topics: |  terrorism | history | france |

To me, this book demonstrates that new things can be said about even a event as widely-written on as the French revolution.

The wide-ranging introduction by Zizek (adapted from a 1997 essay) is important not only because it shows how the moral of the story - that revolution is not the only form of violence, applies to our world today, but it also highlights how our view of the past is constantly being coloured by the lenses of the present.

---

Foreword Slavoj Zizek: The Dark Matter of violence

(Putting terror in perspective)

Sophie Wahnich’s In Defence of the Terror is a book we were waiting for - it cuts into the very heart of today’s ethico-political predicament.

	When, in 1953, Zhou En Lai, the Chinese
	premier, was in Geneva for the peace
	negotiations to end the Korean war, a
	French journalist asked him what he thought
	about the French Revolution; Chou replied:
	‘It is still too early to tell.’

The events of 1990 proved him spectacularly right: with the disintegration
of the ‘people’s democracies’, the struggle for the historical place 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.

 
	La Mort de Marat by Jacques-Louis David, a
	fellow-Montagnard, painted within months of the event.
	Marat used to work while bathing in oatmeal due to a skin
	ailment; it was in his bathtub that he was stabbed by
	Charlotte Corday.



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
has always closely mirrored the twists and turns of later political
struggles.

The identifying mark of all kinds of conservatives is a predictably flat
rejection: the French Revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning.
The product of the godless modern mind, it is at the same time to be
interpreted as God’s judgement on humanity’s wicked ways - so its traces
should of course be kicked over as thoroughly as possible.

The typical liberal attitude is more differentiated: its formula is ‘1789
without 1793’. In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated
revolution, a revolution which does not smell of a revolution. François Furet
proposed another liberal approach: he tried to deprive the French Revolution
of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a
historical anomaly. In short, Furet’s aim was to de-eventalize the French
Revolution: it is no longer (as for a tradition stemming from Kant and Hegel)
the defining moment of modernity, but a local accident with no global
significance, one conditioned by the specifically French tradition of
absolute monarchy.

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 -
then you should not shirk its consequences but instead gather the courage to
say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert A.

Both liberal and conservative critics of the French Revolution present it as
a founding event of modern ‘totalitarianism’: the taproot of all the worst
evils of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, the Gulag, up to the 9/11
attacks - is to be sought in the Jacobin ‘Reign of Terror’. The perpetrators
of Jacobin crimes are either denounced as bloodthirsty monsters, or, in a
more nuanced approach, one admits that they were personally honest and pure,
but then adds that this very feature made their fanaticism all the more
dangerous.  The conclusion is thus the well-known cynical wisdom: better
corruption than ethical purity, better a direct lust for power than obsession
with one’s mission.

[FN 1 Jeanne Kirkpatrick in 1979, drew a distinction between Rightist
authoritarianism and Leftist totalitarianism, privileging the first:
precisely because Rightist authoritarian leaders care only about their power
and wealth, they are much less dangerous than the fanatical Leftists who are
ready to risk their lives for their cause. Is this distinction not at work
today, in the way the US privileges a corrupt authoritarianism in Saudi
Arabia over Iran’s fundamentalism?
(ref: Kirkpatrick doctrine) ]

Wahnich’s book systematically undermines this predominant doxa. In a
detailed 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.

Even the ‘postmodern’ Left (from Antonio Negri to John Holloway) emphasizes
that a new revolution should break with the 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 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.
		[Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, New
		York: Random House, 2001, p. 114.]

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 nonviolent zero-level of ‘civility’. It is
seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things.

However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this
‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains
the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as being
subjective violence.  Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious
‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective
violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is
to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of
subjective violence. Let us take a quick look at some of the cases of this
invisible violence.

