​19, at 14. 79. Auguste Blanqui, “Democratic Propaganda” (1835), in The Blanqui Reader, 59–​61, at 59. 80. Bulletin de la République, no. 9, 30 March 1848; quoted from Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, 73, original emphasis. 81. Samuel Hayat, Quand la République était révolutionnaire: citoyenneté et représentation en 1848 (Paris:  Seuil, 2014); Malcolm Crook, “Universal Suffrage as Counter-​ Revolution? Electoral Mobilisation under the Second Republic in France, 1848–​ 1851,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28, no. 1 (2015):  49–​66; William Fortescue, France and 1848: The End of Monarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 82. For an analysis of Bonapartism, see Melvin Richter, “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory 10, no. 2 (1982): 185–​214; Melvin Richter, “A Family of Political Concepts: Tyranny, Despotism, Bonapartism, Caesarism, Dictatorship, 1750–​1917,” European Journal of Political Theory 4, no. 3 (2005): 221–​48. 83. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 31–​127, at 36. 84. Ibid.,  45. 85. Leo Loubère, “Louis Blanc’s Theory of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 1 (1956): 70–​88; Stephen W. Sawyer, Demos Assembled: Democracy & the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–​1880 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 173–​74. 86. Blanqui writes, “There can be no lasting Revolution without enlightenment!” and “The futility of so many sacrifices is indeed the saddest part of these Revolutions. So much blood spilled, so much pain and suffering endured, only to fall even deeper into the abyss! . . . This dismal denouement has one and only one cause: ignorance!” (2 February 1850), in Blanqui, The Blanqui Reader, 141. 87. Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, “The Mystification of Universal Suffrage” (30 April 1848), in Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, Property Is Theft! A Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon Anthology, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Publishing, 2011), 315–​18. 88. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, “Solution of the Social Problem” (1848), in Property Is Theft!, 257–​80. 89. Ibid.,  261. 90. Ibid., 267–​68. 91. Ibid., 275–​76. 92. Ibid.,  276. 93. Ibid.,  280. 94. Pierre Rosanvallon distinguishes between “substantialist” and “symbolic” conceptions of the people in Le peuple introuvable: histoire de la répresentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 95. “Le Socialisme et la Politique,” Le Peuple, no. 3 (September 1848).

196 Notes 96. Walter Benjamin, “Paris:  Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Perspecta 12 (1969):  163–​72; David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–​1875 (New York: Vintage, 1996 [1975]). 97. Philip Nord, “Republicanism and Utopian Vision: French Freemasonry in the 1860s and 1870s,” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 2 (1991):  213–​29; Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection. 98. Roger Price, The French Second Empire:  An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 255–​403. 99. Most of the credit for the revival of public meetings in France is given to the 6 June 1868 law and the work of men like Jules Simon; see Alain Dalotel, Alain Faure, and Jean-​Claude Freiermuth, Aux origines de la Commune:  le mouvement des réunions publiques à Paris. 1868–​1870 (Paris:  Maspero, 1980); Paula Cossart, Le meeting politique: de la déliberation à la manifestation, 1868–​1939 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 100. Edouard Dentu, ed., Les réunions publiques à Paris:  1868–​1869 (Paris, 1869), 9. Hoover Institute, Stanford University. History of the Second Empire in France: Pamphlet Collection, Box 715, Fol 4. 101. Ibid., 9. 102. Michel, The Red Virgin, 54. 103. Ibid., 52. 104. Ibid., 59 105. Ibid., 65. 106. M. G. de Molinari, Les clubs rouges pendant le siege de Paris (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1874), 140. 107. Ibid., 193. 108. Johnson, The Paradise of Association,  30–​31. 109. Michel, The Red Virgin, 54. 110. Johnson, The Paradise of Association, 34. 111. Ibid., 43. 112. Molinari, Les clubs rouges, 221–​22. 113. Odilon Delimal, “Autonomie de Paris,” La Commune, 21 March 1871. 114. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 113–​14. 115. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland (Indianapolis, IL:  Hackett, 1985), 81. 116. Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars; David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France:  Invention Nationalism, 1680–​1800 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003). 117. Jean-​Paul Betraud, Valmy, la démocratie en armes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 118. Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars, 16. 119. Jean-​Paul Bertaud, La révolution armée: les soldats-​citoyens et la Révolution française (Paris:  Robert Laffont, 1979); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Les citoyennetés en révolution, 1789–​94 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992). 120. Challener, The French Theory of the Nation in Arms.

Notes  197 121. Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars, 112. 122. Arthur Waldron, “Looking Backward: The People in Arms and the Transformation of War,” in The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution, eds. Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 256–​62, at 258. 123. Daniel Moran, “Introduction:  The Legend of the Lévee en masse,” in Moran and Waldron, The People in Arms,  1–​7. 124. Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience, 173–​200. 125. Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars, 118–​21. 126. Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune, 7. 127. Ibid., 8. 128. Ibid.,  16–​17. 129. Ibid., 27. 130. Ibid., 27. 131. Ibid., 30. 132. Ibid., 14. 133. Ibid., 26. 134. Ibid., 85, 68. 135. Ibid., 69. 136. Hayden White, Metahistory:  The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). 137. Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune, 105. 138. Ibid., 80, 103–​04. 139. Ibid., 105. 140. Ibid., 106. 141. Vallès, The Insurrectionist, 166. 142. Jules Vallès, “Les fausses promesses,” Le Cri du peuple, 26 March 1871. For other descriptions of the election, see Rougerie, Paris libre, 136–​38; John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 38–​9; Donny Gluckstein, The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006), 39–​42. 143. Jules Vallès, “Le Scrutin,” Le Cri du peuple, 29 March 1871. 144. Jules Vallès, “La Fête,” Le Cri du peuple, 30 March 1871. 145. Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience, 189. 146. The debate has been republished in Mitchel Abidor, ed., The Voices of the Paris Commune (Oakland, CA: PM Press), 27–​50. 147. Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune, 194–​95. 148. Ibid., 196. 149. Ibid., 241. 150. Michel, The Red Virgin, 56. 151. Ibid., 64. 152. Ibid., 54. 153. Dana Simmons, Vital Minimum:  Need, Science & Politics in Modern France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 79–​80.

198 Notes Michel, The Red Virgin, 64 Ibid., 65. Ibid., 1, 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 60. André Léo, “Aventures de neuf ambulancières,” La Sociale, 6 May 1871. Louise Michel, La Commune (Paris: Stock, 1978 [1898]), 165–​66. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1993), 75–​76. 162. Michel, The Red Virgin,  42–​43. 163. Ibid., 51. 164. Vallès, The Insurrectionist, 91. 165. Ibid., 94, 97. 166. Ibid., 99. 167. Michel, The Red Virgin, 26. 168. Vallès, The Insurrectionist, 101. 169. Ibid., 118. 170. Ibid., 129. 171. Ibid., 130. 172. Ibid., 132. 173. Ibid., 157. 174. Ibid., 157. 175. Ibid., 166–​67. 176. Ibid., 191–​92. 177. Ibid., 203. 178. Eric Hazan, A History of the Barricade, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2015 [2013]), 111–​13. 179. Eugène Pottier, “L’Internationale,” in Appendix 2, Tombs, The Paris Commune, 220–​23. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161.

Chapter 4 1. Jean Jaurès, “Discours de Jaurès,” L’Humanité, 23 January 1914. 2. Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 417–​76. 3. Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–​1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 69–​84, 120–​44. 4. Charles Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 22–​23. 5. Gustave Hervé, My Country, Right or Wrong?, trans. G. Bowman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1910 [1906]), 157; Paul B. Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870–​1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 201–​12.

Notes  199 6. Robert Wohl defends the idea of a “generation of 1914,” not as a sociological description, but as a self-​reflexive idealization. For those who lived during the first half of the twentieth century, it was how they made sense of themselves. See Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 2–​3. 7. Charles Péguy, “Ève,” Cahiers de la Quinzaine 15, no. 4 (1913). 8. Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France; Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991); Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie:  les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale, 1910–​1919 (Paris:  Découverte, 1996); Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect:  French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social Thought:  Hobbes to the Present, trans. Alex Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 116–​55. 9. Rene Avord (Raymond Aron), Les dictateurs et la mystique de la violence (New Delhi: Bureau d’information de la France combattante, undated), 3, 13. 10. Judith Shklar, “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition,” The Review of Politics 20, no. 4 (1958): 634–​56, at 635, 646. 11. Mark Antliff, Avant-​Garde Fascism:  The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–​1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Pierre Birnbaum, “Catholic Identity, Universal Suffrage and ‘Doctrines of Hatred,’” in The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, 1870–​1945, ed. Zeev Sternhell (Jerusalem:  The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996), 233–​51. 12. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996 [1983]), 1. 13. J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason:  European Thought, 1848–​1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Irving Louis Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason:  The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (New  York:  The Humanities Press, 1961); Frederick Brown, The Embrace of Unreason:  France, 1914–​ 1940 (New York: Knopf, 2014); S. P. Rouanet, “Irrationalism and Myth in Georges Sorel,” The Review of Politics 26, no. 1 (1964): 45–​69, at 45. 14. Romain Rolland, Péguy, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1944), I: 246. 15. For a good account of the relation between the prewar and interwar generations of reactionaries, which was one of creative reappropriation rather than fidelity, see Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate:  Far-​Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 43–​74. 16. The phrase “populist” appears frequently in the writings of the extraparliamentary left, such as Hubert Lagardelle, to discuss the “vague parti populiste” of Boulangism. 17. Maurice Barrès, “Les enseignements d’une année de Boulangisme,” Le Figaro, 3 February 1890. 18. Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, 21. 19. Jack J. Roth, “The Roots of Italian Fascism:  Sorel and Sorelismo,” The Journal of Modern History 39, no. 1 (1967):  30–​45; Lawrence Wilde, “Sorel and the French Right,” History of Political Thought 2, no. 2 (1986): 361–​74; Shlomo Sand, “Legend, Myth, and Fascism,” The European Legacy 3, no. 5 (1998): 51–​65; Mark Antliff, “Bad

200 Notes Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel,” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2 (2011): 155–​87. 20. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1908]), 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text as RV. 21. The encyclical reads, “a difficulty presents itself. ‘This Republic,’ it is said, ‘is animated by such anti-​Christian sentiments that honest men, Catholics particularly, could not conscientiously accept it.’ This, more than anything else, has given rise to dissensions, and in fact aggravated them. . . . Legislation is the work of men invested with power, and who, in fact, govern the nation; therefore it follows that, practically, the quality of the laws depends more upon the quality of these men than upon the power. The laws will be good or bad accordingly as the minds of the legislators are imbued with good or bad principles, and as they allow themselves to be guided by political prudence or by passion.” Therefore, Leo XIII continues, Catholics should work on improving legislation while maintaining “respect due to constituted power”—​namely the Republic. “Au milieu des solicitudes,” http://​w2.vatican.va/​content/​leo-​xiii/​en/​encyclicals/​ documents/​hf_​l-​xiii_​enc_​16021892_​au-​milieu-​des-​sollicitudes.html 22. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007),  98–​99. 23. Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 142–​49. 24. John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-​de-​Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 25. Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 24–​35. 26. Jeremy Jennings, Georges Sorel:  The Character and Development of His Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 116–​21. 27. Georges Sorel, “Lettre de Georges Sorel à Charles Maurras” (6 July 1909), in Pierre Andreu, Notre Maître, M. Sorel (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1953), 325–​26. 28. Gerald C. Friedman, “Revolutionary Unions and French Labor: The Rebels Behind the Cause; Or, Why Did Revolutionary Syndicalism Fail?” French Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 155–​81; for a broader context of this alliance, see Gabriel Goodliffe, The Resurgence of the Radical Right in France: From Boulangisme to the Front National (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 115–​96. 29. Michael Curtis, Three Against the Third Republic:  Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 6. 30. Both believed science had to reject all forms of theology, but they also tended to see scientists as new priests. See Sheridan Gilley and Ann Loades, “Thomas Henry Huxley: The War between Science and Religion,” The Journal of Religion 61, no. 3 (1981): 285–​308. 31. Ernest Renan, The Future of Science (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1891), 97. 32. Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3. 33. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001 [1889]), 98, 164–​65.

