Rousseau and Revolution

54 Rousseau and Revolution
as a whole. It was part of the revolution. There was nothing inevitable about
it, although given the momentum of its dynamics there was perhaps something
irresistible about it. The word ‘terror’ itself held different meanings to
different parties. Often it merely described great anxiety and fear, but
eventually it did describe a strategy, fi rst ascribed to the enemies of the
revolution before being taken up by the revolutionaries themselves. The
notion of the Terror as a coherent system, however, emerged ‘after the
fact’ in Thermidor, the period of the revolution that opened with the fall
of Robespierre. Curiously, it was the Thermidorians and not the agents of
the Terror on the Committee for Public Safety who succeeded in interring
Rousseau’s remains in the Pantheon.
The revolutionary state of the 1790s – a decidedly incipient state in fl ux –
never managed before Napoleon to secure a monopoly on violence. Jean-
Clément Martin has argued that the absence of a strong state in the 1790s
led directly to an eruption of different kinds of violence, from local vendettas
to civil war to revolutionary justice (Martin, 2006, esp. chapter 5). 3 As
German jurist Carl Schmitt (himself no fan of democracy) would say, there
was no single sovereign power able to decide when the situation of ‘extreme
peril’ had passed and the state of emergency related to the suspended constitution
of 1793 could end (Schmitt, 2005, 6). In spite of rhetoric about the
people, the nation, the revolution, there was no one to decide. It is worth noting
in passing that, like Furet, Schmitt saw in Rousseau’s theory of the general
will a template for revolutionary sovereignty. He was no less critical, but
for different reasons: the people or the nation expressed a mere ‘organic unity’
that was inferior to a king’s decision-making power (ibid., 49). In short, ‘the
people’ are not a person. And yet – here is the important point – the revolution
never succeeded in pulling together in practice the organic unity imagined
by Rousseau or the Jacobins. Gaps remained. For as much as revolutionary
discourse and practice were unitary in aspiration, they were entirely messy in
execution. What James Swenson has called the revolution’s ‘constitutive
instability’ was not just semantic or semiotic; it was physical, bodily and real
(Swenson, 2000, 225).
Rousseau in the Terror
This orienting snapshot of the Terror as a dynamically interactive historical
phenomenon irreducible to ideology or texts leads to the question of
Rousseau’s role in it. To be sure, the topic has been thoroughly explored.
There is no doubt that by 1793 his thought had spread through the ranks