The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination 9780691224916, 069103429X

Citation preview

THE DEATHS OF LOUIS XVI

LITERATURE IN HISTORY SERIES EDITORS David Bromwich, James Chandler, and Lionel Gossman

The books in this series study literary works in the context of the intellectual conditions, social movements, and patterns of action in which they took shape. Other books in the series: Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in NineteenthCentury Fiction David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels

THE DEATHS OF LOUIS XVI REGICIDE AND THE FRENCH POLITICAL IMAGINATION

SUSAN DUNN

P R I N C E T O N P R I N C E T O N ,

U N I V E R S I T Y N E W J E R S E Y

P R E S S

Copyright © 1994 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunn, Susan. The deaths of Louis XVI : regicide and the French political imagination / Susan Dunn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03429-X 1. Louis XVI, King of France, 1754-1793—Death and burial. 2. Louis XVI, King of France, 1754-1793—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Regicides—Public opinion. 4. Monarchy—France—Public opinion.np. 5. Public opinion—France—History—19th century. 6. France—History—Revolution, 1789—1799—Psychological aspects. 7. Historians—France—Political and social views. 8. Kings and rulers in literature. I. Title. DC137.08.D86 1994 944'.035'092—dc20 93-39519 CIP This book has been composed in Galliard Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the Memory ofMy Mother

CONTENTS

FOREWORD,

by Conor Cruise O'Brien ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

INTRODUCTION 3 PARTI: POLITICAL MYTHS CHAPTER ONE

Louis XVI and the Cult of Human Sacrifice CHAPTER TWO

Louis XVI and Joan of Arc

15

38

CHAPTER THREE

Michclet and Lamartine: Regicide, Passion, and Compassion

67

EARTH: LITERARY MYTHS CHAPTER FOUR

Louis XVI and His Executioners

CHAPTER FIVE

95

Victor Hugo, Kingship, and Louis XVI CHAPTER SIX

116

Camus and Louis XVI: A Modern Elegy for the Martyred King CONCLUSION INDEX

171

165

140

FOREWORD

S

USAN DUNN'S study ofThe Deaths ofLouis XVI will be read with intense interest by scholars concerned with history and literature, among whom Professor Dunn herself occupies a distinguished place that will be notably enhanced by the publication of the present study. The subject matter is exceedingly odd. Dunn demonstrates, through ample quotation, the centrality of the execution of Louis XVI to the French national psyche in the nineteenth century and its abiding significance for the twentieth. This is a work of demonstration rather than of argument, for quotations are at its core. Dunn is sparing with argument and never forces a personal opinion or conclusion on the reader. She puts the material before us, in all its anguished ambiguity, and intervenes mainly in order to clarify and qualify: the qualifications consisting mainly of alertly drawing attention to the contradictions that abound, with great complexity, especially in the writings of Jules Michclet and Victor Hugo on this, for them, the most fraught of all historical and ethical subjects. In a passage quoted near the end of this book Jean-Francois Lyotard writes: We French cannot really think about politics or philosophy or literature without remembering that all this—politics, philosophy, literature—began, in the modern world, under the sign of a crime. A crime was committed in France in 1793. They killed a good and entirely likable king who was the incarnation of legitimacy. We cannot not remember that this crime was horrible. This means that when we try to think about politics, we know that the question of legitimacy is always at issue. We can say the same for literature. The difficulty that Americans, and also English and Germans have in understanding what we ourselves call writing [ecriture] is linked to the memory of this crime. When we speak about writing, the accent is on that which is necessarily criminal in writing.

That statement was published as recently as May 1985. Dunn, characteristically, refrains from making much of such a ringing, and recent, tribute to the centrality of her chosen subject matter. She puts it in a footnote and calls it a "hallucinatory assertion." But she also calls it "a fascinating argument for remembering . . . Louis XVI." An argument yes, but also a reminder that the French are still remembering, even in the late twentieth century, and can still be tormented by that historical memory. The torment was renewed as recently as January 1993; the bicentennial of the execution of Louis XVI fell on the twenty-first of that month. French commentators almost unanimously deplored the act. The English cut off the head of their Charles I nearly a century and a half

FOREWORD

before the execution of Louis XVI. Charles's execution is an important landmark in English history, yet it has not left any significant traces in the English national psyche. The contrast with the French is here quite striking. Why should this be so? The present study furnishes abundant material for an answer (all subsequent quotations are from The Deaths of Louis XVI). In justifying the execution of Charles I, John Milton had quoted Bishop John Ponet: 'The people may kill wicked Princes as monsters and cruel beasts." Both the royal victims were designated as "monsters" by their accuser-executioners. The word is part of an apparently instinctive strategy for the dehumanization of the chosen victim. Yet the objective of the French regicides was far more radical than that of the English ones. The English saw themselves as getting rid of one wicked prince. For the French, monarchy itself was "an eternal crime." Louis deserved death because he was guilty of having reigned. The killing of one wicked Prince had not been a radical break with the past; wicked princes had been killed before, and virtuous princes had succeeded them. But in killing a king because he was a king, the French were repudiating the history of their country. As a revolutionary newspaper wrote: 'The blood of Louis Capet, shed by the blade of the law on 21 January 1793, cleanses us of a stigma of 1300 years." All those years of monarchy and of Catholicism had formed the French people who, in trying to cut themselves off from all that with the guillotine, were inflicting a huge psychic injury on themselves. That is what has made the memory of the death of Louis XVI so traumatic for generation after generation of French intellectuals. The recollection of regicide bothers few English consciences. Impressive statues both of Charles I and of Oliver Cromwell stand near the seat of government in London. Louis XVI has no monument in Paris, and the only one of Robespierre is a rather diffident one in the redfaubourg of St. Denis, appropriately near the ancient burial place of the kings of France whose remains the revolutionary mobs flung into the Seine two hundred years ago. It was in St. Denis and only in St. Denis that the bicentennial of the real French Revolution was celebrated on 14 July 1989. By the "real" French Revolution, I mean the actual course of the Revolution whose apogee consisted in the executions of the king and queen, followed by the Terror over which the principal regicides, Robespierre and Saint-Just, presided. The commemoration, organized by President Mitterrand and celebrated by most of the citizens of Paris and their sometimes slightly maudlin guests, was a Version of Pastoral around a sanitized and bloodless French Revolution. The centerpiece of the official celebration was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), a document that stood in the same relation to the realities of the French Revolution as the benevolent words of Stalin's Constitution of 1936 did to the realities of the Gulag.

FOREWORD

XI

When the king was put to death, what took place? Albert Camus seems to suggest that nothing did: The condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now God was a part of history through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king. Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles. I believe "the secularization of our history" is a misleading formula. What really happened was the substitution of a new cult for an old one. The new divinity had various names, used interchangeably: La Nation, LaPatrie, la Republique, lepeuple. When the king's head fell into the basket on 21 January 1793, there were cries of "Vive la Nation" according to some accounts, "Vive la Republique," according to others. No doubt both slogans were used; they meant the same thing: Le Roi est mort. Vive la Nation. Textbooks on nationalism often suggest that that phenomenon actually begins with the French Revolution. This is not so. As an emotional force, nationalism is very ancient. It is present at the roots of our civilization, on both sides of our Judeo-Hellenic heritage. The Hebrew Bible abounds in fiercely nationalistic passages, along with some matter of a contrary tendency. On the classical side we have the official religious and national cult of those who fell for the polls or thepatria. French nationalism, specifically, is ardent already in the fifteenth century, in Joan of Arc. What is new in the French Revolution is not nationalism itself but the severance of the tics that had joined nationalism to the supernatural from time immemorial. That severance was symbolized by the decapitation of Louis XVI. Henceforward there was nothing above the Nation. The Nation itself became God. Obviously this was not true for everyone, but it was true for the revolutionaries and for their heirs, and for ardent nationalists in every nation. The apotheosis of the new nationalism was reached not in France but in Germany, 140 years after the execution of Louis XVI. There was nothing on earth or in Heaven above the Volk, and the Volk, purifying itself, must either dominate or destroy all peoples that did not belong to it. As I draw breath after writing the above paragraph, I realize that I have been doing just what I praised Susan Dunn, at the beginning of this foreword, for not doing, that is, pushing an argument. I believe the argument is compatible with her findings, but readers will judge that matter for themselves. Now it is high time to let this splendid book speak for itself. Conor Cruise O'Brien

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

AM GRATEFUL to the many friends and colleagues from whose advice and encouragement I have benefited in the preparation of this book. Paul Benichou's deep knowledge of French intellectual history always showed the way. Conor Cruise O'Brien energized me with his enthusiasm for this subject. Carol Blum's pioneering work on Rousseau as well as Maurice Weyembergh's informative remarks about Camus and Sartre opened new lines of inquiry. At Williams College, I pitilessly mobilized my colleagues: Francis Oakley generously shared his historical insights with me; Gary Jacobsohn and Jeff Weintraub were on permanent call concerning all matters pertaining to law and political theory, respectively. George Pistorius, James Wood, MacAlister Brown, Mark Taylor, Robert Jackall, Clara Park, and David Park were all important intellectual presences. At Columbia University, I also profited from the stimulating intellectual atmosphere created by the members of the University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture. Special thanks are due to Robert F. Dalzell Jr. for his unfailing friendship and perceptive advice about several chapters. I wish to express my deep gratitude to James MacGregor Burns for his careful readings of my manuscript and sensitive suggestions, and for his warm support and the excitement of our political conversations. I am very indebted to Lionel Gossman for his interest in my manuscript and for his wise and penetrating comments. My work was supported by a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, by a grant from the American Philosophical Society, and by generous assistance from Williams College. Some parts of this book appeared in quite different form in Partisan Review 57 (Winter 1990); History and Theory 28 (1989); The Romanic Review 80 (May 1989); and L'Esprit createur 27 (1987). My friends in the Faculty Secretarial Office of Williams College—Shirley Bushika, Donna Chenail, Lori Tolle, and Peggy Bryant—as well as Lois Cooper and my copy editor Richard Jones skillfully and tirelessly assisted me in various ways in the preparation of this manuscript. Finally I thank my father for the invaluable gift of his constancy and good cheer and for much more. Williamstown, Massachusetts

THE DEATHS OF LOUIS XVI

INTRODUCTION

L

OUIS XVI was not a great king. Among nineteenth-century historians of the Revolution, none considered him an effective leader, and few had anything very positive to say about his reign. For royalists, he was too liberal; for republicans, too conservative. At best, he was well-meaning, at worst, treasonous. For most, he was weak and ineffective, not the stuff out of which national fathers are made. It was the death of Louis XVI, not his life, that would scar the collective memory of France for two hundred years. The execution was a solemn and extraordinary event. Under leaden January skies, a procession of sixty drummers and hundreds of guards, soldiers, and cavalry escorted Louis from the Temple prison across Paris to the Place de la Revolution. Guards brandishing bayonets and lances lined the way, forming walls of steel. Behind them, silent crowds watched. The king prayed with his priest as his carriage slowly made its way through the subdued streets. The silence that shrouded the city was broken only by the noise of horses and drums and by a few lone calls for mercy. Awaiting them at the Place de la Revolution (formerly Place Louis XV, today Place dc la Concorde) stood the guillotine. Since the dawn, an immense crowd had been gathering around the hideous machine. People were crammed everywhere: on the bridges, along the riverbanks, even hanging from the branches of trees. A sea of a hundred thousand heads was waiting to witness one head of state fall. When the king arrived at the scaffold, three executioners attempted to undress him, but he angrily pushed them away, insisting on taking off his own jacket. Indignant that the executioners demanded to bind his hands, he vigorously protested. A struggle was about to ensue when Louis's priest advised him to submit to this last humiliation, which, he said, would draw him closer to Christ. Leaning on the priest for support, Louis arduously mounted the steep steps of the scaffold. At the top, he suddenly broke free, ran to the other side of the platform, and, making a gesture to silence the steady beat of the drums, cried out to the crowd: People! I die innocent! I forgive my enemies, and I pray God that the blood you spill will never fall on France . . . He wanted to continue, but General Santerre ordered a roll of the drums, and the king's speech was cut off, seconds before his head. His body was

4

INTRODUCTION

strapped to a board and then thrust horizontally into the inexorable apparatus. The board tipped down, the blade fell. Moments later, one of the executioners held the dripping head aloft for the crowd to behold. Many people shouted, "Vive la republique!" A few drowned themselves or cut their own throats; for these people, a oncefinelyordered universe had been destroyed.1 Thus began—in the shadow of the guillotine—the long clash over the meaning of this singular event. Indeed, the specter of the decapitated monarch stood at the crossroads of the old world and the new—on the one hand, signifying the audacious repudiation of magical political authority, and, on the other, evoking for decades to come a profound sense of nostalgia and loss. Along with Louis, the organizing principle of an entire society had disappeared, leaving in its wake political chaos, moral confusion, and deep and disorienting historical discontinuity. How different from England, where the execution of Charles I has never been considered an event fraught with meaning. Perhaps this is because in England regicide was a political act, whereas in France it was the object of elaborate theological and ideological explanations. Although the public execution of Louis XVI was part of a calculated strategy for setting the Revolution on the path of no return, the Jacobins also bestowed upon it potent symbolic value. They portrayed it as the ritualistic founding act of a new social order, attributing to Louis the unusual sacred status of a sacrificial victim who possesses the supernatural ability to purify and regenerate the nation through his own death. Implicit in the Jacobins' political and mythological argument in favor of regicide was a theory of social change and renewal: this theory made political murder the necessary means for social progress, and it made the elimination of dissent and the death of the enemies of the patrie the condition for national unity and fraternity. Not only was this doctrine used a few months later to justify the Terror, it would be used in the twentieth century to justify the violence and repression of totalitarian regimes. 1 Although nineteenth-century historians alternately criticized Louis as a paralyzed leader (Michelet, Quinet) and praised him as a farsighted reformer (Tocqueville), on one thing all agreed: he had died very well. To posterity his greatest gift was his death. For royalists, it was a martyr's death; for liberals and republicans, an unfortunate and courageous death. Chateaubriand admired the Bourbon race that "knows how to die admirably well" ("Mort de Charles X," in his Metnoires d'outre tombe [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 2:908, italics mine). Lamartine concurred: although the king did not know how to rule or fight, "he knows how to die" (Histoire des Girondins [1847; reprinted Paris: 1984], 1:111, italics mine). In his Histoire desMontagnards, Alphonse Esquiros admitted that Louis knew one single thing in his life, "he knew how to die" (Histoire des Montagnards [Paris: Lecou, 1847], 2:289, italics mine). For Quinet, Louis on the scaffold was nothing less than an exemplary being: "The lowliest man of the people could learn from this king how to die welF (LaRevolution [1865; reprinted Paris: Belin, 1987], 353, italics mine). All translations of French texts in this book, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

INTRODUCTION

b

Since 1793, French historians, writers, and intellectuals have been wrestling with the political consequences and moral implications of the regicide. In the guillotining of the king, royalists perceived an act of unspeakable transgression; for them, regicide was tantamount to deicide, the decapitation of God's representative on earth. They were easily convinced that Louis was a Christ-like martyr who sacrificed himself for the redemption of France. Had he not submitted to his terrifying fate with courage and piety acknowledged and admired by all? Had he not, moments before his death, pardoned the French and expressed love for them? Throughout the turbulent succession of postrevolutionary governments—empires, restorations, and republics—the memory of his death would recall for pro-royalists the loss of the legitimacy and stability of an eight-hundred-ycar-old monarchy. For nineteenth-century liberal and republican writers, the king's disquieting death posed even more complex problems of paramount significance. Although they praised the trial for serving the cause of revolutionary justice, virtually all considered the execution politically inept and morally troubling. But unlike the royalists, who could denounce the regicide while remaining within the parameters of counterrevolutionary thought, republican historians and writers had to find ways of voicing their doubts and reservations without calling into question the fundamental value of the Revolution. Especially as they traced the short and violent path from the regicide to the Terror, it was difficult for them not to sec Louis's death as inextricably linked to the moral failure of a pitiless Revolution, powerless to rise above violence and devote itself to the creation of lasting democratic institutions. The task of liberal historians was thus dual: first to describe, explain, and meditate on the significance and consequences of the regicide, and second, to rehabilitate republican ideology, to dissociate it from violence and Terror and restore to it the political ideals of 1789 and the compassion that the Jacobins had ultimately banished from politics. The thinkers whose meditations on revolution and regicide are the subject of this book—the liberal, pro-royalist Ballanchc, republican historians Michelet, Lamartine, and Quinet, the great French poet, Victor Hugo, and the twentieth-century writer Albert Camus—stand among the principal creators and followers of the humanitarian credo that, for all its contradictions and unresolved tensions, is ours still today. Whether on the right or the left of the liberal political spectrum, these were idealists dedicated to the creation of a just society, historians and politicians committed to uniting politics and morality. Their goal was to create an agenda for French society founded on the ideals of the Revolution and on the ethical concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. (The English translations of their enduring words are, unless otherwise noted, my own.) As they plumbed the Revolution for its great message, they inevitably had to tackle the problem of the execution of the king. They found that they

6

INTRODUCTION

could not confront the regicide without also confronting basic questions of political violence, revolutionary justice, idealistic ends and merciless means. From those reflections, it was but a short step to the expression of fresh visions of progress, justice, and fraternity. The historically specific and individual case of Louis XVI provided them with a concrete means for repudiating the vengeance, violence, and expediency that were associated with 1793, for reformulating the idealistic legacy of 1789, and for transforming royalist and Jacobin political mythologies into democratic and humanitarian ones. The issue of kingship may have become politically marginal, but the problem of regicide remained ediically central. The quintessentially political act of regicide was translated, even by historians and politicians, into timeless and universal dramas about punishment, charity, compassion, pardon, and amnesty. The regicide was like a screen onto which writers projected their own attitudes toward history, progress, revolution, violence, the death penalty, and the role of morality in politics. Through the lens of regicide they viewed many of the critical problems of their own societies. Against the background of regicide, Ballanche condemned capital punishment, Lamartine articulated die moral failures of the Restoration, Michelet meditated on social justice and citizenship, Victor Hugo viewed the tragedy of the Commune, and Camus denounced totalitarianism and the reign of the new god, History. Historians perceived a need, indeed an obligation, to inject their own ethical values into their commentaries on the king's death. They permitted themselves to empathize with the king and announced their own moral stance in regard to his deadi. Some even projected onto Louis their personal feelings for their own fadiers. Paul Veyne, writing about die art and science of historiography, remains firmly opposed to such personal statements of ethical judgment. History, he asserts, "consists in saying what happened." The historian should not ponder if what happened was good or bad, and he should never utter value judgments in his own name.2 Another historian with pretensions to scientific objectivity, Marc Bloch, similarly condemned "die satanic enemy of true history: the obsession with making judgments. . . . Robespierristes, anti-robespierristes, for God's sake, enough! We beg you, just tell us plainly who Robespierre was."3 Nineteenth-century historians of the Revolution, however, would not have been moved by admonitions against the inclusion of their personal opinions in historiography. On die contrary, they considered it precisely 2

Paul Veyne, Writing History, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 183 and 186. 3 Marc Bloch, Apolqgie pour I'histoire ou Metier d'historien (1949), quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Les morales de I'histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 10.

INTRODUCTION

7

their duty to make such assessments. They expressed moral opinions that stated or implied "what should have been" because they were using history in a new way, as a means of formulating ethical and political values for postrevolutionary French society. Implicit in their bold breaches of the historian's putative objectivity was not only a judgment of the past but also a prescription for the future. Edgar Quinet passionately explained the historian's personal and moral responsibility to judge and condemn the violence of the past and to articulate political and ethical values for future generations: The contribution that the historian can make to the future is to deliver free men, for all time, from the temptation to kill one another. . . . This is what I have done, this is what I had to do. . . .1 would willingly give up my life for democracy, but do not expect me to give up justice and reason too. . . . The principles contained in my work will enter the public conscience. . . . Justice, pity, liberty, humanity: this is what will survive us.4 Michael Walzer observed that the "shared understandings of a people" are often expressed in its historical ideals and its foundational texts: "It is not only what people do but how they explain and justify what they do, the stories they tell, the principles they invoke, that constitute a moral culture."5 Many nineteenth-century histories of the French Revolution were exactly such foundational texts. In postrevolutionary France, where there was no consensus as to the national identity, commentaries on the Revolution, the Terror, and the regicide began to formulate the "shared understandings" of the French people: the political principles they admired and those they deplored, the ethical values they believed in, the heroes they invoked, and the events they mythologized. In this enterprise, historians and poets conducted themselves alternately as laic priests shaping the morality of the public conscience, prophets announcing their vision of a just and nonviolent future, and mythmakers fashioning exemplary figures to incarnate new concepts of nationhood and civic virtue. Before stepping into this world of the resonances of regicide, it will be useful to lay out briefly the facts of the trial and execution of Louis XVI, facts that would be presented and interpreted in a variety of lights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6

4

Edgar Quinet, La Revolution, 57 and 59. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 29. 6 Albert Soboul discusses the trial in Le Proces de Louis XVI (Paris: Collection Archives, 1966). Mona Ozouf examines it in her essay, "King's Trial," inA Critical Dictionary ofthe French Revolution, ed., Francpis Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 5

8

INTRODUCTION

In 1789, it had not been the intention of France's revolutionary leaders to abolish the monarchy, much less to execute the monarch. During the first years of the Revolution, France was a constitutional monarchy and remained so even after the king's flight to Varennes in June 1791. At that point, Robespierre and most of the members of the Constituent Assembly were reluctant to call for a republic and forced an obviously unwilling king back on the throne. It was only after the bloody fighting at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 that the Legislative Assembly suspended the king from his functions and only after the discovery of the king's armoire defer, containing his secret correspondence with Austria, that a public trial became inevitable. However, the Constitution, which Louis had duly accepted, contained the provision that should the king betray the Constitution, he would be deposed. Were he guilty of any crime, were he to go so far as to place himself at the head of an enemy army, abdication would be his one and only punishment. He could be prosecuted to the full extent of the law only for crimes committed after his abdication. The Convention asked Jean-Baptiste Mailhe to examine the legal questions implicit in a trial, the king's inviolability, constitutional immunity from prosecution, and the makeup of the judicial body that would try him. Mailhe concluded that the immunity clauses did not absolve the king of responsibility for his actions; he was justiciable, and the entire Convention should judge him, since the delegates constituted a democratic and therefore perfect representation of the French nation. The legal procedures of the trial, according to Mailhe, should depend upon the will of the nation and not on legal precedent. Mailhe's report provoked two radically different responses, both in opposition to a trial. The deputy Morisson, urging the uncompromised rule of law, argued that no statute applied to die king, since the Constitution had granted him immunity. He proposed that the people, possessing no legal right to try the monarch, should banish him instead. Saint-Just, on the other hand, speaking for the Jacobins, declared that Louis XVI was neither citizen nor king; he was an alien who had no role in the social contract or in the legal system. He should thus not be tried at all but simply and summarily executed. Monarchy, after all, was "an eternal crime." Robespierre pushed the point one step further: if die king were tried, he might be judged innocent, 1989), 95—106. David Jordan also presents a detailed description in The King's Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Michael Walzer discusses many of the historical and legal issues in his important introduction to Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial ofLouis XVI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Ferenc Feher analyzes questions of judicial procedure in the trial in The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Carol Blum places the trial in the context of eighteenth-century ideology inRousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

INTRODUCTION

9

and if he were innocent, the revolution would be guilty—a situation he considered intolerable. Submission to the yoke of law, moreover, in times of revolution revealed counterrevolutionary weakness and lack of courage and energy: "We invoke forms because we lack principles." Ultimately, however, on the issue of whether or not to try Louis, it was the Girondins who carried the day. Conscious of public opinion at home and abroad, they insisted on the importance of judicial procedure and prevailed, although they failed to secure the special tribunal they had proposed. After two months of debate, the trial finally began on 5 December 1792. Many people continued to harbor grave doubts about the legal procedures of the trial, doubts that still linger today. The jury that formulated the accusations against the king was constituted by the same men who eventually would hear and judge the case. The members of the Convention simultaneously played the roles of judge, jury, and, in some cases, attorneys for the prosecution. In addition, Louis was not informed of the accusations against him until he appeared at the bar, nor was he granted legal counsel until after his public interrogation. On the other hand, unlike the trials that took place during the height of the Terror, at the king's trial specific charges were at least made and evidence was presented, which the king and his lawyers were permitted to refute. As for the accusations against Louis, he was essentially charged with treason—a novel crime that had been logically impossible under the ancien regime. Since the king had been believed to be the incarnation of the Body Politic, it was inconceivable for him to betray himself. In addition to treason, Louis was accused of the massacres of 10 August, of corruption, and more subtly, of the crime of kingship itself. The prosecution deemed him responsible for a multitude of misdeeds: suspending the meetings of the Estates General, ordering his troops to march on Paris, not embracing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, vetoing decrees, not supporting the clergy's oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Whereas the only other king in history to be publicly tried and executed, Charles I of England, grandly denied the authority of the court and remained silent throughout his trial, Louis proved to be a cooperative and dignified, if less than candid, defendant. He contested the charge of treason and denied knowledge of the armoire defer, refusing to recognize incriminating documents written in his own hand. The thirty-eight-ycar-old monarch insisted that his actions had all fallen within his constitutional prerogative, that he had relied on his ministers, and that the welfare of the French had always been foremost in his mind. Three lawyers helped him in his defense: Tronchet, Malesherbes, and dc Scze. The defense argument, delivered by dc Sezc, competently and dispassionately addressed the legal and constitutional issues, but few people were moved. Jacobin axioms, as cold

10

INTRODUCTION

and trenchant as the guillotine—"No man can reign innocently," "This man must reign or die," "Louis must die because the nation must live"—were more memorable than de Seze's soporific legal brief and more effective than the emotional pleas for mercy of Thomas Paine and Girondins like Vergniaud. Just two weeks before the execution, Paine, still hoping to save Louis's life, eloquently advocated exiling him to America, whose Revolution the French king had generously supported; there Louis would be reeducated and learn firsthand about democracy, citizenship, and equality. Marat interrupted the speaker reading the translation of Paine's address to charge that the translation was incorrect; such treasonous sentiments could not be those of Thomas Paine.7 During the trial, the king, a prisoner in the Temple, devoted himself to his family, his young son's education, and his own defense. Humbled, dispossessed, he became for many of the delegates and citizens of France a sympathetic, courageous, and even tragicfigure.His defenders among the Girondins, believing that a national referendum on his fate would surely save him, maneuvred for an appeal to the people, but, considered by the majority of delegates a threat to the authority of the Convention and possibly a pretext for civil war, this attempt at direct democracy was defeated by a vote of 424 to 287. The vote on an appeal to the people and the subsequent votes on guilt and punishment were roll-call votes that permitted each delegate to deliver a speech along with his vote. Thefinalvote on Louis's fate shows a Convention deeply divided. On the first vote concerning his guilt, out of 718 members of the Convention who were present, 691 declared that the king was guilty. On the question of the death penalty, 721 voting members were present: 321 voted for punishments other than death, 361 for death, 13 for death with reprieve, and 26 for death but with a debate on reprieve. Historians interpret thesefiguresdifferently; those well-disposed to the Revolution, such as Albert Soboul,8 place thefinalcount at a relatively decisive 387 to 334. Those of more moderate inclinations, such as Alfred Cobban,9 R. R. Palmer,10 and Mona Ozouf,n place it at 361 to 360, a majority of one. However, a fourth and last roll-call vote rejected a stay of execution by 380 to 310. It was the task of Louis's lawyer, Malesherbes, to inform the king of the verdict. Malesherbes entered the king's cell, crestfallen, unable to speak. 7 Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip Foner (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 556. 8 Albert Soboul, Le Proces de Louis XVI, 218. 9 Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 1,1715-1799 (1957; reprinted London: Penguin, 1987), 210. 10 R. R. Palmer, A History of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 1964), 357. 11 Ozouf, "King's Trial," 103.