Notes  201 34. Ibid.,  128. 35. Ibid.,  128. 36. Donna Jones, “Mysticism and War,” in Annales bergsoniennes VII:  Bergson, l’Allemagne, la guerre de 1914, eds. Arnaud François, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Camille Riquier, Caterina Zanfi, and Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 167–​79, at 174. 37. George Boas, “Bergson (1859–​1941) and His Predecessors,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 4 (1959): 503–​14. 38. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 176. 39. Mark Sinclair, “Bergson’s Philosophy of Will and the War of 1914–​1918,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 3 (2016): 467–​87. 40. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson:  Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-​ Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Malcolm Vout and Lawrence Wilde, “Socialism and Myth: The Case of Bergson and Sorel,” Radical Philosophy 46 (1987): 2–​7 41. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality:  Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63. 42. R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–​1914 (Calgary:  The University of Calgary Press, 1988), ix. 43. F. W. H. Myers, Science and a Future Life, With Other Essays (London and New York: MacMillan, 1893), 88. 44. Anatole France, “Pourquoi sommes-​nous tristes?” in Oeuvres completes illustrées de Anatole France, Tome VII, eds. L. Carias and G. Le Prat (Paris: Calmann-​Lévy, 1925–​35),  22. 45. Antliff, Inventing Bergson. 46. François Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson:  essai sur le magistère philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 47. Hisashi Fujita, “Anarchy and Analogy:  The Violence of Language in Bergson and Sorel,” in Bergson, Politics, and Religion, eds. Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 126–​43, at 130; Shklar, “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition,” 644. 48. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–​1930 (New York: Knopf, 1958), 341. 49. A terrific overview of its evolution can be found in Marion de Flers, “Le Mouvement socialiste (1899–​1914),” Cahiers Georges Sorel 5 (1987): 49–​76. 50. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 16; Jennings, Georges Sorel, 118. 51. “L’affaire des fiches” was a scandal in which efforts to “republicanize” the army and administration involved using Freemasons to collect information on the religious activity of officers. It occurred discretely for years until it broke in 1904. 52. Michel Prat, ed. “Lettres de Georges Sorel à Daniel Halévy (1907–​1920),” Mil neuf cent: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 12 (1994): 151–​223. 53. The journal’s pages were filled with essays by revisionists like Eduard Bernstein or, far more commonly, Sorel and his French and Italian admirers. See Jack J. Roth, “Revolution and Morale in Modern French Thought: Sorel and the Sorelians,” French Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (1963): 205–​23, at 209.

202 Notes 54. “Déclaration,” Le Mouvement socialiste, 1 (1899): 1–​5. 55. Eduard Bernstein was responsible for stirring this crisis, and some of his essays were republished in Le Mouvement socialiste as topics of conversation. For a discussion of this interpretative crisis, see Jennings, Georges Sorel,  62–​72. 56. Samuel Bernstein, “Jules Guesde, Pioneer of Marxism in France,” Science & Society 4, no. 1 (1940): 29–​56; Michelle Perrot, “Le premier journal marxiste français: ‘L’Égalité’ de Jules Guesde (1877–​1883),” L’Actualité de l’histoire 28 (1959): 1–​26. 57. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: histoire de la répresentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 223. 58. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim:  His Life and Work (Middlesex:  Penguin, 1975), 542–​45. 59. J. B. Severac, “Influence de la philosophie de M. Bergson,” Le Mouvement socialiste 29 (1911): 182–​83, at 182. On their self-​understanding as the “Bergsonian Left,” see also Shklar, “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition,” 645–​46; James Jay Hamilton, “Georges Sorel and the Inconsistencies of a Bergsonian Marxism,” Political Theory 1, no. 3 (1973): 329–​40; Vout and Wilde, “Socialism and Myth.” 60. Edouard Berth, “Marchands, Intellectuels et Politiciens,” Le Mouvement socialiste 22 (1907): 1–​12, 302–​16, 384–​98; 23 (1908), 202–​22; Edouard Berth, “Le procès de la Démocratie,” Revue critique des idées et des livres 13 (1911): 9–​46; see also Jeremy Jennings, “Syndicalism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 1 (1991): 71–​96, at 85. 61. Hubert Lagardelle, “Socialisme ou Démocratie?” Le Mouvement socialiste 7 (1902): 625–​32, 673–​87, 774–​81, 889–​97, 1009–​16, 1081–​88, at 1014. 62. Jennings, “Syndicalism and the French Revolution,” 91. 63. Hubert Lagardelle, “De l’homme abstrait à l’homme réel,” Plans 1 (1931): 24–​32. 64. Daniel Halévy, Charles Péguy and the Cahiers de la Quinzaine (New  York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947), 131. 65. And yet, as Eugen Weber has observed, “when faced with the choice between his Left-​Wing Dreyfusard past and those Catholic influences of the Right, which had been heartened by the publication of his Jeanne d’Arc in 1909 and were pulling towards nationalism, Péguy chose the former,” in Weber, The Nationalist Revival, 122. 66. Halévy, Charles Péguy, 74. 67. Charles Péguy, Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1914), 18–​19. 68. Charles Péguy, Basic Verities:  Prose and Poetry, trans. Anne and Julian Green (New York: Pantheon, 1943), 9. 69. Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, 31; emphasis in the original. 70. Ibid.,  21–​22. 71. Anthony Edward Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1976), 27–​98. 72. Georges Sorel, “Science and Morals” (1900), in From Georges Sorel:  Vol 2, Hermeneutics and the Sciences, ed. John L. Stanley, trans. John and Charlotte Stanley (New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 1990), 123–​38, at 133: “pain is found in all manifestations of our activity. . . . Perhaps we could better translate this observation

Notes  203 by saying that pain is the primordial manifestation of life, the one that gives irrefutable proof (for our consciousness) of our immersion in the physical world and demonstrates our existence and the existence of the world simultaneously. . . . Thus, the role of pain is very great in the world.” 73. K. Steven Vincent, “Citizenship, Patriotism, Tradition, and Antipolitics in the Thought of Georges Sorel,” The European Legacy 3, no. 5 (1998): 7–​16. 74. “Déclaration,” Le Mouvement socialiste 1 (1899): 2–​4. 75. Sorel, “Science and Morals,” 133. 76. Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, 20–​24, 29. 77. Lagardelle, “Socialisme ou Démocratie?” 890–​91, 1013. 78. Ibid., 890–​91, 893–​95. 79. Richard Vernon, “‘Citizenship’ in ‘Industry’:  The Case of George Sorel,” American Political Science Review 75, no. 1 (1981): 17–​28. 80. Georges Sorel, “The Socialist Future of the Syndicates” (1898) in From Georges Sorel:  Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, ed. John Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), 71–​93, at 80–​81, 93. 81. Sorel, “Science and Morals,” 136–​37. 82. Eric Brandom, “Georges Sorel, Émile Durkheim, and the Social Foundations of La Morale,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 38 (2010):  201–​15, at 202. 83. Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–​1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen:  The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–​1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). 84. Nord, The Republican Moment, 4. 85. Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social:  essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1984). 86. Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 106–​41. 87. Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, 21. 88. Zeev Sternhell, “The ‘Anti-​Materialist’ Revision of Marxism as an Aspect of the Rise of Fascist Ideology,” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 3 (1987): 379–​400. 89. Interpretative work on Sorel has occurred in roughly two waves. The first, classical interpretation of Sorel located him squarely in the prehistory of fascism and interpreted the Reflections on Violence extracted from his broader intellectual biography. Besides Sartre’s infamous reference to Sorel’s “fascist utterances” in the preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, this was the view of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, as well as his scholarly interpreters like Jack Roth and later Zeev Sternhell. See Isaiah Berlin, “Georges Sorel,” in Against the Current:  Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 296–​332; Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 66–​83; Roth, “The Roots of Italian Fascism”; Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left; Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press,

204 Notes 1994 [1989]), 36–​91; Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason; Hughes, Consciousness and Society; Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality; Curtis, Three Against the Republic. Recently, scholars have corrected Sorel’s canonization as a protofascist by turning to his philosophy of science, especially his scientific conventionalism. The result is that he become a liberal pragmatist or a radical democrat: Jennings, Georges Sorel; John Stanley, The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); John L. Stanley, “Sorel’s Study of Vico: The Uses of the Poetic Imagination,” The European Legacy 3, no. 5 (1998): 17–​34; Arthur L. Greil, Georges Sorel and the Sociology of Virtue (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:  Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New  York:  Verso, 1985). For an attempt at squaring these two together, see K. Steven Vincent, “Interpreting Georges Sorel:  Defender of Virtue or Apostle of Violence?” History of European Ideas 12, no. 2 (1990): 239–​57. 90. Arendt, On Violence, 66. 91. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits:  Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 97. 92. Shklar, “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition,” 648. 93. Consider Moishe Postone, who describes Sorel’s aimless violence as an escape valve from structural domination, and Martin Jay, who views it as a clarion call for revolutionary violence. See Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 93–​110; Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1. 94. George Ciccariello-​Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 23–​46. 95. Surkis, Sexing the Citizen, 4. 96. Georges Sorel, “The Trial of Socrates” (1889), in Sorel, From Georges Sorel, 62–​70, at 67. 97. Georges Sorel, “The Ethics of Socialism” (1989), in Sorel, From Georges Sorel, 94–​ 110, at 97–​98. 98. “All of Sorel’s writings,” Arthur Greil argues, “display a profound concern with morality. Whenever he spoke of ‘crisis,’ he meant ‘moral crisis’; whenever he spoke of ‘decadence,’ he meant ‘moral decadence,’ ” in Greil, Georges Sorel and the Sociology of Virtue, 22. 99. Jennings, Georges Sorel, 79. 100. J. E. S. Hayward, “The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism,” International Review of Social History, 6, no. 1 (1961): 19–​48. 101. Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology:  Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London:  Sage, 1975); Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness & Politics in Modern France:  The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1984); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration:  A European Disorder, c.  1848–​ c. 1918 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), 42–​ 73; Donna Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life

Notes  205 Philosophy:  Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8–​9; Jennings, Georges Sorel,  40–​41. 102. Sorel discusses Le Bon often sympathetically but critically; see Georges Sorel, “Sorel, lecteur de Le Bon: Huit Comptes Rendus (1895–​1911),” Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 1, no. 28 (2010): 121–​54; for his relationship to Lombroso and criminal anthropology, see Jennings, Georges Sorel,  40–​41. 103. Georges Sorel, “On Revolution Without Politics” (1902), in Richard Vernon, ed., Commitment and Change: Georges Sorel and the Idea of Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 93–​111. See also Stanley, “Sorel’s Study of Vico.” 104. Sorel makes this case earlier in “Necessity and Fatalism in Marxism” (1898) in Sorel, From Georges Sorel, 111–​29, at 123: “We should never lose sight of the fact that it is in the economic order and under the regime of free competition that chance furnishes ‘average’ results, capable of being regularized in such a way as to draw attention to tendencies analogous to mechanical processes; these average results can be suitably expressed in the form of natural laws.” 105. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1990 [1905]), 123. 106. Jennings, Georges Sorel,  45–​49. 107. Sorel, “On Revolution Without Politics,” 93. 108. Sorel, “Science and Morals,” 126. 109. Sorel, “The Socialist Future of Syndicates,” 84. 110. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985 [1651]), 200. 111. Jules Vallès, The Insurrectionist, trans. Sandy Petrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971 [1886]), 166–​67. 112. Again, Bergson is Sorel’s influence. The general strike “groups them all in a coordinated picture . . . it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness—​and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously” (RV 118). 113. Sorel, “The Socialist Future of the Syndicates,” 91. 114. Georges Sorel, “On Revolution and Terror” (1901), in Vernon, Commitment and Change, 76–​81, at 78. 115. “Déclaration de la ‘Cité Française’ ” in Andreu, Notre Maître, 327–​28. 116. “L’ ‘Indépendance Française,’ ” in Andreu, Notre Maître, M. Sorel, 329–​31. 117. Antliff, Avant-​Garde Fascism, 65. 118. Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, “Déclaration,” Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon 1 (1912): 1–​2. 119. Wilde, “Sorel and the French Right.” 120. Georges Sorel, “Le réveil de l’âme française,” L’Action française, 14 April 1910; Georges Sorel, “Socialistes antiparlementaires,” L’Action française, August 22, 1909. 121. Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War:  Life and Matter in Conflict (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1915), 18, 32–​33. 122. Ibid., 36. 123. Ibid.,  37–​38.

206 Notes 124. Filippo Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New  York:  Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006), 11–​17, at 14. 125. Filippo Marinetti, “Futurism:  An Interview with Mr. Marinetti in Comoedia,” in Critical Writings, 18–​21, at 19. 126. Jack Roth, The Cult of Violence:  Sorel and the Sorelians (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1980). 127. Sand, “Legend, Myth, and Fascism,” 56. 128. Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-​Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 442. 129. Roth, The Cult of Violence, 186–​87.

Conclusion 1. Élie Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–​1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996 [1994]); Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–​1945 (New York: Verso, 2016 [2006]). 2. George Kateb, “The Adequacy of the Canon,” Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 482–​505, at 482–​83. 3. Ira Katznelson, Enlightenment and Desolation: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 4. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands:  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New  York:  Basic Books, 2010). 5. Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 6. Filippo Marinetti, “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1915) in Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux), 60–​74, at 62. 7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 93. 8. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence:  The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–​1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Matthew Rainbow Hale, “Regenerating the World: The French Revolution, Civic Festivals, and the Forging of American Democracy, 1793–​1795,” Journal of American History 103, no. 4 (2017): 891–​920. 9. Jürgen Habermas, “Constitutional Democracy:  A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” Political Theory 29, no. 6 (2001): 766–​81; Jan-​Werner Müller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007); Patchen Markell, “Making Affect Safe for Democracy?: On ‘Constitutional Patriotism,’” Political Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 38–​63. 10. Müller, Constitutional Patriotism, 6; the case for constitutional patriotism as a form of moral minimalism is made in Jan-​Werner Müller, “A European Constitutional Patriotism? The Case Restated,” European Law Journal 14, no. 5 (2008): 542–​57.

