The Legacy of History (VI)
This next part of "The Legacy of History" gets more into the psychoanalytic side of things, which I tend to accept a lot less readily. But it's interesting, nonetheless, even if I do think the first parts of the chapter stand on firmer foundations. (Though I might add that this is mostly due to my distrust of historians' undertaking the psychoanalysis of a historical figure, much less an entire historical movement or generation of people. It just feels too much like speculation and reading things into a series of historical events that just aren't there, or that it would really be a stretch to believe about them... Anyway, Huet doesn't take what these Freudian "historians" have to say uncritically, so I'm probably overreacting. As usual.)
Revolution and Its Discontent
In a recent essay entitled La Révolution fratricide, Jacques André proposed an analysis of the French Revolution that throws some light on the process by which Danton and Robespierre were recreated as monstrous embodiments of the Revolution and, more importantly, on the role of the Terror has played in these posthumous interpretations. André sought to analyze the Revolution in the light of Freud’s theories, with a view to exploring a “psychoanalysis of the social bond as such.” In Totem and Taboo, Freud’s account of the beginning of society, and, to a lesser degree, in Moses and Monotheism, André finds the key to an understanding of the Revolution as a privileged moment when the origins of society are briefly revealed. “In terms of these ageless questions, the French Revolution constitutes an exceptional circumstance. It is part of one of those historical movements in which an aspect of the origins of society is played out anew, is staged to the point of exposing itself - before quickly burying itself and again becoming imperceptible to us.”[1]
The reader will recall Freud’s account of the formation of social bonds in “The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism.” “One day, the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde.” From the resulting guilt emerged the fundamental taboos of totemism, the prohibition against killing the totem/father, and the taboo of incest with the mother that “correspond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.” Moreover, we find in moral precepts
the consequences of the tender impulses toward the father as they are changed into remorse…. The social and fraternal feelings on which this great change is based, henceforth for long periods exercises the greatest influence upon the formation of society. They find expression in the sanctification of the common blood and in the emphasis upon the solidarity of life within the clan.[2]
Certainly, Totem and Taboo provides a compelling framework for an analysis of the Revolution as replay of the origins of society. In The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt remarks that “the French killed the father in an act that comes as close as anything does in modern history to a ritual sacrifice.”[3] André himself proposes a different theory based on a rereading of Totem and Taboo. He argues that the incest taboo is not successfully integrated into Freud’s text, because “the horde itself is not incestuous … and there is nothing before the horde.” On the basis of Freud’s observation that the brothers “kept the organization that had made them strong and which may have relied on homosexual feelings and practices that had become established among them at the time of their exile,” André speculates that the originary social bond was based, not on the father’s murder, but on the brothers’ love. “From love addressed to the father to reciprocal attachment, fraternal homosexuality and the state of society develop through the same impulse” (p. 26, emphasis in original). Consequently, in André’s rereading of Freud, the brothers did not kill the father in order to lay claim to the women, but because “he does not respond to the request for love, that he nonetheless elicits” (p. 27, emphasis in original).
This conceptual shift from a social tie founded on parricide and the resulting incest taboo to a social tie based on homosexual love and the concurrent exclusion of the feminine leads André to argue that the execution of Louis XVI was in no way the “founding” act of the Republic. André writes: “the murder of the father-tyrant is not a drama, or a phantasm, that haunts the brothers of the Revolution, supplying the final meaning for their acts, but a scenario they construct, in an attempt to bind the anxiety and violence that threatens to dissolve the social order ‘in every direction’” (p. 130, emphasis in original). In this, André is closer to René Girard than to Freud.[4] As Lynn Hunt notes: “In a Girardian account [of the King’s sacrifice], the emphasis would not be on the King’s position as father of his people. The brothers do not kill him because they want to share his power but rather because the French fear their own capacity for violence and need a ritual in order to reinstate community boundaries” (p. 11). Interestingly, there is no founding act in André’s analysis, just the replay of an originary model (“there was nothing before the horde”).
The sacrifice of the king is “a failed sacrifice,” André contends, since it failed to diminish the violence and disorder that threatened the successful outcome of the Revolution. By contrast, 9 Thermidor, he asserts, is a “successful sacrifice”:
Unlike the execution of the King, or the elimination of the Girondins and other members of the Convention, the sacrifice of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon and their partisans is a successful sacrifice - the word does not prejudge of the appreciation one can make on the following period. The sacrifice is successful in that it absorbs, if not all the violence that threatens the social body, at least that which, under the name of Terror, does instead of government and serves as a social bond. (pp. 184-85)
Finally, André notes, “the Freudian thesis positing a deep complicity between paranoia and unconscious homosexuality - in both the collective and individual orders - finds a remarkable confirmation in the Terror, and in the Terror’s best spokesman, the Incorruptible” (p. 242). In Robespierre’s last discourse, André finds a “classic example of the rhetoric of persecution” (p. 242). Quoting Robespierre’s words: “One hides, one dissimulates, one misleads, thus one conspires,” as an expression of paranoia, he adds: “But this is not its originality.” Indeed, he argues, one has to go back to the discourse attacking Danton to see that “on that occasion [Danton’s elimination], the enemy is named, isolated, and the dialectic of accusation is still that of antagonism; an antagonism that contains the principle of its own resolution: the restoration of the One through suppression of everything opposed to it” (p. 242).
For our purpose, the most revealing part of André’s brilliant and controversial analysis lies not in its suggestive interpretation of Terror as pathology (p. 137), or its reevaluation of the marginalization of women by the Republic (“the feminine danger,” p. 204, “the hatred of women,” p. 206),[5] but rather in its inescapable return to the dominating figure of Robespierre, which concludes the study, and its accompanying reduction of the revolutionary process to the unfolding of Terror. Indeed, although the book takes the entire Revolution to task, none of its relevant achievements are discussed. The Revolution appears as a succession of “murders” and inescapable bloodshed. Even André’s discussion of David’s painting is embedded in a rhetoric of violence, where the brothers’ love yields a deep hatred of women.
[1] Jacques André, La Révolution fratricide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 11-12.
[2] Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 915-18.
[3] Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 9.
[4] See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
[5] I would not endorse André’s view that the revolutionaries “hated” women. Much has been written recently on the complex political status of women before and during the French Revolution. See, in particular, Paule-Marie Duhet, ed., Cahiers de doléances des femmes en 1789 et autres textes (Paris: Des Femmes, 1981) ; Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds. Rebel Daughters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Concerning the last footnote, icon!Maxime would like to contest the "fact" of revolutionary misogyny. He would especially like such to stop being attributed to him in particular, since, as he points out, the WTF quotient of such an assertion is simply too high for it to be taken seriously.
Also, random fact that has nothing to do with this essay at all: I found out a few new things about Babet. I knew she had married Philippe Le Bas's brother a few years after Thermidor, but I didn't know much else about that. Now I know that it was his younger brother, Charles-Louis-Joseph (called Charles) Le Bas, that they were married on 20 Nivôse Year VII (19 January 1799), had two children (Caroline, with whom Babet was living at the time of her death, and Charles), and that he died in 1829 (meaning she survived him by twenty-seven years).
...I figure that Babet's marriage with Charles Le Bas, while not necessarily particularly useful to know about (though you never know), is interesting at least.