INTRODUCTION

11

When he wept, Louis understood that he would die. The king embraced his friend and tried to console him; no one could have known then that Malesherbes too, the maternal grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville, would perish by the guillotine. The king wanted to know how certain members of the Convention had voted and was dismayed to learn that his cousin, the duke of Orleans, had cast his ballot for death. Then the revolutionary delegation arrived to inform him officially of his fate, and the king requested a threeday stay of execution as well as a priest and a last meeting with his family. Condorcet, Thomas Paine, and others sympathetic toward the king tried but failed to obtain this reprieve. Louis was granted a priest, to whom he made his last confession, and a few final hours with his family. On the evening of 20 January, he saw the queen, Marie-Antoinette, his sister Madame Elisabeth, his son, and his daughter, the only one of the family who would survive the Terror. When they could sob no longer, they spoke softly and made their last tearful farewells. The public reactions after the execution included celebration, consternation, and bewilderment. Was the regicide a victory for freedom or an illomened error? Many people were uncertain.

The public guillotining of Louis XVI was a startling event that seemed to stand at the threshold of a democratic republic until it became clear that it stood instead at the threshold of the Terror. The reflections that Louis's death would inspire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the focus of this book—suggest that the regicide has occupied a critical place in French intellectual history. And just as this event provided nineteenthcentury historians with insight into their own societies, it continues to illuminate problems of our own times, for the issues facing us today are similar to the ones of a hundred and fifty years ago. Louis's trial and execution shed a somber light of warning on such moments in history as the trial and execution of Ceausescu in Romania, exactly two hundred years after the birth of the French Revolution, and the reflections that the king's death produced concerning not only the punishment of political foes but also amnesty and national reconciliation may illuminate some of the moral and political dimensions of such recent issues as pardon for Richard Nixon in 1973 and amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders in 1977. The grandeur attributed to the king's "sacrifice" gives us insight into the prestige of contemporary national "martyrs" such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and, in recent calls for American citizens to make sacrificesfortheir nation, we can hear resounding echoes of the Romantic linkage of sacrifice and civic virtue. The regicide of 1793 is indeed an exemplary case charged with a multi-

12

INTRODUCTION

plicity of layers of meaning. It is located at the crossroads of many paths, the juncture where historical narrative joins myth, where political commentary incorporates ethical imperatives, where revolutionary ideals are transformed into a nationalist religion, where kingship merges with citizenship, and where powerful monarch and defenseless individual converge. It is this world that we will be exploring in the chapters that follow.

PART I POLITICAL MYTHS

Chapter One LOUIS XVI AND THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

L

OUIS MUST DIE because the patrie must live,"1 declared Robespierre in December 1792, establishing the death of the king as the condition for the birth of the Republic. At Louis's trial, the representative Carra declared that only when the king, "the source of corruption and servitude," had disappeared from their soil would the people be "regenerated in morality and virtue." He concluded: "Let us end this debate by proclaiming the death of the tyrant; and with this auspicious beginning, after having destroyed thefatal talisman of all our ills, let us march on to new triumphs: victory awaits us." 2 Revolutionary rhetoric thus portrayed Louis XVI virtually in pagan terms, as a magical being whose death was necessary for the health of the polity, moral regeneration, and social and historical progress. The Jacobins spoke of regicide as if it were a form of purgation, of human sacrifice, that would cleanse France of its social problems as well as of its historical past. Implicit in the calls for Louis's death seemed to be a belief not only in his guilt and sole responsibility for the social and political crisis, but also in his power to end the crisis, through his own death. The survival of the new nation and the assurance of a golden age appeared to hinge not on the creation of a constitution and lasting democratic institutions and laws but on the slaying of a monster. Hannah Arendt points out that there arc two stages in revolution, each with its own mythology. The first violent stage of revolution consists in rebellion, the uprising against tyranny for purposes of liberation. The second, quieter stage addresses the foundation and preservation of freedom. 3 In the symbolic act of regicide the Jacobins fused the two stages, thus confusing rebellion against the king with the foundation of a republic and conveniently ignoring the crucial reflective stage of constitution. Execution became constitution; regicide was regarded as the essential founding act and founding myth of the new French nation. Oddly, the theme of regicide as human sacrifice did not disappear until the 1

Robespierre, speech of 3 December 1792, in Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, 138. LePouretle contre, Recueil complet des opinions prononcees a I'Assemblee conventionnelk dans le prods de Louis XVI (Paris: Buisson, l'An I, 1792-93) (Bibliotheque rationale L6 41.356), 6:270 and 279 (italics mine). 3 Arendt notes that the American Constitution incorporates the stage of constituting a government as well as the document itself (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [New York: Viking Press, 1965], 140). 2

16

CHAPTER

ONE

mid-nineteenth century. Restoration pro-royalists and liberals, such as Ballanche, Lamartine, and the young Michelet, preserved this notion of human sacrifice but Christianized it (they associated the victim Louis XVI with Christ) andfinallyintegrated it into their doctrines of social progress. Their visions of history, however, according to which progress is dependent upon human sacrifice and political violence, pose serious problems in relation to the freedom of individuals to shape history and to refuse the fatality of violence.

The members of the Convention displayed a puzzling uncertainty about the identity of the defendant Louis XVI and the nature of his crimes. He was alternately characterized as monarch, citizen, rebel, alien, tyrant, traitor, and supernatural monster. These contradictory images surfaced in the speeches proposing and opposing a trial. Morisson reminded the delegates that, according to the Constitution, the person of the king was still inviolable and sacred, and thus he could not be tried. Condorcct, on the other hand, maintained that, although kings were unfortunately still "phantoms of all manner of superstition," in the eyes of reason, they were "mere men" whom the law should judge impartially.4 But, for the Jacobins, Louis was anything but a "mere man," and they had multiple reasons for denying him a trial. First of all, he was intrinsically guilty. "No man can reign innocently," Saint-Just ruled.5 Louis should be condemned for his identity, kingship, the crime of his birth. Second, the Jacobins also realized that, at the same time that they were attacking a guilty man, they were also attacking a symbolic personage, the incarnation of divine-right monarchy. Inasmuch as the king was afictionalbeing, it was logical for them to try to exclude him from the judicial process.6 As Ferenc 4 Condorcet, speech of 3 December 1792, in Walzer, cd., Regicide and Revolution, 158,147, and 156. 5 Saint-Just, speech of 13 November 1792, in ibid., 124. 6 Ernst Kantorowicz's explanation of the medieval concept of "the King's two Bodies" is useful in understanding the Jacobin attitude toward regicide. According to this doctrine, the king possessed a mortal Body Natural and an immortal Body Politic. Upon the death of the king's Body Natural, his immortal Body Politic was transferred to another Body Natural, that of the heir to the throne (The King's Two Bodies [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957]). It was the intention of the Jacobins to put to death Louis's Body Natural for his crimes, but, more important, they would also destroy his immortal Body Politic and replace it with an entirely new and different Body Politic, that of a sovereign people. Because Louis was the incarnation of the monarchical Body Politic, he presented the major obstacle to the birth of the nation. The Jacobins claimed that as long as he was alive, disorder would reign, the disorder of an unnatural state which denied the true and natural sovereignty of the people. His death would be the birth of the people, and his decapitation their coronation. At the Convention, Jacobins insisted on this equation. In a typical exhortation, the representative Thibaudeau

T H E C U L T OF H U M A N S A C R I F I C E

17

Feher wisely points out, the trial of a person accused of his symbolic role rather than of his own misdeeds can have nothing to do with justice or legal procedure. 7 The third reason the Jacobins had for opposing a trial again concerned the king's identity. Although Louis was for the Jacobins a symbolic personage, they also portrayed him as a very real but inhuman creature who existed outside of the polity and therefore outside of the law: "To judge is to apply the law; law supposes a common share injustice; and what justice can be common to humanity and kings?"8 The Jacobins were eager to execute a king whom they were unwilling to consider a human being. As if Louis were a supernatural being, Robespierre imagined that only the equivalent of supernatural force could vanquish him: "A people . . . does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss."9 Louis was depicted as a monster. During the trial, revolutionary rhetoric was saturated with references to his monstrosity and the necessity of expelling the monster from human society.10 The Abbe Gregoire charged that the royal prisoner was a flesh-devouring monster whose magic the Revolution would destroy: "Dynasties have never been anything but voracious breeds living off human flesh. . . . We must destroy this talisman whose magic power may still stupefy many more people." 11 Bertucat assured that "there lies the salvation of the people, in cutting off the head of a monster so as to paralyze his whole race with fear." Vadier railed against "the royal monster" Lakanal reviled "this monster made out of blood and mud." Carra denounced "a monster covered with all species of crime." Noel Pointe demanded: "What? do you behave timidly when it is a question of slaying a monster)" Gabriel Bouquier proclaimed that "a king, for a true republican, is but a carnivorous monster." Joseph Serre decried Louis the assassin, "a monster soiled by crime." Jean-Bon Saint-Andre cautioned: "It is in favor of this monster that they want to arouse your humanity. But for them to make this claim, it would have to be shown that he was at least partly human." Louchct similarly derided pity for an inhuman creature: "They demand implored: "Citizens, are we republicans? Well then! Let us judge Louis XVI promptly and let the scaffold, on which a deceitful king is guillotined, become the throne of the universal republic" (Le Pour et le Contre, 3:202). 7 Feher, The Frozen Revolution, 103. 8 Saint-Just, speech of 13 November 1792, in Walzer, ed. Regicide and Revolution, 124. 9 Robespierre, speech of 3 December 1792, in ibid., 133. 10 In the seventeenth century, John Milton, in his defense of the execution of Charles I, had also made the association of king and monster. Milton quoted the Bishop John Ponet: "The people may kill wicked Princes as monsters and cruel beasts" (John Milton, Complete Prose Works [New Haven: Yale University Press], 3:249). 11 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise (1847—53; reprinted Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 1:1182 (italics mine).

18

CHAPTER

ONE

your clemency! For whom? for a monster dripping with the blood of the French."12 The king had violated the natural order, that is, the sovereignty of the people, and for that reason too was a monster. Conor Cruise O'Brien pointed out that the indictment of the king was essentially for crimes against la nation and, given the Rousseau-inspired juxtaposition between "nature" and "nation," the status of being against the nation signified being against and outside of nature.13 Once the Jacobins established that the king was a monster, hors nature, with no social or moral identity, it was tolerable and acceptable to exclude him from society and put him to death. Louis's guilt was located not only in the political act of treason or in the crime of kingship, but also in his state of abnormality and difference.14 His execution would not even be confused with homicide. Excluded from citizenship and from the polity, a monster outside of the nation and outside of nature, Louis XVI had no intrinsic right to justice, life, or even the human condition.15 For the radicals of the Convention, the king, once the healing roithaumaturge who could cure his subjects of scrofula by touching them, remained a healer. The death of this unique, nonhuman being would cure France of war, poverty, corruption, and all its other ills. In their passionate speeches to the Convention, the Jacobins promised that regicide would inaugurate an era of peace and stability. Marat claimed that the success of the Revolution depended solely on the king's death: "No freedom, no security, no peace, no tranquillity, no happiness for the French, no hope for other peoples of breaking their chains, if the tyrant's head does not fall."16 SaintJustfollowedsuit: "That day will decide the fate of the republic; its doom is 12 LePouretkcontre: Bertucat, 3:219; Vadier, 2:113; Lakanal, 2:351; Carra, 3:41; Pointe, 3:33; Bouquier, 3:144—945; Serre, 2:63; Saint-Andre, 3:163; Louchet, 3:192 (italics mine). 13 Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Nationalism and the French Revolution," in The Permanent Revolution, ed. G. Best (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 34. 14 Rene Girard discusses the criteria for selecting persecutory victims. In addition to various forms of abnormality, which he calls "marginality on the outside," there is also "marginality on the inside, that of the rich and powerful." He believes that in times of social crisis, the rich and powerful may become the object of collective persecution and violence (Rene Girard, LeBouc emissaire [Paris: Grasset, 1982], 30-31). 15 Geoffrey Best offers one explanation of how admirers of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen could have denied such rights to the king. His argument is that the authors of the Declaration assimilated the rights of man with the rights of the citizen, that they were concerned not with "the rights of man anywhere at all but the rights of a citizen of France." Pointing to the basic difference between the rights of a citizen and intrinsic human rights, Best finds that "human rights means rights recognized in persons not by virtue of their being citizens of a state but simply because they are individual human persons, whatever state they do or do not belong to." The French Revolution, according to Best, had no clear concept of inalienable human rights. See G. Best, "The French Revolution and Human Rights," in his The Permanent Revolution, 103 and 108. 16 Le Pour et It Contre, 3:368.

THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

19

fixed if the tyrant goes unpunished." 17 Robespierre, an unlikely precursor of Joseph de Maistre, also equated the happiness and salvation of the nation with punishment: "The salvation of the people, the right to punish the tyrant, and the right to depose him are one and the same." 18 The radical newspaper Revolutions de Paris printed that "the blood of Louis Capet, shed by the blade of the law on 21 January 1793, cleanses us of a stigma of 1300 years. . . . Liberty resembles the divinity of the Ancients which one cannot make auspicious and favorable except by offering to it in sacrifice the life of a great culprit." 19 Michael Walzer, in his pioneering analysis of the regicide, defended the execution of the king as a symbolic act of liberation that was necessary for the destruction of the monarch as a magical figure. According to Walzer, the French needed to witness for themselves the public beheading of Louis XVI in order to be entirely disabused of the idea of monarchical political authority. The regicide performed "the symbolic disenchantment of the realm as well as the establishment of a secular republic." 20 And yet, although one of the Jacobins' political goals was surely demystification, their powerful rhetoric also suggests that their intention was not only to "disenchant" the realm, but simultaneously to reenchant it with a new myth of salutary, life-giving regicide. Indeed, Fercnc Feher commented that "the personal decapitation of an institution can only be crucial for those who intend to crush a tradition by symbolic acts, in other words for those who want to substitute a new mythology for an old one." 21 In a similar vein, Clifford Geertz asserts that political power cannot exist without a political mythology, that "a world wholly demystified is a world wholly depoliticized."22 Founding myths for 17

Saint-Just, speech of 27 December 1792, in Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, 175. Robespierre, speech of 3 December 1792, in ibid., 133. Quinet also commented on the similarity of vision between Robespierre and de Maistre: "Through the contagion of violence, the theologian Monsieur de Maistre becomes the Robespierre of the clergy. He epitomizes the terrorism of the Church instead of the terrorism of the Convention. His inexorable God, assisted by the executioner, the Christ of a permanent comite de salutpublic, is the ideal of 93, but a 93 eternally opposed to the Revolution. In the name of the Church, he accepts the system of the Montagne, the terror, the guillotine. . . . In this theology which makes death the order of the day, the absolutism of the Convention remains unchanged" (Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la revolution francaise [1845; reprinted Paris: Fayard, 1984], 245). 19 Quoted by Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 10. 20 Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, 88. Walzer also makes the comment that through the medium of the trial, "the king and his judges enacted, using the rituals of the law, the transition from the monarchy t o the republic" (Michael Walzer, "The King's Trial and the Political Culture of the Revolution," in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modem Political Culture, ed. C. Lucas [Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987-89], 2:188). 21 Feher, The Frozen Revolution, 1 0 1 . 22 Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma," inRites of Power, ed. S. Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 30. 18

20

CHAPTER

ONE

the new republic were essential, and, in January 1793, the Jacobins substituted for the myth of magical monarchical authority the myth of a phoenixlikc republic rising from the blood of the dead king. It was ironic that the Jacobin attempt to desacralize monarchy had the opposite effect of resacralizing it in a different form. In their classic essay on sacrifice, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert lucidly point out that "in any sacrifice of desacralization, however pure it may be, we always find a sacralization of the victim."23 It was thus inevitable that the Jacobins would revalorize the victim they portrayed as a monster. Rene Girard phrases Mauss's discovery differently, emphasizing the dual role of the victim whom he calls the bouc emissaire or scapegoat: "The people's unanimous execration of the agent who causes their ills also implies their subsequent unanimous veneration of the one who will cure them of this very disease." Persecution of the scapegoat implies belief in its total power to effectuate healing or some reestablishment of order and harmony. 24 Stripped of his authority, humbled, tried, and publicly executed, Louis XVI was, in reality, nothing but a guilty and powerless man; but at the same time, the crucial role in the birth of the republic that the Jacobins attributed to him could only valorize him as an essential agent of change whose power to generate a republic would endure even after his death. Such a sacrificial act also serves two other contradictory aims. Mauss suggests that, in primitive societies, the ritual of sacrifice traditionally "induced a state of sanctity and dispelled a state of sin." 25 Louis's death did in fact fill both these roles. As far as the Jacobins were concerned, regicide dispelled a state of sin by eliminating the monster responsible for the nation's ills, and, at the same time, it induced a state of sanctity by making possible a virtuous and virtually sacred republic, the reign of popular sovereignty, happiness, and security. What of the other actor, the one who performs the ritual of sacrifice? Mauss characterizes the "sacrifier" by his abnegation: sacrifice is not optional; the gods demand it, and the "sacrifier" must obey, no matter what personal deprivation is required of him. Indeed, Robespierre explained that the real sacrifice was not the sacrifice of the king, but rather the one that he, Robespierre, himself had to make. So that he could participate in the execution of the king, Robespierre saw himself as forced to banish his feelings of compassion, which, under other circumstances, would have been a virtue. He regretted this "sacrifice" of pity for the king, but deemed it essential for the survival of the republic. Such "boldness" was proof of "strength of character" and courage: "I have felt the republican virtues weaken in my heart in the presence of the guilty man humiliated before the power of the 23 Marcel Mauss and H e n r i H u b e r t , Sacrifice: Its Nature Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 9 5 . 24 Girard, he Bouc emissaire, 6 8 . 25 Mauss and H u b e r t , Sacrifice, 5 8 .

and Function

( 1 8 9 8 ; reprinted

T H E C U L T OF H U M A N S A C R I F I C E

21

sovereign people. But, Citizens, the final proof of devotion which representatives of the people owe to their country is to sacrifice those first natural movements of sensibility to the safety of a great people and to oppressed humanity." 26 His so-called "sacrifice" was the imagined personal cost to him of his willful dehumanization of the king. A century and a half later, German fascists also claimed to regret having to inure themselves to the extermination of millions of people by extinguishing pity and by convincing themselves that their victims were nonhuman, that their existences constituted "life unworthy of life." Like the Jacobins, they lamented the necessity of the sacrifice of their own goodness. Not all revolutionaries viewed the regicide as the founding act of the republic. For their part, the Girondins responded directly to the Jacobins' praise of regicide, pointing to the illusory and mythic underpinnings of their argument. Kersaint appealed to reason: "Citizens, do not believe that your troubles will cease the day you succeed in beheading the king." Biroteau dismissed the idea that regicide could have any positive effect on France's future: "It is not on the life or death of a prisoner that public tranquillity depends. Is it really Louis's death that is supposed to guarantee our freedom? No, it is the abolition of royalty that will set us free." Joseph Guiter proposed that the founding act of the Republic and the "first chapter of the Constitution" be the humane banishment of the royal family from French soil, instead of the violent decapitation of the king. Guiter discerned in regicide a misguided form of human sacrifice to the gods of the Revolution: "People have demanded that Louis be offered to the two tutelary divinities of France, freedom and equality, a sacrifice of human blood; but as for me, I ask that rather than offering them a sacrifice that they abhor, a cult and altars to them be erected instead." 27 Members of the Gironde were convinced that the Jacobins' allusions to the ritualistic act of slaying the monster masked a rational, calculated strategy to gain control of the Convention. The Girondins thus shifted the focus of the debate from the fate of the king to the goals and tactics of the Jacobins. Vergniaud, Faure, and others warned that, once the principle was established that the life of one individual could threaten the welfare and security of an entire nation, that principle could also be used against the members of the Convention. From the logic of die proposal for regicide, Faure deduced the logic of the Terror: 'Today [the people] blame the king for their troubles, tomorrow they will blame the Convention." 28 Although Walzer argues that the king's trial had nothing to do with the coming rule of the Terror,29 26

Robespierre, speech of 28 December, 1792, in Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, 179 (italics mine). 27 he Pour et le Contre: Kersaint, 6:306; Biroteau, 5:144; and Guiter, 5:160—61. 28 Ibid., 5 : 4 1 . 29 Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, 78.

22

CHAPTER

ONE

during the trial the Girondins were in fact predicting the Terror. Vergniaud perceived that the Jacobin demands for the death of the monarch, imprisoned in "the Temple," were the first step in their plan to discredit the Convention and establish a dictatorship: Have you not heard . . . people cry out in fury: if bread is expensive, the cause is in the Temple; if there is not enough currency in circulation, if your army is badly equipped, the cause is in the Temple; if every day we are forced to face the spectacle of indigence, the cause is in the Temple. Those who use this kind of language know perfectly well that the cost of bread, the food shortages, the poor administration of the army, and the terrible indigence we witness daily, have many other causes than those of the Temple. Who will guarantee that these same men who continually vilify the Convention, . . . who talk only of conspiracies, executions, traitors, and banishment; who write that . . . we must name a Defender of the republic; that there can be only one leader who can save the republic; who, I ask, will guarantee that, after Louis's death, these same men do not scream with equal violence: if bread is expensive, the cause is in the Convention. . . .Who will guarantee that in this new storm-tossed sea . . . they will not introduce, covered with blood as if he were our liberator, this Defender, this leader who they say has become so necessary?30 Petion insisted that the real enemies of freedom were those Jacobins who urged the king's execution, not the moderates who hoped to save his life.31 Finally, Mennesson concluded that the salvation of the Republic depended, not on Louis's death, but on his safety and survival: "In my eyes, Louis is no longer anything more than a contemptible ghost. But let me add this: I believe . . . that the salvation of the Republic hinges on the existence of this ghost; I see the eclipse of freedom the moment he disappears. . . . I already see despotism coming out of Louis's tomb; in the preparations for his execution, despotism is being reborn." 32 Although the Girondins, like virtually everyone else at the Convention, agreed that the king was guilty of various misdeeds and voted accordingly, they rejected the mythic persecutory claim that in one man could reside responsibility for the crisis as well as for its solution, for both the fall and salvation. They saw Louis instead as an unjustly persecuted scapegoat.33 30 Le Pour et le Contre, 5:245-47. 31 "Those men who demanded that the king be tried and immediately put to death, who denounced as supporters of despotism and traitors to the nation those who hesitated, . . . those men themselves were the greatest enemies of freedom" (Petion, in LePouretle contre, 5:26). 32 L. F. Jauffret, Histoire impartiale duproces de LouisXVI (Paris: Au Bureau du Journal de Perlet, L'An II, 1793), 7:295. 33 The Jacobins would have denied that Louis was a scapegoat, since the concept of the scapegoat implies the scapegoat's innocence. See Girard, Le Bouc emissaire, 62 and chap. 3, "Qu'est-ce qu'un mythe?"

THE CULT OF H U M A N S A C R I F I C E

23

The Girondins were convinced that their adversaries were more Machiavellian than pagan, that they did not themselves believe in their own persecutory rhetoric, and that they were motivated by politics and power, not by superstition. Pursuit of dictatorship was the Jacobin goal, not a magical and violent panacea.34 The lucid political analysis of the Girondins not withstanding, JeanFrancois Laharpe, in 1797, refocused attention on the Jacobins' troubling rhetoric, which seemed to him indeed to evoke ritualistic murder. In his Du Fanatisme dans la langue revolutionnaire, he found the idea that violence and assassination could constitute even the symbolic basis of a republic politically repugnant and intellectually vacuous. "In order to establish a republic, is all that is required the execution of a king? Rationality and the interests of the polity together declare: Whatever opinion one might have about Louis XVI, it can have no bearing on our freedom and our constitution.'" 35 Moreover, if the founding of the Republic were to be associated with violent origins, those origins, Laharpe maintained, were in Thermidor, not in January 1793. "If, fourteen months ago, you were able to draft a republican constitution, it is not because on the 21st of January a king perished; it is because on the 9th of Thermidor you sent the tyrants marching to their death." 36 Yet, the sham Thermidorean trials of Robespierre, Saint-Just, et al. had little to distinguish themselves from the trial of the king. 37 In his account of the last hours of Robespierre, Michelet reveals that Thuriot exhorted: "Let us purge the earth of this monster."38 The Terror concluded as it had begun. 34

The nonrational rhetoric that the Jacobins directed against the king took on, regretfully, an even more ritualistic dimension in the strange and sad trial of Marie-Antoinette in October 1793. Then they evoked not only monsters, outsiders, plague, and magic, but other traditional taboos such as incest. The queen's trial, once again, had nothing to do with guilt or justice and was characterized by unusually violent language. Hebert recommended in Le Pen Duchesne that the Austrian tigress be chopped into little pieces. The queen was accused of a variety of political and financial misdeeds, general hostility to the Republic, and the crime of being "foreign" and therefore ethnically marginal and different. But even more devastating and fatal to her were the bizarre accusations of incest. Fouquier-Tinville branded Marie-Antoinette "immoral and perverse in every way; this new Agrippa, intimately acquainted with every species of crime, denying her motherhood as well as the taboos forbidden by the laws of nature, this widow Capet was not afraid t o lure her son, Louis Capet, into the kind of obscene behavior the very idea of which makes us shudder in horror." The queen refused to defend herself, saying only that there were accusations to which a mother could not respond. If the Jacobins used a magical vocabulary as part of a political strategy to persuade the members of the Convention to vote for the regicide, their reckless language seemed to take on a life of its own in the trial of Marie-Antoinette, persecuted and finally executed for an imaginary and mythic crime. 35 Jean-Francois Laharpe, Du Fanatisme dans la langue revolutionnaire (Paris: Migneret, 1797), 7 4 - 7 5 . 36 Ibid., 76. 37 Feher, The Frozen Revolution, 112. 38 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution francaise, 2:987 (italics mine).

