Legacies of Terror: Interrogating Mass Violence in Post-Revolutionary France

The revolutionary Reign of Terror in France (1793-4) was an event of destructive violent proportions: some seventeen thousand people had been executed, a collective death sentence was hanging over the head of about one hundred and forty thousand political refugees (the émigrés), and about half a million people were languishing in makeshift prisons as suspects of various counter-revolutionary offenses. Yet it was also an act of political creation that transformed French society in myriad and often unpredictable ways.

This paper investigates the constructive aspects of the Terror by looking at its aftermath. It argues that the same revolutionary processes that gave rise to the first, modern use of terror as a political tool also led to an unprecedented public interrogation of the ways in which society is marked by the legacies of mass violence. In the Terror’s wake, revolutionary leaders, relatives of victims and citizens at large grappled with novel dilemmas such as how to locate individual responsibility in the aftermath of mass crime? How far back to go in remedying the damage caused by state actions? What place was there to commemorate a difficult past, one that evoked disagreement and horror rather than glory? Such dilemmas were novel in that they derived from some of major political innovations of the French Revolution: they would have been unthinkable under absolutism. Dealing with the dilemmas left in the wake of the Terror as an event of mass violence came to be a significant part of how post-revolutionary society reconstituted itself.

The paper draws on my recently completed doctoral dissertation, The Afterlives of the Terror: Dealing with the Legacies of Violence in Post-Revolutionary France, 1794-1830s (University of Chicago, 2010.)