people), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the ‘complex circumstances’ which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people – suffice it to recall two examples here, Robespierre himself, his ‘great truth’ (‘the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself’), and Mao’s critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, where he qualifies Stalin’s point of view as ‘almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants.’).42 And is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe that looms over our horizon not precisely the combination of these four moments? What is demanded is:
– strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in terms of renunciations, i.e., one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);
– terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal ‘freedoms’, technological control of the prospective law-breakers);
– voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logic of capitalist development – it is not a question of helping the historical tendency or necessity to realize itself, but to ‘stop the train’ of history which runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe;
– and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the ‘informer’ who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (Already in the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)43
Back in the early seventeenth century, after the establishment of the shogun regime, Japan made a unique collective decision to isolate itself from foreign cultures and to pursue its own path of a contained life of balanced reproduction, focused on cultural refinement, avoiding wild expansion. Was the ensuing period which lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century really just an isolationist dream from which Japan was cruelly awakened by Commodore Perry on the American warship? What if the dream is that we can go on indefinitely in our expansionism? What if we all need to repeat, mutatis mutandis, the Japanese decision, and collectively decide to intervene into our pseudo-natural development, to change its direction? The tragedy is that the very idea of such a collective decision is discredited today. Apropos of the disintegration of state socialism two decades ago, one should not forget that, at approximately the same time, the Western social-democratic welfare state ideology was also dealt a crucial blow; it also ceased to function as the imaginary able to arouse a collective passionate following. The notion that ‘the time of the welfare state has passed’ is today a piece of commonly accepted wisdom. What these two defeated ideologies shared is the notion that humanity as a collective subject has the capacity to somehow limit impersonal and anonymous socio-historical development, to steer it in a desired direction.
Today, such a notion is quickly dismissed as ‘ideological’ and/or ‘totalitarian’: the social process is again perceived as dominated by an anonymous Fate beyond social control. The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which one cannot fight – one either adapts oneself to it, or one falls out of step with history and one is crushed. The only thing one can do is to make global capitalism as humane as possible, to fight for ‘global capitalism with a human face’ (this is what, ultimately, the Third Way is – or, rather, used to be – about). The sound barrier will have to be broken here, the risk will have to be taken to endorse again large-scale collective decisions – this, perhaps, is the main legacy of Robespierre and his comrades to us today.
Moments before Robespierre’s death, the executioner noticed that his head would not fit into the guillotine with the bandages applied to his jaw wounds, so he brutally ripped them off; from Robespierre’s ruined throat emerged a ghastly piercing scream, only cut short as the blade fell upon his neck. The status of this last scream is legendary: it gave rise to a whole panoply of interpretations, mostly along the lines of the terrifying inhuman screech of the parasitical evil spirit which signals its impotent protest when it is losing possession of its host human body – as if, at this final moment, Robespierre humanized himself, discarding the persona of revolutionary virtue embodied and emerging as a miserable scared human being.
The popular image of Robespierre is that of a kind of Elephant Man inverted: while the latter had a terribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was a kind and polite person hiding ice-cold cruel determination signalled by his green eyes. As such, Robespierre serves perfectly today’s anti-totalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray him as a cruel monster with a sneering evil smile, as was the case for nineteenth-century reactionaries: everyone is ready to recognize his moral integrity and full devotion to the revolutionary cause, since his very purity is the problem, the cause of all trouble, as is signalled by the title of the latest biography of Robespierre, Ruth Scurr’s Fatal Purity.44 The titles of some of the reviews of the book are indicative: ‘Terror Wears a Sea-Green Coat’, ‘The Good Terrorist’, ‘Virtue’s Demon Executioner’, and, outdoing them all, Graham Robb’s ‘Sea-Green, Mad as a Fish’.45 And, so that no one misses the point, Antonia Fraser, in her review, draws ‘a chilling lesson for us today’: Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but ‘[t]he bloodlettings brought about by this “sincere” man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant.’46 Happy we who live under cynical public-opinion manipulators, not under the sincere Muslim fundamentalists ready to fully commit themselves to their projects … what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as was clear to Robespierre, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’, the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution:
But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.47
ROBESPIERRE TEXTS:
In English:
ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Speeches (with a biographical sketch), New York, International Publishers, 1927.
In French:
ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Oeuvres, edited by A. Soboul and M. Bouloiseau, Paris, 10 vols, 1958–67, (reprinted 2000 by Société d’Etudes Robespierristes (Paris); an eleventh volume of unpublished texts is in preparation).
Old but useful selections:
ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Textes choisis, notes and introduction by Jean Poperen, Paris, Editions sociales, 3 vols, 1956–58 (reprinted 1974).
ROBESPIERRE Maximilien, Discours et rapports à la Convention,