24

CHAPTER

ONE

In the nineteenth century, Michelet was also troubled by the disquieting subtext in the Jacobins' promotion of regicide. He remarked that in their obsession with the execution of the king, the Jacobins seemed bound to a primitive cult of human sacrifice to the gods: "Many people believed . . . that there had to be a human sacrifice, that a man had to be immolated to satisfy the god of War. . . . No, France did not have to become barbaric, France did not have to make human sacrifices to Fear."39 Although Michelet appreciated the need to abolish the monarchy before the new order could be established, he stood opposed to the magical thinking underlying the Jacobins' obsessive focus on the death of Louis XVI: 'These great citizens . . . truly believed that it was impossible to found a new society without completely annihilating the old one by destroying its principal symbol. They believed that the ancien regime was alive as long as its symbol was alive, and that the death of Louis XVI was the life of France." 40 Michelet even compared the Jacobins to the superstitious ancient Romans who literally founded their society on pagan symbols of violence: "What did the Romans do in order to establish their Capitol and assure that it would remain for eternity? In its foundation, they placed a blood-soaked head, without a doubt the head of king." 41 Other nineteenth-century historians as well perceived that, for the Jacobins, regicide had ritualistic as well as political resonances. Lamartine recognized that the Republic "clamored and cried out for a head, as if to sacrifice it to the angry god of the people." 42 Edgar Quinet also criticized the magical nature of the Jacobins' faith in regicide: "It appeared [to the Jacobins] that the life of the king was the sole obstacle separating them from the future they dreamt of. . . . Each instant of life granted to the prisoner in the Temple postponed the happiness they glimpsed beyond the guillotine." 43 Like the Girondin moderates Faure and Pction, however, Quinet realized that the myth of regicide served the Jacobins politically and that the association of a political execution with future felicity would be the Terror's standard justification for murder: "The accused alone are responsible for delaying the promised happiness. When they cease to exist, the golden age will begin." 44 39

Ibid., 2:94 and 71. ° Ibid., 2:17. 41 Ibid., 2:18. Lionel Gossman observes that for Michclet, in contrast to Tocqueville, the Revolution "was nothing less than an irruption of a different temporality into the time of profane history," and that Michelet located the Revolution in the "sacred time of origins" (Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 205—6). If we use Mauss's theory of sacrifice, the regicide would appear to be precisely that "sacred time of origins," for, like all sacrifices, it established communication between the sacred and the profane world through the mediation of a victim. 42 Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins 2:9'. 43 Quinet, La Revolution, 3 5 2 - 5 3 . 44 Ibid., 418. 4

THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

25

Even Jean Jaures pointed to the ritualistic implications in the calls for regicide: "There were revolutionaries who attributed to Louis's death a certain sacrificial meaning and majestic symbolism." Although he expressed fascination if not admiration for the Jacobins' "majestic" symbolism, Jaures nevertheless was troubled by the introduction of pagan ritual murder into the Jacobin vision of the birth of the republic. In his mind, the return to violent, pre-Christian superstition clashed ominously with modern progressive social intentions. "It was a most disturbing contradiction that the death of Louis, the sign of a new world from which servitude and suffering would be excluded, seemed to belong to a long and ancient tradition of sanguinary superstition." But, most important, he suspected what Mauss underlined, that the desacralization of the victim also implies his sacralization, first by attributing to him the power to purify the community and, second, by making his blood the source of political regeneration. Jaures was dismayed by the Jacobins' valorization of the king: "Dangerous mysticism which, even as it struck Louis down, magnified his power and made him emblematic of a whole world." 45 But the most stinging criticism of the regicide Jaures placed in the mouth of Louis XVI when he imagined what Louis might have said in his own defense: "You blame me and what you call my treasonous crimes for the turmoil in France. And you place on the head of one single man all the weight of staggering events. Be careful, you who believe that you are republicans. Because if you think like that, you are still monarchists; if it is true that one single man can determine, for better or for worse, the course of History, then the legitimacy of monarchy is founded." 46

It was not surprising that, contrary to the illusory promises of the Jacobins, no golden age, no era ofjustice, and no establishment of democratic institutions followed the guillotining of Louis XVI. 47 His death did not create a just order or free the French from the burdens of poverty, war, monarchy, or Catholicism; instead it had profoundly shaken the foundation of French politics, religion, and society. Geertz remarked that the French Revolution was "the greatest incubator of extremist ideologies, 'progressive' and 'reactionary alike," not because of social disequilibrium, but because "the central organizing principle of political life, the divine right of kings, was destroyed." The resultant socio-psychological strain, he argued, prepared the way for the rise of systematic (political, moral, economic) ideologies 45

Jean Jaures, Histoire socialiste (Paris: Rouff, n.d.), vol. 4, La Convention, pt. 2, 9 6 1 - 6 2 . Ibid., 883. 47 Girard mentions that "in myth, and only in myth, does the victim restore order" (LeBouc emissain, 66). 46

26

CHAPTER

ONE

that attempt to "render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful."48 In the nineteenth century, most historians of the French Revolution did not have recourse to extremist ideologies, but they did seek a framework in which to render comprehensible the profound discontinuity that the Revolution had injected into French history and society. As Lionel Gossman remarks, "the aim [of Romantic historiography] was . . . to heal the wounds inflicted by decades of social turmoil. . . . At the same time, the revolutionary rupture on which the new state rested had to be shown to have been necessary and justified."49 The framework that both reactionaries and progressives would use to explain and justify the Revolution was Christianity.50 Historians discovered that the king's death, the quintessential 48 Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in Ideology and Discontent, ed. D . Apter (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 640. 49 Gossman, Between History and Literature, 153. 50 Virtually all nineteenth-century historians of the Revolution took stands, one way or the other, as to whether the Revolution was an essentially Christian event, whether Christian theology could explain its significance or its failings. Joseph de Maistre envisaged the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment that would be followed by the resurrection of a strengthened, renewed monarchy. Buchez and Roux, in their Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution francaise (1833—38), which was Lamartine's principal source for his Histoire des Girondins, considered the Revolution an advanced stage in Christian theology. They praised the Revolution for bypassing modern individualism and for realizing instead the Catholic ideal of a community of equals. According to Lamartine, the principles of equity and fraternity, which the Revolution inherited from the Enlightenment, were essentially Christian. For him, the Revolution, in general, was characterized by a kind of religious rationalism. The Revolution was the political realization of Christian morality (see his Histoire des Girondins, 1:38—39). Quinet, assuming that political and religious revolutions were inseparable, interpreted the Revolution in Christian, although anti-Catholic, terms (see his Le Christianisme et la Revolution francaise). The Revolution resuscitated the fundamental principles of Christianity— equality and fraternity—which had been stifled for centuries by the Catholic Church. But France's attempted separation from Catholicism remained incomplete: the Jacobins' comite de salut public was but a slightly different incarnation of the absolute theocratic authority of the ancien regime. Although a foe of Catholicism, Quinet nevertheless wished to preserve continuity in French history by stressing the survival of the Christian tradition. For this reason, he expressed his conviction that only if the Revolution had been Protestant could it have succeeded in its fundamental struggle against Catholicism. Rejecting Buchez-Roux's antiindividualism, Quinet asserted that a Protestant revolution of free individuals and free minds, like that of the United States, could have accomplished the political and moral regeneration of the French. For Michelet, too, the issue of the Christian roots and ideals of the Revolution was of fundamental importance. H e summed up the dilemma in the second paragraph of his Histoire de la Revolution frangaise by posing the one most basic question: "Is the Revolution Christian or anti-Christian? This question, historically and logically, precedes all others" (1:21). Unlike Quinet, Michelet had no interest in preserving or continuing France's Christian heritage, and he saw the Revolution as an anti-Christian event, irreversibly opposed to France's theocratic Catholic past. The Revolution's most essential concept, that of Justice, was antithetical to and entirely incompatible with one of the most essential concepts in Catholicism, that of God's arbitrary and mysterious Grace. For Michelet, the ideals of the Revolution emanated

THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

27

symbol of historical discontinuity, could be integrated into French history and consciousness if it were interpreted in Christian terms. Indeed, not only reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, but republicans like Lamartine, Michelet, and Hugo searched for religious symbols, cyclical patterns, and "laws of history" that would reveal the meaning of the regicide. Although they scorned the Jacobins for equating regicide with human sacrifice, they too would view the king's death in terms of a Christ-like sacrifice in the cause of progress. Pro-royalists easily established a relationship between the king's fate and Christ's, since the king's quasi-divinity had for centuries been assumed. Bossuet, the seventeenth-century tutor of the future Sun King, instructed his royal pupil that the title of "christ" was traditionally given to kings, and, in fact, the dauphin at the time was called "petit christ."51 Referring to the oldest theories of sacred monarchy, Bossuet taught that the French king was divine and that he incarnated the greatness and authority of God. 52 In the eighteenth century, pro-revolutionary pamphleteers had enjoyed comparing Louis XVI to Christ, but their tone had, of course, always been sarcastic. Louis as divine martyr had provided revolutionaries with a vehicle for religious and political satire. 53 There was no irony at all, however, in the Restoration's deification of Louis XVI. The God-like attributes of the king had traditionally made him a superhuman being, but to make Louis XVI's execution equivalent to Christ's crucifixion, it had to be shown that Louis was an innocent victim who died willingly for the redemption of others. For some historians, Louis's last words provided crucial evidence. Among the many versions of Louis XVI's final words on the guillotine, there is one according to which the king expressed the hope that his imminent death would play a "useful" role for the French, that of a redemptive sacrifice for the nation. Louis supposedly said: "I die innocent, I pardon my enemies, and I hope that my blood may be useful for the French and diat it may appease God's wrath." 54 The testimony of the executioner himself, Sanson, was somewhat different, although from purely human values. The sacred and sovereign French people had, moreover, displaced both God as Prime Mover in history and Christ as agent of salvation. The French could emancipate and regenerate themselves, assuring their own salvation. The Revolution and the nation constituted the new religion; Christianity could be discarded. Almost all the early historians and commentators of the Revolution, from de Maistre to Quinet, wrestled with the same question, "How Christian was it?" 51 Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Politique tiree des propres paroles de I'Ecriture Sainte (1709; reprinted Geneva: Droz, 1967), 66. 52 Ibid., 177-78. 53 Frank Paul Bowman, Le Christ romantique (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 56—57. 54 Soboul, Le Proces de Louis XVI, 232 (italics mine), and Esquiros, Histoire des Montagnards, 2:292.

28

CHAPTER ONE

he too portrays Louis accepting his death calmly and expressing the hope that it might serve some purpose: "'I hope that my blood will cement the happiness of the French.' These, citizens, were his last, true words." 55 Lamartine's version is less kind to Louis, for there is more than an edge of vindictiveness in his pardon: "I pray to God that the blood which you are about to spill will not come to haunt France." As for Michelet, he permits the king no final statement other than a pathetic cry of despair: "I am lost! I am lost!" 56 But for some historians, Louis's last words were those of a voluntary sacrificial victim and redeemer.57 Such a sacrificial vision came naturally to the reactionary royalist Joseph de Maistre, obsessed as he was with sin, sacrifice, sanguinary punishment, and redemption. De Maistre was one of the first postrevolutionary thinkers to attempt a marriage of pagan and Christian concepts of sacrifice in order to explain Louis's death. He saw the Revolution as an event so purely evil, so absolutely extraordinary and unique, that it attained sacred status. He proclaimed this satanic Revolution the result of divine intervention, a "miracle" as marvelous in its own way as "the instantaneous fructification of a tree in the month of January."58 A satanic Revolution could only have also been a divinely inspired benevolent miracle if an epoch of supernatural evil and crime had been necessary to produce not only the greatest imaginable atrocity, the death of Louis XVI, but also that same sublime act of selfimmolation and sacrifice that alone could purify and redeem the country. Civilizations, de Maistre maintained, could be retempered only in blood. He found truth in the archaic and pagan practice of human sacrifice and in the "age-old dogma," adopted and consecrated by Christianity, that the innocent suffer for the benefit of the guilty. Louis XVFs death was such an act of sacrifice and redemption, a divine self-immolation.59 There are two key elements in de Maistrc's commentary on Louis's death. The first is the king's role as a voluntary sacrificial victim who died to expiate 55

Chateaubriand, Essai sur les revolutions ( 1 7 9 7 ; reprinted Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 3 3 3 . Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution francaise, 2 : 1 8 7 . 57 According t o the socialist historian Louis Blanc, Louis XVI was conscious of the sacrificial nature of his death and believed in his o w n martyrdom. His valet, Clery, in his account of Louis's last days, related that his master asked him t o guess the answer t o a puzzle in an old Mercure de France. W h e n he could n o t solve the puzzle, Louis said, "What? You cannot find the answer? A n d yet it surely applies t o me! T h e w o r d is sacrifice" (quoted by Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Revolution francaise [Paris: Pagnerre, 1 8 6 6 ] , 8:63). 56

58

Joseph de Maistre, Considerations sur la France ( 1 7 9 7 ; reprinted Brussels: 1838), 16. Joseph de Maistre believed that the idea of h u m a n sacrifice was the basis of all religions in every place a n d in every time. H e founded his o w n belief in sacrifice, however, o n his unwavering acceptance of the doctrine of original sin: "The gods are just, and we are guilty: we m u s t appease t h e m , we must expiate o u r crimes; and in order to d o this, the most powerful means is 59

sacrifice" (Joseph de Maistre, Eclaircissementsur les sacrifices, in his Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg

[Paris: Gamier Freres, n.d.], 2:261).

THE C U L T OF H U M A N S A C R I F I C E

29

the sins of others: "The majestic martyr seems only to fear escaping from this sacrifice or being a less-than-perfect sacrificial victim: what acceptance! and what a different fate he deserved!" The second is the idea that any positive historical change is accompanied by an act of human sacrifice: "The most propitious changes that occur among nations can almost always be imputed to blood-drenched catastrophes in which the victim is innocence itself."60 As anachronistic and sanguinary as these ideas are, they unexpectedly emerge at the core of the historical visions of writers from the liberal neo-Catholic Ballanche to progressive democrats such as Michelet and Victor Hugo. In the fascinating works of Ballanche, one finds a similar concept of the king's Christ-like death as well as that of the necessary punishment of an innocent man for historical change. Ballanche's description of the execution of Louis XVI, in his intriguing tale about the regicide, UHomme sans nom, emphasized the solemn grandeur of the king's sacrifice for the social redemption of France. He describes Louis wearing a crown of thorns and holding a sceptre of reed, reliving Christ's Passion.61 The members of the Convention who demanded the king's execution are compared to the evil Judas. Ballanche, moreover, distinguishes among those who voted for the death penalty. He asserts that certain men, less guilty than others, were unwittingly participating in a sacred ritual, unaware that "they were like sacrifiers and priests who were performing the immolation of the expiatory victim." As for the king, his final words suggested that he was conscious of the role his death would play in the future of the nation: "I saw him turn toward his people to speak to them, from the bottom of his fatherly heart, these words of pardon, words already recorded in his last testament, sublime monument of the most sublime clemency, for it simultaneously embraced past and future." Ballanche portrays the king as an entirely innocent redeemer who dies for the sins of the people in full knowledge of his future resurrection: "The sacrifice of his life in expiation for the parricide and for the transgressions of the people who had been entrusted to him: this was royalty itself, still pure and untainted, glorified by its own inevitable resurrection, since not the slightest crime or immoderation could be attributed to it." The execution itself constitutes a supernatural event. At the precise moment of decapitation, a burst of heavenly light descends, dazzling the stricken witnesses and transforming the moment of sacrifice into an epiphany.62 For Ballanche, the king's Christ-like sacrifice is, first of all, a redemptive act. Mauss remarked that "there is no sacrifice into which some idea of 60

Ibid., 3 1 4 - 1 5 . Pierre-Simon Ballanche, L'Homme sans nom (1820) in his Oeuvres (Paris: Barbezat, 1830), 1:342. 62 Ibid., 357 and 359. 61

30

CHAPTER

ONE

redemption does not enter." 63 Indeed, for Ballanche the tragic, divinelyordained Passion of Louis XVI was part of God's plan for the redemption of France: "From his immutable throne on high, far removed from all vicissitudes, perhaps God had condemned this just man for the salvation of his beloved France. Had this God not wished for his Son to pay humanity's debt? The king redeemed France as Jesus Christ redeemed the human race." 64 Ballanche considers sacrifice, however, more than a redemptive act, located in the spiritual sphere. It is also an act that permits social and political reform, and as such is located in the historical world. The originality of Ballanche's vision lies in his assimilation of Catholic eschatology and a modern Enlightenment doctrine of historical progress. Ballanche takes the view that Louis XVI immolated himself so that France could break with the past and enter a new age of justice and liberalization, "monarchy according to the Charter." The king's sacrifice ultimately enables France to progress toward political reform, freedom, and equality, in other words, toward the goals of the Revolution. Not only does the king redeem France and the Revolution, the Revolution, through the mediation of the king's sacrifice, is integrated into a Catholic vision of French history. Progress is divinely ordained, and the passage from a retrograde period in history to a more progressive one demands the bloody sacrifice of a "majestic victim." Could it be that societies, that are about to be transformed, undergo afinaldeathstruggle marked by bloodshed, or better still, a kind of painful childbirth? And might kings, those majestic victims, be the symbolic personification of this situation, which, after all, causes them the most anguish, since it is they who were designated die guardians of law, the safe-keepers of tradition? Might it be true, then, that a king, who can no longer represent a society about to expire, must die along with that society, and like it, die a violent and unjust death?65 Thus "Passion" becomes, so to speak, a law of history, a necessary and sacred condition for social and political progress. In this vision, Louis was more than the symbol and prisoner of the past: he also called into being the future. Paul Benichou remarked that, in Ballanche's interpretation, Louis 63

Mauss and Hubert, Sacrifice, 99. Ballanche, L'Homme sans nom, 3 9 1 . 65 Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Essai sur les institutions societies (1818) in his Oeuvres, 2 : 7 8 - 7 9 . In L'Homme sans nom, the Regicide entertains the same idea of human sacrifice for progress, although he seems to consider it an ancient rather than a modern concept: "I do not doubt that if we were in the epoch of individualizations, allegories, and apotheoses, Louis XVI would be considered, in some sense, the mystical victim of a societal transformation. . . . Never was a holocaust more noble or pure; never did a more resplendent and innocent virgin pay a heavier ransom for her life" (L'Homme sans nom, 4 0 2 - 3 ) . 64

THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

31

was truly a Christ-figure, announcing the coming of social regeneration and shedding his blood for the salvation of those who put him to death. 66 Although Ballanche and de Maistre were both royalists, their ideas about royal sacrifice were extremely different. The two agreed only about the divine right of kings and Louis's role as a sacred Christ-like victim who played a pivotal role in history. For de Maistre, the king's sacrifice would ultimately resurrect the ancien regime and even strengthen the absolute monarchy. But for Ballanche, the king died, not to resurrect and restore the ancien regime, but to liberalize it. The originality of Ballanche's vision is his attempt to reconcile Catholicism and revolution, permanence and change. It is very surprising that, in 1833, Michelet followed Ballanche by suggesting that the closure of historical cycles and the abolition of unjust, retrograde social structures require human sacrifice. This young Michelet, clearly writing with affection and nostalgia for the monarchy, displayed none of the antipathy toward Christianity and hostility toward French royalty that would permeate his Histoire de la. Revolutionfrangaise and other texts written in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. In his Histoire du Moyen Age, Michelet referred to Louis XVI as a saint who had the misfortune of bearing the responsibility for the crimes of his dynasty. History demanded this innocent martyr's death in order to abolish an archaic and corrupt social order. One could easily mistake Michelet's words for those of Ballanche: It is a law of history: a world about to expirefindsclosure and expiation through a saint. The purest member of a race will bear its sins, the innocent one will be punished. His crime is having tried to perpetuate a society condemned to perish, having used his virtue to conceal ancient injustices still present. Through his virtue, social injustice is struck down. . . . He who has the misfortune of offering his life in exchange for the immolation of a society, whether his name be Louis the Debonair, Charles I, or Louis XVI, is nevertheless not entirely beyond reproach. His suffering would move us less if he were so very different from other men. No, he is flesh and blood like us, a gentle soul, a weak spirit, wanting the best, sometimes doing the worst, a prisoner of his times, betrayed by those closest to him.67 Lamartinc perceived the same "law of history" according to which historical progress demands the sacrifice of a victim who, although himself innocent, stands for corrupt political institutions: "The fall from popularity of French royalty, all the sins of former administrations, all the vices of kings, all the scandals of the court, all the grievances of the people, had, so to speak, fallen on [Louis's] shoulders, designating him as the expiatory victim of 66

Paul Benichou, Le Temps des prophetes (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 78. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, Moyen Age (1833; reprinted Paris: Flammarion, n.d.), 1:275. 67

32

CHAPTER ONE

centuries of misrule." 68 Lamartine saw the regicide as "the point at which the most necessary and holy revolutions come to a head in the anguish, torture and suffering of victims who personify institutions about to be immolated." 69 In this sense, history was like religion: "Epochs have their sacrifices, like religions. When they want to renew an institution that is no longer viable, they lay upon a man, who personifies that institution, all the odium and condemnation of the institution itself; they make that man a victim whom they immolate to time: Louis XVI was this innocent victim, burdened with all the iniquities of the throne, and who had to be sacrificed for the punishment of the monarchy. Such was the king." 70 It is curious that, in viewing the regicide as the prerequisite for historical change, Lamartine and others blithely discount the closeness of the vote for the death penalty, for, in this case, a "law of history" hinged on a precariously small number of vacillating individuals.71 Lamartine, however, not only justified the regicide as a condition for political and social renewal, but astonishingly accepted political violence as the necessary price for progress: "A nation must weep for its dead, no doubt, and weep inconsolably if one single head has been unjustly and treacherously sacrificed; but it should not bemoan the spilling of blood, for blood is shed so that eternal truths may bloom. This is the price that God has set for the germination and florescence of his designs for man. Ideas find nourishment in human blood; revelations come down to us from the scaffold." 72 In this ode to violence, Lamartine surprisingly sees "ideas" and even revelations of truth springing from blood and violence. Violence is more than the terrible price that must be paid for progress, it is valuable in itself, the source of progress. Quinet directly contradicted Lamartine, vehemently repudiating the idea that violence—the sacrifice of the king, of the Girondins, or of all the other 68

Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 1:47. Ibid., 2:10. In still another version of the same scenario, Lamartine goes so far as to imagine a kind of collaboration between Revolution and Church; he hypothesized that the priest w h o received Louis's last confession "imposed on his penitent the expiatory act of sacrificing his own blood in order to cleanse the throne of the sins of his race" (ibid., 2:125). 70 Ibid., 1:47 (italics mine). 71 As Furet observed, "the assumption of the necessity of 'what took place' is the classic retrospective illusion of historical consciousness" (Francois Furet, Penser la revolution [Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1978], 40). 72 Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:924. Years later, in his Critique de I'Histoire des Girondins, Lamartine repudiated this justification of revolutionary violence: "This page represents one of the two gross, yet involuntary, errors for which I must accept blame. . . . The judgment I expressed was an ode rather than a verdict. It seems to soar over the entire scene with a glorious amnesty, thus appearing to justify, in one vindicating halo, all acts and all actors. . . . An historian does not have such a right to throw his mantle over the hideous crimes of his century and say: 'All is well'" (Alphonse de Lamartine, Critique de I'Histoire des Girondins, in his Oeuwes completes [Paris: 1861], 15:158 and 251). 69

T H E C U L T OF H U M A N S A C R I F I C E

33

victims of the Terror—could be necessary or productive. "There was certainly no need for the immolation of even one of these noble beings for society to have made the progress that we now enjoy. . . . Nothing was gained by the horror of so much suffering. . . . The most heroic blood was ultimately the most sterile." Quinct mocks the pat phrases of historians with which they assert that men must perish "so that a new order can be born." For Quinet, a true Enlightenment spirit, there are no imaginary "laws" of history; there are only human beings and their freedom. 'There is no other polestar. He who abandons it walks in darkness."73 Quinet's rationality not withstanding, the great republican writer, Victor Hugo, surprisingly regresses to an acceptance of the myth that the regicide was an act of expiation and redemption. First of all, Hugo envisioned the regicide in terms of the king's expiation for the centuries of royal misdeeds, rather than simply envisioning it as an act of political violence or radical change: O royaltyfinallycrushed by the weight of your crimes, Lugubrious blossoming of infamous deeds! Fearsome expiation! Dreadful settlement of infinite debts!74 Like Ballanche, Michelet, and Lamartine, he portrayed regicide as a human sacrifice necessary for the closure of a retrograde historical epoch. But whereas Lamartine stopped short of comparing Louis XVI to Christ, Hugo assimilates Louis's death widi Christ's. He imagines a kind of FrancoChristian drama in which the execution of the king, a sacred, time-stopping event, revolutionized life on earth, transforming the nadir into the zenith. Slowly ascending the stairway of the years, The eighteenth century reached eighty. Thirteen more, that strange number, and the day dawned. Then, as happens for each phenomenon, For each transformation of the human soul, As when Jesus died at Golgotha, The eternal hourglass of the centuries stopped short, 73 74

Q u i n e t , La Revolution, 4 2 7 and 4 2 9 . O royaute pliant a la fin sous le faix! Epanouisscment lugubre des forfaits! Expiation formidable! N o i r paiement des dettes sans n o m b r e ! ( H u g o , "Boite aux lettres" (1855—58), from AUntours des Chatimmts, in his Oeuvres poetiques [Paris: Gallimard, 1 9 6 7 ] , 2:264)

34

CHAPTERONE

Leaving time unfinished and interrupted; The poet's profound eye dove into the clouds, And saw a hand turning back time. All knew that this was one of those solemn moments, That everything would begin anew, and that in this planetary phase The summit would collapse into the depths, The nadir would become the zenith, And the people would rise as the vanquished king fell.75

Although Hugo had also referred to the king's death as the "lugubrious childbirth of the twenty-first of January," here it is without ambivalence that he resuscitated the Jacobin equation of regicide and the birth of the people. Implicit in Hugo's poem is a vision of the Revolution as an absolutely new beginning ("everything would begin anew") that could only occur because a transmundane event interrupted and suspended profane historical time ("the eternal hourglass of the centuries stopped short"). The only other occurrence of such an event is of course the crucifixion. Meaningful historical and political change, therefore, does not take place gradually but can only be conceived as an entirely new epoch born in a Christ-like sacrificial death. The striking similarity between the revolutionary radicals on the one hand and liberals like Ballanche and republicans like Michelet, Lamartine, and Hugo on the other, is that they all envisioned the slaying or the sacrifice of a human being, a significant political figure, as the price that had to be paid for social redemption and progress. The nineteenth-century idea that the Christ-like sacrifice of an innocent politicalfigurewould end one retrograde epoch and inaugurate a new progressive one incorporated the essence of the Jacobins' irrational claim that the regicide would purge French society 75

Quand, montant lentement son escalier d'annees, Le dix-huitieme siecle atteignit quatrevingt. Encor treize, le nombre etrange, et le jour vint! Alors, comme il arrive a chaque phenomene, A chaque changement de Tame humaine, Comme lorsque Jesus mourant au Golgotha, L'eternel sablier des siecles s'arreta, Laissant 1'heure incomplete et discontinued; L'oeil profond des penseurs plongea dans la nuee, Et l'on vit une main qui retournait le temps. On comprit qu'on touchait aux solennels instants Que tout recommenc,ait, qu'on entrait dans la phase, Que le sommet allait descendre sous la base, Que le nadir allait devenir le zenith, Que le peuple montait sur le roi qui finit. (Hugo, Le Verso de la page, in his Oeuvres completes [Paris: Club Francois du Livre, 1967-70], 10:265)

