Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-lcgwf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-12T12:23:37.975Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The People as a Natural Disaster: Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2017

KEVIN DUONG
KEVIN DUONG*
Affiliation:
Bard College
*
Kevin Duong is Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Bard College. Mailing address: 753 Broadway, Apt. 7, Kingston, NY12401, 865-548-9937, kduong@bard.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. This essay describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence's enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 111 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 786 - 800
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

I would like to thank the following: Carlo Accetti, Nolan Bennett, Lisa Disch, Jason Frank, Jill Frank, Paul Friedland, Murad Idris, Colin Kielty, Isaac Kramnick, Vijay Phulwani, Ed Quish, Aziz Rana, Camille Robcis, and Enzo Traverso. Thanks also to the participants of the political theory workshop at University of Virginia, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors of APSR for helpful feedback.

References

REFERENCES

Antliff, Mark. 2007. Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York, NY: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Baker, Keith Michael. 1975. Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Keith Michael, ed. 1987. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Keith Michael. 1990. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the 18th Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Keith Michael. 2001. “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in 18th-century France.” The Journal of Modern History 73 (1): 32–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Frederick. 2014. The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914–1940. New York, NY: Knopf.Google Scholar
Camus, Albert. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by Bower, Anthony. New York, NY: Vintage.Google Scholar
Cocks, Joan. 2012. “The Violence of Structures and the Violence of Foundings.” New Political Science 34 (2): 221–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Condorcet, Marquis de. 1992 [1792]. “Condorcet, 3 December 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 139–58.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert M. 1986. “Violence and the Word.” Yale Law Journal 95: 1601–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daston, Lorraine. 2004. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 24, ed. Peterson, Grethe B.. Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press.Google Scholar
Dilts, Andrew. 2012. “Revisiting Johan Galtung's Concept of Structural Violence.” New Political Science 34 (2): 191–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunn, Susan. 1999. Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light. New York, NY: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Edelstein, Dan. 2009. The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. 2000. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. 2011. Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie. Montreal and Kingston, CA: McGill-Queen's University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, Constance. New York, NY: Grove Weidenfeld.Google Scholar
Fehér, Ferenc. 1987. The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York, NY: Vintage.Google Scholar
Friedland, Paul. 2002. Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedland, Paul. 2012. Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldhammer, Jesse. 2005. The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gombrich, Ernst Hans. 1979. “The Dream of Reason: Symbolism of the French Revolution.” Journal for 18th-century Studies 2 (3): 187–205.Google Scholar
Gordon, Daniel. 1994. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. “Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” Political Theory 29 (6): 766–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Matthew Rainbow. 2017. “Regenerating the World: The French Revolution, Civic Festivals, and the Forging of American Democracy, 1793–1795.” Journal of American History 103 (4): 891–920.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 1991. “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic.” American Political Science Review 85 (1): 97–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2007. “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory.” American Political Science Review 101 (1): 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howes, Dustin Ells. 2016. Freedom Without Violence: Resisting the Western Political Tradition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huet, Marie-Hélene. 1997. Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, H. Stuart. 1958. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930. New York, NY: Knopf.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn. 2004 [1984]. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Jaucourt, Louis de. 1765. “Morale (Science des moeurs).” Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, etc., eds. Diderot, Denis and Rond d'Alembert, Jean le. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2016 edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds.), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.Google Scholar
Jaume, Lucien. 2015. Le Religieux et la Politique dans la Révolution Française: L'idée de Régénération. Paris, FR: PUF.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, David P. 1979. The King's Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kalyvas, Stathis. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. 2009. History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Livingston, Alexander. 2017. “The World According to Bannon.” Jacobin. February 7, 2017. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/bannon-trump-muslim-travel-ban-breitbart-generation-zero.Google Scholar