Notes  207 11. Françoise Gaspard, A Small City in France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 12. This is an enormous debate, but see, for a classic position, Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989): 250–​74; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 13. Michaele Ferguson, Sharing Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 14. Jacob Levy, “Against Fraternity:  Democracy Without Solidarity,” in The Strains of Commitment: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies, eds. Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 107–​24, at 107. 15. Ibid.,  107. 16. Robert A. Nisbet, “Rousseau and Totalitarianism,” The Journal of Politics 5, no. 2 (1943): 93–​ 114; David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006); Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–​715. 17. Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–​1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976); Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century France (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1995). 18. John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1987): 1–​25, at 10. 19. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (Paris: Découverte, 2014). 20. Élisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, trans. Gregory Elliot (New York: Verso, 2014).

References Abidor, Mitchel, ed. The Voices of the Paris Commune. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Agulhon, Maurice. “Le problème de la culture populaire en France autour de 1848.” Romantisme 9 (1975): 50–​64. Agulhon, Maurice. Les Quarante-​huitards. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Agulhon, Maurice. The Republican Experiment, 1848–​1852. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983. Aisenberg, Andrew R. Contagion:  Disease, Government, and the ‘Social Question’ in Nineteenth-​Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Andreu, Pierre. Notre Maître, M. Sorel. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1953. Andrews, Naomi J. Socialism’s Muse:  Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Antliff, Mark. Inventing Bergson:  Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-​ Garde. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Antliff, Mark. Avant-​Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–​1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Antliff, Mark. “Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel.” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2 (2011): 155–​87. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, 1970. Armitage, David. Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. New York: Vintage, 2017. Athanassoglou, Nina. “Under the Sign of Leonidas: The Political and Ideological Fortune of David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae under the Restoration.” The Art Bulletin 63, no. 4 (1981): 633–​49. Audier, Serge. Tocqueville retrouvé: genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillean français. Paris: Vrin, 2004. Avord, René (Raymond Aron). Les dictateurs et la mystique de la violence. New Delhi: Bureau d’information de la France combattante, undated. Azouvi, François. Maine de Biran: la science de l’homme. Paris: Vrin, 1995. Azouvi, François. La gloire de Bergson: essai sur le magistère philosophique. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Baecque, Antoine de. Glory and Terror:  Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution. Translated by Charlotte Mendell. New York: Routledge, 2001. Baker, Keith Michael. Condorcet:  From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Baker, Keith Michael, ed. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Baker, Keith Michael. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Baker, Keith Michael. “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-​ Century France.” The Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001): 32–​53.

210 References “Banquet de la République démocratique et sociale du mardi 17 octobre 1848.” Paris: Imprimerie de Schneider, 1848. Barrès, Maurice. “Les enseignements d’une année de Boulangisme.” Le Figaro, February 3, 1890. Barrows, Susanna. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Barry, David. Women and Political Insurgency:  France in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century. New York: St Martin’s, 1996. Bates, David William. States of War:  Enlightenment Origins of the Political. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Beecher, Jonathan. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Beecher, Jonathan. Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France:  Inventing Nationalism, 1680–​1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Bell, David A. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. Bell, Duncan. “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–​715. Behrent, Michael C. “The Mystical Body of Society:  Religion and Association in Nineteenth Century French Political Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 219–​43. Behrent, Michael C. “Liberal Dispositions:  Recent Scholarship on French Liberalism.” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 (2016): 447–​77. Benjamin, Walter. “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Perspecta 12 (1969): 163–​72. Bennoune, Mahfoud. The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–​ 1987:  Colonial Upheavals and Post-​Independence Development. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988. Bergson, Henri. The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict. London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1915. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001. Berlin, Isaiah. “The Thought of de Tocqueville.” History 50, no. 169 (1965): 199–​206. Berlin, Isaiah. “Georges Sorel.” In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy, 296–​332. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter-​Enlightenment.” In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy, 1–​24. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Berlin, Isaiah. “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism.” In The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy, 95–​177. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Bernal, Angélica Maria. Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Bernstein, Samuel. “Jules Guesde, Pioneer of Marxism in France.” Science & Society 4, no. 1 (1940): 29–​56. Bernstein, Samuel. Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection. London:  Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. Bernstein, Richard. Violence: Thinking Without Banisters. New York: Polity, 2013. Bertaud, Jean-​Paul. Valmy: la démocratie en armes. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

References  211 Bertaud, Jean-​Paul. La révolution armée:  les soldats-​citoyens et la Révolution française. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979. Berth, Edouard. “Marchands, Intellectuels et Politiciens.” Le Mouvement socialiste 22 (1907): 1–​12, 302–​16, 384–​98; 23 (1908): 202–​22. Berth, Edouard. “Le procès de la Démocratie.” Revue critique des idées et des livres 13 (1911): 9–​46. Bezucha, Robert. The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Blake, William. The Selected Poems of William Blake. Herfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2000. Blanc, Louis. “Letter to M. Marie Escudier.” 22 September 1850. Misc 482. Gustave Gimon Collection, Stanford University. Blanc, Louis. Organization of Work. Translated by Marie Paula Dickoré. Cincinatti, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 1911. Blanckaert, Claude. La nature de la société: organiscime et sciences sociales au XIXe siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. Blanqui, Auguste. The Blanqui Reader: Political Writings, 1830–​1880. Edited by Philippe Le Goff and Peter Hallward. Translated by Philippe Le Goff, Peter Hallward, and Mitchell Abidor. New York: Verso, 2018. Bianchi, Serge, and Roger Dupuy, eds. La Garde nationale entre nation et peuple en armes: mythes et réalités, 1789–​1871. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006. Birchall, Ian H. The Spectre of Babeuf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Birnbaum, Pierre. “Catholic Identity, Universal Suffrage and ‘Doctrines of Hatred.’” In The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, 1870–​1945, edited by Zeev Sternhell, 233–​51. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996. Boas, George. “Bergson (1859–​1941) and His Predecessors.” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 4 (1959): 503–​14. Boesche, Roger. The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1987. Boesche, Roger. “The Dark Side of Tocqueville:  On War and Empire.” The Review of Politics 67, no. 4 (2005): 737–​52. Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2007. Bowd, Gavin. The Last Communard:  Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary. New York: Verso, 2016. Boyd, Richard. “Tocqueville and the Napoleonic Legend.” In Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, edited by Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd, 264–​87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Brandom, Eric. “Georges Sorel, Émile Durkheim, and the Social Foundations of La Morale.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 38 (2010): 201–​15. Breaugh, Martin. The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom. Translated by Lazer Lederhendler. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Brower, Benjamin Claude. A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Brown, Frederick. The Embrace of Unreason:  France, 1914–​1940. New  York:  Knopf, 2014. Bruhat, Jean, Jean Dautry, and Emile Tersen, eds. La Commune de 1871. Paris: Editions sociales, 1960.

212 References Bunel, Victor, ed. Réimpression du Journal Officiel de la République française sous la Commune, du 19 mars au 24 mai 1871. Paris: Bunel, 1871. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Burrow, J. W. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–​1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Burton, Richard D.  E. Blood in the City:  Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–​1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon. “Déclaration.” Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon 1 (1912): 1–​2. Camus, Albert. The Rebel:  An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage, 1956. Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2015. Canovan, Margaret. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1990): 2–​16. Carr, John Laurence. Robespierre:  The Force of Circumstance. New  York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1973. Case, Holly. “The ‘Social Question,’ 1820–​1920.” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 3. (2016): 747–​75. Case, Holly. The Age of Questions:  Or, A  First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Castoriadis, Cornelius. Political and Social Writings, Vol. 1, 1946–​1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism. Translated by David Ames Curtis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Chabal, Emile. “Writing the French National Narrative in the Twenty-​First Century.” The Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 495–​516. Chabal, Emile. A Divided Nation: Nation, State, and Citizenship in Contemporary France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Challener, Richard D. The French Theory of the Nation in Arms, 1866–​1939. New York: Russel and Russel, 1965. Chaplin, Tamara. Turning on the Mind:  French Philosophers on Television. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Chappel, James. “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe.” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (2011): 561–​90. Christofferson, Michael Scott. French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. New York: Bergahn Books, 2004. Christofferson, Michael Scott. “A Mind of the Left?” New Left Review 88 (2014): 131–​37. Ciccariello-​Maher, George. Decolonizing Dialectics. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2017. Ciepley, David. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Claeys, Gregory, and Christine Lattek. “Radicalism, Republicanism and Revolution: From the Principles of ‘89 to the Origins of Modern Terrorism.” In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-​Century Political Thought, edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys, 200–​54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

References  213 Cocks, Joan. “The Violence of Structures and the Violence of Foundings.” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 221–​27. Commune, La. “Déclaration.” La Commune, 20 March 1871. Connolly, William E. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Connor, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: Science and Revolutionary. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. Coquard, Olivier. Jean-​Paul Marat. Paris: Fayard, 1993. Cordillot, Michel. Aux origines du socialisme moderne:  la Première internationale, la Commune de Paris, l’exil. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2010. Cossart, Paula. Le meeting politique: de la déliberation à la manifestation. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Cover, Robert M. “Violence and the Word.” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601–​629. Cousin, Victor. Fragmens Philosophiques, Seconde Edition. Paris: Ladrange Libraire, 1833. Craiutu, Aurelian. Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. Craiutu, Aurelian. “Rethinking Political Power:  The Case of the French Doctrinaires.” European Journal of Political Theory 2, no. 2 (2003): 125–​55. Crook, Malcolm. “Universal Suffrage as Counter-​Revolution? Electoral Mobilisation under the Second Republic in France, 1848–​1851.” Journal of Historical Sociology 28, no. 1 (2015): 49–​66. Curtis, Michael. Three Against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. Commun:  Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle. Paris: Découverte, 2014. Dalotel, Alain, Alain Faure, and Jean-​Claude Freiermuth. Aux origines de la Commune: Le mouvement des réunions publiques à Paris: 1868–​1870. Paris: Maspero, 1980. Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Daston, Lorraine J. “Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society:  From Probability to Statistics.” In The Probabilistic Revolution, Vol. 1:  Ideas in History, edited by Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberg, 295–​304. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987. Daston, Lorraine. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 24. Edited by Grethe B. Peterson. Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2004. Day-​Hickman, Barbara Ann. Napoleonic Art: Nationalism and the Spirit of Rebellion in France (1815–​1848). Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Dean, Carolyn. The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Dejob, Charles. “La defense de Mazagran dans la littérature et les arts du dessin.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 19, no. 2 (1912): 318–​40. Delimal, Odilon. “Autonomie de Paris.” La Commune, March 21, 1871. Dentu, Edouard, ed. Les réunions publiques à Paris, 1868–​1869. Paris, 1869. History of the Second Empire in France: Pamphlet Collection, Box 715, Fol 4. Hoover Institute, Stanford University. Desanti, Dominique. Visages de femmes. Paris: Editions sociales, 1955. Dilts, Andrew. “Revisiting Johan Galtung’s Concept of Structural Violence.” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 191–​94.

214 References Dommanget, Maurice. Auguste Blanqui et la Révolution de 1848. Paris: Mouton, 1972. Donzelot, Jacques. L’invention du social:  essai sur le déclin des passions politiques. Paris: Fayard, 1984. Drévillon, Hervé. L’individu et la guerre: du chavelier Bayard au Soldat inconnu. Paris: Belin, 2013. Drolet, Michael. “Carrying the Banner of the Bourgeoisie:  Democracy, Self and the Philosophical Foundations of François Guizot’s Historical and Political Thought.” History of Political Thought 32, no. 4 (2011): 645–​90. Drolet, Michael. “Manners, Method, and Psychology:  The Enduring Relevance of Tocqueville’s Reflections on Democracy.” European Journal of Political Theory 11, no. 4 (2012): 487–​98. Duong, Kevin. “‘Does Democracy End in Terror?’ Transformations of Antitotalitarianism in Postwar France.” Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 2 (2017): 537–​63. Duong, Kevin. “What Was Universal Suffrage?” Theory & Event, forthcoming. Durkheim, Emile. On Morality and Society: Selected Writings. Edited by Robert N. Bellah. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Dunn, Susan. The Deaths of Louis XVI:  Regicide and the French Political Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Dupuy, Roger. Le Garde nationale, 1789–​1872. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Edelstein, Dan. The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Edelstein, Dan. “Do We Want a Revolution Without Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority.” French Historical Studies 35, no. 2 (2012): 269–​89. Eichner, Carolyn J. Surmounting the Barricades:  Women in the Paris Commune. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. Evans, R. J. W., and Harmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds. The Revolutions in Europe 1848–​ 1849: From Reform to Reaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963. Faucher, Florence, and Colin Hay. “Les rituels de vote en France et au Royaume-​Uni.” Revue française de science politique 65, no. 2 (2015): 213–​36. Fehér, Ferenc. The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Ferguson, Michaele. Sharing Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Field, Frank. British and French Writers of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism:  Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times:  Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Flers, Marion de. “Le Mouvement socialiste (1899–​1914).” Cahiers Georges Sorel 5 (1987): 49–​76. Fohlen, Claude. Qu’est-​ce que la révolution industrielle? Paris: Robert Laffont, 1971. Forrest, Alan. The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-​in-​Arms in French Republican Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Fortescue, William. France and 1848:  The End of Monarchy. London and New  York: Routledge, 2005. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish:  The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.

