Free In Defence of the Terror by Sophie Wahnich Page A

historical analysis of the stages of Jacobin Terror, she first demonstrates how this Terror was not an uncontrolled explosion of destructive madness, but a precisely planned and controlled attempt to prevent such an explosion. She does what Furet wanted to do, but from an opposite perspective: instead of denouncing Terror as an outburst of some eternal ‘totalitarian’ which explodes from time to time (millenarian peasants’ revolts, twentieth-century communist revolutions . . .), Wahnich provides its historical context, resuscitating all the dramatic tenor of the revolutionary process. And then, in a detailed comparison between the French revolutionary Terror and recent fundamentalist terrorism, she renders visible their radical discontinuity, especially the gap that separates their underlying notions of justice. The first step towards correct politics is to break with false symmetries and similarities.
    However, what is much more interesting is that, beneath all these diverging opinions, there seems to be a shared perception that 1989 marks the end of the epoch which began in 1789 – the end of a certain ‘paradigm’, as we like to put it today: the paradigm of a revolutionary process that is focused on taking over state power and then using this power as a lever to accomplish global social transformation. Even the ‘postmodern’ Left (from Antonio Negri to John Holloway) emphasizes that a new revolution should break with this fetishization of state power as the ultimate prize and focus on the much deeper ‘molecular’ level of transforming daily practices. It is at this critical point that Wahnich’s book intervenes: its underlying premise is that this shift to ‘molecular’ activities outside the scope of state power is in itself a symptom of the Left’s crisis, an indication that today’s Left (in the developed countries) is not ready to confront the topic of violence in all its ambiguity – a topic which is usually obfuscated by the fetish of ‘Terror’. This ambiguity was clearly described more than a century ago by Mark Twain, who wrote apropos of the French Revolution in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court :
    There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; . . .  our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. 2
    Does not the same duality characterize our present? At the forefront of our minds these days, ‘violence’ signals acts of crime and terror, let alone great wars. One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence – violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the ‘objective’ violence inscribed into the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level of