T H E C U L T OF H U M A N S A C R I F I C E

35

and make possible an epoch of felicity, justice, and democracy. Although Michelet and Lamartine criticized the Jacobins for stooping to pagan primitivism in committing an act of sacrifice that they denigrated as ritualistic, superstitious, and barbaric, they themselves praised Louis XVI for performing a courageous, heroic act of self-sacrifice and expiation. Valorized by his suffering and sacrifice, no longer the monster he had been for the Jacobins, Louis became a scapegoat, a Christ-figure, "innocence itself." These nineteenth-century republicans refuted the Jacobins' persecutory idea that the king was responsible for the fall, but they retained the even more supernatural belief that his death was necessary for redemption and social renewal. The Jacobins did not succeed in their mission of desacralization, for until the mid-nineteenth century, the king's prestige remained intact. Still a deus ex machina, he possessed power over society and history through an exemplary Christian death that supposedly generated a sovereign people and a new historical era. Although this vision of regicide was charged with Christian resonances, merging as it did "progress" and "Passion," these historians nevertheless imagined that the royal Christ-like victim was sacrificed, not to the Revolution's gods or even to Christianity's God, but rather to History itself, the metaphysical, disembodied deity of the nineteenth century. History and the ideal of progess, the new objects of hope and faith, had incorporated the essentially religious concept of sacrifice. Sacrifices would henceforth be made in the name and cause of history and progress. History not only replaced religion, but also made the same mysterious gratuitous and irrational demands. As Lamartine asserted, "Epochs have their sacrifices, like religions." Quinet had attempted to unmask the irrationality of a doctrine of progress according to which change depends on suffering and sacrifice rather than on the efforts of human intelligence. As Quinet correctly suggests, there are no rational grounds for the belief that violence and cruelty, rather than political reforms and utilitarian measures, must determine the course of events. In truth, neither the regicide nor the Terror contributed to "progress." One may even question, as does Tocqueville, whether the Revolution itself ended one retrograde era and began another progressive one. For Tocqueville, politically the Revolution merely substituted one despotic government for another; socially, given the eventual industrialization and democratization of Europe, the same changes in the structure of French society would have occurred over time. Tocqueville viewed the Revolution as the "sudden and violent consummation of a process to which ten generations of men had contributed. If the Revolution had not taken place, the traditional social structure would still have been dismantled everywhere, here a little sooner, there a little later; only it would have continued to fall bit by bit instead of collapsing all at once. The Revolution produced suddenly,

36

CHAPTER

ONE

convulsively, and painfully, without transition, without forethought, without circumspection, something that would have occurred gradually and eventually by itself. So much for the Revolution's accomplishment."76 Tocqueville's purpose, however, was radically different from those of a writer like Ballanche, historians like Michelet and Lamartine, and a poet like Hugo. Tocqueville was not trying to justify the revolutionary rupture or revolutionary violence; on the contrary, he was attempting to prove that many of the Revolution's social reforms had already been initiated by the ancien regime and that the political foundation of freedom requires more than revolutionary upheaval. He therefore needed no recourse to hallucinatory "laws of history" according to which progress demands human sacrifice and violence. But despite Quinet's and Tocqueville's rational views, bizarre "laws" of history were still discerned by a historian as brilliant as Michelet and by a politician as intelligent as Lamartine. Strangely they seemed to ignore that revolutionary violence hardly produced "revelations" or "eternal truths," but only drowned the king, the Revolution, and the Revolution's leaders in a sea of blood. Regicide and terror were not the key to historical change, but rather led directly to the turbulence that subsided with the restoration of the monarchy. These historians were equally unwilling to view the Revolution as an event that, although unique, was nevertheless part of the innumerable and continuing changes of which history consists. Instead they bestowed upon it sacred status, explaining it with "laws" of the historical necessity of violence. Sadly, such "laws" create a new historical mysticism at the expense of human freedom and intelligence, contradicting all of the real progress that was made during the Enlightenment. Instead of praising the power and autonomy of human agents to make and modify historical events, Michelet, Lamartine, and Hugo, as well as their royalist counterpart Ballanche, diminish human freedom by presenting humans as passive spectators at sacred events. Contrary to "laws" that bind progress to violence, real progress depends on the rational and moral deeds of free human agents. Only mythic thinking can justify the utility of sacrifice and violence. The Jacobins had hoped that, in executing the king and destroying the living symbol of magical royal authority, they would set free man's critical faculties and endow him with responsibility for his own fate. But the disappearance of the old dogmas of the ancien regime left a troubling vacuum that was soonfilledwith new dogmas, based, like the old ones, on superstition and magical thinking. Just as the Jacobins responded to the traditional magical valorization of monarchy with their own magical valorization of 76

Tocqueville, LAncien Regime et la Revolution (1856), in his Oeuvres completes, ed. J.-P.

Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 96.

THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

37

regicide, nineteenth-century historians responded to the Jacobin promotion of human sacrifice by substituting for it a progressive Christian version of the same myth. Michelet, Lamartine, and Hugo were held just as spellbound as the Jacobins by the superstitious idea that a golden age of justice and progress could be produced by the murder of one royal person.

Chapter Two LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

T

HE THEME of sacrifice, associated with the regicide as well as with the Passion, was woven not only into nineteenth-century theories of history but also into Michelet's democratic concepts of civic virtue and nationhood. In an act of tremendous historical and mythopoeic imagination, Michelet revived the medieval monarchist heroine, Joan of Arc, and transformed her, in virtually one swift move, into a people's saint and martyr. Louis XVI, the royal sacrificial victim, was displaced by Joan who incarnated the capacity for self-sacrifice of the French people and of their nation. And yet, the monarch Louis XVI and the new democratic Joan of Arc were not entirely dissimilar. Both were devout Christians, both had been tried and executed, and both left behind followers who attested to their sainthood and who interpreted their deaths in terms of Christ's martyrdom and Passion. Moreover, the king and Joan of Arc had similar symbolic functions: for monarchists, Louis XVI was the living incarnation of the Body Politic; for republicans, Joan incarnated the sovereign French people. Michelet reworked the story of Joan of Arc, borrowing elements from monarchist mythology and Catholic theology, to create a galvanizing democratic and patriotic myth. As Gossman noted, "Romantic historiography set out to invent an identity for the modern nation that could replace the identity once provided by the representative figure of the king." 1 In several of Michelet's texts Jeanne d'Arc, Le Peuple, and Preface de 1869 a PHistoire de France, as well as in the Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, it is Joan of Arc who provides a new spiritual identity for the French collectivity, filling the void created by the death of Louis XVI. 2 Through her mediation, reverence for the king yields to reverence for the nation, and she ultimately becomes the vehicle for modern messianic nationalism, a most disturbing and ominous accomplishment.

1

Gossman, Between History and Literature, 221. In the nineteenth century, Joan, the national saint, was a national industry. Hundreds of biographies/hagiographies, poems, plays, and musical scores were written about Joan of Arc by Prudhomme, Sismondi, Dumas, Lamartine, Guizot, Barante, Sainte-Beuve, Scribe, Gounod, Alphonse Karr, and hundreds of others. In the twentieth century, Anatole France, Peguy, Claudel, Barres, Maurras, Bernanos, Maeterlinck, Audiberti, Aragon, and Anouilh composed works about Joan of Arc. Outside of France, David Hume, Schiller, Schlegel, Mark Twain, Thomas de Quincey, George Bernard Shaw, Gcorg Kaiser, Maxwell Anderson, Brecht, and countless others wrote about the French heroine. Operas about Joan were composed by Verdi and Tchaikovsky. 2

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

39

The assimilation of the "martyred" Louis XVI and Jesus Christ, which had become a commonplace in the early nineteenth century, provoked Michelet's outrage. He did not deny die king's real religiosity or his effort to find strength in the emulation of Christ, but he scorned the ideas that Louis XVI had been an absolutely just and innocent human being or that any believing Christian could consider himself perfect and saintlike or compare his own suffering to that of Christ. 3 Michelct was stunned by the hubris of Louis's "strange deification of himself."4 Nothing had been easier for the Church, in whose sacred texts kings were referred to as "christs" and Christ as king, than to present Louis XVI as a Christ-like martyr and to translate the story of his imprisonment and death in terms of Christ's Passion. But Michelet knew that the myth of Louis as Christ had devastating political consequences; it had united and strengthened the reactionary forces of both church and monarchy, institutions that had almost been discredited by the Enlightenment and between which there had always been more rivalry than collaboration. "How sad that all the toil of the Revolution should have led only to filling up the churches again!" he lamented.5 Michelet was determined to subvert the royalist myth of the martyred king by placing sanctity and martyrdom on the side of the Revolution, by showing that there had been saints and martyrs who belonged to the people, not to the monarchy. None of the "martyrs" of the Revolution, however, could function as the mythical equivalent of Louis XVI; none could abolish political differences and represent all the French; none could fuse political, supernatural, and Christian themes; and no single participant in the Revolution could be identified as the chosen agent of divine intervention. Michelet was, moreover, wary of great individuals in history. He detected several drawbacks in choosing an individual to represent the collectivity. First of all, no individual can sustain such adoration; when his flaws are recognized, nothing remains.6 Second, the materiality and destiny of any historical personage chosen to represent the people would necessarily constrain the nation's sense of its freedom to create its own destiny. For those reasons, and also because he was convinced that the abstract was always superior to the individual and the concrete, he sought a universal and abstract figure to represent the collectivity. "Mystical unity dirough the medium of one man? . . . It would still be limited by materiality, by one single destiny. Just one man? Why not several? Why not a thousand? Why not everyone? . . . As for the Revolution, it had no need of models, or even of men and heroes; for when the hero came, the Revolution perished."7 3

Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangedse, 2:190. Ibid., 2:184-85. 5 Ibid., 2:161-62. 6 Jules Michelet, Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 5 September 1850, 2:128. 7 Ibid., 2 2 - 2 3 February 1845, 1:593. 4

40

CHAPTER

TWO

Looking beyond the Revolution, Michelet discovered such a general and abstract being in Joan of Arc whose individuality was superseded by her universality. Self-sacrificing and selfless, she took on the suffering and identity of the collectivity and simultaneously imparted to them her own courage, patriotism, and sainthood. Michelet's obvious problem in revitalizing the moribund myth of Joan of Arc was transfiguring her into a democratic heroine and symbol of a nonmonarchical nation. For this, he had to turn his back on centuries of royalist interpretations of the legend. 8 In his revisionist version of the myth, he extricated Joan from her traditional association with the monarchy by stressing her devotion to the kingdom and not to the king. Her mission was to save the realm, not the royal person. Joan informs Baudricourt, the king's servant, that "the kingdom did not belong to the dauphin, but to her Lord; and it was the Lord's will that the dauphin should become king, and hold the kingdom in trust." 9 Her lord and the real king of France is Jesus Christ; Charles VII is only the "lieutenant of the Heavenly King, Who is the King of France." 10 For Gustave Rudler, this emphasis on kingdom was Michelet's invention and did not correspond to the historical Joan of Arc; he asserts that Joan, unlike Michelet, never conceived of France without reference to the king. *1 Conor Cruise O'Brien, however, considers Michelet's portrait of Joan historically accurate. He argues that she had always placed the kingdom of France and the King of Heaven above the French king whom she considered no more than "a necessary adjunct to the kingdom, a lieutenant . . . through whose coronation Jesus manifests his concern for the Holy Kingdom." Cruise O'Brien concludes that, inasmuch as the historical Joan emphasized the direct link between God and Kingdom and located the object of her devotion in the nation and not in sacral kingship, her role was disruptive: "Joan's form of nationalism may be seen as a move . . . in the direction of a land-and-people cult, such as is elaborated in the Marseillaise."12 Whether or not the real Joan ofArc intended to bestow upon the nation and the people the sacred characteristics formerly associated with the monarchy, there is no doubt that this transference of the sacred from monarch to people was Michelet's clear ideological intention. 8 During the Restoration, Joan of Arc was the heroine of many pro-royalists. One group, in their desire to consecrate Joan as a royalist heroine and martyr, attempted to prove that she was of royal blood, thereby demonstrating that French royalty had been capable of its own salvation and erasing its debt to the French people. Charles Nodier, in his introduction to Dumas's Jeanne d'Arc (Paris: Gosselin, 1843), P. Caze in his La VeritesurJeanne d'Arc (Paris: Chez Rosa, 1819), and others categorically stated that Joan was the daughter of the due d'Orleans and Queen Isabelle. 9 Jules Michelet, Joan of Arc, trans. Albert Guerard. (1842; reprinted Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 Gustave Rudler, Michelet, historien de Jeanne d'Arc (Paris: PUF), 26 and 119. 12 Conor Cruise O'Brien, God Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 2 1 - 2 2 .

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

41

Once Michelet established that Joan conferred her allegiance on the nation and not the king, she could epitomize his notion of the hero—selfless, national, collective. Paul Viallancix astutely commented that, for Michelet, the hero transcends his own identity; he becomes the symbol of the entire nation by never preferring himself to the "general will." 13 Indeed, the relationship between Joan and the French people is profoundly reciprocal. At the same time that the multitude becomes a person, Joan becomes the multitude. Just as the French adopt the characteristics of a single individual, Joan embraces the characteristics of the French. She becomes plural and singular, male and female, terrestrial warrior and celestial saint. "And let no one be surprised if the people become manifest in the form of woman, if a woman cast aside patience and the gentle virtues for the virile ones, the ones of war; if the saint turned into a soldier."14 Joan was so polymorphous that she appeared, reincarnated, in the young male heroes of the Revolution. "What can it matter," wrote Michelet, "if the girl became a young man, Hoche, Marceau, Joubert, or Kleber!"15 In 1850, Michelet recognized that the greatest disadvantage in constituting society around a great individual was that the individual would inevitably become the center of a personality cult, not a vehicle for inspiring fraternal unity.16 The originality of Joan of Arc is that she directed her love toward the French and that they occupy, along with her, the altar of devotion. She functions as a medium through which the French people could experience their own unity. Her self-abnegation shifts the locus of her ego 13

Paul Viallaneix, "Preface," in Jules Michelet, Jeanne dArc, ed. P. Viallaneix (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1974), 15. 14 Jules Michelet, Histoire du Moyen Age (Paris: Flammarion, n.d.), 5:15-16. Uncertainty concerning Joan's male or female traits mirrors the contradictor}' elements in Michclet's own thought, in his oscillation between paternal and maternal images of deity and nation. In the Histoire de la Revolutionfrancaise,he defines the androgynous true God thus: "The all-powerful Creator of the heavenly spheres, or, rather, the Great Mother, ever fertile, giving birth every minute to waves and hearts" (2:428). God, like Joan of Arc, is comprised of masculine principles of energy and activity and female principles of sympathy, fecundity, and love. In his Journal of 1850, Michelet distinguished between "male" and "female" religions, noting that male religions emphasize individualism and female religions stress sociability and fraternity (Journal, 13 August 1850,2:117). Inasmuch as Joan of Arc gave birth to the idea of nationhood and spiritual community, she is essentially a female symbol, Mary as Savior, the mother of the nation. But in 1856, Michelet expressed ambivalence about his own exile of the father image, especially in his interpretation of the Middle Ages. He lamented the disappearance of the creative and generative male power: "The Middle Ages dreams of childbirth without sperm, dispensing with God the Father (female acrobatics of love); the Middle Ages are sterile" (Journal, 8 August 1856, 2:308). 15 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution fmn^aise, 1:75. 16 "The most serious drawback in the messianic entreprise, which gathers men around a man-god and has them place their ultimate aspirations in him, is that it misses its mark. Messianism does create love. But for whom? For this quasi-divine ideal more than for the followers themselves" (Michelet, Journal, 5 September 1850, 2:129).

42

CHAPTERTWO

and her identity to the people, making her inseparable from them: "Pity was so immense within her that she had no pity left for herself."17 Joan's compassion for the French permitted her simultaneously to merge with the group and to bestow upon the group a new national identity. It was empathy for the people she called the "French" that enabled heterogeneous individuals to feel, for the first time, a sense of nationhood that obliterated regional differences and loyalties: Before the Maid, there had been hatred for the English; there had been the fierce hostilities of province against province, and then passionate political conflicts; but never had the feeling of nationhood been expressed. It was she who uttered the first such word during the siege of Orleans: "When I see the blood of a Frenchman, my hair stands on end." In the past, a Breton might have said that about a Breton, or a Burgundian about a Burgundian; no one had ever had the idea of saying it about the nation. And so the idea of nationhood . . . emerged for the first time through a woman.18 The strength of Joan's love made the French conscious of belonging not only to a political and geographical nation but, more important, to a spiritual community. Joan loved the French as if they were a person, and Michelet believes that her love transformed isolated individuals into a transcendent collective being: [Pity] was alive within the heart of a woman. These naive yet profound words bespeak what was in her heart: 'The Pity that dwells in die Kingdom ofFranceT "I never saw the blood of a Frenchman without my hair standing on end." . . . "Blackguards! you dare admit that the blood of France has been spilled!" These astonishing words, the blood of France, are heard for the first time. For the first time, we sense that France is loved like a person. And from that day on, she becomes a person, because she is loved.19 When Joan is ultimately betrayed, it is because national feeling and hence empathy and morality were completely absent: "An alarming egotism had obliterated political passions. People were no longer for Armagnac or for Burgundy; instead it was every man for himself."20 A polymorphous being whose personality, intelligence, gender, and social class can encompass the entire people corresponds to Michelet's definition of the "genius" who incarnates the unity and diversity of the people: 'The genius . . . fuses within himself the two sexes of the soul, so to speak, the instinctive behavior of the simple folk and the comprehension of the wise. In a sense, the genius is both man and woman, child and adult, savage 17 18 19 20

Michelet, Jeanne Michelct, course Michelet, Jeanne Michelet, course

d'Arc, 39. at the Sorbonne, 1834, ibid., 283. d'Arc, 4 0 - 4 1 . at the Sorbonne, 1834, in his Jeanne d'Arc, 293.

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

43

and citizen, populace and aristocracy."21 Joan was a "genius" because she represented the triumph of spirit over matter and the general over the particular. Michelet, in fact, equated civilization and progress with the victory of spiritual and abstract values over backward individualist, materialist, and local values, over the retrograde pull of the earth, over the tyranny of material circumstances.22 The late nineteenth-century nationalist emphasis on "rootedness" that called attention to the importance of unique regional characteristics would have held little appeal for Michelet,23 for whom Joan's strength and originality lay in her capacity to transcend locality, difference, and individuality. Interestingly, in his texts of the 1830s, not unfavorable to Catholicism and monarchism, Michelet identified medieval kings with the universal and abstract hero whom he would later define as "genius." In his Introduction a Phistoire universelle, he expressed admiration for the medieval saintlike "citizen kings:" 24 'The gentle Dagobert, Louis-le-Bon or Louis the Debonair, the good King Robert, and finally Saint Louis. The model for the King of France has always been a saint." 25 Frail and disempowered kings were especially privileged in the popular imagination; in their inertia, the people venerated "the image of their own servitude." 26 This suffering king, with whom the people could identify, offered them an image of a familiar Christ. "From that time on, the idea of a Christ living among them resurfaced again and again whenever great suffering afflicted the people. . . . They created for themselves a Christ of flesh and blood, living and suffering with them." 27 Michelet imagined that the individuality and personality of such Christ-like kings ultimately disappeared, and there remained only the symbol of the sacred, Christian identity of the nation. 28 21

Jules Michelet, he Peuple (1846; reprinted Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 187. "Little by little, the original strength within man will unshackle him, unloosening his roots in this earth. . . . H e will need, not his native village, or city, or region, but a wonderful patrie. . . . The idea ofpatrie, so abstract and intangible, will nevertheless guide him toward the idea of the universal patrie, of the City of Heaven" (Jules Michelet, Introduction a Phistoire universelle; Tableau de la France; Preface a I'Histoire de France [ 1 8 3 1 , 1 8 6 1 , 1 8 6 9 , respectively], ed. Charles Moraze [Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1962], Tableau, 160). 23 However, in 1869, Michelet criticized the histories of his predecessors for being "not material enough, recognizing the importance of race, but not of soil, climate, food, and many other physical and physiological factors" (Michelet, Preface [1869] a I'Histoire de France, 169). 24 Michelet, Introduction a I'histoire universelle, 68. 25 Ibid., 66. 26 Paul Viallaneix, ha Voie royale, essai sur I'idee de peuple dans Voeuvre de Michelet (Paris: Delagrave, 1959), 3 1 3 . 27 Michelet, course of 1 8 3 5 - 3 6 , quoted in Viallaneix, La Voie royale, 4. 28 "The King is the universal form of the people's immense diversity, the symbol of the entire nation. And yet, the more he represents the nation, the less significant he becomes. His own personality disappears; he becomes less a man than an idea. This symbolic being achieves universality by merging with the people, the Church, which is the daughter of the people: he is 22

44

CHAPTER

TWO

Michelet hypothesized that, at the time of the Revolution, the monarchy passed on to the people the sacred, general, and abstract characteristics of the monarch. 'The prestige of the priest and of the king, representatives of what was the most universal—and therefore the most sacred—in the national consciousness, lent the embryonic people a kind of mystical cocoon in which it developed and grew strong. Until one morning, aware that it had become tall and strong, it cast aside its swaddling clothes. The divine right of kings and priests mattered only inasmuch as it expressed God's own design, that is, the universal idea of the people."29 Michelet, of course, later disavowed such praise for saintly French royalty. In 1846, at the time of his father's death, he reproached himself for having betrayed the spirit of the Revolution he associated with his father, and, in 1869, he still bitterly regretted his idealization of the Middle Ages, "those reckless juvenile words."30 But there nevertheless remained conceptual similarities between his nationalist saint and his vision of the medieval king. In her abstract universality, in her ability to reveal to the people their Christlike nature, their transcendent unity and collective essence, Joan of Arc mirrored the "catholic" medieval kings of France. The new democratic myth of Joan of Arc is also firmly anchored in Catholic theology.31 Michelet relied on Christian imagery to mold Joan into a complexfigure,both Mary and Jesus, holy national mother and sacrificial victim and savior. He asserted that Joan partook of the divine authority that God bestowed on the Virgin Mary. Her surprising ability to lead unruly soldiers proved that she was the incarnation of the Virgin Mary, the only figure whose authority could supersede that of king and even of Christ: "The God of that age was the Virgin, far more than Jesus. The Virgin was needed, a virgin descending upon earth in the guise of a maid from the common folk, young, fair, gentle, and bold."32 Joan is credited with renewprofoundly 'catholic,' in the etymological sense of the word" (Michelet, Histoire de France, quoted in Viallancix, La Vote royale, 315). 29

Michelet, Introduction a I'histoire universelle, 67. Michelet, Preface (1869) a PHistoire de France, 172. 31 Although the history of Joan of Arc that Michelet wrote in 1842 was unmistakably rooted in Catholic theology, in 1869, he conceived of Joan as a post-Christian heroine who, delivered from Christian "passivity," shapes her own destiny. He dissociated Joan of Arc from a Christian world of miracles, supernatural voices, and kings endowed with magical powers. He emphasized instead her humanity and frailty: "She is effective precisely because there is no artifice in her, no magic, no enchantment, no miracles. Her only spell is her humanity. There are no wings on this poor angel: she is the common folk, she is frail like us, she is everyone" (Michelet, Preface (1869) a I'Histoire de France, 183). But human frailty also permits human strength. Joan was not the passive instrument of otherworldly powers; her ability to act came entirely from within. She represented the principle, learned from Vico, that humanity creates itself. She is thus a hero of action. 32 Michelet, Joan of Arc, 25. 30

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

45

ing the cult of the Virgin and bringing out the sweet, gentle side of Christianity.33 It is as the holy Virgin that Joan gives birth to a sacred nation. Michelct's tableau shows Joan of Arc as an essentially sacrificing and suffering being who gives birth to the idea of "pa-trie." "May the French always remember that our patrie was born from a woman's heart, from her tenderness and her tears, from the blood she shed for us." 34 Michelet's transformation of the father-king into Joan of Arc as Virgin Mary and national maternal figure mirrors the changing social status of women in the nineteenth century, the elevation of maternity as well as the Romantic cult of virginity. In addition, there were revolutionary resonances in Michelet's valorization of women, for he considered women the unsung heroines of the French Revolution. It was not, however, women's courage that he prized, but rather their capacity for sacrifice and suffering. "Women were the vanguard of our Revolution. But this should not come as a surprise, for women have suffered the most." 35 Like Joan of Arc, women express their strength through their compassion, their ability to share the suffering of others: "Pity is passive in men, but in women it is an active emotion, even violent, oftimes becoming a heroic impulse that imperiously impels them to the most audacious deeds." 36 Michelet also assimilates Joan with Christ, discerning in her life the medieval reenactment of his Passion. Her suffering and martyrdom, he maintains, were part of a divine plan, not a chance result of arbitrary human history. "Such a cruel destiny was inevitable; and let us dare to say that it was necessary. She had to undergo that suffering."37 Like Christ, Joan consciously chose to die for the salvation of others: "Her sacrifice was not simply suffered and endured; her death was not a passive one. It was a selfsacrifice that she had premeditated and that, over long years, had ripened within her." 38 The French people, through their identification with Joan of Arc, could share in her—and in Christ's—Passion. In hisHistoire duMoyenAge, Michelet makes die equivalence between Christ, Joan of Arc, and die French people explicit. He remarks that although "this gentle, forbearing Christ" appeared in the medieval kings, Louis the Debonair and Saint Louis, he also appeared "in woman, in a pure woman, in the Virgin; shall we not call her 33 Michelet, course at the Ecole Normale, 1829, in his Jeanne d'Arc, 278. Viallaneix, by the way, finds no evidence of Mariology in this work, because there are no parallels to scenes from the life of the Virgin. H e believes that Michelet interpreted Joan of Arc's life only in terms of the Imitation de Jesus-Christ ("Preface," 2 8 - 2 9 ) . 34 Ibid., 4 1 . 35 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution francaise, 1:254. 36 Ibid., 1:255. 37 Michelet, Joan of Arc, 5 0 - 5 1 . 38 Michelet, Jeanne d'Arc, 39.

46

CHAPTERTWO

by her folk name, the Maid? She would be the last figure of Christ in the Middle Ages, this Maid, in whom the people died for the people." 39 Joan of Arc was the Christ of the people and the Christ in the people. She helped the French to recognize their own Christ-like essence; in her Passion, their own Passion was visible. At this point, Michelet has effectively responded to the counterrevolutionary myth of Louis XVI as Christ; Joan of Arc has become simultaneously king, Virgin Mary, and Christ. Just as the king had previously been believed to incarnate the nation, Joan of Arc now incarnates the French people. Through her association with the Virgin Mary, she is the holy mother of a holy nation, replacing the king as father of the land. By virtue of her Christ-like Passion, she also emerges as a voluntary sacrificial victim who becomes the redeemer and savior of the people. Through their identification with her, the French people are also divinized.

