The Legacy of History (IX)
The Anxiety of Origin
Indeed, such mythical and fanciful images could not have taken hold had they not responded to a deep anxiety regarding both the inevitability of the Revolution and its dramatic unfolding as origin of the modern state. And this is why the figure of Robespierre as Sphinx takes on a special urgency. In his analysis of the origin of the political state, Mitchell Greenberg quotes these lines from Stephen Heath: “For Hegel, the Sphinx stands at the beginning of the history of consciousness…. Oedipus solves the riddle, flings the Sphinx over the rock, gets rid of the monstrous.”[1] And Greenberg adds: “The politics that the Oedipus myth represents, the politics that is condensed in and on the figure of the riddle-solving perpetrator of parricide and incest, is also the originary moment of Western masculine hegemony.”[2] There also rests the enduring power of the revolutionary legend, which reads[3] at times like a modern version of the Oedipus myth: it combines the haunting memories of the parricide/regicide with the plague and the chaos that preceded the Sphinx’s encounter with Oedipus. From this perspective, the transformation of Robespierre the statesman, the regicide, the theoretical founder of the Republic, into the man-eating Sphinx, the feminine figure of archaic chaos and disorder, forcefully expresses a repudiation of the modern state on the part of the early royalist manufacturers of the revolutionary legend and, as Baudrillard puts it, a “boundless ressentiment” on the part of more recent commentators (p. 22).
For Michelet, a Republican mourning the Revolution, the legend of the Sphinx pervaded the history of the Revolution, but he added a correlated element. Describing Danton’s emergence of the political state, he exclaimed: “What is most terrifying about [Danton] is that he has no eyes; at least one hardly sees them. Indeed! Will this terrible blindman be the guide of nations?” (I: 505) and a few lines later, he commented: “He is a devoted Oedipus, who, possessed by his riddle, carries the terrible sphinx within himself, so as to be devoured by it” (I: 505).[4] From Michelet’s point of view, the Revolution failed because Danton, both its Minotaur and its Oedipus, internalized his hidden enemy, the sphinx-like Robespierre, and was blinded before he had an opportunity to rid the city of the plague. He would die, but still, Michelet repeatedly argued, he ultimately triumphed over the winged monster and ultimately caused its death. Indeed, Robespierre was doomed from the moment he sentenced Danton/Oedipus, and the devouring sphinx would perish for it: “Billaud threw Danton to him, a meal fit for a king [royal morceau], but that was difficult to digest, and became deadly for Robespierre” (2: 1014, emphasis added).
The Sphinx herself, of course, was sent to Thebes a punishment for a parricide. Similarly, although nineteenth-century writing made him primarily into the devourer of young lives, Robespierre was seen as both agent and punishment for the kings’ death. It is significant as well that no one among the Thermidorians would arise as the riddle-solver, the parricide hero, founder of a new order. For the legend of Robespierre as Sphinx also posited that the chaotic unfolding of the Revolution could not lead to a new order. Nor did Robespierre’s death single-handedly check revolutionary violence. On the contrary, the Terror continued,[5] and Robespierre’s fall precipitated France into another twenty years of tyranny and war.
Varying accounts suggest that the Sphinx either threw herself to her death or was killed by Oedipus after he solved her riddle. With striking similarity, history has it that either Robespierre tried to kill himself just before he was arrested or the gendarme Merda, a most unlikely hero, shot and wounded him. The sphinx was dead, to be sure, but no riddle-solver emerged, chaos remained. Thus Robespierre had to be killed again, explained, “anatomized,” to use Michelet’s expression, resolved, in the endless representations of his revolutionary legend.
The pervasive presence of the legend in nineteenth-century accounts of the Revolution also reminds us that the discipline of history in France was developed in part as an attempt to solve the riddle of the Revolution. History emerged as a new science whose dual goal was to account for the past and, at the same time, indefinitely to ponder the moment when the Sphinx plunged to her death unvanquished, her enigma unresolved, and the illuminating encounter with Oedipus, as well as the birth of the modern state, indefinitely postponed.[6] We might apply to these efforts to decipher the Revolutionary past what Lamartine once wrote of Robespierre: “He was the last word of the Revolution, but nobody could read him” (p. 41).
[1] Stephen Heath, “The Ethics of Sexual Difference,” Discourse (Spring-Summer 1990): 128, quoted by Mitchell Greenberg in Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering and Seventeenth-Century Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. xxxiii.
[2] Greenberg, Canonical States, Canonical Stages, p. xxxiii.
[3] It may be necessary to emphasize the obvious fact that the Revolution cannot possibly the replay of Freud’s imaginary scenario, nor that of the Oedipus myth. But it reads as such. Our own assessment of the Revolution, our narratives of the Revolution have also taken as models these other narratives were we believe we recognize the origins of state and society.
[4] In a remarkable essay on Michelet’s fascination for monsters, Gilles Marcotte argues that the History of the French Revolution contrasts Danton, as sublime monster, to Robespierre, “a man, only a man.” Marcotte also quotes Michelet on Danton’s oedipean blindness. See “L’Amour du monstre: Michelet, la sirène, Danton;” Etudes Françaises 30, I (1994) : 122-31.
[5] The Thermidorian terror is not a subject discussed at length by conservative historians, as it would invalidate the construction of Robespierre as scapegoat and diffuse the guilt among ordinary citizens.
[6] Donald Greer wrote of the Terror that it “was the translation, perhaps garbled in the process, of the chaotic instincts of the people, of popular borborygmies.” Donald Greer, The Incidence of Terror, p. 125. History also undertook the task of translating this inchoate speech, still inarticulate and made more frightening by its incoherent sounds, into a recognizable narrative, one that carried, however, in its unfolding an unresolved enigma. Greer adds at the end of his study, “The Terror, after all, was inevitable; but it was operated by a small group of men who, for a few months at least, lived in that dangerous world where ideas, principles, or dreams count more than anything else” (p. 128).
It's just one of those things: it's perfectly accurate, but since it doesn't suggest that there's anything we can do (read it, you'll see) it's not exactly happy-making. Or, more accurately, I'm happy that someone out there besides myself and you here recognizes these things--and publishes about them--but it just ends on such a melancholy note. :(