Rousseau and Revolution

58 Rousseau and Revolution
July 1793 but less so afterwards. Rousseau’s political thought may help us
describe the moment of the Terror, but it is less clear that the protagonists
of the Terror themselves found in his political thought the means by which
to solve the dilemmas with which they were confronted in 1793–4. Moreover,
there seems to have been considerable continuity in how Rousseau
was evoked by revolutionaries during the Terror and early Thermidor. The
issue of transferring Rousseau’s remains, for example, seems to have had
no relation whatsoever to the dynamics of the Terror. In 1793–4, talk about
the content of the Social Contract and especially the issue of political violence
was strikingly absent, apart from some obscure Swiss voices. Insofar as
the Terror witnessed a thematization of violence, Rousseau was indeed not
a useful resource, since it was emergency government and not the general
will that became crucial from October 1793 to July 1794.
Rousseau on Violence
What would the Terror have looked like through Rousseau’s eyes? To
answer that question one would have to reverse the old formula of reading
Rous seau through the lens of the Terror. Such a counter-factual exercise
would show his congenital rejection of violence. That Jacobins may have
read Rousseau selectively is a normal and comprehensible consequence of
reception history; yet it is worth pausing on the fact that if he did help
write the ‘script’ for the revolution, then he would have been an especially
disappointed and disgruntled playwright once the curtain went up on his
supposed work. I will focus on the issue of violence in the fi rst three books
of the Social Contract. Some discussions of violence there might indeed
have come from the mouths of the likes of Robespierre, Saint-Just and
Georges Couthon; others provide ammunition for a powerful critique of
the revolution from the fall of 1793 to the summer of 1794; and still other
of Rousseau’s points remain stubbornly ambiguous. In the fi rst two books
of the Social Contract, violence appears as a problem related to the establishment
of sovereignty, its preservation and the risk of disestablishment.
The third book focuses more exactly on the issue of governance.
One might say that violence rests at the origin of the social contract in so
far as the growing insecurity of the state of nature propels men and women
to enter into association. But Rousseau is clear that force itself cannot establish
the contract, and that primitive violence lies outside it. The citizen has
above all given up his ‘power to harm others’, and equality ensures that
‘power should fall short of violence’. Nevertheless, the issue of foundational