The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France
by David Andress
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Book Summary Information
Author: David AndressEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-12-26
ISBN: 0374530734
Number of pages: 456
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France
Book Review: A Very Thought Provoking Book
Summary: 4 Stars
Terror as State Policy? This is the essential question posed by David Andress' excellent work, "The Terror: the Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France".
This book should be read by the reader as an inquiry not so much into the events of the French Revolution as to his or her own thoughts on the question posed. It is immensely relevant to us today, when we see, worldwide, an increasing abridgement of civil rights worldwide in response to the rise of Islamic and other-oriented terror groups adopting similar policies.
The United States, as the primary target for most Islamic groups, has directly to confront the question of the degree to which we are willing to use state terror policies to protect ourselves. By such policies we don't need necessarily, or immediately, to envision the most extreme examples; of tumbrils and heads in a basket, but rather the extrajudicial use of the state's police power to quell what it deems to be threats to the nation when that power is accountable to the Executive alone. The Montagnard's demand that the Constitution of 1793 be suspended, and that the Committee of Public Safety remain in power, in control of the police powers, until the threat was quelled, does in fact have its counterpart in the Patriot Act and the broad police powers assumed by the Bush Administration's legal authorities on behalf of the executive and accountable only to the executive. Gitmo was chosen specifically because it was deemed to be outside the reach of the judiciary. The detention of Jose Padilla was done through recourse to the war making powers of the President, again, as justified, outside the reach of the judiciary. Even the patdowns and fullbody scanners at airports represent an extrajudicial reach in that probable cause is not even required to justify a TSA agent's decision to subject any given individual to personal scan or even more personal search.
Imagine a decade hence, when Islamic terrorists, or some other group with a perceived grievance against the United States, succeed in a few more attacks against our cities...not just an exploded airplane, but a series of suicide bombings, or something else which puts us in daily fear of our lives. Imagine that we, as a people, have not only to worry about a worldwide set of enemies bent on our destruction, but even people within our own nation who would be as happy to see our regime go down as any of our most deadly enemies outside our borders?
We can all imagine it. But we don't have to. Because Andress' book, on a daily basis ever bit as detailed as the week after 9/11, shows us exactly what the French Revolution, and its leaders, faced during that critical year of 1793-94, known as the Terror. And what we can imagine happening a decade or two down the road in America DID happen in France during that year.
In reading this book, therefore, keep the following question in mind: where will you stand if we, as a nation, come to that point where we reasonably have cause to believe, on a daily basis, that our lives are threatened by enemies foreign and domestic alike? To what degree will you accept the detention of people whose guilt is presumed by their associations, or past words, or, finally, their perceived lack of enthusiasm for the governing regime? If in fact there were insurrection in this country, rebellion against the Federal government, how far would you allow the Feds to go in crushing it? Would you accept the attempted destruction of an entire city, as the French government did Lyons, as an object lesson in further resistance? Or would you accept the defiance of that city even though it were accepting aid and comfort from your nation's declared enemies?
Put yourself in the position of the average Frenchman. In reading about the sometimes, as most would agree, necessary bloodletting, for there were definite and known traitors uncovered, you must confront as well the mindless bloodletting, and then too the in-between bloodletting. For instance, can you, for yourself, justify the September Massacres, the night of 5 September 1793, when prisoners deemed liable to revolt were executed after summary hearings at best? Does the fact that the petty criminals were exempted from the executions redeem them? Can they ever be justified taking place, even though, at that moment, the vast majority of Parisians were convinced of the imminent threat of insurrection?
Is it acceptable to execute children with their parents--remembering, as we must, that we as a nation already accept the trying of children as adults and the imposition of appropriate sentences for the same...a child proven to be involved with his parent's subversive goals, especially in our modern world, can be as much as threat to lives as a the most hardened terrorist. We saw the reaction to children's deaths at Waco...what if those children are instead in, say, a white supremacist compound, or in an Islamic mosque taken over by militants...if a thirteen year old Muslim boy is found to be setting an ied in one of our streets in a civil insurrection, is he subject to summary execution? Is it always wrong to execute children? If not, where draw the line? These too are questions that the revolutionaries, from the Representatives on assignment up to Robespierre himself had to face; they are questions as well we might as a people need to face in the not so distant future.
If the book moves sometimes a bit slowly at times with the detail, then bear with it, it is important because it is of the details that the stuff of history is made. It is the cumulative effect of the little decisions, the individual events, the individual actions, on those who experience them that decides ultimately where those indivdiuals will stand. So too with us, as one attempted bombing is followed by another, and another, until another actually succeds, and then a few more plots foiled...and then another succeeds...as more and more we realize that there are those in our own nation who are hostile to us and do not mind killing their fellow citizens...ranging from army majors in Texas to disaffected youth in Seattle to well-off ideologues in Connecticut...the events in Lyon, Marseille and Paris have their counterparts today in our own world. If you know how to read history, you can skim over the repetition of instances, absorbing them lightly so as to draw the main point: these are not just historical made-ups, these are things that actually happened and that the people who had to decide whether to support the Terror or not had to take in account in making those decisions.
I would have enjoyed a bit more depth of the main characters in Andress' treatment of the Terror, but there are other sources for that purpose. This book should be read in light of what we as a nation face today, and in that respect, not only do I consider it not politicized, but I think that bringing that to light more often might make have made it more instructive to the reader.
For myself, I came to this book already sympathetic to Robespierre, and left it admiring him even more. To my mind, the most critical phase of the revolution, and what earned Robespierre truly his sobriquet of the Incorruptible, was his willingness to deal with both the quasi-anarchists led by Hebert and the Paris Commune, and at the same time to deal with the moderates in Danton and the Girondists. Only by demonstrating his willingness to quash anyone who dissented, by the same methods, could he save the Revolution as he saw it, which ultimately was the most idealistic version of it. No regime was ever going to measure up to his (and Saint-Just's) vision, but of those offered, even an incomplete fulfillment was better than what any of the other competing visions had to offer. Far from destroying the Revolution, Robespierre saved it, and his heir was not the Directory, but Napoleon, who merely, in making himself emperor, legitimized the absolute role Robespierre played a decade prior, but ultimately institutionalized Robespierre's vision of a secular, rational, civil government based on merit. Without Robespierre's inflexibility in pursuit of his own vision, and his willingness to sacrifice anyone, no matter whom, who contravened that vision, it is likely that France would have slid either into the hands of Hebertists and the Commune and vicious civil war on a far larger scale than she suffered, or, even worse, that the moderacy of the Girondists would have been unable to summon the absolute will France required in order to withstand counterrevolution at home and the armies of her enemies apart.
The question to be faced in respect to Robespierre and the Terror is whether the Revolution was worth saving. There can be little doubt that as many, if not more, would have died had the Allies succeeded in reimposing the Bourbons upon France; the vengeance of the regime and restored aristocrats would likely have doubled or trebled the cost in life of the Terror. Therefore the choice is simple: would you trade, for the casualties, the Revolution for the Bourbons?
Most of us would say not. France chose the Revolution, by submitting to the discipline of the Terror, and survived. Will America be faced with the same question, and, if not, where will you tand?
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