Ping Pong 26: Revolving Terror
The fact that everyone assumes that they know about the French Revolution, that is the Grisly Terror, and the mass execution of pretty well most of the Aristocracy is a universally recognized misconception. As with many other popular legends, this fact is actually false on both counts. On the one hand, large portions of the Aristocracy survived the Terror, and kept their estates, some even joined the new regime. On the other hand, the idea that the Terror involved mass murder on an unprecedented scale is an idea which one needs to treat with a degree of caution. It is certainly true that around 20,000 people were executed in the course of the Terror, and yet that number pales into insignificance against the 100,000 or so killed in the bloody reaction to the Terror by the forces of law and order that eventually took power. The lesson of these two figures is that old sad one; Deaths count for more if those who are being killed are somehow the ‘natural’ rulers of the state or world. 20,000 is a whole lot of deaths if it includes a very large number of aristocrats (in the same way that 3,000 is a lot of deaths if those deaths are Western), but 100,000 sans culottes (or Iraqis or Afghans) are not so very many…
However one needs of course care here. In spite of the relatively few deaths, the Terror remains critical in the understanding of the French Revolution and its aftermath, both as a historical event but also because in the course of that event, rather distinct elements were defined and conjoined, a conjunction which still matters today, and still locates us firmly within the shadow of the Great Terror. These elements or perhaps rather problems, might be loosely said to be: the problem of the questioned state; the problem of applying theory; and the problem of the poor. Each of these elements will then be considered in turn in this Rant, before the nature of their conjunction in the Terror itself is assessed.
The problem of the questioned state is the problem which dated back to Hobbes and the English Civil War. States or political parties tend to collapse the minute that the rules which allowed those groups to be set up in the first place, are questioned. The problem here is that the assumptions which set up the system are (for Hobbes at least) by definition arbitrary, and so if they are questioned they can be no real answer to that question. On the contrary, all that will be produced in answer will be a whole nexus of shifting possible alternative solutions. Each such solution will answer the problem in their own way, and yet will not be ‘better’ than any of the others, and will be subject to collapse when questioned in any deep way. The problem is then exacerbated by the fact that each of these solutions, each of these constitutions will be developed, adopted, and adapted by a specific interest group or faction as it reflects their own individual concerns or needs. The state then dissolves into a series of conflicting interest groups, each with their own constitution, fighting it out in a veritable state of nature, where all rules are up for grabs, and permanently questioned.
This state of conflict was seen very clearly in the years that led up to the Great Terror. Numerous constitutions came and went, and with them voting practices and interest groups, in a kaleidoscope of conflicting hopes. On a totally different register, this kind of endemic conflict is one of the silent elements that surrounds all political parties. A party that thinks it is doing well will certainly and unquestionably pull together. But if there comes a moment when a party suddenly has a deep crisis of faith in their ability to win, and starts to soul search, all hell can break loose, or at least party discipline collapse, and devolve into conflicting groups. Each faction will peddle their own solution to the current problem, a solution that subtly reflect their own position in the party, and (the solutions of MPs in safe seats is different to those in marginals), and do so with blithe disregard for any pretence of party discipline.
It is of course the case that the ‘state of nature’ into which such bouts of questioning propel the unfortunate state or political party, cannot carry on forever. There will come a moment when such an anarchy itself will collapse and a strong government reassert its grip on the state or party. However, according to the Hobbesian paradigm, a paradigm confirmed in the French (and English) revolutions, there are two salient features about the eventual resolution to the state of nature. On the one hand the elements that bind together the state are elements (or better a faction) internal to the system. (Stalin made the party secretariat the government, when it started off as merely a part of government.) One group will then use the others in some way, and seize power. Once in power this faction can only hope to keep its position by impressing the sheer inevitable nature of its rule upon everybody else. This impression is best preformed by some great (and violent) ritual, in which the power and by implication the unquestionable nature, of the new regime is confirmed, be that ritual a mass execution, the killing of a monarch, or a war. Secondly not only will the faction that seizes power be internal to the system, but also the regime of power which wins out will most likely be one of those initially thrown up in the welter of solutions which was associated with the collapse of the old regime in the first place. The great Committees of General Security and Public Safety that orchestrated the Terror were prefigured within the earlier kaleidoscope of factions or systems. The difference is of course, that in the case of the Terror, what had merely been an arm of government became the government itself. Thence not only is the faction which gains power already present in the system of government but also the new constitution will already have been outlined. The act of usurping which founds a strong government is not then the simple imposition from outside of an alien political system, but the rather the unpeeling from which, of elements that were already immanent to the system itself. Moreover the appeal to the naturalness of the system (that is, to its unquestionable status) is itself created within the system itself. Each such system must make itself appear god (or Reason) given, and will use Terrors great and small to do so: That is, human sacrifices, confirming as they do the power of a state over life and death, were (and are) the agency by which a state confirms its unquestionable authority (think here of the link between soldiers, religion, the monarch, and the delight of politicians in War).