Michelet's assimilation of royalist and Catholic symbols into his democratic myths of the suffering and self-sacrificing French people and Christ-like French nation should not be a surprising phenomenon. Raoul Girardet, in his illuminating Mythes et mythologies politiques, comments on the fluidity of political myths and on their constant reversibility of images and symbols: Political myths, in twentieth-century societies, . . . overlap, interconnect, and occasionally merge. Together these myths form a subtle albeit powerful network in which complementary elements fuse, mutate, and collide. . . . Political mythology, like religious mythology, is essentially polymorphous. . . . We find the same mythological structures in the foundations of ideological systems that politically are not only different but even contradictory.40

But political mythology will inevitably shape political and social reality, and Michelet's glorification and democratization of the concept of sacrifice are therefore deeply problematic. In a democracy that prizes the dignity and freedom of the individual, there are grave dangers in conceiving, as Michelet does through Joan of Arc, citizenship, nationhood, and leadership in terms of retrograde myths of sacrifice. For Michelet, sacrifice reigned surpreme: indeed, sacrifice was his political ideal. In the French Revolution, he discerned not only justice and equality but, perhaps more important, sacrifice for the nation: "The absolute, infinite quality of sacrifice in all its grandeur, the gift of oneself that holds 39 40

Ibid., 281. Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologiespolitiques (Paris: 1986), 15 and 22.

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

47

41

back nothing, appeared in its most sublime form in the elan of 92." In his important text, Le Peuple, written in 1846, he sought to resuscitate the revolutionary faith in sacrifice by transforming its spirit into a social religion based on the fraternal communion of citizens, united in self-sacrifice. Michelet was disheartened that the French had strayed from the spirit of a Revolution that had originally schooled them in self-sacrifice and social solidarity. He deplored the libertarian ethos of individualism and selfinterest of the July Monarchy. He traced what he diagnosed as a profound spiritual crisis in France to the July Monarchy's promotion of self-interest and demotion of the spirit of self-sacrifice. Underlying his disdain for the profit-oriented ethos of capitalism, however, is also considerable hostility to industrialization and urbanization. Michelet sounds a retreat from engagement in the new international economic and industrial marketplace, substituting for competition with England resentment against modernism and a fantasy of France as a nonindustrialized nation whose glory resides in her spiritual rather than economic wealth. Thus (improbably) locating France's strength in her relative economic weakness, Michelet contrasts her with the "Anti-France"—industrial, commercial England. 42 He insists that it was to France's spiritual advantage to be economically and industrially backward: "You must work, O my France, to remain poor! Work, suffer, and never give up. "43 Michelet vehemently repudiates the wealthy, who, he asserts, were weakening the country "to the point of death," 44 sapping its vitality, degrading it morally and spiritually. The man of new wealth "has no understanding of sacrifice, even when it is in his own interest."45 The capacity for sacrifice was the sole province of the people: many times Michelet repeats that "the treasure that is in the people is the virtue of sacrifice." He celebrates the poorer classes in France,forwhom sacrifice—not interest or profit—was a way of life, passed down from generation to generation. 46 As an example 41

Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, 1:12-13. "Robespierre had the bizarre notion that France had strayed from God and that he, Robespierre, would return God to her. Good Lord! Was H e not everywhere and in everything? Could not everyone see Him in the unquestioning allegiance of our soldiers, in that life of unheralded sacrifices, typified by Desaix?" (ibid., 2:813). 42 Michelet, Le Peuple, 224. 43 Ibid., 119. 44 Ibid., 245. 45 Ibid., 163. "The strength, the magnanimity of sacrifice, so common among our forefathers, seems lost as far as we are concerned. This is the true cause of our troubles, of our animosities, of the internal discord that weakens this country almost to death. Each person appears disinterested, but he really clings to some petty thing that he would not sacrifice for anything. So-and-so is willing to give up his lifeforFrance, but he will not give up some hobby or habit or vice" (ibid., 245). 46 Ibid., 58, 64, and 146.

48

CHAPTER

TWO

and a model, he describes his own family; his self-revelatory preface to Le Peuple evokes, with considerable emotion, the sacrifices his struggling parents made repeatedly for him. 47 Michelet leaves no doubt about his hierarchy of moral and social values when he writes that "the capacity for dedication and sacrifice is, I must confess, my criterion for judging mankind." 48 He was convinced that the capacity for sacrifice marked the highest emotional and spiritual development of the individual. From the egotism of youth, one ascended to the plenitude of fraternal communion, accessible only through self-sacrifice: "Sacrifice is the culmination of human life. From the inert, egotistical existence of the child, from the involuntary communion of birth and baptism, man ascends to the state of voluntary communion: communion with woman, or marriage; communion with nature, or work; with God, or religion. In all of that, there is sacrifice."49 Sacrifice simply becomes the sine qua non of citizenship. Atomized, isolated individuals are transformed into citizens only when they make sacrifices for the Nation. A good citizen leads a life of sacrifice and poverty and shuns the unrestrained pursuit of his own happiness. These sacrifices, moreover, are specifically not made for the sake of the material prosperity of the collectivity, but rather for its spiritual superiority. Sacrifice was a value for Michelet precisely because it was anti-individualist and antimaterialist, not the means to an end, but an end in itself. In a sense, Tocqueville agreed with Michelet's criticism of the unrestrained pursuit of material advantage and the atomizing effect of unbridled individualism.50 But, whereas Michelet prescribed, as a remedy for the resultant anomie, self-sacrifice and the submission of the individual to a sacred collectivity, Tocqueville advocated the contrary idea of political freedom. His understated yet typically brilliant insight was that political freedom counteracts egotistical individualism, for participation in a free government involves citizens in their polity, motivates them to be interested in the public welfare, and ultimately creates a sense of social solidarity and even patriotism: 47 "In our desperate penury, a friend of my father made the suggestion that I work in the Imperial Printing Office. My parents were sorely tempted. Others might not have hesitated. But my family's faith always remained resolute: first, their faith in my father, for whom they had all made sacrifices; next, their faith in me. I was expected to heal everything, to restore their hope. . . . My exhausted father and my ill mother decided that, no matter what, I must continue to study" (ibid., 69). 48 Ibid., 64. 49 Jules Michelet, Origin® du droit fran^ais (1837; reprinted Paris: Calmann Levy, n.d.), Introduction, xxvi. 50 "People are only too inclined to be preoccupied with their own self-interest, driven to pursue only their own advantage and to withdraw into a narrow individualism that extinguishes any sense of civic virtue" (Tocqueville, UAncien Regime et la Revolution, 74).

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC 49 Nothing except freedom can deliver citizens from the solipsistic existence fostered precisely by their social independence. For only political freedom can impel them to join together, warming them to their common need to work together in concert, to counsel each other and thus to derive mutual profit and satisfaction from their participation in the affairs of the polity. Only political freedom can emancipate them from the cult of money and from the petty, everyday nuisances pertaining to their own personal affairs, so that they may at all times comprehend as well as appreciate thepatrie that they themselves constitute and yet that towers above them.51 Although Tocqueville's notion of civic virtue, "self-interest rightly understood," refers to the ability of citizens to balance an interest in the common good and in their own personal good, inDe la Democratic en Amerique, he emphasized that politically free and involved citizens would ultimately desire to transcend their own self-interest because they would deeply feel part of a social entity larger than themselves.52 Tocqueville even comments that "I have oftentimes seen Americans make real and significant sacrifices for the public good," 53 however the sacrifices citizens might make for the res publica, the pleasure they might take in participating in the polity and even in placing the interests of their fellow citizens ahead of their own, nevertheless occur in the context of a democratic society in which political institutions and laws guarantee and encourage individual freedom. For the goal of this society is the well-being and political involvement of its citizens, not the spiritual superiority of the nation. In America, the Founding Fathers hoped tiiat citizens would be interested in and devoted to the common good; their emphasis, however, clearly was not on the sacrifices that citizens make for their government, but rather on the protection of citizens' rights to life, liberty and happiness. 54 The new government, after all, existed for their 51

Ibid., 75. ' T h e free institutions that the inhabitants of the United States possess . . . are a constant reminder to each citizen that he lives in society. His thoughts are ever focused on this idea, that one's duty as well as one's self-interest are to be useful to one's fellow citizens. . . . At first, one takes an interest in the public welfare out of necessity, but then by choice; what begins as calculation becomes instinct; for as one pursues the good of one's fellow citizens, it becomes not only natural but also enjoyable to be of sendee to them" (Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Democratic en Amerique [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981], 2:134—35). 53 Ibid., 2:134. 54 According to John Rawls, "it is good to do [acts of benevolence and mercy, of heroism and self-sacrifice] but it is not one's duty or obligation. Supererogatory acts arc not required, though normally they would be were it not for the loss or risk involved for the agent himself. . . . For while we have a natural duty to bring about a great good, say, if we can do so relatively easily, we are released from this duty when the cost to ourselves is considerable. . . . The moralities of supererogation, those of the saint and the hero, do not contradict the norms of right and justice; they are marked by the willing adoption by the self of aims continuous with these principles but extending beyond what they enjoin" (Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971], 117 and 479). 52

50

CHAPTER

TWO

benefit, for their security and protection; it would facilitate their pursuit of happiness, not provide them with a spiritual identity. But Michelet had nothing but scorn for those who arrogantly believed that the nation existed to promote the egotistical pursuit of citizens' own happiness. The real citizen, on the contrary, felt duty toward the nation, not entitlement: 'The poor love France as if they had responsibilities and obligations to her. The rich love her as if she were their possession that had obligations to them. The patriotism of the former is a sense of duty; that of the others is a demand and the pretension to a right." 55 Michelet envisioned, not the mutually advantageous coexistence of individual and collectivity, but a mystical, transcendent collectivity that squarely supersedes the freedom and inviolability of the individual.56 Citizenship becomes a means for infusing transcendence into the nation; it is the foundation of a social religion, not of a political contract. Michelet's fusion of quasi-religious sacrifice and nationalism was not a nineteenth-century phenomenon, for it appears clearly in the writings of Bossuet. This seventeenth-century bishop taught that sacrifice was a key element in citizenship: "One must be a good citizen and, if called upon, sacrifice all that one has for the patrie, even one's life."57 But even more important, Bossuet sought to prove that sacrifice for the nation was a quintessential Christian act that could be traced to Christ's own sacrifice. He demonstrated that, up to the moment of his death, Jesus was loyal and devoted to his patrie, the Jewish nation, and that love for the nation was one of the principal elements in his sacrifice: "Thus he shed his blood with particular regard for his nation; and in offering this great sacrifice for the expiation of the entire world, he wanted love of country to play its part." 58 Like Bossuet, Michelet hoped that sacrifice for the nation would retain a suprarational, religious character, although, as Benichou points out, his vision of sacrifice did not embrace the supernatural nature of Christian sacrifice.59 Nevertheless, sacrifice for the nation offers citizens an experience of transcendence. By sacrificing their own interests, people transcend their finite individuality and partake of Michelet's mysticakpeuple: "[The Patrie] is like one person. The same soul and the same heart. All would die for one, and each should live and die for all. . . . Our faith lies in dedication, in sacrifice, and in the great fraternity in which all sacrifice themselves for all—I 55

Michelet, LePeuple, 141. Like Michelet, Lamennais had also taught that self-sacrifice opened the way to membership in the collectivity and that patriotism required self-abnegation: "T^hcpatrie is our common mother, the unity in which isolated individuals merge and become one. And this fusion takes place through the devotion of each for all, the sacrifice of oneselP' (Felicite de Lamennais, Le Livre dupeuple [Paris: Pagnerre, 1838], 132-33). 57 Bossuet, Politique tirie des paroles de I'Ecriture Sainte, 33. 58 Ibid., 39. 59 Benichou, he Temps des prophetes, 540. 56

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

51

60

mean for the Patrie." The nation is conceived as mystically one, just as it was in the Rousseauian-revolutionary tradition of unity and unanimity. In fact, the new fusion of self-sacrifice and fraternity produces a particularly coercive and oppressive notion of community.

Nationhood, like citizenship, was inextricably woven into Michelet's obsession with sacrifice. Just as French citizens were supposed to sacrifice themselves for the nation, Michelet conceived of France as a nation that continually sacrifices itselfforthe world. 61 The heroic mission of France consists in spreading the gospel of equality around the globe. 62 But because other countries, like England, were mired in "egotism and immoral indifference" and therefore declined to follow the example of France, 63 France was obliged to do alone "the work of the world" 64 at a cost of great national sacrifice: "France watered with her own blood this tree that she has planted." A martyr among nations, France is rewarded only with the knowledge of her superior contribution to humanity: If it were possible to amass all the blood, the gold, and the various offerings that each nation disinterestedly bequeathed to the welfare of mankind, France would be a pyramid climbing toward heaven. . . .But your pyramid, O nations, the mass of all the sacrifices you have made through the ages would rise no higher than a child's knee! So do not say, "France looks so pale," for she has given her blood for you.65 That France has become a country of poverty is insignificant; her material inferiority is a sign of her superiority and devotion to spiritual values—"the imponderables, intangibles, invisibles." It is now understandable that French citizens would be willing to make sacrifices for a Christ-like nation that voluntarily chooses to immolate itself 60

Michelet, Le Peuple, 2 4 0 and 245. In America, the idea of a self-sacrificing nation was as alien as the concept of a selfsacrificing citizen. George Washington, for example, did not believe that it was out of devotion to revolutionary principles that Louis XVI sent troops to America. O n the contrary, he maintained that it had served France's interest to take advantage of England's distracting effort with her rebellious colonies. For Washington, it was "interest" that made for proper relations between nations. "Nations as well as individuals, act for their own benefit, and not for the benefit of others, unless both interests happen t o be assimilated" (quoted by Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment [New York: Doubleday, 1984], 94). 62 The foreign policy of the savior-nation would apparently not be based on the common interests of France and other nations but rather on France's privileged access to universal truths. 63 Michelet, Le Peuple, 2 2 3 . 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 226 61

52

CHAPTER

TWO

for the salvation of the world. Michelet reasoned that individuals could be persuaded to make sacrifices only for a mystical being or entity greater than themselves.66 And, indeed, this mystical entity was not God but rather the Nation. As early as 1831, Michelet had yearned for a faith in which die people and the nation would replace an extinct monarchy and an elusive deity, thus filling the postrevolutionary spiritual void: "It is from you that I shall ask for help, my noble country: you must take the place of the God who escapes us, that you mayfillwithin us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left there." 67 Through the mediation of the self-sacrificing figure of Joan of Arc, the nation itself has taken the place of a quasi-divine king and a transcendent God. There are several successive stages in Michclet's deification of France, stages in which he borrows from Judaism and from Christianity. From the Old Testament he takes the notion of a chosen people. It was as the savior of the chosen French people that he conceived of the role of Joan of Arc: "She knew that more than once a woman had saved God's chosen people." 68 But Michelet's formulation of French nationalism does not stop at the relatively modest and innocuous idea of the French as the chosen people, an idea that recognizes God's right to punish as well as cherish his people. Michelet went further. France appeared to him to have been chosen permanently to be a Messiah among nations, even though, as Cruise O'Brien points out, the concept of a holy messianic nation is as alien to Christianity as the notion of a chosen people: Christ was explicit that his kingdom was not of this world. 69 Nevertheless, for Michelet, France was elected to be the site and the medium of the social realization of Christianity's moral message: "France has continued the work begun by Rome and by Christianity. Christianity made the promise, but France kept it. . . . Christians believed that a God appearing as a man would turn people into brothers and would sooner or later unite the world in one single heart. This has not yet happened: but we will prove it to be true." 70 Michelet could not refrain from envisaging Christianity as a particularly French religion: cTheImitation of Jesus Christ is a Christian book. It is universal rather than national. But if it were to be national, it would probably be French." 71 66 "'Sacrifice one's self for anotherl' Our philosphers would be stunned by such a strange and preposterous idea. 'Offer one's self in sacrifice?' For whom? For a man we know to be less worthy than we? . . . Why would we sacrifice ourselves except for a being of infinite value? . . . H o w might we then offer ourselves in sacrifice? We have lost our gods! . . . God needed to have a second coming, to appear on earth in His incarnation of 1789, for that was when H e gave the human brotherhood its truest and most encompassing form, the one that can, by itself, unite us and, through us, save the world" (ibid., 216). 67 Michelet, Journal, 6 August 1831, 1:83. 68 Michelet, Joan of Arc, 5 1 . 69 See Cruise O'Brien, God Land, 4 1 - 4 2 . 70 Michelet, Le Peuple, 228, 237. 71 Michelet, Histoire de ¥ ranee, Moycn Age, 5:12.

LOUI S XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

53

Little by little, however, in the equation of France and Christianity, Christianity and God fade into insignificance and only France, the new God, remains. Cruise O'Brien identifies three different kinds of holy nationalism: in ascending order of "arrogance and destructiveness," they arc chosen people, holy nation, and deified nation. "The idea of'holy nation' . . . is getting dangerously near to the third category. But the holy nation is still under God, even if basking in His permanent favor. When the third category is reached there is no longer any entity, or law, or ethic superior to the nation." 72 If Cruise O'Brien's categories are used, it would appear that Michelet indeed comes close to deifying France. First of all, French history replaces the Bible as a source of meaning and divine revelation. Michelet's hyperbolic comments about the perfection of French history and its superiority over the histories of other nations leave little doubt that, for him, the collective past of the French nation constitutes a sacred text. "All other histories are mutilated. Ours alone is complete." The legends of France, unlike the "individual, isolated, disconnected" stories of other nations, possess a universality and illustrate a "moral ideal" that make French history into a Gospel for all nations: "The national legend of France is an immeasurable, uninterrupted stream of light, a veritable Milky Way on which the world has always focused its gaze." 73 There are, no doubt, inconsistencies in Michelet's thought about France's holy status. One moment he equates nation and deity ("Let man, from his childhood on, learn to see the living God in his Patrie"74), the next he recognizes the existence of a God who enlightens France ("God assuredly sheds His light on France more than on any other nation, for even in the blackest night, when other nations behold nothing, France still sees"75). One moment he expresses the hope that God will save the French, 76 the next France becomes a God-like nation that can save itself and has the messianic mission of saving the world: "France was and must be the salvation of the human race. . . . The patrie, my patrie, can alone save the world." 77 Ultimately one is left with the impression that France possesses the experience and wisdom of the gods; it need not look outside of itself and its history for political, moral, or spiritual lessons: 72

Cruise O'Brien, God Land, 4 1 - 4 2 . Michelet, Le Peupk, 228—30. Michelet's admiration for French history was antithetical t o Voltaire's contempt for if. "Those tomes of French history must surely be as boring t o other nations as they are t o me. . . . W h a t does our history contain but the petty fusses of the court, the big battles lost, t h e insignificant victories won, and the inescapable Lettrcs de cachet. If it were n o t for five or six notable assassinations and especially for the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, nothing could be as insipid" (Letter 14,638, quoted by L. Bongie, David Hume, Prophet of the Counter-revolution [London: Clarendon Press, 1965], 6). 74 Michelet, Le Peupk, 2 3 7 . 75 Ibid., 227. 76 Ibid., 230. 77 Ibid., 229 and 246. 73

54

CHAPTER

TWO

France is the only country that has the right to instruct itself, for it is the only one that has intimately wed its national interest and destiny to those of humanity. It is the only country that may so instruct itself, because its wondrous, yet human, national legend is alone complete; more coherent than all the others, it is the one that best fulfills the criteria of reason. Do not confuse this with fanaticism; it is the very abbreviated summary of my considered judgment.78 At this point, there is no authority higher than the wise, self-contained, messianic nation that may now idolize itself. Joan of Arc, similar to the Christ-like medieval French kings, has been eclipsed by her own abstract and sacred essence that now belongs solely to the people. This is a long way from monarchism and a king who, although authoritarian, was merely God's lieutenant on earth. French nationalism, rather than monarchy, now seems in dire need of "disenchantment," for Michelet's cult of the French nation is ultimately more idolatrous than Louis XVPs "strange deification of himself." The hubris of such a nationalist doctrine—the pretentiousness of the national claim to follow a higher code than self-interest, contempt for inferior outsiders such as the English, and the assertion of moral autonomy—suggests, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, a collective egotism that is the antithesis of the humility that self-sacrifice normally implies. 79 It is unclear whether Michelet was trying to transcend self-interest or disguise it.

How did ordinary, imperfect, mortal Frenchmen acquire the perfection that justifies their worship of the collectivity that they themselves constitute? Perhaps it is because, as Michelet suggests, they have recognized the God or the Christ in themselves, or perhaps it is because the collectivity, by definition, is more than the sum of its parts. But in spite of Michelet's great praise for French history, for the unique French Revolution, and for the "living fraternity"80 that is France, one is at a loss to find a rational explanation of France's pivotal role in the salvation of humanity. In fact, the apprehension of and the faith in the divinity of the collectivity take place on an explicitly nonrational plane, for Michelet's cult of sacrifice and the nation is founded on the promotion of instinct and the demotion of reason. Whereas intellect supposedly immobilizes people in a static world of reflection, instinct, Michelet asserts, leads them spontaneously to act and make sacrifices. Hence his cult of the uneducated: 'The classes that we 78 Ibid., 229. 79 Reinhold Niebuhr, "Ethics and Power Politics," in Private and Public Ethics, ed. Donald Jones (New York: Mellen Press, 1978), 9. 80 Michelet, Le Peupk, 229.

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

55

consider inferior, but that are more closely allied with instinct, are for that very reason supremely capable of action, always ready to move. But we, the educated minds, we chatter, argue, and dissipate all our energy in words." 81 In fact, the antithesis of rationality is not irrationality but rather sacrifice: "Intellectual superiority, which is in part the result of education, is not commensurate with this supreme faculty [of dedication and sacrifice]."82 Instead of the usual call for an educated citizenry in a democratic republic, Michclct is comfortable with a retrograde fantasy of uneducated but patriotic peasants and workers. Eager to preserve the "purity" and selflessness of the people, he offers them—in lieu of education—regression to childhood simplicity. The people should "adjourn their studies, lock up their books, which have been of little use to them, and go simply among mothers and nursemaids to unlearn and forget."83 The child is the new model of the citizen; not yet "deformed," he represents "what is still young and primitive" in the people. 84 His so-called "education" is consubstantial with a kind of emotional indoctrination: "I want the child to do more than behold and study thepatrie; I want him to experience her as Providence, to perceive, in her invigorating milk and life-giving warmth, that she is his mother." 85 Similarly, the story of Joan of Arc, the foundational legend of French patriotism and nationalism which teaches the moral lesson of self-sacrifice 81

Ibid., 160. Ibid., 64. Reason for Michelet does not seem to be solely human or even solely rational, but includes some essential spiritual features. For even when he praises reason, he is unable to say whether it is divine or human in origin: ' T h e essential ideas that are in us, that are not of our own making but that nevertheless constitute our very reason, do they belong to us or to God?" Reason, he confesses, is "the highest expression of God" (Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, 2:637). 83 Michelet, Le Peuple, 166. Disparaging reason, Michelet maintains that the objective of education is the enhancement of instinct: "The master-teachers of the Revolution, the rational and subtle philosopbes, possessed every gift except that of pure simplicity which alone can fathom the child and the people. And so it was that the Revolution could not activate the great revolutionary engine, the one that, better than any law, can create fraternity: education. Such is the task of the nineteenth century, although its initial efforts in this domain have been feeble ones. In my little book, Le Peuple, I sought to champion the right of instinct, of inspiration, against their aristocratic sister, reflection, the rationalist science that considers itself the queen of the world" (Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, 1:5). 84 Michelet, Le Peuple, 1 6 6 - 6 7 . Victor H u g o takes the opposite view of child and citizen in Les Miserables. H e compares the "people" to the child, but believes in the liberation of the people-child through public education: ' T h e Paris gamin . . . is the people still a child. . . . The gamin is the nation's blessing, but also an affliction, one that needs to be cured. How? By light. . . . All the beacons of progressive social enlightenment issue from science, literature, the arts, and teaching. You must give people their humanity! Enlighten them so they can warm you. Sooner or later the shining question of universal education will be posed with the overwhelming authority of absolute truth" (Victor H u g o , Les Miserables [Paris: Flammarion, 1967], 2:116). 85 Michelet, Le Peuple, 242. 82

56

CHAPTER

TWO

for the nation, can itself be fathomed only emotionally: "In all of French history, there is no more astonishing event than the advent and death of the Maid. . . . The phenomenon of Joan of Arc is virtually beyond comprehension." 86 The intuition or experience of the patrie thus depends on the renunciation of lucidity and rationality. Michelet's vision of the nation clearly prizes mystical communion rather than rational communication. He seems to have imagined the French crying out for relief from individualism and the burden of rationality imposed on them by the Enlightenment, yearning to submerge themselves in the group and sacrifice themselves for the nation. At every stage in Michelet's formulation of modern concepts of citizen and nation, there is a challenge to the inviolability of the individual and a diminution of the value of rationality. Citizen is demoted to child, enlightened self-interest is supplanted by self-sacrifice, the dignity of the individual is superseded by the sanctity of the collectivity, the kingdom disappears and a deified nation emerges in its place, and Enlightenment reason is branded inferior to collective emotion. In addition, not only has Michelet transferred the revolutionary ideal of fraternity and monarchist and Catholic concepts of sacrifice to his nationalist mythology, he has set these elements in a new totalitarian context. Everything that belonged to God—sacrifice, faith, and the experience of the sacred—now belongs to the French people. As Paul Benichou cautioned: "In this particular intellectual tradition, the democratic spirit cannot be divorced from a deep irrationalism that necessarily undermines critical thought and therefore freedom."87 Michelet's explicit irrationalism founds the society on emotion instead of on institutions based on human reason. Karl Popper addressed the problem of a society based on collective emotional bonds in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a work in which he confronted Nazism as well as Marxism and their attacks against freedom and human reason. For Popper, societies were presented with a fundamental choice between "a faith in reason and in human individuals and a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united to a collective."88 Emotional communion, Popper insisted, actually "divides men into friends and foes, masters and slaves,"89 whereas a faith in reason and in individuals "recognizes the unity of mankind." He envisioned a form of fraternity based on "a common medium of communication, a common language of reason" that affirms "that mankind is united by the fact that our different mother tongues, in so far as they are rational, can be translated into one another." Furthermore, he explicitly rejected a social religion based on 86

Michelet, course at the Sorbonne, 1834, in his Jeanne d'Arc, 282. Benichou, Le Temps des propbetes, 549. 88 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 4 3 1 . 89 Ibid. 87

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

57

love and compassion: "I hold that it is humanly impossible for us to love, or to suffer with, a great number of people. . . . But reason, supported by imagination, enables us to understand that men who are far away, whom we shall never sec, are like ourselves. . . . By the use of thought and imagination, we may become ready to help all who need our help." 90 Ultimately, a society based on irrational emotion and passion is doomed not only to divisiveness, misunderstanding, and bad faith, but to violence. Popper traces modern political violence to the societal valorization of collective emotion: This attitude, which is at best one of resignation towards the irrational nature of human beings, . . . must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute. For if a dispute arises, then this means that those more constructive emotions and passions which might in principle help to get over it, reverence, love, devotion to a common cause, etc., have shown themselves incapable of solving the problem. But if that is so, then what is left to the irrationalist except the appeal to other and less constructive emotions and passions, to fear, hatred, envy, and ultimately, to violence? . . . No emotion, not even love, can replace the rule of institutions, controlled by reason.91 Although Popper acknowledged that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality, the link between them clearly preoccupied him between 1938 and 1943 when he wrote The Open Society, an endeavor he termed his personal contribution to the war effort. At bottom, his remark that "he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens the way for those who rule by hate" targets not only Michelet's nationalist cult based on collective emotion, but also its ancestor, what Arcndt called the Jacobins' "Rousseauian passion for compassion" that led them to the Terror. Not only does Michelet's cult of collective emotion offer no rational mechanisms for resolving conflict and protecting individual freedom, the very idea of a unitary, unanimous people precludes the people's democratic involvement in the public affairs of their society, which was Tocqueville's definition of public freedom and happiness. In America, Tocqueville discovered that citizens derived both freedom and happiness from sharing in the business of the res publica. But participation in the polity implies inevitable conflict and division, and there is no role for dissent or criticism in this unitary Rousseauian vision of the nation. Government would be based, not on the consent of the governed, but on their reverence for the nation. In America, the consensus that creates nationhood is based on a universal agreement only as to the nation's form of government, the institutions that regulate conflict; but Michelet is uncomfortable with the very ideas of 90 91

Ibid., 424-25. Ibid., 419-22.