References  215 France, Anatole. Oeuvres completes illustrées de Anatole France, Tome VII. Edited by L. Carias and G. Le Prat. Paris: Calmann-​Lévy, 1925–​35. Frank, Jason. Constituent Moments:  Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Friedland, Paul. Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Friedland, Paul. Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Friedman, Gerald C. “Revolutionary Unions and French Labor: The Rebels Behind the Case; Or, Why Did Revolutionary Syndicalism Fail?” French Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 155–​81. Fujita, Hisashi. “Anarchy and Analogy: The Violence of Language in Bergson and Sorel.” In Bergson, Politics, and Religion, edited by Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White, 126–​43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Fulford, Tim. “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s.” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57–​78. Furet, François. Interpreting the French Revolution. Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Furet, François. The Passing of an Illusion:  The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Gaillard, Jeanne. Communes de province, Commune de Paris, 1870–​1871. Paris: Flammarion, 1971. Gallois, William. “Dahra and the History of Violence in Early Colonial Algeria.” In The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism, edited by Martin Thomas, 3–​25. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Gallois, William. A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Galston, William A. “Realism in Political Theory.” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 385–​411. Gaspard, Françoise. A Small City in France. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Gauchet, Marcel. “Préface:  Benjamin Constant:  L’illusion lucide du libéralisme.” In Benjamin Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes: écrits politiques, 11–​91. Paris: Livre de poche, 1980. Gauchet, Marcel. “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous.” Libre 7 (1980): 43–​76. Gaukroger, Stephen. The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–​1760. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010. Gentile, Emilio. “Fascism as Political Religion.” Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 2/​3 (1990): 229–​51. Gilley, Sheridan, and Ann Loades. “Thomas Henry Huxley: The War Between Science and Religion.” The Journal of Religion 61, no. 3 (1981): 285–​308. Gleason, Abbott. Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gluckstein, Donny. The Paris Commune:  A Revolution in Democracy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006. Godechot, Jacques. The Taking of the Bastille: July 14, 1789. Translated by Jean Stewart. New York: Scribners, 1970.

216 References Goldberg, Harvey. The Life of Jean Jaurès. Madison:  The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Goldhammer, Jesse. The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Goldstein, Jan. The Post-​Revolutionary Self:  Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–​1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Gombrich, Ernst Hans. “The Dream of Reason: Symbolism of the French Revolution.” Journal of 18th-​Century Studies 2, no. 3 (1979): 187–​205. Goncourt, Edmond, and Jules Goncourt. Pages from the Goncourt Journals. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007. Goodliffe, Gabriel. The Resurgence of the Radical Right in France: From Boulangisme to the Front National. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gopnik, Adam. “The Fires of Paris.” The New Yorker, December 15, 2014. Gordon, Daniel. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–​1789. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Grainville, Jean-​Baptiste Cousin de. Le Dernier Homme. Paris: Payot, 2010. Greer, Donald. The Incidents of the Terror During the French Revolution:  A Statistical Interpetation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Greif, Mark. The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–​1973. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Greil, Arthur L. Georges Sorel and the Sociology of Virtue. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981. Grogin, R. C. The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–​1914. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press, 1988. Guégan, Xavier. “Transmissible Sites:  Monuments, Memorials and Their Visibility on the Metropole and Periphery.” In Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller, 21–​38. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Guennifey, Patrice. “Cordeliers and Girondins: the prehistory of the republic?” Translated by Laura Mason. In The Invention of the Modern Republic, edited by Biancamaria Fontana, 86–​106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gueniffey, Patrice. La politique de la Terreur: essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789–​ 1794. Paris: Fayard, 2000. Guizot, François. The History of Civilization in Europe. Translated by William Hazlitt. New York: Penguin, 1997. Habermas, Jürgen. “Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” Political Theory 29, no. 6 (2001): 766–​81. Hale, Matthew Rainbow. “Regenerating the World:  The French Revolution, Civic Festivals, and the Forging of American Democracy, 1793–​1795.” Journal of American History 103, no. 4 (2017): 891–​920. Halévy, Daniel. Charles Péguy and the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. New  York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947. Halévy, Élie. L’ère des tyrannies. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Hanna, Martha. The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Hamilton, James Jay. “Georges Sorel and the Inconsistencies of a Bergsonian Marxism.” Political Theory 1, no. 3 (1973): 329–​40. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003.

References  217 Hayat, Samuel. Quand la République était révolutionnaire: citoyenneté et representation en 1848. Paris: Seuil, 2014. Hayward, J. E.  S. “The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism.” International Review of Social History 6, no. 1 (1961): 19–​48. Hazan, Eric. A History of the Barricade. Translated by David Fernbach. New  York: Verso, 2015. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. The Saint-​Napoleon:  Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-​ Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. “Memory and Political Imagination:  The Legend of Napoleon Revisited.” French History 18, no. 4 (2004): 463–​83. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. “Memory, Legend and Politics:  Napoleonic Patriotism in the Restoration Era.” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006): 71–​84. Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hervé, Gustave. My Country, Right or Wrong? Translated by G. Bowman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1910. Hippler, Thomas. Soldats et citoyens: naissance du service militaire en France et en Prusse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin, 1985. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789–​1848. New York: Vintage, 1996. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital: 1848–​1875. New York: Vintage, 1996. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes:  A History of the World, 1914–​1991. New  York: Vintage, 1996. Hoffman, Stanley. “Paradoxes of the French Political Community.” In In Search of France, edited by Stanley Hoffman et al., 1–​117. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Odes and Elegies. Translated by Nick Hoff. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Holmes, Stephen. Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Honig, Bonnie. “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic.” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 97–​113. Honig, Bonnie. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1993. Honnig, Bonnie. “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory.” American Political Science Review 101, no. 1 (2007): 1–​17. Horowitz, Irving Louis. Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel. New York: The Humanities Press, 1961. Huet, Marie-​Hélene. Mourning Glory:  The Will of the French Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Hughes, Stuart H. Consciousness and Society:  The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–​1930. New York: Knopf, 1958. Hunt, Lynn, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Boston and New York: Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 1996. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

218 References Hutton, Patrick H. The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition:  The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864–​1893. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Ihl, Olivier. “Une autre représentation: sur les pratiques d’acclamatio dans la France de la seconde à la troisième république.” Revue française de science politique 65, no. 3 (2015): 381–​403. Israel, Jonathan. Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Jacob, Louis. “Marat Physicien.” Revue du Nord 29, no. 114 (1947): 81–​86. Jainchill, Andrew. Reimagining Politics After the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Jainchill, Andrew, and Samuel Moyn. “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography.” The Journal of Modern History 76, no. 1 (2004): 107–​54. Janara, Laura. “Commercial Capitalism and the Democratic Psyche:  The Threat to Tocquevillean Citizenship.” History of Political Thought 22, no. 2 (2001): 317–​50. Jardin, André. Tocqueville:  A Biography. Translated by Lydia David with Robert Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988. Jaucourt, Louis de. “Morale (Science des moeurs).” In Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Volume 10, 699–​700. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, edited by Robert Morrisey. Jaume, Lucien. Le discours Jacobin et la démocratie. Paris: Fayard, 1989. Jaume, Lucien. L’individu effacé. Ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Jaume, Lucien. Tocqueville:  The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Jaume, Lucien. Le religieux et le politique dans la Révolution française: l’idée de régénération. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2015. Jaurès, Jean. “Discours de Jaurès.” L’Humanité, 23 January 1914. Jaurès, Jean. A Socialist History of the French Revolution. Translated by Mitchell Abidor. London: Pluto Press, 2015. Jay, Martin. Refractions of Violence. New York: Routledge, 2003. Jennings, Jeremy. Georges Sorel:  The Character and Development of His Thought. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Jennings, Jeremy. “Syndicalism and the French Revolution.” Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 1 (1991): 71–​96. Jennings, Jeremy. Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knöbl. War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present. Translated by Alex Skinner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Johnson, Christopher H. Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–​ 1861. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. Johnson, Martin Phillip. The Paradise of Association:  Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of 1871. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. Jones, Donna. The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Jones, Donna. “Mysticism and War.” In Annales bergsoniennes VII: Bergson, l’Allemagne, la guerre de 1914, edited by Arnaud François, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Camille Riquier,

References  219 Caterina Zanfi, and Frédéric Worms, 167–​ 79. Paris:  Presses universitaires de France, 2014. Jones, Gareth Stedman. “The Redemptive Power of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens.” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 1–​22. Jordan, David P. The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Judt, Tony. Past Imperfect:  French Intellectuals, 1944–​ 1956. New  York:  New  York University Press, 2011. Jünger, Ernst. On Pain. Translated by David C. Durst. Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2008. Kalyvas, Stathis. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kaplan, Alice Yaeger. Reproductions of Banality:  Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Kateb, George. “The Adequacy of the Canon.” Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 482–​505. Katznelson, Ira. Enlightenment and Desolation:  Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Keenan, Alan. Democracy in Question: Openness in a Time of Political Closure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Kelly, George Armstrong. “Conceptual Sources of the Terror.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 18–​36. Kent Wright, Johnson. A Classical Republican in Eighteenth Century France: The Political Thought of Mably. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Khilnani, Sunil. Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Kohn, Margaret. “Empire’s Law: Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 2 (2008): 255–​78. Laborde, Cécile. Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso, 1985. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. “Post-​Marxism Without Apologies.” In Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 97–​132. New  York:  Verso, 1990. Lagardelle, Hubert. “Socialism ou Démocratie.” Le Mouvement socialiste 7 (1902): 625–​32, 673–​87, 774–​81, 889–​97, 1009–​16, 1081–​88. Lagardelle, Hubert. “De l’homme abstrait à l’homme réel.” Plans 1 (1931): 24–​32. Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier. Les citoyennetés en révolution, 1789–​94. Paris:  Presses universitaires de France, 1992. Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier. “Guerre colonial: guerre totale? Brèves remarques sur la conquête de l’Algérie.” Drôle d’epoque 12 (2003): 59–​73. Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier. Coloniser, exterminer:  sur la guerre et l’État colonial. Paris: Fayard, 2005. Lee, Daniel. Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–​1942. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Ledru-​Rollin, Alexandre-​Auguste. Discours politiques et écrits divers, tome premier. Paris: Germer Baillière, 1879.

220 References Ledru-​Rollin, Alexandre-​Auguste. Discours prononcé par le Citoyen Ledru-​Rollin au banquet du Mans. Bourdeaux: Impr. Des ouvrièrs-​associés, 1849. Lefort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society:  Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Edited by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986. Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge:  Polity Press, 1988. Lefort, Claude. Writing: The Political Test. Translated by David Ames Curtis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Léo, André. “Les soldats de l’idée.” La Sociale, 28 April 1871. Léo, André. “Aventures de neuf ambulancières.” La Sociale, 6 May 1871. Leo XIII. “Au milieu des solicitudes.” 16 February 1892. http://​w2.vatican.va/​content/​leo-​xiii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​l-​xiii_​enc_​16021892_​au-​milieu-​des-​ sollicitudes.html Levy, Jacob. “Against Fraternity:  Democracy Without Solidarity.” In The Strains of Commitment:  The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies, edited by Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, 107–​24. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Lilla, Mark, ed. New French Thought:  Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1994. Lissagaray, Prosper-​Olivier. History of the Paris Commune of 1871. Translated by Eleanor Marx. New York: Verso, 2012. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1960. Loubère, Leo. “Louis Blanc’s Theory of History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 1 (1956): 70–​88. Loubère, Leo. “Intellectual Origins of Jacobin Socialism.” International Review of Social History 4, no. 3 (1959): 415–​31. Lukes, Steven. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. Middlesex: Penguin, 1975. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Maistre, Joseph de. St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence. Translated by Richard A. Lebrun. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1993. Maistre, Joseph de. Considerations on France. Translated by Richard A. Lebrun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Malon, Benoît. La troisième défaite du proletariat français. Neuchàtel:  Guillaume Fils, 1871. Manent, Pierre. An Intellectual History of Liberalism. Translated by Rebecca Balinski. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Mantena, Karuna. Alibis of Empire:  Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Mantena, Karuna. “Social Theory in the Age of Empire.” In Empire and Modern Political Thought, edited by Sankar Muthu, 324–​ 50. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012. Manuel, Frank E. The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Marinetti, Filippo. Critical Writings. Edited by Gunter Berghaus. Translated by Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006. Markell, Patchen. “Marking Affect Safe for Democracy? On ‘Constitutional Patriotism.’” Political Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 38–​63.

