Jacobins at the Gates
On February 5th, 1794, Maximilien Robespierre addressed the National Convention at a pivotal moment in the French Revolution:
“. . . the first maxim of our politics ought to be to lead the people by means of reason and the enemies of the people by terror . . . If the basis of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is murderous, terror without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing less than swift, severe, indomitable justice; it flows, then, from virtue.”
Robespierre and his followers had driven their moderate rivals from the National Convention the previous summer and seized power in the name of the Committee of Public Safety. Though Robespierre’s “Mountain” faction was only one such group within the larger Jacobin movement, popular history and imagination have long associated the name “Jacobin” with Robespierre and his followers. At war with almost all of Europe and facing rebellion and resistance throughout the country, Robespierre was convinced that counter-revolutionary forces were aligning against the leadership of the Committee in Paris. More importantly, he was able to use his considerable rhetorical skills to convince the rump members of the Revolutionary government that all manner of counter-revolutionaries – devout Catholics, moderate supporters of the Constitution of 1791, rural Frenchmen opposed to the autocratic government in Paris, and many suffering as the wartime economy collapsed and the levee en masse dragooned more and more husbands and sons into the army – were secretly conspiring with noble émigrés and their Prussian and Habsburg allies to restore the Bourbon monarchy and the Ancien Régime. For Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon and the supporters of the Committee this justified the Reign of Terror, an effort to identify and destroy “the enemy within.” Arguing that the new republic must defend itself at all costs, Robespierre claimed that "revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.”
Robespierre and the Committee’s power depended on the sans-culottes, the working classes of Paris; they frequently mobilized and unleashed the mob to enforce their will and terrorize their enemies. “Sans-culottes” translates literally as “without breeches,” referring to the tailored knee breeches worn with silk stockings by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It was originally a derogatory term until the working classes claimed it as their own during the Revolution. This poor, urban working class had grown in numbers in the 18th century, buffeted and displaced by economic changes they little understood and were powerless to control. Like other parts of Atlantic Europe, France's economy was increasingly dominated by commercial agriculture and manufacturing and connected to an ever growing international market, the first stirrings of globalization. Spurred by increasing agricultural productivity, the population was growing. For the average rural laborer, already crushed under the weight of Bourbon absolutism and an elite-dominated, and rigged, mercantile economic system, this all meant declining wages and rising prices. Many of these laborers fled to cities like Paris in search of work; on the eve of the Revolution, a deep economic recession and the bankruptcy of the French government left many unemployed and impoverished – and radicalized. The sans-culottes were a critical group throughout the Revolution, at first supporting the bourgeoisie in 1791 but then turning on them during the tumultuous days of 1793 and 1794. Eventually they would embrace the autocrat Napoleon. Feeling marginalized and abandoned first by the monarchy and then by the liberal constitutional government created in the early stages of the Revolution and controlled by the property-owning classes, they idealized a republic based on direct democracy and a state responsive to their needs. As that goal became more and more illusory, the mob fell under the sway of political nihilists who promised to tear down the existing system by any means necessary. Leaderless, amorphous, disorganized, out of work, egged on by street-corner demagogues, and energized by conspiracies, rallies and protests over the price of bread and wages often turned violent, most famously in the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 and the sacking of the Tuileries Palace in August 1792.
Into this charged atmosphere stepped Robespierre. He promised to root out the corruption and conspiracies that kept the propertied classes and royalists in power, and he appealed to the Parisian laboring poor by offering a moral economic order, national workshops, and a truly egalitarian society. It was Robespierre who led the effort to organize the mob into his armée révolutionnaire. This “revolutionary guard” would protect the republican government (which Robespierre argued was coincidental with the Revolution itself) and “educate” the people in democratic principles. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1793 – most notably in the September Massacres of 1793, as he consolidated his power – Robespierre used the armée révolutionnaire to take control of the National Guard and intimidate the Convention, surrounding it on several occasions with thousands of armed men and artillery demanding ever more radical reforms. Without the sans-culottes and his armée révolutionnaire, Robespierre would not have been able to force out his Girondin enemies on the right or his Hébertist rivals on the left.