58

CHAPTER

TWO

conflict and disunity. Consensus for him takes the shape of fraternity and emotionality that forge unanimity and unity. Questions of the structure of government, the regulation of conflict, the participation of citizens, and the exercise of political power are not posed, as if nationhood existed on a nonpolitical plane. Yet political power will somehow have to be exercised in this land, and it will be exercised by a few individuals over the mass of people who will have enthusiastically abdicated their critical faculties, their rationality, and their self-interest. Who will the leaders be? The people cannot vote for them, because voting implies division. Their leader would have to be someone who is the transparent and immediate representation of their unity, unanimity, and will. Who else but Joan of Arc?

When one turns from nationalist myths to the issue of real political power, one sees that there are serious drawbacks to the myth of a national savior. Unfortunately, Joan of Arc has all of the features of the modern dictator. Girardet examines the archetype of the savior as "prophet" of whom there have been many manifestations in the twentieth century. For example, he mentions Andre Malraux's characterization of Charles de Gaulle. In Malraux's estimation, de Gaulle was a major figure, not because he was a great general or a great politician, but because he was a charismatic leader "who was the embodiment of France, almost as if he were a prophet." Like Joan of Arc with whom he identified, de Gaulle saw himself as representing or rather incarnating the nation's personality, history, will, and destiny. Girardet, however, also goes on to explore the darker side of the same myth. He quotes Hitler as having said to the entire German people, "I am nothing without you, but all that you are, you arc through me." 92 Similarly, Dominique Pelassy, in an analysis of the political mythology of German fascism, asserts that "the Fuehrer speaks and acts not only for the people and in their place, but as if he were they. In him, the people recognize their true face."93 As both of these quotations illustrate, Hitler as well as Joan of Arc could seem to approximate Michelet's concept of the "genius" through whom the nation becomes conscious of itself. The political myth of the national savior or "genius"—whether it be Joan ofArc, Napoleon, de Gaulle, or Hitler—is, as Girardet suggests, an extremely complicated phenomenon implying some variation on the search for the missing father figure and the personalization of political religiosity. Fortunately for France, there was no danger— at least in the nineteenth century—that the medieval national savior would become a national dictator, a distinct advantage in enshrining as a national 92 93

Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, 78—79. Dominique Pelassy, Le Signe nazi (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 69.

LOUISXVI AND JOANOF ARC

59

hero a dead legendary figure from the past. But in a country whose political mythology is founded on the notion of a Christ-like national savior and selfsacrificing citizens, one cannot dismiss the possibility that its citizenry may turn to a dictator. The other significant danger in a nation defined in terms of fraternal union concerns inevitable polarization and exclusion, for any individul who represents dissent or difference can only disrupt the spiritual consensus of the people. The idea of a community of emotionally united citizens necessarily divides people into friends and foes. Indeed, seeking France's foes, Michelet rounds up the usual suspects, and they are, not surprisingly, the Jews. Michelet's attitude toward the Jews was always ambivalent and in flux, but, in Le Peuple, it is simply negative. The Jews are the anti-Joan of Arc. They represent the antithesis of all the values she incarnates. She is a peasant, they arc landless; she is poor, they are wealthy bankers; she defines French nationhood, they are nationless wanderers; she sacrifices herself, they are profit-seeking capitalists. In one short passage from Le Peuple, Michelet reveals the key elements of his anti-Jewish mythology: The Jews, whatever be said of them, have a country—the London Stock Exchange; they operate everywhere, but they are rooted in the country of gold. Now that the funds of every state are in their hands, what can they love? The land of the status quo—England. What can they hate? The land of progress—France. Another mistake: from either vanity or an exaggerated feeling of security, they have taken kings into their band, mingled with the aristocracy. . . . What a decline in Jewish wisdom!94 Although his cherished Revolution granted the Jews legal emancipation, Michelet refuses them citizenship in his holy nation, insisting that their home is in the financial center of the world, the capital of the anti-France.95 For this anticapitalist, the Jews represent the essence of capitalism.96 Michelet associated capitalism not so much with investment in industry but rather with purely rational speculation. He feared that Jewish abstract thinking and behavior were undermining the centuries-old habits and customs of France, weakening the moral strength and spiritual health of the nation. 97 Jewish capitalists were guilty of distorting normal social relations by transforming moral values into money values, reducing people to num94

Michelet, Le Peuple, 141n. Because Michelet defines modernism in terms of heightened awareness of national differences (Histoire de la Revolution, 2:14), the stateless Jews, whom he usually considers quintessential modernists, are also antimodernists. 96 "There is the smallest number of wealthy people in France, if we eliminate from the figure our foreign capitalists" (Michelet, Le Peuple, 134). 97 Paradoxically, Michelet uses the same adjectives "invisible" and "intangible" to denounce Jewish capitalism and to praise French spirituality. 95

60

CHAPTER

TWO

bers, and spreading anomie throughout the land. Comparing the social classes of French society to geological layers, Michelet claims to have discovered that warmth and vitality as well as the capacity for sacrifice exist solely in the lower strata of society, that is, in the peasant class. In the higher strata, he found Jews frozen in a world of money and numbers: "How cold it is if I go higher! It is like the cold of the Alps. Moral vegetation gradually disappears, and the flower of nationality grows pale. If I ascend one step higher, there is the pure egotism of the calculator who has no fatherland, where people are no longer people, but only numbers. There is a true glacier, abandoned by nature." 98 Jews, then, can have no emotional bonds with the French nation. They constitute a stateless group of capitalists, residing (temporarily?) within the Christ-like France. The myth of the Jew as quintessential capitalist was a new accusation added to an old and long list. In ancient times, Jews had been accused of killing God, and in the Middle Ages, they were blamed and then massacred for having poisoned France's water supply, thereby unleashing the bubonic plague. It is not surprising that in his Histoire du Moyen Age, Michelet rejected the preposterous idea that, in 1320, the Jews poisoned the water of France. But it is surprising that his rejection of this myth corroborates another virulent anti-Semitic myth: "It was unlikely that the Jews were guilty," he concedes, noting that "they were favored by the king, and usury provided them with a much more effective form of vengeance."99 Michelet imagined that, already in the fourteenth century, Jewish financial power constituted an essentially vindictive conspiracy, all the more antidemocratic and retrograde because it allied itself with royalty. From the role of mere associate of the king, the Jews ascend, in the resourceful anti-Semitic imagination, to the status of financial king. This idea became a commonplace in the mid-nineteenth century; it was the diesis of an influential book, Lesjuifs, rots de I'epoque, written in 1845 by Alphonse Toussenel, a follower of the socialist Charles Fourier. 100 Although some socialists were troubled by Toussenel's obsessive anti-Semitism, his book was nevertheless reviewed in socialist periodicals as a serious work, that, despite its weakness, illuminated France's fundamental problem, Jewish financial hegemony. 101 As Benichou points out, it was not the political right that was hostile to banking and capitalism, but rather socialists who de98

Michelet, Le Peuple, 141. Michelet, Histoire de France (1837), quoted by Paul Benichou, "Sur quelques sources de l'antisemitisme moderne," Commentaire 1, no. 1 (1978): 75. 100 Benichou, "Sur quelques sources de l'antisemitisme moderne," 70. 101 The following year, in 1846, Pierre Leroux, one of the fathers of French humanitarian socialism, wrote an article entitled "Lcs Juifs rois de l'epoque," which made no mention of Toussenel or his book. Leroux's essay contained, first of all, a long attack on capitalist England in which the words "English" and "Jewish" were used interchangeably, a phenomenon not untypical of leftist anglophobia. Second, he argued that the Jews were enemies of progress. Standing for money and individualism, they resisted the "movement of History" which was 99

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

61

102

nounced what they called the new Jewish financial feudalism. Michelet preceded Toussenel by several years in comparing the Jews to kings. Attributing (erroneously) to the Jews the invention of credit, he claims that they "solved the problem of volatizing wealth; liberated by international monetary exchange, now they are free, they are the masters; after adding insult to injury, there they are sitting on the throne of the world." 103 Astonishingly, the Jews have become kings, but the kings of Europe have also come to resemble Jews, for they too are stateless104 capitalists. "As kings unloosened their bonds to their national lands to become international capitalists, they negated the very essence of royalty, which is to incarnate the nation." The king has become an "armed banker." 105 The Jew is the new Louis XVI, for both are guilty of the crime of alterity, and neither can be assimilated into the spiritual union of the French. Michelct's concept of French nationhood thus fuses four fundamental elements of political mythology: first, the national savior and saint; second, the unitary nation; third, nostalgia for a preindustrial golden age; and last, the myth of the Jewish conspiracy. Societies have traditionally been attracted to such myths in times of historical crisis or anomie. And just as these myths are but modern variations of older myths—biblical, medieval, monarchical, revolutionary—they may also continue to be transmuted into new, even contradictory, forms. For example, the transference of elements from

apparently toward collectivism and socialism and away from individualism (See Benichou, "Sur quelques sources de I'antisemitisme m o d e r n e , " 72). 102 Ibid. 103 Michelet, Histoire de France (1837) q u o t e d in Benichou, "Sur quelques sources de I'antisemitisme m o d e r n e , " 7 4 - 7 5 . Tracing the Jewish love of financial speculation t o the Old Testament, Michelet announces that for the Jews "art and productivity, along with agriculture, have n o role to play. . . . T h e real Jew, the aged patriarch, is the shepherd adept in speculation and in increasing his flock by paying careful attention t o calculation and acquisition. After all, the cherished son of Jacob is the slave w h o becomes the vizier. This was Joseph, the financier" (quoted in ibid., 78). 104 In his Histoire de la Revolution, Michelet made the argument that the real crime of Louis XVI was the French royalty's crime of statelessness; French kings were foreign usurpers w h o had n o bonds t o the nation. This crime of being apatride was sufficient for Michelet to justify the old Jacobin association of kings with monsters: "As the concept of nationalities grew in importance . . . , kings, being all of one blood and forming a separate race, outside of h u m a n ity, lost any sense oipatrie. T h e y thus went against the tide of humanity. We should dispassionately recall the passionate words of abbe Gregoire: . . . kings had become monsters" (2:14). 105 Michelet, Journal, 10 July 1847, 1:670. T h e rise of the Jewish banker seems t o produce in Michelet nostalgia for the legitimate kings of France. T h u s he accuses Jewish speculators of having compromised the ability of a king t o govern in a period of transition such as the July M o n a r c h y : "I t h o u g h t that royalty m i g h t still be possible, that it might even be unavoidable, as a transition government, for a people ill-prepared for and poorly t a u g h t in self-government. But royalty is herself making this impossible by allying herself with those w h o unremittingly and clandestinely extort funds from the national treasury, sucking it dry as if it were their o w n and using it for their o w n capitalist speculations" (Michelet, Journal, 14 July 1847, 1:674).

62

CHAPTERTWO

Michelet's French nationalism to fascism—the cult of the nation built on a sense of insecurity and inferiority, a kind of reactionary modernism, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, the moral autonomy of the nation and its messianic mission, the figure of the "Savior," and, finally, the exclusion of the conspiratorial Jewish enemy—is unfortunately not impossible or improbable. If this is true, then, especially in the light of twentiethcentury history, the pro-royalist myth of Louis XVI, which was never a vehicle for idolatry of the nation, could only have been less oppressive than the nineteenth-century democratic and nationalist myth of Joan of Arc. 106

The first sentence of Lzmartine's Jeanne d'Arc set a decidedly different tone: "Love for the patrie is to a people what love of life is to individual men." 107 Lamartine hastened to demystify patriotism. Neither spiritual nor mystical, 106 T n e c u ] t o f j o a n o f Arc became an even less palatable p h e n o m e n o n w h e n patriotism passed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the left t o the right of the political spectrum. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist movem e n t , Action Franchise, politicized Joan of Arc, molding her into a right-wing heroine. Charles M a u r r a s , the key figure of the Action Franchise, revived the myth of Joan the royalist and attacked republicans for imposing a democratic interpretation o n a royalist legend: " O u r girl of the fields was n o t a democrat. She surely wasted n o time with those cavilling cowards, always w h i n i n g that they needed the consent of the people." In Maurras's scenario, Joan saved the m o n a r c h y so that the monarchy could save France. In an untimely bit of advice for France in 1937, he r e c o m m e n d e d another restoration of the monarchy: "If we consider France as she really is, we will realize, as did Joan, that France must have a King." O n the eve of World War II, Maurras t u r n e d t o monarchist myths for salvation. H e located t h e threat t o French national security less in Germany than in the "foreign" element within France, "foreign" being synonymous with Jewish. H e sought national protection in archaic monarchist fantasies, in his faith that the king, with the help of Joan, w o u l d save France from the enemy. As for the pretenders t o the t h r o n e themselves, the due de Guise and his heir, the comte de Paris, they wanted n o part of Maurras, the Action Franchise, or French antiSemitism. In fact, the comte de Paris w r o t e that the Action Franchise, by fusing monarchism and nationalism, was reviving a Jacobin creation alien to the tradition of French monarchism, which had never wanted o r c o n d o n e d a cult of the nation. But whereas the pretenders t o the t h r o n e could abjure the Action Franchise, Joan of Arc remained the prisoner of the right. She was even identified with Petain. T h e early nineteenth-century pro-royalists' support of a restoration, which guaranteed most of the principles of the Revolution and which ultimately p u t o n the t h r o n e a citizen-king, appears as a rational and moderate wish for continuity and stability w h e n compared w i t h Maurras's antidemocratic, reactionary, and pro-fascist position. If t h e political right associated salvation with Joan, so did Charles de Gaulle and the Resistance movement. T h e m y t h of Joan of Arc sustained the Resistance, which t o o k its symbol, the cross of Lorraine, from her native province. Charles de Gaulle seems n o t only t o have believed in the m y t h of Joan, b u t t o have identified with it. D u r i n g the war, although in exile in L o n d o n , de Gaulle never d o u b t e d that he incarnated the legitimacy of France. As the political and mystical representative of the sovereignty of the French people, he internalized the m y t h of t h e French saint and supposedly said, in L o n d o n in 1942, "I am truly Joan of Arc." 107

Alphonse de Lamartine, Jeanne d'Arc ( 1 8 5 2 ; reprinted Paris: Michel Levy, 1863), 1.

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

63

it was a human emotion, the social manifestation of love and the antidote to the atomization of society. Lamartine's Jeanne d'Arc is unusual in that it reflected neither promonarchist sentiment nor mystical republican nationalism. Lamartine saw in Joan neither a reminder of submission to royal authority nor the sacred representative of a divine collective being, but, on the contrary, a symbol of individualism and free expression. The opening paragraphs emphasize the freedom of the individual to revolt against unjust authority, whether monarchical or republican: "When civilization is imposed by force, it becomes a form of servitude. It follows that, for social progress to be accepted, the people must be as free to reject it as to embrace it." 108 Citizens are free to create their own concepts of patriotism and to express their love for their country as they wish. Lamartine placed individual freedom squarely before a mystical concept of collective sovereignty. Individualism and the right to revolt supersede membership in any collectivity. Lamartine's description of the beheading of Louis XVI emphasized the injustice and violence that result when people permit membership in a collectivity to supersede their individuality. Moral and humane actions, Lamartine asserted, can be expected of individuals, but not of a collective being. In his Histoire des Girondins, he juxtaposed the solitary king about to be executed ("one against all") and masses of soldiers and passive spectators. His text depicts the hollow victory of collective amorality over individual morality: If each one of the two hundred thousand citizens, actors as well as spectators, at the funeral of this living man had been asked: "Must this man, alone against all, die today?" probably not one would have responded^. But . . . together they unhesitatingly performed a deed that not one of them would have executed alone. The multitude, by exerting this mutual pressure on itself, prevented itself from yielding to its pity and its horror.109 Although each citizen would have wished to save the king's life, a unitary and oppressive "general will" suppressed their particular wills. Lamartine located sovereignty not, as Michelet did, in the mystical idea of an immortal French people, but in the minds of rational citizens who act as individual moral entities: "In the nation resides the inalienable sovereignty that issues from the rationality, natural rights, and free will of each one of its citizens, who collectively constitute the people." 110 In his sympathetic treatment of Louis XVI, the superiority of the king is no more and no less than the superiority of the individual over the collectivity.111 108

Ibid., 4. Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:129—30. 110 Ibid., 134. 1 ' ' Bcnichou points o u t the inconsistency in Lamartine's thought about individualism and unity in his writings prior t o his Histoire des Girondins. In 1838, Lamartine emphasized the 109

64

CHAPTERTWO

Lamartine not only refused Michelet's cult of the people, he also defused his glorification of French nationalism and implicit claim that France had its own French Christ. He briefly acknowledged the similarity between Joan of Arc and Christ ("like the master she served, she experienced the anguish of the Mount of Olives before submitting to her martyrdom" 112 ), but he would not entertain the idea that the French were a chosen people and maintained instead that all countries had a Joan of Arc: 'The annals of all nations contain such miraculous feats of patriotism in which a woman is an instrument in the hands of God." 113 In the opening paragraph of Jeanne d'Arc, Lamartine uses the heavily charged word "passion," but he was referring, not to Christ's martyrdom, but to "the passion of the citizen for his patrieT Lamartine purposefully transformed "passion" into the sublunary idea of a citizen's intense yet mundane and quotidian feelings of affection and loyalty for his country. 'The citizen's passion for his patrie is made up o f . . . love of family, . . . love of woman, . . . national honor, . . . property, . . . love of the sky, the air, the sea, the mountains, the horizon, the climate, . . . traditions, language, laws, and government." 114 In this long catalog, there is no mention of a transcendent collectivity, holy nation, or God. Even the heavens are demoted to a sky that is no more privileged than air, sea, or mountain. Devoid of Christian and supernatural resonances, "passion" thus became a sign of citizenship, not of martyrdom or supernatural election, and patriotism is no more and no less than the everyday sentiments of all citizens who love their families, property, language, national honor, laws, and government. Lamartine conceived of the origin of this patriotic passion as twofold. One part of it was created in man by God, the other is the product of man's own temporal consciousness, which is both backward- and forwardlooking. There is "a passion natural to man, a passionate concern for the memory he will leave of himself, the memory that his contemporaries as well as his descendants will always have of him." 115 Passion and patriotism are thus understood as a citizen's involvement in the various facets of his social existence and his interest in the nation's historical past and perpetual collective memory. primacy of national unity over individualism. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "Your system is based on individualism, the least patriotic and least human thing; mine is based on unity which gives human deeds the intensity and irresistibility of divine action." Again in 1843, he insisted on the overriding value of unity: "Democracy? It is unity! The Revolution? It is unity! True liberalism? It is unity!" But in other contemporaneous texts, he wrote that the Revolution occurred in France "in order to individualize our political culture." See Paul Benichou, Les Mages romemtiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 54. 112 Lamartine, Jeanne d'Arc, 174. 113 Ibid., 11. 114 Ibid., 2 - 3 . 115 Ibid., 4.

LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

65

Lamartine's version of the story of Joan of Arc is really something of a rationalist response to Michelet. He expressed ambivalence about a history infused with supernatural Christian myths and with notions of the nation as a transcendent collective being. He distanced himself from the irrational aspect of Michelet's religion of patriotism by reducing patriotism to the rank of "sacred superstition." 116 When he wrote that the "miraculous" in history comes from patriotism, he was distinguishing between what he himself termed "supernatural" and "natural" miracles.117 The "supernatural" miracle is the result of God's active material intervention. God's direct verbal communication with Joan would have been a supernatural miracle. But Lamartine suggested that Joan's voices were a "natural" miracle, the silent beckoning of her own conscience. Such a "miracle" is still an object of wonderment, but its source is human, not supernatural. Whereas Michelet was a maker of national myths, Lamartine was wary of the supernatural and wished to exclude the irrational aspects of popular myth from historical narrative. He rejected the concept of divine right, whether of kings or of nations. As a historian, he did not want to create myths, but neither did he want to destroy them entirely. He sought an intermediate position that would permit both distance and admiration. The questions he posed about Joan of Arc were calculated to undermine the possibility of supernatural intervention: 'Were her voices truly supernatural miracles, actual divine words that addressed the maids in the crowd by name, imparting to them the mission to save their nation? Or are they in truth nature's own miracle, the silent summons to action conceived in our own hearts?" He suggested that what was extraordinary about her was not her commerce with the supernatural world, but her own personal qualities. He expressed awe for what was sacred in Joan herself, her sincerity and enthusiasm ("enthusiasm is a sacred flame").118 In retrospect, Lamartine's skepticism regarding the supernatural and emotional elements that Michelet introduced into French nationalism and into the myth of Joan of Arc seems prophetic. Perhaps he sensed the danger of attributing transcendent qualities to monarch, national saint, or national collective being. Perhaps he was also aware of the ominous potential power of a mystical cult of patriotism buttressed by supernatural myths. But he could not have guessed that nationalism would become an even more disturbing force at the end of the nineteenth century when it passed from the left to the right. In 1943, Simone Weil echoed Lamartine's warning, remarking that the popularity of Joan of Arc during the previous twenty-five years had not been a healthy phenomenon: "It was a convenient mechanism for forgetting that there is a difference between France and God." 119 But 116 117 118 119

Ibid., 245. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 13-14. Simone Weil, L'Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 170.

66

CHAPTER

TWO

Weil's distress about the unpredictable consequences of infusing French nationalism with supernatural elements ran counter to centuries of French mythology, for even a republican such as Michelet conceived of French nationhood in Catholic and mystical terms. The French Revolution had never solved the problem of integrating into its ideology of universalism and rationalism a sense of the unique past of the French nation. Neither through the Declaration of the Rights of Man nor a founding myth of regicide nor through the revolutionary cult of a Supreme Being did the Revolution succeed in creating a viable national mythology for France. Michelet tried to fill the postrevolutionary mythological vacuum by creating the nationalist myth of Joan of Arc that would combine the universalism of revolutionary ideology and the specificity of the French Christian and monarchist tradition. Joan could symbolize what was essential in revolutionary ideology, the dignity and divinity of the common person, but she also belonged to French history and to the Christian vision of suffering, sacrifice, and redemption. Once one understands the profound attraction that the Passion story held for Michelet,120 it is not surprising that he conceptualized French nationhood in terms of an innocent and divine victim and savior. Joan, however, also becomes Michelet's vehicle for undermining individualism, rights, self-interest, and rationality; for reviving and personalizing the irrational and mystical Rousscauian concept of the General Will; for imposing on French nationhood the Rousseauianrevolutionary obsession with unity and unanimity; and for bestowing upon France a messianic mission. Lamartine, in his Jeanne d'Arc, had hoped for national myths that would somehow be devoid of the supernatural and the irrational, a wish that underestimated the emotional continuity of monarchist mythology, Catholic theology, and the revolutionary myth of fraternity, a wish that failed to recognize the persistence, on the left as well as on the right, of intense antimodernist trends. 120 "The Passion endures and will always endure. The world has its Passion, as does humanity during its long historical trial, as does every human heart during the few moments it beats on earth. To each his cross and his stigmata. Mine date from the day my soul entered this miserable body, so weary as I write down these words. My Passion began with my Incarnation. . . . To live is already to have entered the Passion" (Michelet, Histoirede France, quoted by Benichou, Le Temps des propbetes, 521).

Chapter Three MICHELET AND LAMARTINE: REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

I

N THEIR historical writings, both Michelet and Lamartine sought to provide texts in which the nation would discover its past as well as a moral and political program for the future, a postrevolutionary foundation for French society. Sacrifice was one of the essential themes in these texts, but accompanying sacrifice was the sister theme of compassion. Just as commentaries on the king's death evolved into fresh concepts of citizenship and nationhood that emphasized self-sacrifice, these commentaries also sparked reflections on compassion that developed into a novel theory of justice that subordinated rational legal principles to pity. Together, sacrifice and compassion became key elements in a social vision that extolled fraternity, for what is fraternity if not self-sacrifice and compassion? The emphasis on the emotional communion of the nation became so predominant in the nineteenth century thatfraternite eclipsed liberte and egalite, and the stage was set for a new and most disturbing form of nationalism. Nineteenth-century historians, however, envisioned compassion not only as the emotional foundation of justice, but also as a vital and potent force that could shape history. According to Michelet and Lamartine, pity for Louis XVI had determined the course of events to the detriment of the Revolution and the principles of republican government and popular sovereignty. They interpreted the outpouring of pity following the king's death as having a profound and negative effect on the Revolution. Michelet, in his Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, and Lamartine, in his Histoire des Girondins, wrote that, by killing the defenseless monarch, the Jacobins had awakened and unleashed tremendous sympathy that purified the monarchy in the public imagination, laying the psychological and moral groundwork for the Restoration. They attributed the Restoration to Jacobin pitilessness, but even more important, they traced what was, for them, the real failure—the moral failure—of the Revolution to the Terror and to the Terror's initial crime and founding act, the pitiless regicide. Politically, Jacobin mercilessness served the royalist cause; morally, it destroyed the Revolution and discredited republican ideology for decades to come. Pity was central to their visions of history and politics, but it also influenced the attitudes of these historians toward historiography itself. They envisaged pity, to which revolutionaries, kings, and politicians were so ambivalent, as the basis for

68

CHAPTERTHREE

historiography and as the fundamental moral mission for the historian. The question of pity for Louis XVI served them as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between ethics and politics and for examining the role of pity in the writing of history.