References  221 Martin, Jean-​Clément. “La Vendée et sa guerre, les logiques de l’événement.” Annales ESC 40, no. 5 (1985): 1067–​85. Martin, Jean-​Clément. “Est-​il possible de compter les morts de la Vendée?” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 38, no. 1 (1991): 105–​21. Martin, Jean-​Clément. Violence et révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. New York: International Publishers, 1940. Marx, Karl. Early Political Writings. Edited by Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Marx, Karl. Later Political Writings. Edited by Terrell Carver. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996. Matthes, Melissa M. The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Mavidal, M. J. and M. E. Laurent, eds. Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860, première série (1787 à 1799), 82 volumes. Paris:  Librairie administrative de P.  Dupont, 1862–​1913. Mayer, Arno J. The Furies:  Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. McPhee, Peter. Robespierre:  A Revolutionary Life. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2012. McQueen, Alison. “Politics and Public Sculpture in Nineteenth-​Century Colonial French Algeria.” Sculpture Journal 28, no. 1 (2019): 7–​34. Meckstroth, Christopher. The Struggle for Democracy:  Paradoxes of Progress and the Politics of Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Translated by John O’Neill. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969. Merriman, John. The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-​de-​Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Merriman, John. Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Michel, Louise. La Commune. Paris: Stock, 1978. Michel, Louise. The Red Virgin:  Memoirs of Louise Michel. Edited and translated by Bullit Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. Michelet, Jules. The People. Translated by John P. McKay. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Miller, Mary Ashburn. A Natural History of the Revolution:  Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–​1794. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2011. Miller, Paul B. From Revolutionaries to Citizens:  Antimilitarism in France, 1870–​1914. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Moggach, Douglass, and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds. The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Molinari, M. G. de. Les Clubs rouges pendant le siege de Paris. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1874. Moran, Daniel, and Arthur Waldron, eds. The People in Arms:  Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

222 References Morefield, Jeanne. Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-​American Decline and the Politics of Deflection. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Morrissey, Robert. The Economy of Glory:  From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Mouvement socialiste, Le. “Déclaration.” Le Mouvement socialiste 1 (1899): 1–​5. Moyn, Samuel. “On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet’s Masterpiece.” The Tocqueville Review/​La Revue Tocqueville 29, no. 2 (2008): 59–​78. Müller, Jan-​Werner. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007. Müller, Jan-​ Werner. “A European Constitutional Patriotism? The Case Restated.” European Law Journal 14, no. 5 (2008): 542–​57. Munholland, Kim. “Michaud’s History of the Crusades and the French Crusade in Algeria under Louis-​Philippe.” In The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, edited by Petra ten-​Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg, 144–​65. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Myers, F. W.  H. Science and a Future Life, With Other Essays. London and New  York: MacMillan, 1893. Näsström, Sofia. “The Legitimacy of the People.” Political Theory 35, no. 5 (2007): 624–​58. Nisbet, Robert A. “Rousseau and Totalitarianism.” The Journal of Politics 5, no. 2 (1943): 93–​114. Nisbet, Robert A. “The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France.” American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 2 (1943): 156–​64. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Noiriel, Gérard. Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New  York:  Berg, 1990. Nord, Philip. “Republicanism and Utopian Vision: French Freemasonry in the 1860s and 1870s.” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 2 (1991): 213–​29. Nord, Philip. The Republican Moment:  Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Nye, Robert A. The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic. London: Sage, 1975. Nye, Robert A. Crime, Madness & Politics in Modern France:  The Medical Concept of National Decline. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Oberst, Bethany S. “Algeria and the Algerians in the French Theater:  1800–​1850.” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 8 (1985): 70–​78. Offerlé, Michel. Un homme, une voix? Histoire du suffrage universel. Paris:  Gallimard, 1993. O’Neal, John C. The Authority of Experience:  Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Owen, David. “Machiavelli’s Il Principe and the Politics of Glory.” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 1 (2017): 41–​60. Ozouf, Mona. La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–​1799. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Ozouf, Mona. L’homme régénéré: essais sur la Révolution ƒrancaise. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Paz, Maurice. “Le mythe de la Commune: les deux reproches majeurs.” Est et Ouest 482 (1972): 23–​28. Péguy, Charles. “Ève.” Cahiers de la Quinzaine 15, no. 4 (1913): 13–​395.

References  223 Péguy, Charles. Note sur M. Bergson et al philosophie bergsonienne. Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1914. Péguy, Charles. Basic Verities: Prose and Poetry. Translated by Anne and Julian Green. New York: Pantheon, 1943. Péguy, Charles. Temporal and Eternal. Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-​Garde, Avant-​Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Perrot, Michelle. “Le premier journal marxiste français:  ‘L’Égalité’ de Jules Guesde (1877–​1883.” L’Actualité de l’histoire 28 (1959): 1–​26. Pettit, Philip. Republicanism:  A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997. Pettit, Philip. On the People’s Terms:  A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Peuple, Le. “Manifeste du peuple.” Le Peuple, no. 1 (September 2, 1848). Peuple, Le. “Le Socialisme et la Politique.” Le Peuple, no 3 (September 1848). Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848—​c. 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pilbeam, Pamela. French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2000. Pilkington, Anthony Edward. Bergson and His Influence:  A Reassessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pitts, Jennifer. “Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question.” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 295–​318. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Porterfield, Todd. The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–​ 1836. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Postone, Moishe. “History and Helplessness:  Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism.” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 93–​110. Prat, Michel, ed. “Lettres de Georges Sorel à Daniel Halévy (1907–​1920).” Mil neuf cent: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 12 (1994): 151–​223. Price, Roger. The French Second Empire:  An Anatomy of Political Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Prochasson, Christophe. François Furet: Les chemins de la mélancolie. Paris: Stock, 2013. Prochasson, Christophe, and Anne Rasmussen. Au nom de la patrie: Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale, 1910–​1919. Paris: Découverte, 1996. Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. Selected Writings of Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon. Edited by Stewart Edwards. Translated by Elizabeth Fraser. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969. Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. Property Is Theft! A Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Publishing, 2011. Przeworski, Adam. “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense.” In Democracy’s Value, edited by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-​ Cordon, 23–​ 55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rabinbach, Anson. “Moments of Totalitarianism.” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 72–​100. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement:  Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

224 References Rawls, John. “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1987): 1–​25. Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness:  A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2005. Rebérioux, Madelaine. “Le mur des Fédérés: rouge ‘sang craché.’” In Les lieux de mémoire, tome 1: La République, edited by Pierre Nora, 626–​37. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Rémond, René. The Right Wing in France: From 1815 to de Gaulle. Translated by James M. Laux. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969. Renan, Ernest. The Future of Science. Boston, MA: Roberts Bros, 1891. Richter, Melvin. “Tocqueville on Algeria.” The Review of Politics 25, no. 3 (1963): 362–​98. Richter, Melvin. “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democracy Legitimacy.” Political Theory 10, no. 2 (1982): 185–​214. Richter, Melvin. “Tocqueville and Guizot on Democracy: From a Type of Society to a Political Regime.” History of European Ideas 30 (2004): 61–​82. Richter, Melvin. “A Family of Political Concepts:  Tyranny, Despotism, Bonapartism, Caesarism, Dictatorship, 1750–​1917.” European Journal of Political Theory 4, no. 3 (2005): 221–​48. Rid, Thomas. “Razzia:  A Turning Point in Modern Strategy.” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 4 (2009): 617–​35. Riley, Denise. “Am I  That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. London: Macmillan-​Palgrave,  1988. Riskin, Jessica. “The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod.” Science in Context 12, no. 1 (1999): 61–​99. Robcis, Camille. The Law of Kinship:  Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Robespierre, Maximilien. Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre. Edited by Gustave Laurent. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1939. Robespierre, Maximilien. Virtue and Terror. Translated by John Howe. New  York: Verso, 2007. Robespierre, Maximilien, “Letter to Benjamin Franklin, 1 October 1783.” In The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Ellen R. Cohn, Volume 41, 61. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Roche, Daniel. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Roelofs, Joan and Victor Considerant. “Considerant’s ‘Principes du socialism.’ ” Science & Society 74, no. 1 (2010): 114–​27. Rogers, Melvin L. “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect:  On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (2012): 188–​203. Rolland, Romain. Péguy, 2 volumes. Paris: Albin Michel, 1944. Rond, Paul de Mont. Histoire de la conquête de l’algérie de 1830 à 1847, Tome 2. Paris: Marc-​Aurel,  1847. Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le moment Guizot. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Rosanvallon, Pierre. L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 1990. Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le sacre du citoyen:  histoire du suffrage universel en France. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

References  225 Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le peuple introuvable: histoire de la répresentation démocratique en France. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le modèle politique francais: la société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Rosanvallon, Pierre. Democracy Past and Future. Edited by Samuel Moyn. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Rosanvallon, Pierre. The Society of Equals. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Rosenblum, Nancy L. “Romantic Militarism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no. 2 (1982): 249–​68. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:  Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994. Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space:  Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. New York: Verso, 2008. Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury:  The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. New York: Verso, 2015. Roth, Jack J. “Revolution and Morale in Modern French Thought: Sorel and the Sorelians.” French Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (1963): 205–​23. Roth, Jack J. “The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo.” The Journal of Modern History 39, no. 1 (1967): 30–​45. Roth, Jack J. The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Rouanet, S. P. “Irrationalism and Myth in Georges Sorel.” The Review of Politics 26, no. 1 (1964): 45–​69. Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Lacan:  In Spite of Everything. Translated by Gregory Elliot. New York: Verso, 2014. Rougerie, Jacques. “Composition d’une population insurgée: l’exemple de la Commune.” Mouvement social 48 (1964): 31–​47. Rougerie, Jacques. Paris libre 1871. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques. The Government of Poland. Indianapolis, IL: Hackett, 1985. Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques. The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Sade, Marquis de. Justine:  or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Translated by John Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Saint-​Simon, Henri de. Selected Writings. Edited and translated by F. M. H. Markham. Oxford: Blackwell, 1952. Saint-​Simon, Henri de. The Political Thought of Saint-​Simon. Edited by Ghita Ionescu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Sand, Shlomo. “Legend, Myth, and Fascism.” The European Legacy 3, no. 5 (1998): 51–​65. Sanos, Sandrine. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-​Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Sawyer, Stephen S. “Louis Blanc’s Theory of the Liberal Democratic State.” The Tocqueville Review/​La revue Tocqueville 33, no. 2 (2012): 141–​63. Sawyer, Stephen S. Demos Assembled:  Democracy & the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–​1880. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Sawyer, Stephen S., and Iain Stewart, eds. In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-​Totalitarianism, and Intellectual Politics in France Since the 1950s. New  York: Palgrave-​Macmillan,  2016.

226 References Schechter, Ronald. A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-​ Century France. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Schulkind, Eugene. The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer:  French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Scott, Joan Wallach. Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007. Sessions, Jennifer E. “Ambiguous Glory:  The Algerian Conquest and the Politics of Colonial Commemoration in Post-​Revolutionary France.” Outre-​Mers 94, no. 350–​51 (2006): 91–​102. Sessions, Jennifer E. “‘Unfortunate Necessities’: Violence and Civilization in the Conquest of Algeria.” In France and its Spaces of War:  Experience, Memory, Image, edited by Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Daniel Brewer, 29–​44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Sessions, Jennifer E. By Sword and Plow:  France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Severac, J. B. “Influence de la philosophie de M. Bergson.” Le mouvement socialiste 29 (1911): 182–​83. Sewell, William. Work & Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Sewell, William H. “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures:  Inventing Revolution at the Bastille.” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 841–​81. Shafer, David A. The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture, and Society at the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Shklar, Judith. “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition.” The Review of Politics 20, no. 4 (1958): 634–​56. Siedentop, Larry. “Two Traditions of Liberalism.” In The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Alan Ryan, 153–​74. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph. Political Writings. Edited and Translated by Michael Sonenscher. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003. Simmons, Dana. Vital Minimum:  Need, Science & Politics in Modern France. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Sinclair, Mark. “Bergson’s Philosophy of Will and the War of 1914–​1918.” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 3 (2016): 467–​87. Skinner, Quentin. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–​1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands:  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New  York:  Basic Books, 2010. Soboul, Albert. Le procès de Louis XVI. Paris: Julliard, 1966. Sonenscher, Michael. Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Sorel, Georges. “Socialistes antiparlementaires.” L’Action française, 22 August 1909. Sorel, Georges. “Le réveil de l’âme française.” L’Action française, 14 April 1910.

