Review
"Countering the historiography of the last generation, including Simon Schama…Andress focuses not just on the killings but on the "grand political pronouncements, uprisings, and insurrections"…His focus on the Terror as the culmination of a complex historical process rather than an unprovoked outbreak of violence, makes for a bracing historical reassessment." —Publishers Weekly
" [A] well-researched, well-written, and highly revisionist work."—Sunday Times
"Andress, in this compelling study . . . scotches many myths, and gives some sobering parallels to contemporary society." —Scotland on Sunday
"Andress creates a vivid picture of the time… Amid today’s issues of individual rights, legitimate limits of state power and demonization of enemies, the book has great relevance" —Waterstones Books Quarterly
Praise from the UK: "This is the most authoritative treatment we are likely to have for many years." —William Doyle, The Independent
"A tour de force. There is nothing to beat it." —Spectator
"[A] brilliantly deadpan account . . . one of the ironies that Andress skillfully reveals is that the law was denied, bit by bit, by the very men who had once been practicing it . . . he also shows how the feeble poisoned the righteous, revolutionary anger." —The Guardian
"In such alarming times, it is important to understand what exactly terror is, how it works politically, and what, if anything, can be done to combat it. The historian David Andress has made a serious contribution to this central subject of our times with an accessible account of the way terror overtook the French Revolution at the end of the 18th Century." —The Times
"It is a staggeringly complicated story that is just about ordered into a manageable narrative in Andress’s even-tempered re-telling." —The Observer
"Much important work on the French Terror has been done over the past 20 years by French, English, and American historians, and there is now a need to synthesize this into an accessible narrative history for a wider public. This is David Andress’s aim, and one which he generally achieves in this well-written and handsomely produced book." —Sunday Telegraph
“David Andress has given the reader a meticulous account of the Terror, in all its confusing twists and turns . . . While never failing to convey the drama and horrors of the Terror, Andress resists the temptation to exaggerate or turn drama into melodrama. He has written a book which stands beside Simon Schama’s Citizens.” —Times Literary Review
“Andress, in this compelling study, offers a far subtler, far more cogent approach to understanding the period, without ever becoming an apologist for the excesses.” —Scotland on Sunday
“Andress creates a vivid picture of the time… Amid today’s issues of individual rights, legitimate limits of state power and demonisation of enemies, the book has great relevance.” —Waterstones Books Quarterly
About the Author
David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, is Principal Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The Terror is his first book for a general readership.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from The Terror by David Andress. Copyright © 2005 by David Andress. Published January 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
How far can a state legitimately dehumanise its enemies? When is it right arbitrarily to detain those suspected of subversion? Can terror ever be justified as an instrument of policy? These are questions which ought not to need contemporary answers, and yet they do. We have supposed repeatedly over the last two hundred years that we live in a world attuned to the benefits of liberal civilisation — a world that ended slavery, regulated the humane conduct of warfare, created genuine democracy and held out the prospect of universal peace. A world, in short, where the almost sixty-year-old opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’, had meaning.
Yet that same world is also the world of the tyrannies of colonial rule, of eugenic experimentation in the name of modernity, of the horrors of two world wars, and the vile perversions of Darwinist science that spawned them, of racial annihilation and a half-century-long contemplation of deliberate nuclear armageddon. The new world order that was supposed to be born from the end of Soviet Communism (itself of course originally a project to better the lot of the oppressed) now seems no more than a morass of moral ambiguity and expediency.
The dawning of this troubled modernity saw two great upheavals in the political life of nations: the French and American Revolutions. The principles that underlay both have continued to resonate down the ages — whether the pithy ‘no taxation without representation’ or the varied assertions of ‘natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ to liberty, security, the pursuit of happiness and other goods. The leaders of both revolutions had a common grounding in the humanitarianism of the Age of Reason, members of a generation that across the European world was abolishing state torture, refining the process of justice away from punishment to rehabilitation, and gearing up to contest the legitimacy of slavery (though only the French tried at this point to abolish it, and that only temporarily, until Napoleon’s more pragmatic reign).
From these common roots, the two revolutions are usually seen as diverging sharply. The Americans founded an enduring constitutional settlement on the separation of powers and the checks and balances of a federal system. The French plunged into an abyss of blood and fire, to emerge under the thumb of a military dictator crowned as emperor. The story, of course, is not actually that simple. France’s decade of revolutionary strife was easily matched by the years of warfare in North America between the mid-1770s and mid-1780s. Of the colonies’ 2.5 million inhabitants, one in every twenty-five fled abroad, far exceeding the proportion that left France during her Revolution. A third of the adult male population of the colonies were in arms, and many of those were in semi-official militias, or simple armed bands, that preyed on civilian populations for years at a time. Military fatalities reached perhaps one in thirty-five of the entire population, with uncounted tens of thousands of other deaths from violence and unchecked disease. The crude numbers of dead in the wars and repressions of the French Revolution — a half-million or more — are more horrific in their scale, but, in proportion to a population more than ten times greater, little worse than the American example.