Kathryn Bolkovac: US forces' involvement in Sex trafficking

The story of Kathryn Bolkovac, recently made into a film (The Whistleblower,
dir. Larysa Kondracki, 2010), cannot but terrify any honest observer. In 1998
Bolkovac, a US police officer, successfully applied for a place in the UN’s
International Police Task Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina - under the auspices of
a prominent defence contractor, DynCorp - and upon arrival, was assigned to a
task force that targeted violence against women. Still new to this position,
Bolkovac began to follow up leads which exposed a local sex-trafficking ring,
apparently run by the Serbian mafia and dealing in very young girls from
former communist-bloc countries - some of these girls were no older than
twelve.  But another link quickly surfaced: the girls’ johns seemed to
include UN contractors in Bosnia, and possibly some of Bolkovac’s
colleagues. Moreover, there were strong indications that UN personnel
colluded with or even helped operate sex-trafficking rings in the region, and
saw a profit from it.

FN 3 See the review of Bolkovac’s book, The Whistleblower, in Daisy Sindelar,
‘In New Book, Whistle-Blower Alleges US, UN Involvement in Bosnian Sex
Trafficking’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 9 February 2011, at rferl.org.

Shocked by her findings, Bolkovac filed a series of reports with her
superiors, but they were all either shelved or returned to her as ‘solved’.
Nothing was done, and nothing changed - until Bolkovac was demoted and then
sacked for ‘gross misconduct’, well before her contract was up. Finally
warned that her life was in danger, she was reduced to flight and left Bosnia
with her investigative files and little else.

Bolkovac proceeded to sue DynCorp for ‘wrongful termination’, and the suit
was decided in her favour.  As a result, DynCorp dismissed seven of its
contractors in Bosnia for ‘unacceptable behavior’ and publicized changes to
its screening protocols. But this sex-trafficking scandal does not seem to
have tarnished the company. DynCorp has continued to net massive State
Department contracts, despite accusations of criminal misconduct in places
like Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, a US diplomatic cable released by
WikiLeaks cites DynCorp personnel who were seen taking drugs and hiring
‘dancing boys’, a polite name for underage male prostitutes (and DynCorp is
in Afghanistan, we should note, to train the new Afghan police corps).

The New York Times reviewer granted that ‘The Whistleblower tells a story so
repellent that it is almost beyond belief.’  However, in an incredible
ideological tour de force, the same reviewer went on to denounce the film’s
very truthfulness as the cause of its aesthetic failure...
[4 See Stephen Holden, ‘American in Bosnia Discovers the Horrors of
Human Trafficking’, New York Times, 4 August 2011.]

Back in 2001, a UN investigation on the illegal exploitation of natural
resources in Congo found that conflict in the country is mainly about access
to and control and trade of five key mineral resources: coltan, diamonds,
copper, cobalt and gold.  According to this report, the exploitation of
Congo’s natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies is ‘systematic
and systemic’, and the leaders of Uganda and Rwanda in particular (closely
followed by Zimbabwe and Angola) had turned their armed forces into armies of
business. The report concludes that permanent civil war and the
disintegration of Congo ‘has created a “win-win” situation for all
belligerents. The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese
people’. One should bear in mind this good old ‘economic-reductionist’
background when one reads in the media about primitive ethnic passions
exploding yet again in the African ‘heart of darkness’ . . .  Beneath the
facade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the contours of global capitalism.

Today’s capitalism likes to present itself as ethically responsible; however,
its ‘ethical’ face is the result of a complex process of ideological
abstraction or obiliteration.  Companies dealing with raw materials extracted
and exported in suspicious conditions (using de facto slaves or child labour)
effectively practise the art of ‘ethical cleansing’, the true business
counterpart to ethnic cleansing: through reselling, etc., such practices
obscure the origins of materials which are produced under conditions
unacceptable to our Western societies.

There definitely is a lot of darkness in the dense Congolese jungle - but its
heart lies elsewhere, in the bright executive offices of our banks and
high-tech companies. In order to truly awaken from the capitalist ‘dogmatic
dream’ (as Kant would have put it) and see this other true heart of darkness,
one should re-apply to our situation Brecht’s old quip from The Threepenny
Opera:
	What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new
	bank?