The problem of theory, rests on that deepest of problems, how can one apply a self-evident truth to a world that cares nothing for it? Such self-evident truths are rather common place. Any individual left alone for long enough (or in a group of like minded individuals) can bounce off a whole number or welter of solutions that could (and should) make the world a better place. It can all seem so simple - at least on paper. Moreover these solutions can (with a little more difficulty it is true) be applied to analyse the world in an aposteriori manner. That is, one can develop ideas to understand what has been, quite easily (although such ideas are more difficult than the cloud compelling world of solutions). The real rub of course comes at the moment when one moves from the world of thought back to the real world, a world what is quite capable of taking up and twisting any simple solution into a thousand different shards of belief, hope and despair.
At the real nub of such a problem lies the galaxy of difference that opens out in the application of every solution. To think that solution up, is very different from applying it, which is very different again from asking people to inhabit that solution, and take it on as their lives. Of these three elements it is clear that the last is the one that is the hardest to predict. One might apply a solution according to the rulebook, but that does not mean that when it is taken up in other’s minds and refracted into their own lives, it need look exactly the same as it did on paper. Indeed in a sense it cannot. To live a theory and to think that theory up (and so have a life outside of it) are clearly utterly different from each other.
Hence the problem that faced Robespierre and St. Just was the problem of what to do when the theories which they espoused looked so different in other’s lives. How could one make people behave according to plan? Their answer was, that the only way was to control the application of that theory utterly, and to ensure that any real deviation from what was supposed to happen led to death. But this ‘solution’ then placed the entire population theoretically at least, on Death Row, as to have one’s own life in which one attempted to use the principles that one had been given to live a live apart from the application became itself a capital offence. This last fact fairly directly led to the collapse of the regime. One can (and must) in the interest of creating government create an arbitrary base for one’s power, and yet (according to Hobbes’ rule) that arbitrary nature threatens the entire population, so that then the entire system will collapse back into the state of nature. I.e., the lesson is that witch-hunts are all very well (and might be the stuff of government itself) and yet one needs to be very very careful that one defines exactly who the witches are allowed to be. The minute that too many people could be witches, or terrorists for that matter, the entire the hunt becomes counter productive, and likely to produce more enemies than it can ever ‘discover’ (this is the problem of the equation of Moslem=Radical=Suspect=Terrorist, an equation not drawn but certainly implied, and which once implied breeds endless new terrorists of its own).
The problem of the poor comes down to a double equation which bedevils modernity (and left wing politics). On the one hand the French Revolution saw the evolution of a formula that states that the poor in their equality of poverty were somehow recipients of the truth. On the other, there is the idea that the poor had the absolute right to confuse their own desperation with government: such that any increase in their poverty was therefore automatically a reason to change the government come what may. For the first time in history (as was considered in last week’s Rant) the personal concerns and needs of the people became the stuff of politics and political changes. Each of these elements needs to be briefly considered in turn.
The equation of poverty=equality=good was not created by the French Revolution. This very basic equation was the mainstay of peasant thought from the year dot. What the French Revolution did was to change it into a viable and important political theory. The equality that poverty itself necessarily creates became an ideal. The aim of government was then to set up this type of equality, not in poverty but wealth. One must be equal in riches, as one is equal in being poor. The idea that the equality and poverty were reflections of one another was lost within a welter of good intentions and reformist ideals. Lying at the base of these ideals was the belief that equality at some deep level transfigured the poor-rich divide, and did so in two contrasting senses. On the one hand the ethic of equality was seen as more important then the ethic of wealth: Better all be equal than only some be rich. On the other hand, the idea then ran, that once one had set up a degree of equality in poverty (where it is easier to define) one can move that equality into wealth, based on riches, and not on poverty. That is that equality might itself be the secret to forming (or might be the secret to maintaining) a new Jerusalem.
The ins and outs of this set of equations are clearly complex. One has to remember that the equality=wealth equation is itself relative. To another state therefore, our society might indeed look united in wealth itself, while to those inside the state (the UK) it certainly is not (in the same way that the Aristocracy all seemed rich to the sans culottes). Whether a society is or is not equal is therefore a matter of perspective. And yet the maxim or goal of equality (to a degree) remains, and was from the French Revolution onwards, confused with Justice.
The second dimension that the French Revolution opened up on the level of the people, involved the setting up of a tight correlation between government and wealth. Peoples could (and indeed must) change government as soon as their own level of wealth decreased (or looked threatened). Political opinions were therefore to be based (quite literally) on the everyday bread and butter issues of immediate life, and not on any hope or belief that the government might be doing something that might eventually lead to a wider wealth for all. A scepticism that may well be justified, but which certainly makes the task of governing all the harder, as the everyday erupts constantly into the politics of tomorrow.
It is of course no surprise, given the disparate nature of these elements that the regime of Robespierre, which sought to weld these elements into a single indivisible union, could not and did not, last. The ethic of equality, and the right of the people to food, pulled away from the demand for a republic based on virtue (whatever that was), and the two elements became caught up in a murderous factional conflict of their own. But in spite of this inevitable failure the dream that a union could be formed between theory and practice, and government and people lingered on, as a political problem (or goal) in its own right. A goal which then became a favoured topic for philosophers and politicians alike; and to one solution of this problem, the next Rant will turn.