The sheer bloodiness of the American conflict is noteworthy because the rebels were trying to throw off a government that resided several thousand miles distant, and for much of the period were doing so with the active assistance of several other European powers. The French revolutionaries, by contrast, fought to overturn not merely a distant colonial power, but an entire social order, and to do so with virtually all of Europe in arms against them. What is astonishing is not so much that they tried but that, in a very real sense, they succeeded. When the French Revolution was over, the world was a very different place. The map of Europe was no longer drawn to suit the competing dynastic ambitions of ancient monarchical houses, and political debates across the continent no longer hinged on the selfish assertion of ancient privileges and prerogatives. Structures that were created by the powers of Europe explicitly to resist the threat of further revolution nonetheless were also by definition innovations, radical breaks with the past. Out of the destabilising threat of subversion from below came the ‘Concert of Europe’ agreed after the fall of Napoleon, an international system that for a generation governed the politics of the continent. New creations like the kingdom of the United Netherlands came into existence as buffer-states against French revolutionary contamination, and the map of central Europe took a decisive step towards the emergence of a modern Germany.
The French Revolution’s impact was so deep seated that simply turning the clock back had become impossible, and the more profound recognition of this was in the birth of an entire new ideology — conservatism — designed to prevent further upheaval without being mere futile backward-looking reaction. Just as conservatism was born in revolution, so too more directly was liberalism, the crystallisation of the concern for the rights-bearing individual citizen that had animated the initial revolutionary pronouncements of 1789. Together, these two political currents would dominate the modern world, until with the growth of the marginalised industrial working classes of the later nineteenth century socialism intruded violently to join them.
But socialism, too, was a child of the French Revolution. Intellectually, Karl Marx derived his entire picture of historical progress from liberal writers who saw in the Revolution the inevitable rise of the bourgeoisie.3 Socially and politically, the example of the Revolution’s radical phases produced a message of ineradicable commitment to human equality that demanded action against the injustices of an industrialising world. Meanwhile nationalism, without which the history of the last 150 years is simply inconceivable, was also born in its modern forms out of the aspirations and conflicts of the revolutionary era. The modern sense of national identity, of active belonging to a national citizen-body with its associated freight of rights and duties, is as much a product of this upheaval as is the tricolour or the Marseillaise. On a whole host of political, intellectual and structural planes, the French Revolution is the fount and origin of our modern world.
Here, of course, lies the heart of the historical dilemma we began with, for the French Revolution about which William Wordsworth rhapsodised ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ is also the Revolution that brought the Terror to European consciousness, passing its thousands of victims beneath the modern, humane, death-dealing blade of the guillotine, turning an entire realm upside-down with paranoid pursuit of dissent and pitiless subjugation of individuals to a faceless national cause.
Many have argued that the Terror was inherent in the Revolution’s project of innovation — a point made by countless reactionary and Catholic polemics — or that it was inherent in the political culture from which the Revolution itself sprang. That view is particularly prominent today, and has been since the late 1980s. In the declining years of the Cold War, and even more after the fall of the Soviet bloc, there seemed little value in earlier interpretations that put revolution at the heart of modernising change. Historical opinion instead focused on the supposedly unique and iniquitous qualities of revolutionary discourse — on how the power of the revolutionaries to reshape language, to give new names to old things, slid into a wild and erratic intoxication of power, to the commitment to change everything, and to remould humanity in an image so purified as to become perversely meaningless, merely a justification for further purges and executions of those who did not measure up.
Along the way, it has sometimes become hard to see what the Terror actually was. In particular, it is seldom acknowledged now how far it was (much like the American Revolution) a civil war, deriving much of its grim impetus from the inevitable bitterness of conflict between former friends. Seldom, too, is it recognised just how important and active a role the enemies of the Revolution played in the aggravation of its politics — how eagerly, for example, the king and queen of France steered the country into foreign war, with the avowed intention of using the conflict to destroy the Revolution. In all the writings on the paranoid tendencies of the revolutionaries (tendencies which are, again, well attested in the parallel American experience too),5 little attention is given to the issue of how such beliefs were given ample food by the betrayals, some real and deliberate, some clumsy and unintentional, that dogged the very heart of revolutionary politics.