References  227 Sorel, Georges. From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy. Edited by John Stanley. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987. Sorel, Georges. From Georges Sorel: Vol 2, Hermeneutics and the Sciences. Edited by John L. Stanley. Translated by John and Charlotte Stanley. New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 1990. Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Edited by Jeremy Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sorel, Georges. “Sorel, lecteur de Le Bon: huit comptes rendus (1895–​1911).” Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 1, no. 28 (2010): 121–​54. Stanley, John L. The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social theories of Georges Sorel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Stanley, John L. “Sorel’s Study of Vico: The Uses of the Poetic Imagination.” The European Legacy 3, no. 5 (1998): 17–​34. Sternhell, Zeev. “The ‘Anti-​Materialist’ Revision of Marxism as an Aspect of the Rise of Fascist Ideology.” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 3 (1987): 379–​400. Sternhell, Zeev. Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Sternhell, Zeev, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Ashéri. The Birth of Fascist Ideology:  From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1994. Stewart, Iain. “France’s Anti-​68 Liberal Revival,” in France Since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in the Age of Uncertainty, ed. Emile Chabal, 199–​223. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Stewart, John Hall, ed. A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution New  York:  Macmillan, 1951. Strong, Tracy. Politics Without Vision:  Thinking Without a Banister in the Twentieth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Strong, Tracy. “Glory and the Law in Hobbes.” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 1 (2017): 61–​76. Surkis, Judith. Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–​1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Tackett, Timothy. When the King Took Flight. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003. Tackett, Timothy. “Rumor and Revolution: The Case of the September Massacres.” French History and Civilization 4 (2011): 54–​64. Talmon, Jacob L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. London:  Secker and Warburg, 1952. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Terrier, Jean. Visions of the Social:  Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–​1950. Leidsen: Brill, 2011. Thomas, Edith. Louise Michel ou La Velléda de l’anarchie. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Tocqueville, Alexis de. The European Revolution & Correspondence with Gobineau. Translated by John Lukacs. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Selected Letters on Politics and Society. Edited by Roger Boesche. Translated by James Toupin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Writings on Empire and Slavery. Edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

228 References Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Library of America, 2004. Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. Translated by Gerald Bevan. New York: Penguin, 2008. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America:  Historical-​ Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, 4  vols. Edited by Eduardo Nolla. Translated by James T. Schleifer. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010. Tombs, Robert. The Paris Commune 1871. London and New York: Longman, 1999. Tombs, Robert. “How Bloody Was la Semaine Sanglante of 1871? A  Revision.” The Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 679–​704. Traverso, Enzo. The Origins of Nazi Violence. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 2003. Traverso, Enzo. “Intellectuals and Anti-​Fascism:  For a Critical Historicization.” New Politics 9, no. 4 (2004): 91–​101. Traverso, Enzo. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–​1945. New York: Verso, 2016. Traverso, Enzo. “Totalitarianism Between History and Theory.” History and Theory 56, no. 4 (2017): 97–​118. Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine:  Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Tristan, Flora. The Workers’ Union. Translated by Beverly Livingston. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured:  Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Vallès, Jules. “Les fausses promesses.” Le Cri du peuple, 26 March 1871. Vallès, Jules. “Le Scrutin.” Le Cri du peuple, 29 March 1871. Vallès, Jules. “La Fête.” Le Cri du peuple, 30 March 1871. Vallès, Jules. The Insurrectionist. Translated by Sandy Petrey. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971. Varley, Karine. “Reassessing the Paris Commune of 1871: A Response to Robert Tombs.” H-​France Salon 3, no. 1 (2011): 20–​25. Vernon, Richard. Commitment and Change:  Georges Sorel and the Idea of Revolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Vernon, Richard. “‘Citizenship’ in ‘Industry’: The Case of Georges Sorel.” The American Political Science Review 75, no. 1 (1981): 17–​28. Verhoeven, Claudia. The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Vincent, K. Steven. Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Vincent, K. Steven. “Interpreting Georges Sorel:  Defender of Virtue or Apostle of Violence?” History of European Ideas 12, no. 2 (1990): 239–​57. Vincent, K. Steven. “Citizenship, Patriotism, Tradition, and Antipolitics in the Thought of Georges Sorel.” The European Legacy 3, no. 5 (1998): 7–​16. Vout, Malcolm and Lawrence Wilde. “Socialism and Myth:  The Case of Bergson and Sorel.” Radical Philosophy 46 (1987): 2–​7. Walzer, Michael. “Political Action:  The Problem of Dirty Hands.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 160–​80. Walzer, Michael, ed. Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI. Translated by Marian Rothstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

References  229 Weber, Eugen. Action Française:  Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-​Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. Weber, Eugen. The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–​1914. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1968. Weber, Eugen. Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–​1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Routledge, 1990. Weber, Max. The Vocation Lectures. Edited by David Owen and Tracy Strong. Translated by Rodney Livingston. Indianpolis, IN: Hackett, 2004. Welch, Cheryl B. Liberty and Utility:  The French Idéologues and the Transformation of Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Welch, Cheryl B. “Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria.” Political Theory 31, no. 2 (2003): 235–​64. Welch, Cheryl B. “Tocqueville’s Resistance to the Social.” History of European Ideas 30, no. 1 (2004): 83–​107. Wernick, Andrew. Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-​Theistic Program of French Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Wilde, Lawrence. “Sorel and the French Right.” History of Political Thought 2, no. 2 (1986): 361–​74. Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation-​State: Negritude & Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Williams, Rosalind H. Dreamworlds:  Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-​Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Winter, Yves. Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Wolin, Sheldon. “Fugitive Democracy.” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 11–​25. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–​409. Wright, Julian. “Socialism and Political Identity:  Eugène Fournière and Intellectual Militancy in the Third Republic.” French Historical Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 449–​78. Wright, Julian. Socialism and the Experience of Time: Idealism and the Present in Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Young, Iris Marion. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989): 250–​74.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number Abd-​el-​Kader, 73–​77,  81 absolutism, 33–​34, 36, 45–​46 Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 159 acte énonciatif, 48–​49, 50 Action Française, 131–​32, 139, 158 Age of Enlightenment, 8–​9, 36–​37, 39–​40,  162 agency behind regicide, 41 collective agency, 3, 27–​28, 105, 114 democracy and, 102 of nature, 46–​48 redemptive agency, 6, 46, 48 agonism, 15–​16, 145, 146–​47 Alexander II, Tsar, 164–​65 Algeria, French conquest of (1840s), 2, 4–​5, 53, 68–​81, 72f American democratic thought, 165 American frontier expansion, 3 anarchist violence, 1–​2, 66–​67 ancien régime, 8–​9, 17–​18, 58, 163–​64 Anglo-​American liberals,  58–​59 anti-​clericalism,  137 anti-​colonial nationalists, 3, 164–​65 anti-​modernism, 12–​13,  144–​45 antimilitarism, 123–​24, 125, 158–​59 antistatism, 118 antitotalitarianism, 12–​19, 175n72 and totalitarianism, 15, 167–​68 Antliff, Mark, 12–​13 Arago, Louis, 107 Arendt, Hannah, 13, 146 Armée d’Afrique, 53, 54, 57, 68–​81, 83 Armitage, David, 87

Aron, Raymond, 125 associational activity, 65–​66 atheism, 40, 89, 97–​98, 100 atomism, democratic, 97–​99 atomized society, 56, 58, 59–​60, 144 “Au milieu des Solicitudes” (Pope Leo XIII),  130–​31 anti-​Christian sentiments, 200n21 August 1792 insurrection, 27–​28, 44, 105, 109 autonomous moral corps, 34–36 Azouvi, François, 135   Babeuf, Gracchus, 85 Barère, Bertrand, 28 Barrès, Maurice, 5, 123–​24, 144–​45 Beaumont, Gustave de, 59, 64–​65, 69–​70 Beccaria, Cesare, 40–​41 Behrent, Michael, 92 Bergson, Henri (Bergsonism), 129–​30, 132–​41, 136f, 158–​59, 205n112 conscious states, qualitative multiplicity of, 133 élan vital, 134, 159 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 132–​33, 153 intuitive/​temporal cognitive comportment, 133 L’Évolution créatrice, 134 Matière et Mémoire, 134 political Bergsonism, 135–​41 “The Perception of Change,” 134 Bergsonian France, 135 Bertaux, Jacques, 27f Berth, Eduard, 138–​39, 158 Blake, William, 6

232 Index Blanc, Louis, 90, 94, 95–​96 double reform, 94 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 85, 94–​97, 107, 195n86 Blanquists, 101, 108 Bloody Week (Paris Commune), 114 Boesche, Roger, 66–​67 Bois-​Valé, Charles Dominique de Vissery de,  44–​45 Bonaparte, Napoleon (Bonapartism) coup d’état, 58–​59 as defensive patriotism, 55–​56 militarism of, 55–​56, 66–​67, 73 social disintegration and, 58–​59 Tocqueville and, 65–​67, 73 Bourget, Paul, 131–​32, 135 Brissot, Jacques-​Pierre, 25 Bugeaud, Thomas Robert, 2, 53, 77–​78 Burke, Edmund, 8 abstract perfection, 8 cahiers de doléances, 37 Cahiers de la Quinzaine,  135–​41 Camélinat, Zéphirin, 84 Canut revolts, 88 capital punishment, 20–​22, 40–​41 capitalism, 13–​14, 116, 147–​48, 150–​51, 158, 186n38 Cartesianism, 132–​33, 135, 140–​41 Case, Holly, 88 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 13 Catholicism, 132, 135, 139, 144–​45, 202n65 classical spirit, 125 Chapelier, Loi Le, 35 Charpentier, Citoyen, 93–​94, 100 Charter of Amiens, 131 Chevalier, Michel, 90 Christian Crusades, 73 Christianity, 36, 64, 89, 200n21 Ciccariello-​Maher, George,  146–​47 civic virtue, 8–​9 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 25 civil marriage law, 25, 35 civil war, 2, 5, 24, 83, 85–​86, 87, 94, 100, 120, 179n19 Clamorgan, Paul, 65 class conflict/​struggle, 129–​30, 137, 142,  148–​50

classical republicanism, 10, 39–​40, 86–​87, 171–​72n33, 172–​73n41 classical spirit, 125 Clermont-​Tonnerre, Count of, 8–​9 Club de la Reine-​Blanche, 101–​2 Club de l’école de médecine, 101 Club démocratique des Batignolles, 101 Cold War, 15–​16, 162 collective autonomy, 6, 143 Collège de France, 134–​35 colonization of Algeria. See Algeria, French conquest of commemorative medallions, 41–​42, 42f Committee of Defense (Paris Commune),  107–​8 Committee on Public Safety (Paris Commune), 112 communal revolution, 85–​86, 112 Communards. See Paris Commune communist revolutionaries, 12–​13 Condorcet, Marquis de, 29–​31 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), 131 conservative nationalism, 164–​65 Considerations on the Government of Poland (Rousseau), 102–​3 Constant, Benjamin, 58 constitutional patriotism, 31–​32, 38–​39, 165–​66,  167–​68 contractual solidarity, 11–​12, 152 corporate guild system, 25 corporatist society, 34 corpus mysticum, 36–​37, 39, 48 Counter-​Enlightenment traditions,  12–​13 counterviolence, 1 Courbet, Gustave, 112 Cousin, Victor, 62–​64 Cubism, 135 cult of action, 125 cult of the revolutionary tradition, 85   Dahra caves, 54, 72–​73 d’Alphonse, Arsène, 53–​54 Darnton, Robert, 43 Darwin, Charles, 132 David, Jacques Louis, 71–72, 72f de-​Christianization of France, 40, 142 death penalty, 20, 21

Index  233 debt crisis of the Monarchy, 34–​35 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 25 “Défense de Mazagran” (Philippoteaux), 79f, 79–​80, 80f deification of violence, 40 democracy/​democratic theory. See also Tocqueville, Alexis de agency and, 3, 27–​28, 102, 105, 114 American democratic thought, 165 atomism and, 97–​99 Cold War and, 15 continental constitutional democracy, 166 criticisms of, 142–​44, 158 culture of individualism, 4–​5 European model of, 14–​15 Paris Commune and, 84, 99–105, 192n27 parliamentary democracy, 4, 128–​29, 135–​37, 138–​40, 145, 148–​50, 151–​52,  155 psychic dimensions of democratization, 57–63 radical democracy, 177n88 redemptive violence, 4–​12 revolutionary democracy, 16–​17, 39,  162–​68 social body and, 1, 4, 7–10, 12, 15–16, 23, 32, 37–39, 87 social disintegration and, 56–58, 86, 89, 92, 97, 158 128–​29 teleological argument about, 14–​15 terror and, 14–​15, 17–​18, 32 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 7, 59, 60, 63, 65–​66, 67–​77, 81–​82 democratic revolution communard thought on, 105 defeat of 1848, 95–​96 French Revolution into, 20 introduction to, 10–​11, 15, 18 justice and, 24 social bond and, 1–3, 11, 16–19, 24, 36, 39, 52, 56, 67, 89, 129, 157, 163, 164 as social revolution, 162–​68 tyrannicide and, 39, 52 Dentu, Edouard, 100 “The Departure of the volunteers of 1792” (Rude), 104f despotism, 41–​42, 60, 65, 73, 77

determinism, 66–​67, 132–​33, 141, 151–​52 d’Holbach, Baron, 33–​34 The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim), 11 divorce law, 25, 35, 83 domination and systemic violence (Algeria),  69–​70 Donzelot, Jacques, 144 double reform (Blanc), 94 Dreyfus Affair, 137 Durkheim, Emile, 11–​12, 129–​30 contractual solidarity, 11–​12, 152 organic solidarity, 11 École Normale Supérieure (ENS), 139 École Polytechnique, 132 economic competition, 83, 88–​89, 90, 98 economic cooperation, 34, 115–​16 Edelstein, Dan, 21–​22 egalitarianism, 66, 121–​22, 168 egoism, 10–​11, 58–​59, 90, 144–​45, 157 Eighteenth Arrondissement’s vigilance committee (Paris Commune), 113 élan vital, 134, 159 electoral defeats, 101–​2 electoral representation, 98–​99, 102 electorate systems, 92–​99 embourgeoisement, 59, 61–​62, 66 Empire and settlerism. See also Algeria, French conquest of (1840s) American frontier expansion, 3 anti-​colonial nationalists, 3 logic of elimination, 56–​57 native society, 75–​76 enemy of the people, 33 Engels, Friedrich, 84 Enlightenment age. See Age of Enlightenment Enquête sur la Monarchie (Maurras), 132 Enfantin, Barthélemy Prosper, 92 esprit de corps, 34, 89, 93–​94 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Bergson), 132–​33, 153 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 61–​62 “Essay on Algeria” (Tocqueville), 74, 77–​81 Eure-​et-​Loir,  37–​38 evangelism, 73