Michelet was distressed that the emotional impact of the drama of the king and his family was so great that no citizens in 1793 were immune to their pathetic plight. 1 People, he wrote, did not care whether Louis XVI was guilty or innocent; they saw only his unhappiness. During the months of his imprisonment, he moved almost everyone who saw him in the Temple prison, effortlessly converting them to his cause. Michelet criticized those revolutionaries who were so idiotic and inept as to have made a public display of the imprisoned royal family, leaving out nothing that could arouse pity and tears. Upon hearing how solicitous the king was of his family and servants or how he spent his day, people broke down in sobs. 2 Michelet described the king, a month before his death, as a besieged man, alone, isolated, "the very image of pity." Who would have recognized him on December 11th? . . . He was still heavy, but had lost some weight. . . . His three day old beard, . . . neither short nor long, was unkempt and dirty, . . . making his bristly face seem boorish. Inadequate food, weakness, fatigue, all this made him npitiful sight to behold. . . . His blank gaze wandered over the crowd, seeing nothing.3 The night before the execution, there were hardly two city officers to be found who were willing to confront the pitiable king. 4 Michelet commented sardonically that, as a historian, he could have taken any uninteresting and antipathetic prisoner, even one guilty of crimes that extinguish all pity, and, by employing the same methods the Convention used with the royal family, could have succeeded in making everyone weep.5 This profusion of public pity provoked Michelet's anger for several reasons. On a political level, he thought that such pity damaged the young republic and placed it in danger by transferring sympathy from the Revolution to the fallen monarchy, thereby clouding the issue of the king's guilt. The traitorous king appeared before the people as innocent, touching, respectable. "He is a man, the father of a family; all else is forgotten. Justice was disarmed by nature and pity." But he also gave a moral justification for 1 2 3 4 5

Michelet, Histoire de la Revolutionfrangaise,2:181—82. Ibid., 2:97-98. Ibid., 2:115 (italics mine). Ibid., 2:181. Ibid., 2:97.

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

69

his anger. Had not Louis XVI actually stolen this pity from others? Had not the deaths of many unknown heroes of the Revolution gone unnoticed and unmourned? Michelet decided not to include in his history a detailed description of the sorrowful last meeting of the king and his family. His reason, he said, was not that he did not share the heartrending emotion the event inspired, but that such emotion belonged more legitimately to the patriots who perished as victims of the Terror. The king had confiscated pity and made die whole earth cry.6 Michclct's own pity was spontaneously directed toward the Revolution, toward all factions and all citizens caught in the revolutionary storm: "Pity for human nature! for the terrifying vortex of a whirlwind in which every human head was reeling!"7 Personally he found it difficult to feel sympathy for Louis XVI: "It is no negligible effort for the historian . . . to avert his eyes from the misfortune of innocent people and focus his pity on a guilty king." The earth was red with blood spilled by kings, the blood of the innocent victims of monarchy. But despite centuries of royal tyranny, despite the unspoken but practiced maxim of monarchy, "From king to people . . . neitherjustice norpity "& Michelet was convinced diat pity and mercy should not have been withheld from the king: "He was guiltier than he realized, and yet he was not unworthy of the people's clemency."9 Michelet's critical stance toward Louis XVI ultimately yielded to feelings of pity. The community of human suffering was stronger than political ideology; the father was stronger than the king. The family, Michelet wrote, was the point where all people were brought together. It was the vulnerable side of Louis XVI, and it was also where all hearts were wounded for him. King and dauphin disappear, and there remain only father and son: there was no one who was not touched when the king protested, "You took my son away from me one hour too soon." 10 In the conclusion of the 1847 preface to his Histoire de la Revolution, Michelet wrote movingly of the recent death of his own father, who had often recounted to him, when he was a child, the story of the Revolution, who provided a living link to the eighteenth century, and who was, in a sense, the original author of the work, almost the double of Michelet himself. Michelet wanted to write a history of the Revolution that would be a monument to his father, that would incorporate his father's love for history and admiration for revolutionary ideals. The Histoire de laRevolution was an act of filial love and respect and a statement of generational continuity. At * Ibid., 2:187 and 185. 7 Ibid., 2:109. 8 Ibid., 2:133 and 131. 9 Ibid., 2:8. 10 Ibid., 2:182.

70

CHAPTERTHREE

the center of this monumental work of history, his father's memory survives as author and authority. Michelet had praised the Revolution for dismantling the paternal construct of the ancien regime; he deplored the absolute authority of the father—whether king or God—to bestow property or to impose original sin. But whereas he approved of revolt against bondage to arbitrary and oppressive paternal authority in the domain of politics and religion, there were other historical, intellectual, and emotional bonds between fathers and sons he wished to preserve.l * The country could not survive without respect for certain traditions. He ascribed the failure of the republican movement to create lasting democratic institutions to its disavowal of its own father: "It renounced its friend... Dare I say, its own father, the splendid eighteenth century!"12 There is some irony in Michelet's chiding the republican element in French society for not recognizing the intellectual authority of the eighteenth century ("its own father"), the century that audaciously discredited patriarchal rule. But more than irony, the passage reveals Michelet's respect for familial and generational continuity. The opening signs of the Histoire de la Revolution—the historian's emphasis on love for his father and respect for his century's father—establish his fidelity to Enlightenment principles, but, at the same time, suggest his ambivalence toward the Revolution's breach with all forms of paternal authority, including the regicide. Michelet had been writing his chapter on the storming of the Bastille when he received the news of his father's death. He remembered that he felt the blow like a "bullet from the Bastille," associating the demise of his father with his own imagined violent death during the Revolution, a remarkable fusion of historian and history.13 His love was so deep that he felt that part of him died with his father. There could have been no greater imaginable crime or transgression for this son, who described himself as not entirely surviving the death of his father, than parricide. It seems inevitable that Michelet would assimilate, on some level, a dead father and a dead king. Although feelings of loyalty to the father who represented the eighteenth century turned Michelet intellectually against monarchy and church, filial affection could also only have inspired antipathy for the parricide that was also regicide. His feelings of love and his sense of loss are not incongruous as 11

In Nosfik, Michelet praised Judaism for conserving the prestige of the father, undermined by Christianity which "diminished and cast doubt upon the redoubtable image of the Father. . . . The legend of Joseph, martyred by marriage, looms over the centuries of Christianity" (Nasfils [1869; reprinted Paris: 1980], 133). 12 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolutionfrangaise,1:3. 13 In the Preface a I'Histoire Ae France, Michelet recognized the extent of his emotional involvement his work: 'This book absorbed all of my life: I poured my being into it. It has been the single event of my existence. Can there be a danger in this merging of book and author? Is an opus not influenced by the feelings and the times of the person who composed it?" (Preface (1869) a I'Histoire Ae Prance, 169).

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

71

the ambiguous opening signs of a work over which a dead king and father casts his shadow. Michelet never repudiated the Revolution's condemnation of the monarchy. Inasmuch as Louis XVI represented the principle of arbitrary and oppressive political authority, the Revolution was justified in wrenching the nation from his grasp. But inasmuch as he was a human being and a father, the nation erred in withholding pity and pardon. Just as the memory of his own father is the portal of his Histoire de la Revolution, his equally personal feelings of pity for suffering humanity are its guidepost, a reminder of the authority of moral values, even when such values appear to contradict deeply held political beliefs. Higher than intelligence, higher than justice, pity reigns: "If I can discern a miracle or if I can sense that human beings are unique in the natural world, it is not because I possess intelligence but rather because I have pity."14 The Jacobins, of course, had not intended to execute a father and a husband, or even a fellow human being. Their enemy, the king, was an "alien" and a "monster." Although Rousseau had imbued the revolutionaries with a belief that compassion was the source of all social virtues, 15 he had also taught that "pity for the wicked is a great cruelty toward men." Thus Robespierre and Saint-Just could insist that nations had the right to strike down tyrants. 16 But for nineteenth-century historians, Louis was merely a pitiful and defeated man. In their writings, pity for Louis the father transformed regicide into parricide. What had been a radical act consistent with Jacobin political ideology became an unspeakable collective act of transgression against the father. In the nineteenth century, many historians believed that regicide had not been the birth of the republic but rather that a pitiless political execution had been the paradigm of the Terror and had sown the seeds of the Restoration.

Michelet was saddened to admit that the decision to execute the king had been a terrible miscalculation. He approved the Revolution's actions in judging and condemning Louis and even in placing him on the guillotine, but, he concluded, the blade of the guillotine should never have fallen. As a viable head of state and as a representative of monarchical ideology, the king 14

Michelet, Journal, 14 April 1850, 2:97. 15 "What is generosity, clemency, humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, the guilty, the human species in general?" (Rousseau, Discours sur Vinegdite, in his Oeuwes [Paris: Seuil, 1971], 2:224). 16 For an examination of Rousseau's concept of pity as well as Jacobin responses to the question of pity for Louis XVI at his trial, see Blum, Rousseau and the Republic ofVirtue, 74-92 and 169-81.

72

CHAPTERTHREE

had already ceased to exist before the execution. His head was like "a wooden head, meaningless and hollow, a vacant thing. But if that head were struck and just one drop of blood spurt forth, its life would be demonstrated. People would once again believe in this living head: royalty would be reborn."17 On 21 January 1793, the discredited and defunct institution of monarchy "was resuscited by the power of pity and the virtue of blood."18 Pity and blood gave birth to the republic's own nemesis, the cult of a martyred king. Michelet undoubtedly exaggerated the political power of pity. Instead of locating the origin of the Restoration in, for example, the goal of the antiFrench coalition to replace the revolutionary and Napoleonic systems by a restoration of the monarchy, he portrayed compassion for Louis XVI as one of the principal causes of the resurgence of monarchism. It is unlikely that national pity for Louis XVI had played a significant role in the return to power of the Bourbons or in the relegitimization of monarchy, although the Restoration government had attempted to buttress itself by exploiting the myth of the martyred king. Nevertheless, Michelet was convinced that pity was a political force that shaped history, that had already influenced the course of events to the detriment of the Revolution and the principles of republican government and popular sovereignty. Pity for Louis XVI signified more than misplaced public sentiment, the emotional catalyst of political reaction. For Michelet, pity was also the essence of moral behavior without which politics sinks into Terror. Analysts of the Revolution have interpreted the relationship between the regicide and the Terror in different and conflicting ways. Walzer, for example, is convinced that "the trial of Louis and the subsequent Jacobin terror were radically disconnected."19 The judicial process may have been flawed, but Walzer considers the trial at least partially fair since specific accusations were made and the king was permitted to defend himself. Full-scale political terror would not have tolerated even this minimal respect for formal judicial procedure, and next to the so-called trials of the Girondins in 1793, the king's trial looks like perfect justice. "The trial of the king is in no sense the beginning of the terror; nor are the advocates of a trial the organizers of the terror. It is also not the case that the principles on which the king was tried are the principles of the terror."20 For Walzer, the trial served the purpose of turning the king into a justiciable citizen, and the execution served the purpose of "disenchanting the realm," since the king's former subjects, many of whom still viewed him as a magical figure, were able to witness the destruction of the mystery of divine-right authority. 17 18 19 20

Michelet, Histoire de la Revolutionfrancaise,2:95. Ibid., 2:187. Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 87. Ibid., 78.

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

73

Feher interprets the problem differently. He agrees that the Jacobins were, as Walzer implied, trying two persons in one: an "actual-personal" subject accused of treason (Walzer's justiciable king-citizen) and a fictitious person, the symbol of the metaphysical idea of divine-right monarchy. But taking issue with Walzer, Fehcr emphasizes that the trial of a fictitious person, accused not of any misdeeds but of his symbolic role, has nothing to do with justice, and no legal procedure can be built upon it. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine moral or legal grounds for trying and then decapitating a human being not for his deeds but for his symbolic or mythic role, but there are certainly legal grounds for trying a citizen or kingforthe crime of treason (except that the Constitution, to which Louis XVI had sworn allegiance, had specified that his only punishment for crimes he might commit while he was king would be abdication; the Constitution had thus recognized his inviolability). Unfortunately, as Walzer suggests, the king's trial confused a political trial (not dissimilar to an impeachment trial conducted by the American Senate), which does not need to conform to accepted judicial procedure, with a criminal trial, which should conform to judicial precedure, if only because the outcome may be (and was) death rather than just impeachment or abdication. Walzer, however, also makes the reasonable argument that "the point [of the trial] was to make a point—that the king was, like any other citizen, liable to the law. How could that be done without a trial? And how could the trial of the king be anything but an imperfect (which is not to say a 'sham') trial?" Walzer goes on to make an interesting comparison between the trial of Louis XVI and the Nuremberg trials: not unlike the king's trial, the Nuremberg trials were instruments of collective education; they were political as well as criminal, and, on the grounds of pure procedural justice, they were imperfect, but "necessarily imperfect."21 But perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between an international trial (based on principles of international law, which itself may be a contradiction in terms), and a national trial that can be expected to follow a nation's set rules of procedural justice. The Nuremberg trials, moreover, might be viewed as an act of closure, whereas the trial of Louis XVI constituted not only the judicial closure of monarchical rule, but also the founding act of a new political order, one that people hoped would be based on a constitution, on the rule of law, republican institutions, and humanitarian ideals. For Feher, the judicial lapses in the king's trial and the entanglement of political and criminal law corrupted this act of foundation and created the precedent for the politicization of the law that would characterize the Terror. Thus Feher severely censures the trial: it was a "parody" rather than a victory of legal 21

Michael Walzer, "The King's Trial and the Political Culture of the Revolution," in C. Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation ofModem Political Culture, 2:184—90.

74

CHAPTER THREE

procedure, "a legal compromise which compromised law at the very moment when its rule had to be, and could have been, introduced for centuries. In making the law 'revolutionary,' the revolutionary actors made law political and politics lawless."22 For his part, Michelet discerned in the regicide the incubator of the Terror; the king's trial and execution unleashed the forces that were characteristic of the Terror and that would be the Revolution's undoing. With the guillotining of Louis XVI, Death itself took over the reins of the Revolution: "Yes, there were indeed grounds for hesitating when it was clear that the death of one man, albeit a guilty one, would unbridle Death in that vast arena where it would not stop."23 The Terror was the inevitable result of a trial that was a mockery of justice: "From the king's trial to the catastrophe of the Girondins, to the Terror, no halt was possible."24 Although Michelet discovered in the procedures of the trial the seeds of the political procedures of the Terror,25 his more profound objections were moral rather than political, legal, or judicial. He was far more troubled by the degradation of the humanitarian ideals of 1789 than he was by the Revolution's failure to follow legal procedure and establish stable republican institutions. During the trial of Louis XVI, the moral values that were to characterize the Terror were already in evidence: compassion was derided 22

Feher, The Frozen Revolution, 1 0 1 . Michelet, Histoire de la Revolutionfrangaise,2 : 7 1 . 24 Ibid., 2:7. 25 Michelet pointed o u t that during the initial debates at the king's trial, the Jacobins attempted to institute the principle that any election could be challenged and any deputy unseated. The Girondins took up the Jacobin position a month later and demanded the recall of elected deputies, in order t o attack Marat, not realizing that they were signing their own death warrant (Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, 2:109). By undermining the authority of a single election, they were undermining every election. Michelet also argued that the principle of dictatorship could be traced to the Jacobin opposition to a national referendum on the king's fate. At issue during these debates were the warring principles of popular sovereignty and minority rule. The Girondins favored legal process and supported a referendum on the execution (ibid., 2:166). When the Jacobins opposed a referendum, they were claiming the right t o enlighten and dictate the national will, thereby laying the groundwork for tyranny (ibid., 2:166). Ironically, the party that fought to execute the monarch appeared t o be the inheritor of the tradition of absolutism. The king's trial also became the trial of the Girondins: " O n the third of January, the Mountain set in motion an elaborate strategem designed t o degrade the position of the Girondins from that of judge to that of defendant" (ibid., 2:150). Only Danton realized that the cause of the right wing, and ultimately of the Convention, was lost (ibid., 2:173). When Saint-Just was elected president of the Convention, it was the election, not of a man, but of "the axe or the guillotine's blade." Demands for death and execution replaced discussion and debate (ibid., 2:157). The trial of Louis XVI solidified Jacobin domination of the Convention, undermined the authority of law, and gave birth to the monster that would destroy the Revolution: fanaticism, (ibid., 2:160). The king's trial politicized the law to such an extent that politics indeed became lawless. 23

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

75

and salvation associated with the death of the political enemies of the Revolution. The degeneration of an ideology of compassion for the suffering masses into a doctrine that prohibited and punished clemency as counterrevolutionary weakness and treason posed a graver problem for this prorevolutionary historian than political extremism. During the first half of the nineteenth century, in a society still scarred by memories of the Terror, republicanism evoked an ideology of expediency and pitilessness. Republican historians like Michelet felt that it was their task to rehabilitate the concept of republican government and reestablish the moral legitimacy and superiority of the principles of 1789. He sought to formulate a new compassionate basis for republicanism that would disavow the Jacobin Revolution of 1793 but preserve the idealism of 1789. Saint-Just had boasted that the spirit with which the king would be judged would be the same as the spirit that would establish the republic. Michelet agreed with Saint-Just's idea but not with his politics. Paraphrasing Saint-Just, he explained that the Revolution, in judging Louis XVI, judged itself as it expressed the values it associated with its own legitimacy. The trial of the king thus put the Revolution on trial, and the moral survival of the Revolution hinged on the verdict. Before 1792, the laws of the young republic had been humane, generous, and merciful. Michelet was moved just reading such laws imbued with love for humanity: human life was sacred, the death penalty had almost been eliminated. But the trial of Louis XVI marked a watershed. A young, inexperienced nation, facing astonishing hurdles, sacrificed its concept of justice and yielded to expediency and fear. In one swift jump, the men of the Revolution passed from humanity to barbarity.26 The rhetoric of compassion that characterized 1789 was deformed and distorted, in January 1793, into a rhetoric of cruelty and barbarity. The words that Michelet used repeatedly to characterize the trial and the king's accusers are "barbaric" and "merciless." The ink with which the humanitarian speeches of 1792 were written was barely dry when declarations of the inviolability of human life were replaced by calls for death. Saint-Just was chosen to carry the blade of the guillotine, for he had no philanthropic experience and had never pronounced "one word of kindness or pity." The speech of this ''''pitiless purifier," demanding the decapitation of the king, was "monstrous," his words had the "pitilessness of ice." He derided those who expressed sympathy for the king, mocking them for trying to buy tears. Michelet commented that "the day when pity becomes a mockery is the beginning of a barbaric age." 27 In the tenebrous world of the Terror, meanings were reversed: pity became barbarity, and people were condemned to 26 27

Ibid., 2:67-72. Ibid., 2 : 7 3 - 7 8 (italics mine).

76

CHAPTERTHR.EE

death in the name of empathy. Tallien voted against a stay of execution for the king, arguing that it was barbaric to leave Louis uncertain about his fate!28 So difficult was it to voice a word of sympathy or moderation that the deputy Fauchet was reduced to making the pitiful and ridiculously hypocritical argument "that his crimes are so great that death would be too sweet; he must be condemned... to live."29 The logic of the trial was the logic of the Terror. The decision to execute the king was, for Michelet, emblematic of a regime that would soon accept the use of violence against minorities in the name of the misery of the multitude and the well-being and happiness of future generations. As if he were predicting modern totalitarianism, Michelet analyzed the mathematics of terror: "If we accept the proposition that one person can be sacrificed for the happiness of the many, it will soon be demonstrated that two or three or more could also be sacrificed for the happiness of the many. Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of the many, and we will think it was a bargain."30 Michelet could hardly bear to acknowledge this moral defeat of his Revolution from within. "Oh! sweet soul of France and of her Revolution... if only I could break my pen and end my book here."31 With the greatest reluctance, he broached the Revolution's self-destruction: "Here I touch upon a sad subject, but history demands it. Having reached the heights of the Terror, all I find, like on the crests of massive mountains, is an extreme aridity, a desert where life has ceased. . . . Pity was extinguished or mute. Only horror spoke."32 In a comparison of the French and American Revolutions, Arendt located the failure of the French Revolution specifically in the Jacobins' Rousseauian passion for compassion. Whereas the American Revolution, not faced with the problem of overwhelming poverty or suffering, committed itself to the creation of lasting institutions, the direction of the French Revolution was determined by urgent social conditions and an ideology of compassion that was "politically speaking irrelevant and without consequence."33 One alternative to the sentiments of pity and compassion might have been solidarity, "a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited," established by rational deliberation and guided, not by suffering or love, but by social and political ideals. Solidarity can encompass all factions, classes, and even nations, regardless of weakness or strength, poverty or wealth, but pity prefers misfortune; it has a "vested interest" in the existence of the unhappy whose suffering it glorifies. Jacobin pity— 28 " N o reprieve; in the name of humanity, his suffering should be truncated. It is barbaric to leave him in suspense" (ibid., 2:176 [italics mine]). 29 Ibid., 2:79. 30 Michelet, quoted in Viallaneix, La Voie royale, 331. 31 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, 2:69. 32 Ibid., 2:923 (italics mine). 33 Arendt, On Revolution, 81.

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

77

emotional, limitless, absolute—was necessarily incompatible with reason, law, justice, community, and political institutions. "Robespierre's pityinspired virtue . . . played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of . . . the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery."34 As boundless pity responded to the boundless suffering of an abstract multitude, relations with persons in their singularity were lost, considerations of friendship no less than statecraft disappeared, and, in a terrifying reversal, an ideology of pity for suffering humanity prohibited pity and clemency for individuals among whom Louis XVI was only the most visible. "Pity," Arcndt noted, "taken as the spring of virtue, has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself." Victor Hugo preceded Arendt by a hundred years in his 1858 condemnation of the Jacobins whose "barbaric pity" was the annulment of itself: An excess of love makes them abhor. Their goodness turns into hatred. As theytirelesslybrood over the fate of the poor, Their hearts know nothing but gloom. And out of compassion, they are inexorable.35 Michelet's answer to the Jacobins' desecration of the Revolution's ideology of compassion was an imaginative though untested theory of justice founded on emotion rather than on reason, a compassionate humanitarian credo that was unfortunately seriously flawed. In the beginning of the Introduction to his Histoire de laRevolution, Michclct distinguished between the moral bases of the ancien regime and the Revolution. The dominant principle of the ancien regime was Grace, arbitrary and essentially unjust. Only God or the monarch had the power to decide who would or would not be saved, without regard to one's moral or immoral behavior. Belief in Grace implied passive submission to an authority dedicated to the "chosen." The opposite of Grace was Justice, the fundamental principle of the Revolution. Unlike arbitrary and gratuitous Grace, Justice existed in relation to the moral deeds of citizens and presupposed their active and responsible roles in their and society's destiny. Michclet envisioned the Revolution as the struggle of Justice, after centuries of oppression and passive resignation, to free itself from the reign of Grace. In his discussion of the public's pity for the 34 35

Ibid., 86-87. C'cst par exces d ' a m o u r qu'ils abhorrent; bonte Dcvicnt hainc; ils n ' o n t plus de coeur q u e d'un cote A force d e songer au sort des miscrables, E t par misericorde, ils sont incxorables.

(Victor Hugo, he Verso de la page [1858], in his Oeuvres completes, 10:264)

78

CHAPTERTHREE

imprisoned king, pity and justice had been antithetical; he had protested that sympathy had erased the king's crimes, that "justice was disarmed by nature and pity."36 And yet, he reached the conclusion that the Revolution failed because of the absence of pity and grace, not justice. At the end of his Introduction, Michelet revealed his ahistorical mythic vision of the ideal Revolution: Glorious epoch, sublime moment, when our fiercest warriors are also men of peace! When the Rights we achingly mourned for arefinallyrestored to us, and when Grace, in whose name tyranny crushed us, embraces Justice, her sister, herself!37 This Revolution, which never existed, was not a struggle between Justice and Grace but rather the synthesis of both, the reconciliation of the underlying values of the Revolution and Christianity. In this lyric passage, Michelet announced his new understanding of the complex nature of Justice: "Forgive me, Oh Justice! I thought you were austere and cold. I did not realize that you were the same as Love and Grace." 38 By Grace, Michelet understood infinite love and mercy, for he never accepted the theological concept of Grace, the arbitrary and gratuitous selection of certain people for salvation. That mystical idea, essential to certain forms of Christianity, was basically unjust. What is more, a religion in which Grace played such a significant role would never be able to incorporate a rational concept of justice and still remain the religion it was. 39 Justice would forever be alien to Christianity, but the Revolution's concept of justice could incorporate Grace. Grace, however, would no longer be a supernatural concept, a doctrine of privilege, favor, and injustice. Michelet dismantled arbitrary, mystical Grace and retained only the elements of love and pity. 40 The revolutionary faith would accept these Christian values and forge compassion and justice into one. 41 In that sense, Grace would be the salvation of revolutionary ideals. 36

Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, 2:189. Ibid., 1:75-76. 38 Ibid., 1:76. 39 "Can Christianity transform itself, that is, abandon Grace in favor of Justice, and become just? Then salvation would be the just reward for our deeds instead of being the result of grace, of God's arbitrary selection. Salvation would no longer be the gift of Christ's sacrifice, and Christianity itself would be pointless. If Christianity embraces justice, it cannot remain Christianity" (Michelet, Journal, 22 November 1846, 1:658). 40 Benichou summarized Michelet's theology of Justice, which "does not reconcile Grace and Justice in God, but in man, by a process similar to the one that established, in Enlightenment humanism, the intimate alliance of head and heart. . . . His theory of Grace and Justice signifies . . . the formulation of these problems on a human level, in short, a dispossession of God in favor of man" (Le Temps des prophetes, 535). 41 Ballanche had also proposed, in L'Homme sans nom, the synthesis of pity and justice. The guilt-ridden Regicide doubts that he could ever be pardoned for having voted for the king's 37

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

79

By equating justice with compassion, Michelet made justice more dependent on fragile feelings of empathy than on rational legal principles that apply equally to all. So horrified was Michelet by memories of a merciless state and so enchanted by a dream of a merciful Revolution that he seems to forget that while compassion may be part ofjustice, it is not, in and of itself, justice. Agnes Heller lucidly underlines the flaws in a conception ofjustice as compassion. She explains, first of all, that if mercy is extended to all, no offenses will be punished, and people will not be treated according to their deserts as the formal concept ofjustice enjoins. Second, if mercy is extended to some, but not to all, then, unless one observes a concrete form that recommends mercy in such and such a case, formal justice is again infringed upon. 42 From Aristotle, who defined justice in terms of desert, to John Rawls, who defines it in terms of fairness, few if any theories of justice refer to compassion. 43 Rawls argues that although citizens may be motivated by benevolence, such feelings are distinct from and not required by the principles of justice that are the basis of the social contract: "The citizen body as a whole is not generally bound together by ties of fellow feeling between individuals, but by the acceptance of public principles ofjustice. While every citizen is a friend to some citizens, no citizen is a friend to all. But their common allegiance to justice provides a unified perspective from which they can adjudicate their differences."44 Michelet, however, explicitly rejects such a system of justice founded on rational principles. For this reason, he has only disdain for Montesquieu's theory of justice according to which justice concerns rapport, that is, the relations between different entities, that which relates men to their fellow men. This theory struck him as hopelessly relative and abstract.45 Michelet, like many others, wished to found justice on the existence of an absolute, an immutable authority that gives legitimacy and perpetual validity to the law. The absolute authority he seeks, however, appears to be human, not metaphysical or supernatural, and this human absolute is alternately associated with compassion, with the Rousseauian General Will, and with something he calls "excellence of the heart." 46 Rational principles of justice, he maindeath; he accepts his pariah status, believing that "justice comes before pity." But two merciful priests persuade him that "sometimes pity is justice" (L'Homme sans nom, 1:338). 42

Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 5 5 - 5 6 . Although Old Testament prophets were ambivalent toward the inclusion of mercy in divine justice, some of their writings express a desireforjustice to include compassion for the oppressed, for "justice dies when dehumanized" (ibid.). 44 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 474. 45 "Justice eludes Montesquieu; he sees it as ever-changing and relative. For him, law is abstract and inanimate, concerning only legal relationships. This kind of law will not heal our lives. Montesquieu was unknowingly the founder of the absurd English school of law" (Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution francaise, 1:56). 46 Ibid., 1:430. 43

80

CHAPTER THREE

tains, could belong only to the preliminary first stage of the Revolution. 47 The second and ultimate stage of the Revolution will liberate justice from fallible and mediocre rationality: "In the second stage, which will come sooner or later, [the Revolution] will leave behind its rational equations and find its true faith, the one true basis for law. And in this divine freedom, which only the excellence of the heart can bestow, the Revolution will bear hitherto unknown fruits of goodness and fraternity."48 Although Michelet suggests that the essence of justice is compassion, in truth he never really defines what he means by Justice. Statements such as "Justice is all in the soul," "Justice must once again believe that it is just," or "love . . . sees by the light of Justice" 49 do little to elucidate his ideas. One can infer, however, that the aim of his concept of social justice is not anything like fairness or the just adjudication of differences, but rather unity and community, that is, a social religion whose aim is the enhancement of the fraternal bonds among citizens through virtue, defined as a capacity for compassion. 50 Tocqueville's comment that the Revolution had originally functioned like a religion, inasmuch as it looked to "the regeneration of mankind more than to reform in France," 51 describes Michelet's own mystical feelings about the Revolution, for Michelet deems rational principles of law and government less important than higher spiritual principles, whatever they may be and however they may organize society. For him, the essence of the Revolution is a kind of gospel, and his objective as a historian is the revival of this revolutionary faith. Thus his approach to the Revolution is often more sentimental than critical. Indeed, at the end of his Introduction to his Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, he reveals that the emotional and moral truths of love and compassion have been his guide. Of this great work, he said, "My heart led the way."52 Underlying his recreation and interpretation of political events was a profoundly personal moral vision that substituted ethics for politics and fraternity for justice. Unfortunately, Michelet's fusion of justice and pity gives justice a basis in quicksand, making it as indefinable, arbitrary, and unstable as it was for both 47 "In the first stage, which made reparation to the human race for centuries of abuse, justice burst forth and crystallized into law the philosophy of the 18th century" (ibid., 1:430). 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 1:26, 30, and 54. 50 Compassion as the basis for society is a concept that still has great appeal to communitarians. The sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues that "compassion holds forth a vision of what a good society can be" (Acts a/Compassion [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], 309). Suspecting that "compassion is an absolute value like beauty and truth" (ibid., 283), Wuthnow argues that the reason why compassion is so essential is that it creates both the community and a moral as well as a social identity for the individual. 51 Tocqueville, L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution, 89. 52 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolutionfrangaise,1:76.

