place in 1990: everyone, today’s ‘radical Left’ included, is somehow ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror with its state-centralized character, so that the commonly accepted motto is that the Left, if it is to regain political effectiveness, should thoroughly reinvent itself, finally abandoning the so-called ‘Jacobin paradigm’. In our post-modern era of ‘emergent properties’, the chaotic interaction of multiple subjectivities, free interaction rather than centralized hierarchy, the multitude of opinions instead of one Truth, the Jacobin dictatorship is fundamentally ‘not to our taste’ (the term ‘taste’ should be given all its historical weight, as the name for a basic ideological disposition). Can one imagine something more foreign to our universe of the freedom of opinions, of market competition, of nomadic pluralist interaction, etc., than Robespierre’s politics of Truth (with a capital T, of course), whose proclaimed goal is ‘to return the destiny of liberty into the hands of the truth’? Such a Truth can only be enforced in a terrorist manner:
If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our homeland’s most pressing needs.2
Robespierre’s line of argumentation reaches its climax in the paradoxical identification of the opposites: revolutionary terror ‘sublates’ the opposition between punishment and clemency – the just and severe punishment of the enemies is the highest form of clemency, so that, in it, rigour and charity coincide:
To punish the oppressors of humanity: that is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity. The rigour of tyrants has that rigour as its sole principle: that of the republican government is based on beneficence.3
What, then, should those who remain faithful to the legacy of the radical Left do with all this? Two things, at least. First, the terrorist past has to be accepted as ours, even – or precisely because – it is critically rejected. The only alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty in front of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do the critical job better than our opponents. This, however, is not the entire story: one should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle. What this means is that the ruthless self-critique should go hand in hand with a fearless admission of what, to paraphrase Marx’s judgement on Hegel’s dialectics, one is tempted to call the ‘rational kernel’ of the Jacobin Terror:
Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: ‘What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?’ His answer is well-known: they want corruption – another name for the subject’s defeat.4
Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: ‘That which produces the general good is always terrible.’5 These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.
The further crucial point to bear in mind is that, for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre’s speech ‘On the War’ is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who forcefully denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defence of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want ‘revolution without a revolution’ to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it.6 Which is why Robespierre also denounced the temptation to export revolution to other countries, forcefully ‘liberating’ them:
The French are not afflicted with a mania for rendering any nation happy and free against its will. All the kings could have vegetated or died unpunished on their blood-spattered thrones, if they had been able to respect the French people’s independence.7
The Jacobin revolutionary terror is sometimes (half) justified as the ‘founding crime’ of the bourgeois universe of law and order, in which citizens are allowed to pursue their interests in peace. One should reject this claim on two counts. Not only is it factually wrong (many conservatives were quite right to point out that one can achieve bourgeois law and order also without terrorist excesses, as was the case in Great Britain – although there is the case of Cromwell …); much more important, the revolutionary Terror of 1792-94 was not a case of what Walter Benjamin and others call state-founding violence, but a case of ‘divine violence’.8 Interpreters of Benjamin struggle with what ‘divine violence’ might effectively mean – is it yet another Leftist dream of a ‘pure’ event which never really takes place? One should recall here Friedrich Engels’s reference to the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.9
One should repeat this, mutatis mutandis, apropos divine violence: ‘Well and good, gentlemen critical theorists, do you want to know what this divine violence looks like? Look at the revolutionary Terror of 1792–94. That was the Divine Violence.’ (And the series goes on: the Red Terror of 1919…) That is to say, one should fearlessly identify divine violence with a positively existing historical phenomenon, thus avoiding all obscurantist mystification. When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly’, demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is ‘divine violence’ – recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets – this was ‘divine violence’ … Like the biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways, it strikes out of nowhere, a means without end – or, as Robespierre put it in his speech in which he demanded the execution of Louis XVI:
Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.10
The Benjaminian ‘divine violence’ should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will’, but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, not covered by the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral’, it does not give the agent the licence to kill mindlessly with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is justice, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which the ‘people’ (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price – the Judgement Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering – or, as Robespierre himself put it in a poignant way:
What do you want, you who would like truth to be powerless on the lips of representatives of the French people? Truth undoubtedly has its power, it has its anger, its own despotism; it has touching accents and terrible ones, that resound with force in pure hearts as in guilty consciences, and that untruth can no more imitate than Salome can imitate the thunderbolts of heaven; but accuse nature of it, accuse the people, which wants it and loves it.11
And this is what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the moderates that what they really want is a ‘revolution without a revolution’: they want a revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting