Rousseau and Revolution

52 Rousseau and Revolution
This anti-totalitarian reading of Rousseau’s pernicious infl uence on the
French Revolution has proved durable. For the past 30 years, the interpretation
has been linked to François Furet, who continues to tower over French
Revolutionary historiography since his death in 1997. His admonition, fi rst
published in 1978, that ‘the French Revolution is over’ was a provocative
rebuttal to the Marxist interpretation of 1789 just mentioned. Denouncing
this ‘revolutionary catechism,’ as he put it, Furet argued that the Terror was
‘an integral part of revolutionary ideology’, an ideology that turned on the
Jacobins’ voluntarist fantasy of Rousseauean unanimity. Although Furet was
careful to distinguish between Jacobin appropriations of Rousseau and the
overlooked complexity of his thought, the implication was clear: the Terror
was not the result of mere circumstances; rather, the revolution had been
genetically predisposed to extreme violence. The revolution’s bicentennial
in 1989 championed the Furetian view, even among English-language commentators.
Simon Schama wrote that, ‘In some depressingly unavoidable
sense, violence was the Revolution itself,’ and Keith Michael Baker described
how Rousseau ‘wrote the script’ for Jacobinism. The judgement has continued
into the new millennium, with Furet’s student Patrice Gueniffey writing
in 2000 that terror is a ‘necessary product of revolution’ in general
(Furet, 1981, 62 and passim; Schama, 1989, xv; Baker, 1990, esp. chapter 4;
Hesse, unpublished, 1; Gueniffey, 2000, 202; see also McDonald, 1965;
Hampson, 1983; Blum, 1986 and Swenson, 2000). With apologies to Furet,
the French Revolution may be over, but it is not altogether clear that the
historiographical Cold War is.
In what follows, I would like to present a plausible interpretation of the
phenomenon of the Terror adequate to our post–Cold War era before turning
to a brief reassessment of Rousseau’s place in French political culture of
1793–4. I will conclude with a counter-factual exercise: reversing the formula
of reading Rousseau through the Terror, and instead read the Terror
through Rousseau, who we might imagine as a critic of democratic state
violence as much – or more – than a resource for it. Together these qualifi -
cations – the extrinsic context in the 1790s and the intrinsic arguments of
The Social Contract – allow a reassessment of Rousseau’s relationship to the
bloodshed of the French Revolution.
Terror as the Political Vacuum of the French Revolution
Recently, the intellectual historian Samuel Moyn has made the provocative
suggestion that, as it turns out, Furet’s model relied heavily on a decisive