LITMIR.BIZ

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Suggested Further Reading

      Glossary

      Chronology

      Translator’s Note

       Part One: Robespierre at the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club

       1On Voting Rights for Actors and Jews

       2On the Silver Mark

       3On the Condition of Free Men of Colour

       4On the Rights of Societies and Clubs

       5Extracts from On the War

       Part Two: In the National Convention

       6Extracts from Answer to Louvet’s Accusation

       7Extracts from On Subsistence

       8On the Trial of the King

       9Draft Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

       10Extracts from In Defence of the Committee of Public Safety and Against Briez

       11Extracts from Report on the Political Situation of the Republic

       12Response of the National Convention to the Manifestos of the Kings Allied Against the Republic

       13On the Principles of Revolutionary Government

       14On the Principles of Political Morality that Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic

       15Extracts from Speech of 8 Thermidor Year II

       Notes

       INTRODUCTION

       ROBESPIERRE, OR, THE ‘DIVINE VIOLENCE’ OF TERROR

       Slavoj Žižek

      When, in 1953, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean War, a French journalist asked him what he thought about the French Revolution; Zhou replied: ‘It is still too early to tell.’ In a way, he was right: with the disintegration of the ‘people’s democracies’ in the late 1990s, the struggle for the historical significance of the French Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists tried to impose the notion that the demise of Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era which began in 1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary model which first entered the scene with the Jacobins.

      Nowhere is the dictum ‘every history is a history of the present’ more true than in the case of the French Revolution: its historiographical reception always closely mirrored the twists and turns of political struggles. The identifying mark of all kinds of conservatives is its flat rejection: the French Revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning, the product of the godless modern mind; it is to be interpreted as God’s punishment for the humanity’s wicked ways, so its traces should be undone as thoroughly as possible. The typical liberal attitude is a differentiated one: its formula is ‘1789 without 1793’. In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution which doesn’t smell of revolution. François Furet and others thus try to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly: there was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom, etc., but, as the English example demonstrates, the same could have been much more effectively achieved in a more peaceful way … Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the ‘passion of the Real’: if you say A – equality, human rights and freedoms – you should not shirk from its consequences but muster the courage to say B – the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.¹

      However,

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