What is the stealing of a couple of thousand dollars, for which one goes to
prison, compared to financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of
their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime
grandeur?  What is a Congolese local warlord compared to the enlightened and
ecologically sensitive Western CEO? Maybe José Saramago was right when, in a
2008 newspaper column, he proposed treating the big bank managers and others
responsible for the meltdown as perpetrators of crimes against humanity whose
place is in the Hague Tribunal. Maybe one should not wave this proposal off
as a poetic exaggeration in the style of Jonathan Swift, but take it
seriously.

For the oppressed, violence is always legitimate

Alain Badiou recently proposed the formula of ‘defensive violence’: one
should renounce violence (i.e. the violent takeover of state power) as the
principal modus operandi, and rather focus on building free domains at a
distance from state power, subtracted from its reign (like the early
Solidarnosc in Poland), and only resort to violence when the state itself
uses violence to crush and subdue these ‘liberated zones’.

The problem with this formula is that it relies on the deeply problematic
distinction between the ‘normal’ functioning of state apparatuses and the
‘excessive’ exercise of state violence. Is not the first lesson in the
Marxist notion of class struggle - or more precisely, on the priority of the
class struggle over classes as positive social entities - the thesis that
‘peaceful’ social life is itself sustained by (state) violence, i.e.  that
‘peace’ is an expression and effect of the (temporary) victory or
predominance of one class (namely the ruling class) in the class struggle?

... one cannot separate violence from the very existence of the state (as the
apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the subordinated and
oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same
sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the
regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any
specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an offence
against the freedom of the people).

In this strict sense, every violence of the oppressed against the ruling
class and its state is ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this
point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept that its violence is
merely a matter of contingent excesses (to be dealt with through democratic
reforms). This is why the standard liberal motto apropos of violence - it is
sometimes necessary to resort to it, but it is never legitimate - is
inadequate. From the radical emancipatory perspective, one should turn this
motto around.

For the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is
the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it is
always a matter of strategic consideration to use violence against the enemy
or not).

Economic Manipulation

In 1970, in the notes of a meeting with President Richard Nixon on how to
undermine the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende,
CIA Director Richard Helms wrote succinctly: ‘Make the economy scream.’ Top
US representatives openly admit that today the same strategy is being applied
in Venezuela: former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said on Fox
News that Chavez’s appeal to the Venezuelan people

	only works so long as the populace of Venezuela sees some ability for
	a better standard of living. If at some point the economy really gets
	bad, Chavez’s popularity within the country will certainly decrease
	and it’s the one weapon we have against him to begin with and which
	we should be using, namely the economic tools of trying to make the
	economy even worse so that his appeal in the country and the region
	goes down . . .  Anything we can do to make their economy more
	difficult for them at this moment is a good thing, but let’s do it in
	ways that do not get us into direct conflict with Venezuela if we can
	get away with it.

The least one can say is that such statements give credibility to the
suspicion that the economic difficulties faced by the Chavez government
(major product and electricity shortages nationwide, etc.) are not only the
result of the ineptness of its economic policies.

Here we come to the key political point, which is difficult to swallow for
some liberals: we are clearly not dealing here with blind market processes
and reactions (say, shop owners trying to make more profit by keeping some
products off the shelves), but with an elaborate and fully planned strategy -
and in such conditions, is not a kind of terror (police raids on secret
warehouses, detention of speculators and the coordinators of shortages,
etc.), as a defensive countermeasure, fully justified?

Coriolanus

Instead of a simplistic rejection of violence and terror, one should thus
first widen its scope - learn to see violence where the hegemonic ideology
teaches us to see none - and then analyze it in a concrete way, detecting the
potential emancipatory use of what may at first appear to be purely
reactionary militarism. Let us take, from the sphere of great art,
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a play so exclusively focused on its hero’s
militaristic-aristocratic pride and contempt for ordinary people that one can
easily see why, after the German defeat in 1945, the Allied occupation powers
prohibited its performance.

