For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies.
But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility.
The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by timeless standards of morality.
In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violence--in Danton's words, to be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be so--and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war.
The Terror was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty.
About the Author: Sophie Wahnich is a historian based at the Laboratoire d'anthropologie des institutions et des organisations sociales in Paris.
Her previous publications include L'impossible citoyen.
L' tranger dans le discours dela R volution fran aise and La Longue patience du peuple: 1792, naissancede la R publique.
Slavoj i ek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic.
He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential i ek, and many more.
From the Hardcover edition.
| Author | Sophie |
|---|---|
| Longue patience du peuple | 1792 naissancede la |
Verso In defence of the terror: liberty or death in the french revolution, paperback/sophie wahnich