234 Index “Ève” (Péguy), 125 evolutionary theory, 132 ex post facto justice, 28–​29 extralegal violence, 21, 22–​23   Falloux Laws, 95–​96 Fanon, Frantz, 3, 164–​65 fascism, 12–​13, 16, 18, 125–​29, 137, 160, 165, 203–​4n89 Favre, Jules, 83, 107–​8 Ferguson, Michaele, 166–​67 Ferry Laws, 130–​31 Festival of the Supreme Being, 167–​68 feudalism, 25, 74, 90 First World War. See World War I Forrest, Alan, 103–​5 Foucault, Michel, 40–​41 Fourier, Charles, 90 France, Anatole, 135 Franco-​Prussian war, 123 francs-​tireurs, 87 Frankfurt School, 162 Franklin, Benjamin, 44–​45, 46f French communist party (PCF), 13 French conquest of Algeria (1840s), 2, 4–​5, 53, 68–​81, 72f, 188n95 Armée d’Afrique, 53, 54, 57, 68–​81, 83 Dahra caves, 54, 72–​73 domination and systemic violence,  69–​70 French political theory/​tradition Counter-​Enlightenment traditions,  12–​13 cult of the revolutionary tradition, 85 peoplehood in, 8–​10, 18–​19, 58–​59, 128–​29,  130 social-​theoretic orientation toward, 10 French republicanism, 7–​10, 151–​52, 171–​72n33, 172–​73n41 as defensive patriotism 55–​56 French Revolution. See also regicide and redemptive violence in French Revolution August insurrection, 27–​28 debt crisis, 34–​35 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 25 democratic ideology and, 14, 165 introduction to, 3

Chapelier, Loi Le, 35 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 25 Festival of the Supreme Being, 167–​68 National Assembly, 20, 36–​37 Paris Commune and, 84–​85, 87 political republicanism of, 5, 15 preexisting meanings of “terror” and, 170n17 redemptive violence, 4 révolution industrielle and, 87–​88 French socialism, 5, 7–​8, 67–​68, 84–​86 Friedland, Paul, 36–​37 Fujita, Hisashi, 135–​37 Furet, François, 14–​15 The Future of Science (Renan), 132 Futurism, 135, 160   Gambetta, Léon, 83, 107 Gauchet, Marcel, 14–​15 glory exemplified by Bonapartist militarism, 71–72 of French geopolitical expansion, 70–​71 of heroic individuals, 66–​67 premodern glory, 55–​56 of self-​defense,  80–​81 total war vs., 73 valorization of martial glory, 8–​9 Gobineau, Arthur de, 63 Goncourt, Edmond de, 83 Gordon, Daniel, 33–​34 Grainville, Cousin de, 6 Grief, Mark, 7–​8 Griffuelhes, Victor, 137 Grogin, R.C., 134–​35 guerilla war, 77–​78 Guesde, Jules, 137–​38 Guizot, François, 10–​11, 58, 63–​64   Haeckel, Ernest, 132 Halévy, Daniel, 137 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 55–​56 “Heroic Defense of Mazagran” (1840), 78–​81, 79f, 80f Herr, Lucien, 139 Hervé, Gustave, 123–​24, 158–​59 Hippler, Thomas, 55–​56 Histoire des bourses du travail (Pelloutier), 152

Index  235 History of Civilization in Europe (Guizot),  63–​64 Hobbes, Thomas, 1, 66–​67 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 6 Holocaust, 162 Homo Sovieticus, 12–​13 Hughes, H. Stuart, 135–​37 Hutton, Patrick, 85 Huxley, Thomas, 132 hypnotism, 43   individualism individual rights, 35 liberal individualism, 167 Loi Le Chapelier, 25, 35, 59, 131 Paris Commune and, 120–​21 political citizenship, 18 political individualism, 130 Tocqueville on, 82 Tocqueville’s discussion of, 60–​61 individualisme and egoism, 59, 65–​66 industrialism, 140–​41, 159 industrialization, 4, 5, 87–​88, 89 migration patterns, 87–​88 Institut Raymond Aron, 14–​15 insurrection and redemptive violence, 121 intellectualism, 125–​28, 132–​33, 150,  165–​66 irrationalist violence, 125, 128–​29, 130   Jacobin Terror, 162 Jacobins/​Jacobinism critique of, 22–​23, 28, 30–​32 fascination with lightning conduction,  45–​46 in the Paris Commune, 101 introduction to, 14 liberalism and, 58–​59 personification of Mother Nature, 41 regicide and, 21–​23 social body and, 23–24, 32 Jainchill, Andrew, 58 Jaucourt, Louis de, 34 Jaume, Lucien, 66–​67, 194n72 Jaurès, Jean, 123–​25, 124f, 132 Jennings, Jeremy, 138–​39 “Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui” pamphlet, 125, 126f Jones, Donna, 133–​34

July Monarchy (1830–​1848) introduction to, 4–​5 Paris Commune and, 84–​85, 87–​88, 89,  92–​93 social disintegration and, 53, 59–​60, 82 universal male suffrage, 95–​96 Justine (Sade), 43   Kabyles,  73–​74 Kant, Immanuel, 144–​45 Kaplan, Alice, 134–​35 Kateb, George, 162 “the king’s two bodies” doctrine, 36 Korean War, 162   La Barricade (Bourget), 131–​32 La Cité française magazine, 158 La Commune newspaper, 85–​86, 102 La Démocratie pacifique journal, 88 La Guerre et la Paix (Proudhon), 2 La Guerre sociale magazine, 123–​24 la morale, 34, 143–​44 La Phalange journal, 88 La Réforme, 93 la République démocratique et sociale,  84–​85 La Victoire magazine, 123–​24 Lacan, Jacques, 168 LaCapra, Dominick, 3, 146 Lagardelle, Hubert, 135–​45 laïcité,  167–​68 laissez-​faire economy, 34–​35, 95 Le Cri du peuple journal, 90–​91, 99,  116–​17 Le Débat periodical, 14–​15 Le Figaro newspaper, 160 Le Globe journal, 63–​64, 88 Le Mouvement socialiste, 135–​41, 144–​45,  202n55 Le Petit Journal, 127f Ledru-​Rollin, Alexandre, 93 Lefort, Claude, 13 Lejeune, Adrien, 84 Léo, André, 85–​86, 166–​67 Leo XIII, Pope, 130–​31, 200n21 Léonidas aux Thermopylae (David), 71–72, 72f Leroux, Pierre, 90, 92 Les Déracinés (Barrès), 144–​45

236 Index levée en masse, 4, 103–​5, 111 L’Évolution créatrice (Bergson), 134 Levy, Armand, 101 Levy, Jacob, 166–​67 L’histoire de la Commune de 1871 (Lissagaray),  106–​7 L’Humanité newspaper, 124f liberalism, 7–​8, 54–​55, 57, 58–​59, 120–​21 liberal individualism, 167 minimalism, 166, 167–​68, 206n10 lightning as self-​regulation/​self-​correction of nature, 43–​48, 44f, 45f, 46f Lindet, Jean-​Baptiste Robert, 48–​49 L’Insurgé (Vallès), 106–​7, 116–​17 Lissagaray, Prosper-​Olivier, 86–​87,  106–​13 Locke, John, 1, 61–​64, 67–​68 logic of elimination, 56–​57 Loi Le Chapelier, 25, 35, 59, 131 L’organization du travail (Blanc), 94 Louis-​Philippe I, King, 95–​96 Louis XVI, King acte énonciatif (prosecutorial statement), 48–​49, 50 introduction to, 4, 20–​24 “the king’s two bodies” doctrine, 36 royal inviolability debate, 25–​39 trial and execution, 48–​52, 50f, 51f   Machiavelli, Niccolò (Machiavellianism), 66–​67, 73–​74,  102–​3 MacMahon, Patrice de, 83, 120 maieutic discourse, 7–​8 Mailhe, Jean-​Baptiste,  29–​33 Maistre, Joseph de, 8 Malesherbes, Lamoignon de, 48–​49 Mantena, Karuna, 73 Marat, Jean-​Paul, 26–​27, 42–​43, 182–​83n94 Marinetti, Filippo, 3, 160, 164–​65 martial glory 8–​9 Marx, Eleanor, 107 Marx, Karl, 8–​9, 96, 107, 138, 151 Marxism,  140–​41 Mobilization of World War 1, 5 Massis, Henri, 125 Matière et Mémoire (Bergson), 134 Maurras, Charles, 123–​24, 128–​29, 131–​32,  139 Mauss, Marcel, 137

Mayer, Arno, 21–​22 means-​end rationality, 164 Meckstroth, Christopher, 6–​7 medieval penal justice, 3 Mémoires (Michel), 106–​7, 113 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 16–​17, 177n91 Mesmer, Frank (mesmerism), 43 Michel, Louise, 86–​87, 100–​1, 113–​16, 122,  166–​67 microbacterial revolution, 132 militant nationalism, 130 militarism antimilitarism, 123–​24, 125, 158–​59 of Bonaparte, 55–​56, 66–​67, 73 Prussian militarism, 159 republican militarism, 5, 87 Mill, John Stuart, 60–​61 Minimalism (of liberalism), 166, 167–​68,  206n10 “minoritarian” revolution, 86, 101–​2, 105 Miot, Jules, 111–​12 modern democracy, 2, 3, 14–​16, 52, 138–​39, 151–​52, 163, 168 modus vivendi (Rawls), 9–​10, 11–​12 moral society, 11–​12, 130 morality autonomous moral corps, 36 foundation of social body, 37–​39 improvement to, 34, 37–​38 minimalism and, 167 “most noble sentiments” of, 144–​45 regulation of, 143–​44 social cohesion and, 32, 92–​93, 95, 98 socialism and, 144–​45 supra-​individual moral organism, 11 through violence, 146–​57 war and, 68–​77, 120–​22 Moran, Daniel, 105 Morefield, Jeanne, 76–​77 Morellet, Abbé, 40–​41 Morrison, Charles-​François-​Gabriel,  28–​33 Morrissey, Robert, 56, 66–​67 Mother Nature, personification of, 41 Müller, Jan-​Werner,  165–​66 Mur des Fédérés in Père-​Lachaise,  167–​68 Muslim culture, 56–​57, 73–​74, 76–​77 mutual aid institutions/​societies, 34, 88, 92

Index  237 mystique of republicanism, 142, 153–​54 mystique of violence, 125, 139–​40   Napoleon Bonaparte. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleon III (Louis-​Napoléon), 83 coup d’état, 95–​96 declaration of war against Prussians, 117 defeat of, 107–​8 economic modernization and, 99–​100 plebiscitary dictatorship of, 96–​97, 100, 102, 105 political repression by, 95–​96 universal male suffrage, 86 Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will), 164–​65 national benefit of war, 179n22 National Convention (French Revolution), 25 national energy, 125, 126f,  144–​45 National Guard, 87, 109, 111, 113, 118 national sovereignty, 97, 163–​64 nationalism/​nationalist movement anticolonial nationalists, 3 Catholicism and, 123–​24, 126f, 130, 139 civic nationalism, 144 collectivism and, 160 conservative nationalism, 164–​65 Jaurès and, 125–​28 liberal endorsement of, 58–​59 militant nationalism, 130 Péguy and, 128–​29 Proudhon and, 139, 158–​59 redemptive violence and, 3 republicanism of, 160–​61 revival of, 128–​29 Tocqueville and, 61, 66 natural sociabilité,  33–​34 naturalism, 132, 140–​41, 158–​59 “New Philosophers,” 13 Newtonianism, 61–​62, 134 Noir, Victor, 116–​17, 119 nonviolent revolution, 73, 121–​22 Notre Jeunesse (Péguy), 142   October Revolution, 84 On Crimes and Punishment (Beccaria),  40–​41

“On the Jewish Question” (Marx), 8–​9 organic solidarity, 11 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 13 Ottoman rule, 73–​74 Oulad Riah tribe, 54   Paine, Thomas, 20 Paris Commune Bloody Week, 114 Club de la Reine-​Blanche, 101–​2 Club de l’école de médecine, 101 Club démocratique des Batignolles, 101 Committee of Defense, 107–​8 Committee on Public Safety, 112 communal revolution, 85–​86, 112 democratic political system and, 192n27 Eighteenth Arrondissement’s vigilance committee, 113 electoral defeats, 101–​2 electoral representation, 98–​99, 102 equal pay for teachers, 83 introduction to, 5, 83–​87 Lissagaray, Prosper-​Olivier, 86–​87,  106–​13 Michel, Louise, 86–​87, 113–​16, 122 as “minoritarian” revolution, 86, 101–​2,  105 National Assembly, 101 people as electorate, 92–​99 people-​in-​arms, 99–​120, 106f, 119f social question and, 87–​120 summary of, 120–​22 Vallès, Jules, 84–​85, 86–​87, 106–​7, 111,  116–​20 parlements, 29–​30, 34–​35,  36–​37 parliamentary democracy, 4, 128–​29, 135–​37, 138–​40, 145, 148–​50, 151–​52,  155 parliamentary socialism, 132, 137–​39, 140–​41, 146,  149–​50 participatory citizenship, 65–​66 participatory governance, 83 particularism, 130, 166–​67 Pasteur, Louis, 132 patrie en danger, 55–​56, 57, 107 Péguy, Charles, 10, 123–​24, 125, 128–​29,  135–​44 Cahiers de la Quinzaine,  135–​41 “mystique,” 142, 153–​54

