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Terror, Trauma and the ‘Young Marx’ Explanation of Jacobin Politics*

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 191; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/pastj/gtj010

1477-464X

Patrice Higonnet,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Tocqueville in the 1850s wrote of France in the 1780s that never had tolerance been more accepted, authority been more mild, or benevolence been so widely practised. Nonetheless, he went on, 'from the bosom of such mild mores would spring the most inhuman of revolutions'. And even for those of us who deeply admire the French Revolution's message of civic equality, the Terror of the Year II (1793–4) seems not just ominous and horrendous, but also out of place. Auschwitz, Dresden and Hiroshima — after the Great War of 1914–18 and the Great Depression of the 1930s: we can see why these wartime tragedies happened, given the awful events that preceded them. But what of the Terror after the Enlightenment — after Voltaire, Boucher, and Madame de Pompadour? Isser Woloch has rightly described the 'sequence' from 1789 to 1793, from liberalism to terror, as an eternally fascinating 'enigma'. Why the French Revolution occurred is something of a mystery. And why it failed so dramatically is also deeply perplexing.1