Consequently, the play seems to offer a rather narrow interpretive choice:
what are the alternatives to staging the play the way it is, i.e. to
surrendering to its militaristic anti-democratic lure? We can try to subtly
‘extraneate’ this lure by way of its excessive aestheticization; we can do
what Brecht did in his rewriting of the play, shifting the focus from the
display of emotions (Coriolanus’ rage, etc.) to the underlying conflict of
political and economic interests (in Brecht’s version, the crowd and the
tribunes are not lead by fear and envy, but act rationally in view of their
situation); or, perhaps the worst choice, we can overplay pseudo-Freudian
stuff about Coriolanus’ maternal fixation and the homosexual intensity of his
relationship with Aufidius.

When one’s country is undergoing a foreign occupation and one is called on by
a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given
is not ‘you are free to choose’, but: ‘Can’t you see that this is the only
thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?’ No wonder that all the
early modern egalitarian radicals - from Rousseau to the Jacobins - admired
Sparta and imagined republican France as a new Sparta: there is an
emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives
even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule,
ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, etc. Even Trotsky
called the Soviet Union in the difficult years of ‘war communism’ a
‘proletarian Sparta’.

So it is not that soldiers are the problem per se - the real menace is
soldiers with poets, soldiers mobilized by nationalist poetry.  There is no
ethnic cleansing without poetry - why? Because we live in an era which
perceives itself as post-ideological.

Since great public causes no longer have the force to mobilize people for
mass violence, a larger sacred Cause is needed, a Cause which makes petty
individual concerns about killing seem trivial.  Religion or ethnic belonging
fit this role perfectly.  And this brings us back to Coriolanus - who is the
poet there? Before Caius Martius (aka Coriolanus) enters the stage, it is
Menenius Agrippa who pacifies the furious crowd which is demanding
grain. Like Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Menenius is the ideologist par
excellence, offering a poetic metaphor to justify social hierarchy (in this
case, the rule of the senate); and, in the best corporatist tradition, the
metaphor is that of a human body.  Here is how Plutarch, in his Life of
Coriolanus, retells this story first reported by Livy:

	It once happened . . . that all the other members of a man mutinied
	against the stomach, which they accused as the only idle,
	uncontributing part in the whole body, while the rest [of the
	members] were put to hardships and the expense of much labour to
	supply and minister to its appetites. The stomach, however, merely
	ridiculed the silliness of the members, who appeared not to be aware
	that the stomach certainly does receive the general nourishment, but
	only to return it again, and redistribute it amongst the rest. Such
	is the case . . . ye citizens, between you and the senate. The
	counsels and plans that are there duly digested, convey and secure to
	all of you your proper benefit and support.

		Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, vol. 1, trans. J. Dryden
		et al., New York: American Book Exchange, 1880, p. 340.

So yes, Coriolanus is a killing machine, a ‘perfect soldier’, but
precisely as such, as an ‘organ without a body’, he has no fixed class
allegiance and can easily put himself in the service of the oppressed. As was
made clear by Che Guevara, a revolutionary also has to be a ‘killing
machine’:

	Hatred [is] an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the
	enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man
	is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent,
	selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a
	people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.

		[Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental, in Guerilla
		Warfare, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998,
		p. 173.]

So, back to Wahnich’s book: the reader should approach its topic - terror and
terrorism - without ideological fears and taboos, as a crucial contribution
not only to the history of the emancipatory movements, but also as a
reflection on our own predicament.  Do not be afraid of its topic: the fear
that prevents you from confronting it is the fear of freedom, of the price
one has to pay for freedom.

Excerpts

At the Sorbonne, allegedly the stronghold of Jacobin historians, Michel
Vovelle replaced Albert Soboul in 1985. The following year he offered to
organize a ‘calf’s head dinner’ for postgraduates on 21 January. This is a
traditional republican ritual in which the calf’s head represents the head of
the king: the people, gathered at a banquet, replay the king’s death in
carnival mode.