238 Index Pélissier, Aimable, 53–​54 Pelloutier, Ferdinand, 152 penal justice, medieval, 3 Penser la révolution française (Furet), 14 people as agent of violence, 1–​2, 6–​7,  10–​11 people as electorate, 92–​99 people-​in-​arms,  99–​120 peoplehood armed mobilization and, 114 economic competition and, 98 in French political tradition, 8–​10, 18–​19, 58–​59, 128–​29,  130 representational notion of, 11–​12 “The Perception of Change” (Bergson), 134 Père Lachaise, 84, 85 Perion, Arthur, 101–​2 Pétion, Jérôme, 43 Philippoteaux, Félix, 79f, 79–​80, 80f Pitts, Jennifer, 54 plebiscitary dictatorship, 96–​97, 100, 102, 105 pluralism, 15–​16, 177n88 political Bergsonism, 135–​41 political centralization, 58, 82 political individualism, 130 political modernity, 6, 150–​51 political repression by Napoleon, 95–​96 political republicanism of Revolution, 5 populism, 15, 128–​29 positivism, 90, 100, 132, 140–​41 Pottier, Eugène, 122 premodern glory, 55–​56 primogeniture, 59 Prise du palais des Tuileries, 10 août 1792 (Bertaux), 27f probabilism,  150–​51 proletarian violence, 146–​61, 204n93 Proudhon, Cercle, 131–​32, 138–​39, 158 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 2, 97–​99, 120 Provisional Government, 118 Prussian militarism, 159 psychic dimensions of democratization, 57 public banquet bans, 95–​96 public enemy, 1 public-​spiritedness,  66 public utility, 34–​35

radical democracy, 177n88 radical women, 113–​16 radical working class, 84, 129–​30, 131, 190n3 Ranvier, Gabriel, 110 rationalism, 8–​9, 125–​28, 126f, 150–​51, 172–​73n41 Rawls, John, 9–​10, 167–​68 razes/​razzia, 77 reactionary modernists, 12–​13 reality vs. illusion, 134 Recherches physiques sur l’électricité,  42–​43 Red Poster campaign, 101–​2 redemptive violence. See also regicide and redemptive violence in French Revolution agency of, 48 as alternative to positive law, 41–​43 antitotalitarianism,  12–​19 Bergsonism and, 129–​30, 132–​41, 136f communal revolution and, 85–​86 defined, 3 democratic theory, 4–​12 insurrection and, 121 introduction to, 123–​30, 124f, 126f, 127f morality through violence, 146–​57 nationalist movement and, 3 people as agent of, 1–​2, 6–​7, 10–​11 proletarian violence, 146–​61 Sorel, Georges, 129–​32 Sorel and, 139, 141–​57 sources of appeal, 7–​12 summary of, 157–​61 Reflections on Violence (Sorel), 2, 129–​32, 139,  146–​61 reflective/​spatial cognitive comportment, 133 regicide social body and, 23–​24, 32 regicide and redemptive violence in French Revolution introduction to, 20–​24 royal inviolability debate, 25–​39 as “sacrificial violence,” 178n11 summary of, 48–​52 tyrannicide and redemptive violence,  39–​48 Regicide and Revolution (Walzer), 22

Index  239 Renan, Ernest, 132 republican militarism, 5, 87 republicanism, 5, 7–​12, 84–​85, 86–​87, 92,  98–​99 revolutionary democracy, 16–​17, 39, 48,  162–​68 revolutionary terror, 1–​2, 21–​22 revolutionary violence, 17–​18, 22, 24, 50–​52, 164–​65,  204n93 Rigault, Raoul, 112 Robespierre, Maximilien lightning as self-​regulation/​self-​ correction of nature, 44–​45, 46f moral foundation of social body, 37–​39 people as agent of violence, 1–​2, 6–​7,  10–​11 redemptive violence and, 20–​24, 30–​32, 33,  41–​43 Roland, Jean-​Marie,  27–​28 Rolland, Romain, 125–​28 romantic anti-​capitalism, 125 Roosevelt, Theodore, 165 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 14–​15, 92–​93, 137–​38 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 1, 102–​3 Considerations on the Government of Poland (Rousseau), 102–​3 Roussel, Armand, 84 royal corpus mysticum, 36–​37, 39, 48 royal inviolability debate, 25–​39 royalism abdication by monarchy, 25 atheism and, 40 Catholicism and, 130–​32, 145 conservative royalists, 141–​42 father-​king affirmation, 37 Liberty medallion and, 41 Maurras and, 123–​24 nationalist movement and, 135–​37 regicide and, 28–​29, 32 social cohesion and, 4, 39 “Sorelian royalism,” 158 “the king’s two bodies” doctrine, 36 Tocqueville and, 73 Royer-​Collard, Pierre-​Paul,  58 Rude, François, 104f   sacralized regicidal violence, 39–​41, 43–​44, 44f, 45f

“sacrificial violence,” 178n11 Sade, Marquis de, 43 Sadi Carnot, Marie François, 131 Saint-​Just, Louis-​Antoine de, 21, 31–​32, 37–​39,  49 Saint-​Simon, Henri de, 85–​86, 89–​90 Sand, Shlomo, 160 scientific culture, 46–​48, 159, 200n30 secret societies, 94–​95 seditious assemblies, 35 seigniorial privileges, 25, 59 self-​defense, 30, 57, 71–72, 76–​77, 80–​81, 103–​5,  108 self-​instituting activities,  33–​34 self-​reflexive idealization, 199n6 self-​regeneration,  5–​6 self-​regulation/​self-​correction of nature,  43 self-​rule, 6–​7, 17–​18,  65–​66 selfless sacrifice, 66 sensationalism, 61–​64,  67–​68 separation of church and state, 83, 130–​31, 137,  156–​57 September massacres (1792), 24, 27–​28 settlerism, 55, 56–​57, 68–​77 Shklar, Judith, 125, 146 “Siege of Mazagran” (1840), 78–​81, 79f, 80f Sieyès’s doctrine of constituent power, 30 singular savages vs. half savages, 75 Soboul, Albert, 27–​28 the social, 43, 52, 58–​68, 82, 84–​85, 87–​122 autonomous moral corps, 36 social atomization, 35, 58 social body abstract vision of, 88 coherence of, 63 democracy and, 87 electoral representation and, 98–​99,  102 intergenerational reproduction of, 150 introduction to, 1, 4, 7–​10, 11–​12, 14–19 moral disorder in, 89 physiological conception of, 121 regicide and, 23–​24, 32 restructuring of, 37–​39, 48, 84–​85, 120, 164, 167 social conflict and, 148 Turgot and, 35 universalism and, 135–​37

240 Index social cohesion associative bases of, 90 Bonapartism and, 66–​67 consequences for, 63 introduction to, 4, 5, 10–​12, 14, 15–​17,  39 moral bases for, 32, 92–​93, 95, 98 mutual aid institutions/​societies, 34, 88, 92 political individualism, 130 repairing of, 33–​34, 36, 38–​39, 164,  165–​68 separation of church and state, 156–​57 transcendental guarantee of, 39, 163–​64 social consensus (modus vivendi), 9–​10,  146–​47 social cooperation, 5, 83 social disintegration antitotalitarianism,  12–​19 democratization and, 128–​29 fear of, 56 introduction to, 1–​3 psychology of, 58–​68 redemptive violence and democratic theory,  4–​7 social question and, 92–​99 sources of appeal, 7–​12 social dislocation patterns, 88 social equality, 90–​91, 95 social etiolation, 65 Social Fatherland, 84–​85, 117–​18 social harmony, 43, 90, 144, 146–​48,  160–​61 social interdependence, 1, 9–​10 social laws, 34, 37–​38, 79–​80 social question, 87–​120 social republic (une société sociale), 84–​85, 99, 112, 116, 117–​18, 120–​22 social revolution, 59, 93–​94, 95, 96–​97, 100–​1, 116,  162–​68 socialisme, defined, 92 Socialisme ou barbarie group, 13 socialist/​socialism French socialism, 5, 7–​8, 67–​68, 84–​86 general tendencies, 137–​38 Le Mouvement socialiste, 135–​41, 144–​45,  202n55 morality and, 144–​45

parliamentary socialism, 132, 137–​39, 140–​41, 146,  149–​50 revolutionary socialist organizations and, 101 sociological socialism, 137–​38 utopian socialism, 89, 92 société at large, 34 société en poussière, 4–​5, 56, 59, 64, 82 sociological socialism, 137–​38 “Solution of the Social Problem” (Proudhon), 97 Sorel, Georges interpretive work on, 203–​4n89 introduction to, 2 myth, 153 proletarian violence, 146–​61, 204n93 redemptive violence and, 139, 141–​57 Sorrieu, Frédéric, 91f,  91–​92 Soult, Jean-​de-​Dieu,  72–​73 Soviet Union, 13–​14, 84 Spencer, Herbert, 11 spiritualization of matter, 159 statism, 67–​68, 118, 144 Sternhell, Zeev, 12–​13, 125 Strong, Tracy, 12–​13 subject-​object relations, 134 supernaturalism in nature, 91 supra-​individual moral organism, 11 Symbolists, 135 systematic barbarism, 159 systemic violence, 69–​70   Tarde, Alfred de (Agathon), 125 cult of action, 125 Tarde, Gabriel, 134–​35 technological transformations, 162–​63 technological utopianism, 100 terror Bugeaud’s terror, 53–​54, 55–​56 democratic theory, 14–​15, 17–​18, 32 Jacobin Terror, 162 preexisting meanings of “terror,” 170n17 revolutionary terror, 1–​2, 21–​22 Thiers, Adolphe, 83, 109 Third Estate exclusive power, 35 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4–​5, 7, 16 associational activity, 65–​66 colonization of Algeria, 68–​77, 189n115

Index  241 introduction to, 53–​57 on primogeniture, 59 psychology of social disintegration,  58–​68 summary of, 81–​82 total war and, 73, 76, 77–​81 total war, 4, 53, 73, 76, 77–​81 trade guilds, 34, 87–​88 Tridon, Gustave, 86–​87 Tristan, Flora, 92 Tronchet, François Denis, 48–​49 Turgot, Anne-​Robert-​Jacques,  34–​35   ultranationalism, 158, 160 Union de Femmes, 113 universal association, 90 universal male suffrage, 86, 92–​93, 95–​98,  100–​2 Universal Republic, 83 universalism, 8–​10, 55–​56, 103–​5, 135–​37, 165–​67, 172–​73n41 utilitarianism, 4–​5, 34–​35, 67–​68, 144–​45, 150–​51, 152, 161, 164 utopianism, 89, 92, 100–​1   Vallès, Jules, 84–​85, 86–​87, 106–​7, 111,  116–​20 Valois, Georges, 2 Vergniaud, Pierre-​Victurnien,  31–​32 Vernet, Horace, 103f Vernon, Richard, 143 Vietnam War, 162 Villain, Raoul, 123 Vinoy, Joseph, 120 violence. See also redemptive violence; regicide and redemptive violence in French Revolution absorptive aesthetic of, 121 anarchist violence, 1–​2, 66–​67 counterviolence, 1 deification of, 40 extralegal violence, 21, 22–​23

irrationalist violence, 125, 128–​29, 130 massive massacres, 162 morality through, 146–​57 mystique of, 125, 139–​40 nonviolent revolution, 73, 121–​22 proletarian violence, 146–​61, 204n93 revolutionary violence, 17–​18, 22, 24, 50–​52, 164–​65,  204n93 “sacrificial violence,” 178n11 weaponized image of, 2 visual culture, 91–​92 “The Voice of the People” (Hölderlin), 6 voluntarism, 62–​64, 66–​67, 103–​5, 134 voting systems, 49, 93–​94, 97, 100, 101   Waldron, Arthur, 105 Walzer, Michael, 22–​23 war. See also French Revolution Bonapartism and, 117 civil war, 5, 87, 179n19 Cold War, 15–​16, 162 Cold War and democracy, 15 Franco-​Prussian war, 123 glory total war vs., 73 guerilla war, 77–​78 Korean War, 162 mass war mobilization, 5 morality and, 68–​77, 120–​22 national benefit of, 179n22 total war, 4, 53, 73, 76, 77–​81 Vietnam War, 162 World War I, 4, 162 World War II, 162 Wars of Religion, 3 Weber, Max, 18 White, Hayden, 109–​10 Wolfe, Patrick, 56–​57 Women’s March on Versailles, 46–​48 working class radicalism, 84, 129–​30, 131, 190n3 World War I, 4, 162 World War II, 162