Robespierre had much more than a political revolution in mind. That had been accomplished with the end of absolutism and the proclamation of the new Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1791. Robespierre wanted a social and cultural revolution as well, a dramatic and total reordering of French life erasing all vestiges of the Ancien Régime. He attacked the spiritual and secular power of the Catholic Church, creating the Deist “Cult of the Supreme Being” (which, not incidentally, outraged French Catholics and turned many against the revolutionary regime). The republic created a new calendar, replacing holy days and feasts with new, revolutionary holidays. The map of the country itself was reorganized, with medieval borders removed and replaced with new “rational” departments tied to the central government in Paris. New laws abolished historic local rights and customs. The metric system replaced the old, ad hoc regional system of weights and measures. The state suppressed the press and all manner of civic organizations, political and apolitical alike. In sum, the Jacobins sought to remake every aspect of French society and bind all Frenchmen to the republic and harness the power of revolutionary nationalism under the direct control of the Committee. Drawing on the writings of Rousseau, Paine, and Machiavelli – moving well beyond the ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume and those enlightened rationalists who had inspired the American Revolution and the first phase of the French Revolution – Robespierre and his supporters sought to build a new kind of state. All resistance was counter-revolutionary and the resister branded as a de facto, and now a de jure, “enemy of the people.” Historians have quite rightly identified Robespierre and the Committee as direct antecedents to 20th-century totalitarianism and authoritarianism.
Robespierre did not command a majority of support; far from it. What he did control was Paris and the mob, and by extension the levers of government and the army. He was also fully convinced he was right, so much so that his arrogance and dismissiveness made any cooperation or compromise with others impossible. Rousseau had imagined a “general will” arising out of the social contract, an organic, democratic consensus representing the collective interests of all members of society. But Rousseau, like many enlightened philosophes, also believed that society was then divided into the enlightened few and the unenlightened many. In such circumstances, a far-seeing leader or vanguard of leaders could claim to know the general will of the people, even if the people themselves were ignorant of it. This insight gave them the legitimacy to compel, by force if necessary, the people to follow them. This is the mantle of leadership Robespierre assumed (and which, of course, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot later also claimed). As the Reign of Terror progressed, and more and more of his rivals and critics were denounced and summarily executed, Robespierre succeeded only in driving more and more people to the opposition. He was finally denounced and arrested in July 1794 during the Revolutionary month of Thermidor, after less than a year in real power. His jaw was broken, either by a blow from a rifle butt or a failed suicide attempt, and he was unable to speak, his face wrapped in bandages, during his trial the next day (this may have been intentional: given his oratorical skill he might have been able to talk his way out of it or appeal to allies for assistance – the analogy to President Trump’s silencing on Twitter is an apt one). He went to the guillotine along with twenty-one other “Robespierrists” later that afternoon, fewer than thirty-six hours since he had last spoken in the Convention.
The attack on the Capitol last week brought all this to mind: the increasingly-isolated demagogue attacking the “Deep State,” an impassioned, righteous mob believing itself dispossessed and marginalized and motivated by anger and lies, the branding of large numbers of loyal, patriotic citizens as “enemies of the people” for daring to oppose the movement or promising to uphold the law. Republicans in Congress, finally bowing to the inevitable, as the besieged, traitorous Convention; Vice President Pence cast in the role of Georges Danton. The country has been warned, repeatedly, by President Trump and his apologists and enablers that we face radical socialists and anarchists seeking to destroy America in the form of Black Lives Matters protesters, Antifa, and the Democratic Party. We have been told, endlessly, that they are “the enemy within” and that anything that leads to their destruction, however extreme, is justified. The popularity of birtherism and white nativism, the imagined war on Christianity, the criticisms of “Democrat cities” full of black and brown people and led by liberal elites, an anti-intellectualism aimed at the “Fake News” media and schools supposedly co-opted by communists and the Chinese government indoctrinating children against American “values,” the need to resist a state taxing and regulating the people into submission and even slavery, the irrational conviction that nefarious forces are bent on taking away guns (and the very idea that guns are still the linchpins of liberty), the rabid defense of “heritage” in place of history, and on and on. So animated by this irrationalism was President Trump’s Republican Party that they did not even adopt a party platform at the convention this past summer – why bother, when all you really need is passionate conviction, anger, and hate?
