Rousseau and Revolution

Rousseau and the Terror 61
governance roles, proportion, democracy’s structurally instability, and the
tendency of the government to become an alternate sovereign (ibid.,
Book III, chapters 1, 4 and 8)?
Rousseau makes much of this last point, which seems a prescient critique
of bureaucracy. Government is disposed to a ‘continual effort against sovereignty’.
Consequently, either the government contracts and acts like a ‘master
and tyrant’, or the state dissolves, which results in the ‘abuse of government’
called anarchy. In either case, deterioration and disestablishment are the
result. One symptom of the government’s contraction is its growing ‘horror’
when faced with the people; it ‘discourage[s] the citizens from holding’
assemblies. The Committee for Public Safety’s conservative attack on
popular societies and the Commune fi ts here (ibid., Book III, chapters 10,
14 and 18).
In the fi nal chapter of Book III Rousseau comes closest to identifying the
issue of the undecidability I associated with the Terror above. ‘[C]hanges
are always dangerous’, he says. A ‘regular and legitimate act’ must be
‘distinguish[ed] from a seditious act, and the will of an entire people from
the clamor of a faction. [ . . . ] [T]he prince must [ . . . ] preserve its power
in spite of the people, without incurring the possible charge of usurpation’.
Throughout the revolution, and especially in the Terror, determining a
‘regular and legitimate act’ from a seditious one, and the will of the people
from a faction, was the entire problem. Robespierre and his cohort always
believed they were acting for the people while they were preserving their
power, but they were unable to defend themselves from the charge of usurpation.
Hence the label assigned to Robespierre and others on 9 Thermidor
that has resonated ever since: tyranny (ibid., Book III, chapter 18).
Minimizing Rousseau’s Infl uence on the Terror
The Terror was a complex phenomenon that transpired in the empty democratic
space opened by the collapse of the Old Regime. The people were in
charge but could not be found; to represent them was to betray them. The
revolutionary state was unable to achieve a complete monopoly on violence,
though it killed many people trying to do so. Circumstances were what
ultim ately drove the Terror. The foundational and constitutive moment of
modern French democracy was unstable, chaotic, dense, indecisive (in
Schmitt’s sense) and caught in an intensifying whirlwind of confl icting
forces. The Terror was over-determined, and its essence was irreducible to
ideas and books alone.