For the majority of students, even those enrolled in the Sorbonne’s course on
the history of the Revolution, it seemed indecent. The merry chuckling of
Michel Vovelle was met by an embarrassed and incredulous silence. The calf’s
head ritual had become non-contemporary, without time being taken to assess
it properly. It was impossible now to ‘replay’ the severed head - that kind
of thing was shocking, or troubling at the least.

Democracy in France today does not seem to sit well with its foundation. ‘At
a time when democracy has become the sole perspective of contemporary
societies, it is essential for attention to focus on its inaugural moment,
1789, and not on the dark days of 1793’, proclaimed Patrice Gueniffey, one
of the main current detractors of the Revolution, before going on to ask:

	Who would dare today to celebrate the Terror with the frankness of
	Albert Mathiez, who writes in 1922 that it was ‘the red crucible in
	which the future democracy was elaborated on the accumulated ruins of
	everything associated with the old order’?
		Patrice Gueniffey, La politique de la Terreur. Essai sur la
		violence révolutionnaire, Paris: Fayard, 2000, p. 10.

In this vision, subsequent to the bicentenary but in the same spirit,
democracy could no longer have anything to do with this ‘red crucible’. The
possibilities of appropriating the event today are encumbered by a
sensitivity to bloodshed, to political death meted out and decided...

‘Was it necessary to kill the king?’, asks Le Nouvel Observateur in January
1993. ‘Would you French television viewers of today have decided to kill the
queen?’, asks Robert Hossein at the end of his show about Marie-Antoinette.

[to judge past events, two hundred years after the facts, these questions
involve people today in the historical situation of 1793. They have to put
themselves in the place of the Convention members who actually had to judge
this question...]

‘To suggest putting Louis XVI on trial is a counterrevolutionary idea’,
Robespierre declared. ‘It is making the Revolution itself a subject of
litigation.’
[Robespierre, Pour le Bonheur et pour la Liberté, Discours, ed.
Yannick Bosc, Florence Gauthier and Sophie Wahnich, Paris: Éditions
La Fabrique, 2000, p. 194.]

And putting the king’s trial on trial certainly means reopening such
litigation; it explicitly means using the faculty of judgement rather than of
understanding. The moral mechanism here stands in the way of historical
curiosity. ...

The question, rather, is settled in advance. What is played out here is the
figure of historical evil, of the inability to settle political conflicts
peacefully - i.e. without inflicting violence on the body, without putting to
death. To be a happy heir to the French Revolution means becoming complicit
with a historical crime. The event’s character as a political laboratory is
thus eroded in favour of a moral question.

Arguments for the prosecution

This new disgust with the French Revolution is inseparable from a ‘parallel’
constructed with the history of political catastrophes in the twentieth
century, and from a related idealization of the present democratic model of
politics. It is the impact of this democratic model, which is presented as a
culminating point in the process of civilization, that makes possible this
charge against the French Revolution. Whereas contemporary democracy protects
the individual, the Revolution protected the sovereign people as a political
and social group...

Michel Foucault:
opposed the pair of actions that characterized the sovereign power -
‘making die’ and ‘letting live’ - to the pair characterizing what he called
biopolitics - ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’.

[critiques
	* Giorgio Agamben, in Homo Sacer
	* Hannah Arendt's On Revolution]

The end point of this long line of argument is that the question asked about
the French Revolution indicates a profound solidarity between democratic and
totalitarian regimes, a political foundation at which there is no longer a
difference between animal life (being born in a nation) and political life.

Expelling dread: New questions about the terror

	‘But what can have struck men so greatly that they kill their own
	kind, not with the amoral and unreflective act of the semi-animal
	barbarian who follows his instincts without knowing anything else,
	but under an impulse of conscious life, as creator of cultural
	forms?’ [Adolphe Jensen, Mythes et coutumes des
		peuples primitifs, Paris: Payot, 1954]

This question was formulated in order to try to raise the veil over the
anthropological mystery of rituals of sacrifice, and it is tempting to apply
it to the period of the Terror.