Mailhe, Jean-Baptiste. 1992 [1792]. “Speech to the Convention, 7 November 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 93–110.Google Scholar
Mantena, Karuna. 2010. Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marinetti, Filippo. 2006. Critical Writings, ed. Berghaus, Gunter, trans. Thompson, Doug. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.Google Scholar
Matthes, Melissa M. 2000. The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Mavidal, M. J. and Laurent, M. E., eds. 1862–1913. Archives Parlementaires de 1789 à 1860, Première Série (1787 à 1799), 82 volumes. Paris, FR: Librairie Administrative de P. Dupont.Google Scholar
Mayer, Arno J. 2000. The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
McPhee, Peter. 2012. Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Mary Ashburn. 2011. A Natural History of the Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Morrison, Charles-François-Gabriel. 1992 [1792]. “Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992, 110–20.Google Scholar
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ozouf, Mona. 1989. L'homme Régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution Francaise. Paris, FR: Gallimard.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ozouf, Mona. 1991. Festivals and the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. 1969. Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. Edwards, Stewart, trans. Fraser, Elizabeth. New York, NY: Doubleday & Co.Google Scholar
Riskin, Jessica. 1999. “The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod.” Science in Context 12 (1): 61–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robcis, Camille. 2013. The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 2014 [1783]. “Letter to Benjamin Franklin, 1 October 1783.” In The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Vol 41, ed. Cohn, Ellen R.. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 61.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 1939. Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, Tome IV, ed. Laurent, Gustave. Paris, FR: Felix Alcan.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 1992 [1792]. “Speech to the Convention, 3 December 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 130–38.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 2007 [1792]. “Answer to Louvet's Accusation (5 November 1792).” In Virtue and Terror, trans. Howe, John. New York, NY: Verso, 39–48.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 2007b [1793]. “Report on the Political Situation of the Republic (18 November 1793).” In Virtue and Terror, trans. Howe, John. New York, NY: Verso, 80–90.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 2007c [1793]. “Response of the National Convention to the Manifesto of the Kings (5 December 1793).” In Virtue and Terror, trans. Howe, John. New York, NY: Verso, 91–7.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 2007d [1793]. “On the Principles of Revolutionary Government (25 December 1794).” In Virtue and Terror, trans. Howe, John. New York, NY: Verso, 98–107.Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. 2007e [1794]. “On the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic (5 February 1794).” In Virtue and Terror, trans. Howe, John. New York, NY: Verso, 108–25.Google Scholar
Roche, Daniel. 1998. France in the Enlightenment, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sade, Marquis de. 2012 [1791]. Justine: or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. Phillips, John. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine de. 1992 [1792]. “Speech to the Convention, 13 November 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 120–6.Google Scholar
Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine de. 1992b [1792]. “Speech to the Convention, 27 December 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 166–77.Google Scholar
Sewell, William. 1980. Work & Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph. 2003 [1788]. “What is the Third Estate?” In Political Writings, ed. Sonenscher, Michael. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 92–162.Google Scholar
Slotkin, Richard. 1973. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Soboul, Albert. 1966. Le Procès de Louis XVI. Paris: Julliard.Google Scholar
Sonenscher, Michael. 2007. Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorel, Georges. 1999. Reflections on Violence, ed. Jennings, Jeremy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sternhell, Zeev. 1996. Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. Maisel, David. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stewart, John Hall, ed. 1951. A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution. New York, NY: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Strong, Tracy. 2012. Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Banister in the 20th Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tackett, Timothy. 2003. When the King Took Flight. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Talmon, Jacob L. 1952. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. London, UK: Secker and Warburg.Google Scholar
Traverso, Enzo. 2003. The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Lloyd, Janet. New York, NY: The New Press.Google Scholar
Turgot, Jacques. 1987 [1757]. “On Foundations.” In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, ed. Michael Baker, Keith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 89–97.Google Scholar
Vergniaud, Pierre-Victurnien. 1992 [1792]. “Speech to the Convention, 31 December 1792.” In Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 194–208.Google Scholar
Verhoeven, Claudia. 2009. The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael, ed. 1992. Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, trans. Rothstein, Marian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.