The November election was contested on this very point: in the midst of a pandemic and concomitant economic calamity, much of it demonstrably exacerbated by his own incompetence and ignorance, President Trump claimed he alone was the man to restore order and preserve our republic in the face of this existential threat from “the enemy within.” American voters rejected this argument. For many of his supporters, that he lost the election was inconceivable and catastrophic; when Republican leaders refused to accept the legitimate results of the election, joining frivolous lawsuits and engaging in political stunts right up to and including January 6th, they merely affirmed and endorsed the lie, fatefully, and lethally, lending their own credibility and that of their offices to its validation. That alone is criminal, made more so by what followed. The events of January 6th were the almost inevitable consequence.
President Trump is no Robespierre, and for that we should certainly be thankful. He is not nearly as intelligent, educated, driven, or ideological as Robespierre was (and which made him so dangerous), and he certainly has no vision of America to offer – despite the red hats and flags – other than one in which his power is secure and unchallenged and the rule of law does not apply to him (Robespierre, by contrast, was known as “The Incorruptible” for his absolute refusal to engage in any of the grifting or self-dealing that was everywhere during the Revolution). For Trump, facing final defeat and all the attendant consequences, consciously unleashing his Jacobin mob was a very Robespierrian move. However desperately and clumsily, he clearly mounted an insurrectionary attempt to overthrow the Constitution and the November election and install himself in power at the head of some MAGA Committee of Public Safety. The goal was not simply to disrupt the formal counting of electoral votes, it was to destroy the authority of Congress (Senators Cruz and Hawley, and Minority Leader McCarthy, should think about that for a moment). Like Robespierre, but with much less idealism and more connivance, Trump took advantage of his followers, many of whom, like the sans-culottes of 18th century Paris, have been similarly cast adrift in a rapidly changing world. Globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs is real, demographic change is real, the opioid epidemic and “deaths of despair” across the country are real – and the government has shown little ability to address any of it. Hopelessness is a potent, dangerous thing.
The next few weeks will be tumultuous, and historic. Like France at the time of the Revolution, we live in perilous times. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens began thus:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
This is America as 2020 gives way to 2021. President Trump’s actions are impeachable, and he should be removed from office. To argue otherwise is sophistry. The only thing preventing impeachment is, frankly, the cowardice of the Republican leadership, who fear President Trump’s supporters. But it must be done. The rule of law must be firmly reinforced. President-elect Biden will be inaugurated on January 20th. His first order of business, after swiftly addressing the issues of the pandemic, must be to restore the primacy of truth in our public discourse. His second must be working with Democratic majorities in Congress and reaching out to and engaging meaningfully with good-faith members of the Republican loyal opposition to craft an agenda that puts the interests of the American people first. Governments only enjoy legitimacy when they are representative of and responsive to the people. President Trump rose to power in 2016 at least in part because many Americans were convinced – by lies, yes, but also circumstance – the existing government corrupt and illegitimate, and that conviction remained true for those rushing up the Capitol steps on January 6th. The lessons of that day, like the legacy of Robespierre and the Jacobin mobs who overthrew a constitutional government and ushered in the Reign of Terror, should not be ignored. If they are, the Jacobins will be back. Next time the gates of republican democracy may not hold.