Responses and risks:

first risk: to view the Terror as a resurgence of primitivism.... does
	not seem to me an adequate response.
second: The second risk is to propose an analysis in ‘theologico-
	political’ terms.

[suggests an emotional approach to the evolution of Terror]

ch2: Emotions and Terror

In the summer of 1793, the death of Marat aroused a feeling of dread in the
people of Paris. This dread was initially sublimated in the form taken by
Marat’s funeral ceremony, before being turned into a popular demand for
vengeance and terror.

[Background: After the revolution, the Jacobins had been dominant, but by
1792, there was a power struggle between the radical groups among the
Jaocbins and the more moderates, who were called the Girondins and
constituted the dominant group in the assembly.  By June 1792, the
Girondins were sidelined by fiery ideologues like Marat, who drew up lists
of 22 + 10 names who were arrested from their homes.  Others escaped to the
provinces, but most were caught.  The Girondins were the first to be
executed (Oct 1793), unleashing the reign of Terror.

Marat, an ex-aristocrat doctor, was one of the most radical voices of the
Revolution, a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes (="without knee
breeches") who were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th
century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans
of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under
the Ancien Régime.
]

Jean-Paul Marat (24 May 1743 – 13 July 1793) was one of the leaders of the
Montagnards, the radical faction ascendant in French politics during the
Reign of Terror until the Thermidorian Reaction. Charlotte Corday was a
Girondin from a minor aristocratic family and a political enemy of Marat who
blamed him for the September Massacre
[more than 1200 common prisoners were killed by guardsmen without explicit
sanction of the assembly, on the basis of rumours that the prisoners
may support foreign anti-revolution forces.  Marat was one of the key
ideologues behind it.]

This was followed by the "fall of Girondins in June 1793, when a large
number were arrested, and eventually (Oct) executed. ].

Charlotte gained entrance to Marat's rooms with a note promising details of
a counter-revolutionary ring in Caen. Marat suffered from eczema that
caused him to spend time in his bathtub where he would bathe in oatmeal; he
would often work there. Corday fatally stabbed Marat, though she did not
attempt to flee. She was later tried and executed for the murder.
]

Around Marat’s corpse, which represented the injured people and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, feelings of affliction
and grief were transformed into enthusiasm. Spectators of the event moved
from a palpable sense of discouragement to a feeling of enthusiasm towards
‘the spirit of Marat’. His burial was accompanied by the declaration that
‘Marat is not dead’. This proclaimed that the Revolution had not been
destroyed, and would not be so. It then became possible to demand vengeance,
and put terror on the agenda.

the notion of vengeance, one of the modalities of expression of resentment
towards enemies, and likewise that of punishment, always come up when public
safety is at stake.  On 12 August 1793, for example, when Royer demanded the
raising of ‘the terrible mass of sansculottes’, Danton replied:

	The deputies of the primary assemblies have come to exercise among us
	the initiative of terror against domestic enemies. Let us respond to
	their wishes. No amnesty for any traitor. The just man does not show
	mercy to the evil. Let us signal popular vengeance on the
	conspirators within by the sword of the law.8

The demand for terror was inseparable from the levée en masse demanded by
Royer.

Far from being signs of a death-dealing tendency, these demands were the sign
of a movement of life and enthusiasm. ... They transmuted the dissolving
emotions produced throughout the social body by
acts of profanation into emotions that gave new courage.

between spring 1792 and summer 1793, the hypothesis of an Assembly,
supposedly representing the sovereign people but by its inaction forcing free
men to ‘drench their hands in the blood of conspirators’, had become actual
experience with the September massacres.

[presents further evidence in ch.3 - instead of the earlier "emotional
economy", the people started demanding vengeance, and after September, even
repudiated the elected assembly, which had failed to act in their
interests.