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

81

the kings of France and the Jacobins. As Popper and Arendt pointed out, human emotions are complex if not unfathomable, and even the most positive ones are unsuitable as a means for resolving conflicts and protecting freedom and rights. France, if not Louis XVI, would have been better served, not by an outpouring of pity at the trial and perhaps not even by clemency, but by fair judicial process. The real lesson of Louis's trial is not the primacy of compassion but the primacy of just legal procedure.

The Jacobin Revolution, which Michelet repeatedly described as cruel and pitiless, was antithetical not only to his own moral and political values but also to his vision of history and historiography. At the time he was drafting his account of the events surrounding the trial of Louis XVI, he felt that he had not sufficiently emphasized the emotional and moral significance of the unfolding catastrophe. He worried that a purely intellectual analysis would not move his readers: "I have been too preoccupied lately with scholarly details, forgetting how important it is to touch people's hearts. . . .Pity, our instinctive sense of justice? Responding to events with pity, with our moral sense, a sense of what is right." 53 Eight years later, completing the last volumes of his Histoire de France, he continued to find in pity a source of inspiration and sustenance: "May this effusion of pity sustain me in the two volumes that will conclude my History \ The wondrous pity that dwells in the kingdom of France, in the words of the Maid. That is the historian's true inspiration." 54 His compassion for the suffering of others, heightened by his feelings of sorrow and loss at the time of his first wife's death in 1839, convinced him that mourning and tears were the source of his ability to fathom and resurrect the past and that his craft and power as an historian derived, not from his intellect, but from this wealth of emotion and empathy: "The gift that Saint Louis beseeched but was not to obtain, I did receive: 'the gift of tears.' Powerful and fructuous gift. All those I have mourned, nations and gods, came back to life. This artless magic had a virtually infallible power to evoke the past." 55 Pity, however, signified more than a source of inspiration and evocatory power. Michelet believed that pity and compassion enabled him not only to resurrect the sorrows of the nation but also to experience them: "It is through his own personal sorrow that the historian can feel and reproduce the sorrows of nations." 56 Pity was the emotional medium of a spiritual merging with the past. It seemed to produce suprarational memory, a sense 53 54 55 56

Michelet, Journal, 14 April 1850, 2:97. Ibid., 2 7 September 1858, 2:424. Michelet, Preface (1869) a. I'Histoire de France, 174. Michelet, Journal, 30 January 1842, 1:378.

82

CHAPTERTHR.EE

of having lived anterior lives, of being able to identify perfectly with the suffering of others and thus to achieve spiritual communion with the dead. "If Pythagorus could remember having been one of the leaders in the Trojan War, why should I not remember having myself been the same abject man who was a slave in ancient times, a serf during the Crusades, and a worker in the modern day. But if all that is not within me, my compassion is still genuine and deep enough for me to bear all that sorrow."57 The fabric of history consisted of human suffering, the continual reenactment of Christ's Passion. These laic Passions were revealed to the historian by his own compassion. Recalling his work on the history of Egypt, Michelct located the most profound historical truth in the sorrows and "eternal wounds" of the destitute Egyptian fellah. The historian's pity transformed the fellah from a man bound to hard labor to one bound to the cross, thereby uncovering the "universal Passion" in history.58 An earlier example of the revelatory function of pity occurred in Michelet's account of the transformation of Louis the Debonair into "the Saint Louis of the ninth century." He tells the story of the king's wicked son, Lothaire, who rebelled against his father and would not have recoiled from killing him had he not feared the people's disapproval. Rejecting the idea of murder, he thought that by humiliating his father in public, he would destroy his right to kingship. The resigned father accepted the public humiliation and appeared, to the son, morally dead. "But immense pity swelled up within the Empire. The people, themselves so miserable, still had tears for their gray-haired Emperor."59 Stripped of his sword and noble garments, the king appeared to the people an image of themselves, suffering, weak, patient, humble—as well as an image of the Savior. Thus their pity revealed to them a sense that Christ lived among them and that, in their suffering, their lives resembled his. Michelet, too, participated in this universalized Passion, for, at the time he wrote his Histoire du Moyen Age, he conceived of his own existence in terms of Incarnation and Passion.60 Through compassion and their common Passion, people, Christ, and historian became one. Although in Michelet's later texts, his attitude toward Christianity 57 Ibid., January 1839, 1:289. "The man seized and taken far away, shackled to hard labor, man metamorphosed into a tree or lashed to a tree, then nailed, mutilated, dismembered. This is the universal Passion of so many gods. . . . H o w many Christs, how many Calvaries! Immeasurable grief on the interminable via Dolorosa" (Michelet, Preface (1869) a I'Histoire de France, 174). 59 Michelet, Histoire de France, Moyen Age, 1:283-84 (italics mine). 60 "Yes, Christ remains on the cross from which he will never descend. The Passion endures and will always endure. The world has its Passion, as does humanity during its long historical trial, as does every human heart during the few moments it beats on earth. To each his cross and his stigmata. Mine date from the day my soul entered this miserable body, so weary as I write these words. My Passion began with my Incarnation. . . . To live is already to have entered the Passion" (Michelet, quoted by Benichou, inLe Temps des prophetes, 521). 58

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

83

changed from admiration to hostility, he retained the theme of collective heroic suffering, laicizing and translating it into humanitarian terms. In Le Peuple, the collective French being was still "master of sorrow,"61 but the nation, and not Christ, became the locus of the sacred, able to redeem and save itself and the world. 62 The corollaries of the substitution of suffering nation for Christ are the substitutions of the nation's history for the Bible63 and the historian for aposde or priest. Through the historian's compassion, the French would become aware of the universality of their Passion. In a sense, his text becomes the host in the transubstantiation of atomized individuals into a transcendent and sacred collective being, "one man, one soul, one heart." 64 The historian-priest, who can mediate between the individual and the collective, the historical and die sacred, approximates Michelet's concept of genius. In Le Peuple, he explained that only a genius could reveal to the people their common identity and their voice. Unable to recognize their unity by themselves, die people can perceive it in the genius because he transforms their heterogeneity into his own unity. It is his compassion for their suffering that reveals their eternal essence. Genius . . . always tends toward . . . unity. . . . The people, in its noblest incarnation, has difficulty recognizing itself in the people. . . . Only in the man of genius does itfindits true self. Unable to express itself, the people speak through this man, as does God. . . . May the genuis live and suffer with us. From his deep compassion for our suffering and frailties, he will draw God-given strength, which is the essence of his genius.65 It seems clear that here Michelet's model for the genius was not only Joan of Arc but also himself. Just as he became plural and shared the universal suffering of the collectivity, through him the collectivity could become singular, discovering their unity in his individuality. Several years earlier, he had had the same intuition of being able to embrace and give voice to generations of suffering humanity: 61

Michelct, Le Peuple, 112. "Humanity needed to recognize the Christ in itself. . . . The human race was transfigured the moment it recognized God in itself, when it realized that it could raise the individual to the heights of the universal and could embed in an eternal present what had been thought to be transitory and extinct, and when it knew that it could create Heaven on earth: this was the real redemption of the modern world" (Michelet, Eclaircissements, in his Histoire de France, Moyen Age, 2:501-2). 63 "The national legend of France is an immeasurable, uninterrupted stream of light, a veritable Milky Way on which the world has always focused its gaze" (Michelet, Le Peuple, 231— 32). 64 Michelet, Le Peuple, 240. 65 Ibid., 184-86. 62

84

CHAPTERTHREE

Oh, my brothers, I have no dearth of compassion. My compassion is boundless, dolorous. Do you imagine that I can disentangle your grief from my own? Is not my individual life the expression of your collective lives? They moan their answer, that they and I are one, that our hearts suffer as one.66 Following his example, the people would transcend their individuality and experience the general, the universal, and hence the sacred. 67 The historian's goal was ultimately neither the resuscitation of the past nor intellectual understanding and analysis, but rather the spiritual, emotional, and nonrational experience of collective transcendence.68 Perhaps the truest sign of the emotional authenticity of Michelet's spiritual quest for transcendence through shared suffering was the painful sense of failure that on occasion crushed him. The gulf of culture and education separating him from the people caused him to fear that he could not merge with and speak for them: 'That is when I felt our insufficiency, the impotence of men of letters, of ingenious scholars. I despised myself. I was born among the people. The people were in my blood. . . . But their language, their language, was inaccessible to me. I have not been able to make their voice my own." 69 He was tormented that even his deepest feelings of compassion were an inadequate means for transcending his individuality: "Why have I not become the true priest? Why have such sublime events, over which I have wept, not become more a part of me? Why does nature persist so relentlessly in reducing me to my individuality?"70 In such moments of dejection, communion through compassion seemed an elusive dream.

The question of pity, raised by the regicide, preoccupied royalists as well as republicans. Whereas republicans, in the first half of the nineteenth century, faced with the ambiguous legacy of the Revolution, were struggling to redefine politics according to a notion of a merciful polity and formulate a new democratic ideology that would incorporate compassion and justice, the pro-royalist right believed that the issue of compassion had been resolved in their favor. They created an intriguing mythology of a compass's Michelet, >»>"»«/, 18 June 1841, 1:362.

67 "We feel our individuality perish within us. Let us rediscover a sense of the catholic nature of society, of our human universality, of the universality of the world. Perhaps then we will be within sight of God" (ibid., 7 August 1831, 1:83). 68 Lionel Gossman commented that Michelet's objective in his Histoire de la Revolution francaise was not primarily critical: "His aim was not to . . . disengage himself from [the Revolution's] continuing legends. . . . It was the opposite: to recover what people believed, the power of the founding myth. . . . H e explicitly rejected critical, conceptual, and 'scientific' historiography" (Gossman, Between History and Literature, 219). 69 Michelet, Nosfils, 3 6 3 - 6 4 . 70 Michelet, Journal, 20 November 1847, 1:678.

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

85

sionate, conciliatory monarchy, myths that the liberal Lamartine would carefully dissect and dismantle as he made his own plea for compassion in politics and in historiography. During the early years of the Restoration, royalists felt that the overwhelming pity expressed for Louis XVI had led to a virtually universal disavowal of his revolutionary judges and the Revolution. Further, following Louis XVFs pardon of his executioners, royalists identified the monarchy itself as the locus of pity, forgiveness, and reconciliation.71 Writers such as de Maistre and Chateaubriand created the legend of the king as the all-merciful and all-forgiving father. In the wake of Louis's execution, the Restoration justified itself not only in terms of the historical legitimacy of monarchy but also in terms of the role of the monarchy in the collective expiation of the nation and in the granting of pardon for the crimes of the Revolution. De Maistre was one of the first to raise the problem of the relation between the restoration of the monarchy and pity. Although reveries of vengeance were not unknown to him, he chose, in 1797, to reassure the French that a future king of France would certainly disavow all desire for vengeance and would want only to pardon. 72 In de Maistre's mind, the desire for vengeance would be so foreign to the successor of Louis XVI that "the very idea of violence will make him pale, and this crime is the only one that he would not permit himself to pardon." 73 This myth, extolling French kings as the incarnation of mercy and compassion, appalled republicans who saw it in flagrant contradiction to centuries of despotism, but for conservatives it constituted a substantial basis on which to view the politics of the Restoration. The original model for the merciful father-king whom people cited was Saint Louis, but it was Louis XVI who was on everyone's mind. 74 71 In his Testament, Louis XVI emphasized his forgiveness: "With all my heart, I forgive those who have declared themselves my enemies without my having given them any cause, and I pray God that H e pardon them. . . . I exhort my son, should he ever have the misfortune t o become king, always to dedicate himself unreservedly to the happiness of his fellow citizens, and to renounce any resentment or hatred, especially that might be related to the anguish and sorrow I now endure" (quoted in Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:90—91). 72 Dc Maistre, Considerations sur la France, 154. 73 Ibid., 163. 74 An anonymous play, "La Mort de Louis XVI," testifies to the myth of the merciful king in the early nineteenth century. Marie-Antoinette instructs her young son in his filial duty of avenging his father: "My son, if God should place you on the majestic throne / That for centuries gleamed with the glory of your august ancestors, / Think back to your father, and avenge his death / And let the universe tremble when you unsheath your sword." ("Monfils,si Dieu vous place au rang majestueux / Oil brillerent longtemps vos augustes aieux, / Pensez a votrc pere, et vengez son supplice / Au bruit du chatiment que PUnivers fremisse!") The king, possessing a clear understanding of the nature of royal grace, forbids vengeance: "Antoinette, O h no! far from igniting in his soul / The criminal passion of blind fur}', / Take care to teach him instead / That the noblest art of kings is the art of pardon." ("Antoinette, ah! bien loin d'allumer

86

CHAPTERTHREE

Chateaubriand contributed to the legend of Louis XVI as merciful monarch. He remembered that Louis XVI, although cruelly betrayed, humiliated, and put to death by the French themselves, had always loved and forgiven his people. As for the Restoration, Chateaubriand saw it as the Coming of Miscricordia. Louis XVIII was a king who would "close our wounds, holding the testament of Louis XVI in his hand. At his coronation, he will repeat the words written by his virtuous brother: 'With all my heart, I pardon those who have made themselves my enemies, without my having given them any cause, and I pray to God that He pardon them.'"75 Louis XVIII "would overwhelm [the French] with the weight of his pardon and his goodness."76 Evoking the model of the patriarchal family, Chateaubriand painted a tableau of the father-king who comes to dry "the tears of his children, making his family happy once again and covering our wounds with the mantle of Saint Louis, half torn to shreds by our own hands."77 Pro-royalists, then, conceived of the Restoration as a reign of reconciliation, amnesty, and forgiveness, the political fulfillment of the pardon made by Louis XVI seconds before his execution. But as far as Lamartine was concerned, the Restoration was a time of vindictiveness, trials, and executions. Although Louis XVIII seemed to wish to honor his dead brother's promise of forgiveness, according to Lamartine, he was continually dans son ame / D ' u n e avcugle fureur la criminelle flamme, / Appliquez-vous sans cesse a lui bien enseigner / Q u e lc grand art des rois est l'art d c pardonner.") (Paris: 1814, Bibliotheque Nationale, Yth 2 1 2 7 5 [173].) T h e Restoration myth of a clement Louis XVI resurfaces as late as 1865 in Quinet's comments o n Louis XVFs extraordinary capacity for forgiveness. H e wrote that all of Santerre's d r u m s h a d been powerless t o d r o w n o u t the royal message of forgiveness or prevent it from r e s o u n d i n g for posterity. Q u i n e t marveled that, o n the scaffold, where all victims had b r o u g h t t h o u g h t s of vengeance or despair, Louis X V I alone had spoken of pardon (Edgar Q u i n e t , La Revolution, 354). In 1 8 6 6 , Alphonse Peyrat attacked Q u i n e t for writing so favorably about the guillotined king that his w o r d s were used by a pro-royalist newspaper t o c o m m e m o r a t e the anniversary of the king's execution. See Francois Furet, La Gauche et la Revolution frangaise au milieu duXLXsiecle (Paris: 1986), 1 8 3 . 75 Chateaubriand, "Des B o u r b o n s " (1814), in his Melanges politiques, Oeuvres completes

(Paris: 1859), 7 : 3 1 - 3 2 . 76 Chateaubriand, "De l'Etat de la France au 4 octobre 1814," in his Melanges politiques, Oeuvres completes, 7:52. 77 Chateaubriand, "Des Allies" (1814), in his Melanges politiques, Oeuvres completes, 7:41. Chateaubriand also raised the question why, after the Revolution, the French turned to Napoleon instead of to the "legitimate prince" they supposedly yearned for. Refusing to consider the multitude of political circumstances, he proposed instead the implausible theory that the repentant French had found it impossible to believe that the successor of Louis XVI could forgive them for their transgressions against the monarchy. "We believed our sins too enormous to be pardoned. We never dreamed that the heart of a son of Saint Louis could be such an inexhaustible treasure of mercy" ("De Buonaparte et des Bourbons" (1814), in his Melanges politiques, Oeuvres completes, 7:10).

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

87

thwarted by ultra-royalists, demanding punishment for their enemies. During the first few months of the Restoration, he respected his brother's pardon of the regicides, which could not be called into question without challenging the moral stature and heroic death of the martyred king. After the Hundred Days, however, the Restoration unleashed a storm of vengeance. The monarchy's urge to punish its enemies could no longer be contained. The targets of Restoration vengeance were, however, not the regicides, but rather the generals who had remained faithful to Napoleon during the Hundred Days. Two were tried and executed: Ney and Labedoyere. Lamartine considered the execution of Ney the "first stain" on the Restoration, an ominous event that marked the descent of the Bourbons from the heights of quasi-divine monarchy to the swamp of partisan politics. Ney's death excited a vindictiveness that corrupted the Restoration, transforming it into a vengeance machine, a vast military tribunal. 78 The similarity between Bourbon and Jacobin pitilessness did not go unnoticed. Lamartine described the imprisoned and soon-to-be-executed Marshal Ney languishing in the same prison cells that also witnessed the anguish of royalists and Girondins, 79 thereby implicitly comparing the government of Louis XVIII to that of the Convention and Robespierre in 1793. For Lamartine, as for Michelet, the tragic shortcoming of the Revolution had been its distortion and rejection of compassion. He neither admired nor defended Louis XVI, but he lamented his execution, not because it was a political miscalculation, but because it was a pitiless murder. He shared with Michelet the belief that the populace, which judged human events with its heart, had been won over to the royalist cause and alienated from the Revolution by the execution of the king. "Who can deny that sympathy for the fate of Louis XVI and his family was not greatly responsible for the renascence of royalty several years later?"80 The Revolution's recourse to violence and expediency was its doom; the blood of the king cost the Jacobins the republic. In his vision of the nineteenth century, the blood of Louis XVI was more than omnipresent, it was the most important force determining the course of events, in poisoning, until 1848, the idea of a republic. 81 Like Michelet, Hugo, and other believers in Romantic humanitarianism, 78

Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire de la Restauration (Paris: 1850-53), 6:76. Ibid., 17. 80 Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:137. 81 Quinet also adopted the idea that pity for the king was the catalyst of the Restoration. For Quinct, it was an axiom that regicide is followed by a return to monarchy: "The outpouring of boundless pity ineluctably reinstates the next in line to the throne; condemning a king to death never accomplished anything except the reestablishment of a monarchy" (Quinet, La Revolution, 3 5 0 - 5 1 ) . 79

88

CHAPTER THREE

Lamartine regarded pity as the highest form of human justice, the foundation of politics and morality. The execution of Louis XVI inspired Lamartine to remark that "pity is not a vain word among men. It is the generous justice of the human heart, more clairvoyant and infallible than the inflexible justice of the mind. . . . If the absence of pity is a crime under despotism, why would it be considered a virtue in a republic?"82 The duty of a republican government, and even more of a restoration government, was to fuse ethical, religious, and political principles, to politicize pity by making it an act of state, the act of amnesty. But the Restoration fared no better than the Revolution, for pitilessness was also its tragic flaw. In his Histoire de la Restauration, Lamartine made two unequivocal generalizations about the Restoration: first, the essence of any restoration is clemency, pardon, and reconciliation, and, second, the Bourbon Restoration failed dismally to understand that its moral basis had to be the principle of amnesty. Not only did Lamartine agree with de Maistre and Chateaubriand that amnesty would have to be the foundation of the Restoration, he went further by elevating amnesty from an individual king's act of personal generosity to a political and historical principle. "A restoration can never be anything but an amnesty. Pardon is not only its virtue, it is its law."83 A vindictive restoration is a contradiction in terms. After a monarchy has been expelled and permitted to return, it can derive strength only by acknowledging and respecting its moral role as national conciliator. "Restorations by their nature have only one of two roles to play, magnanimity or vengeance. The day they cease to pardon, they arc condemned to avenge."84 Pardon would have saved the Restoration Bourbons as it would have saved the Jacobins; moral values, perhaps even more than political values, can preserve a government or precipitate its fall. Lamartine's model for a postrevolutionary king was a compassionate man who finds within himself divine forgiveness. Louis XVIII appeared to him a weak monarch who made "fatal concessions" to the ultra-royalists, bowing to their demands for vengeance: "He failed . . . as a conciliating sovereign, for to conciliate is to pardon. When the object is to reunite a people, it is not more blood that should be injected between the factions, but rather tolerance and mercy."85 Although Lamartine examined the conflict of ideological, political, and religious forces during the Restoration, he traced such conflict to the inability of Louis XVIII and Charles X to establish a government of reconciliation, a weakness diat he viewed as a moral flaw rather than as a political miscalculation. Throughout his account of the Restoration, Lamartine repeated that the Restoration's fatal deficiencies were its repeated refusals of amnesty. 82

Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:136. Lamartine, Histoire de la Restauration, 5:233. 84 Ibid., 6:60. 8 * Ibid., 5:448.

83

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

89

Whether it was a question of the dying duke de Berry's last unheeded words of pardon for his assassin, a question of the executions following the antiroyalist conspiracy in Grenoble led by Didier, a question of the unwillingness of the French, especially Chateaubriand, to prevent the executions in Spain of those who rebelled against King Ferdinand, whose restoration the French had defended, a question of the amnesty declared at the coronation of Charles X, or the selection, in 1829, of the vindictive Polignac to be Charles X's minister, a choice tantamount to a revocation of Louis XVIIPs bill of amnesty, Lamartine over and over raised the problem of vengeance versus pardon. 86 The most striking and unfortunate omissions of amnesty were the dramatic trials and executions of Labedoyere and Ney. In his account of the emotionally charged trial of Marshal Ney, Lamartine recorded the names of the seventeen courageous men who voted against the death penalty and for exile. He did this so tiiat history might praise them. He also listed the names of the several timid men who simply abstained from voting. But as for those who voted for Ney's death, Lamartine refused to tell who they were: "We will conceal their names out of respect for their memory and consideration for their families. Posterity, like politics, should have its amnesties: the annals of nations are not perpetual catalogs of resentments and quarrels between the sons of fathers who were guilty or unfortunate. To pardon the victims and to pardon even the judges is the law of true justice for beings as fallible as we. To pardon is to forget. Let us forget!"87 One can hardly overestimate the importance of the historian's granting of amnesty to history's actors. Lamartine's willful amnesia is tantamount to a king's amnesty: a clement historian can pardon when a weak or vindictive king cannot. As a historian, he did not erase history or shrink from its crimes, but, in an act of political reconciliation, he pardoned the victims and judges of history. He placed pity and forgiveness at the disposition not only of those who make history, but also of those who transcribe it. Pity was the duty and mission of the historian; it reigned over the writing of history. 86 Guizot's De lapeine de mart en matien politique was written in reaction to the conspiracy trials taking place in Tours, Marseilles, and elsewhere. His pleaforclemency in cases of political crimes resembles Lamartine's argument that amnesty and conciliation were the mission of the Restoration. Guizot attempted to prove that vindictiveness betrayed the nature of the Restoration: "One star bestows upon governments their legitimacy, a star they are not free to choose or reject with impunity. . . . It is peace that determines the destiny [of a restoration.] It is there that it should have sought its orbit and its dignity" (Francpis Guizot, De la peine de mart en mature politique [1822; reprinted Paris: Fayard, 1984], 132 and 137). Guizot hoped that the king would make use of his right to pardon. Whereas the Revolution had viewed pardon as a vestige of princely power, Guizot found that such arbitrary gestures were necessary to counteract the rigidity of a legal system. The king's right to pardon revealed an eternal truth: "Marvelous example of the mysterious wisdom that seems to preside over the evolution of civilization. Unbeknownst to man, this wisdom, by itself, generates institutions and customs that mirror eternal truths, the laws of which cannot be fathomed by human wisdom alone" (ibid., 195). 87 Lamartine, Histoire de laRestauration^ 6:53.

90

CHAPTERTHREE

Interestingly, for Lamartine, pity superseded not historical objectivity but, more important, subjectivity. Even a liberal historian who embraces the grievances of the people and the ideals of the Revolution must set aside partisan ideology when faced with human suffering, whether the anguish of Louis XVI or any other of history's victims: "History, momentarily forgetting that it is always the partisan of the people, has no other cause, no other glory, and no other duty than pity. For history too, this interpreter of the human heart, has tears. Yes, history weeps, but it is not blinded by its tears." 88 Although Lamartine granted pity unique status, he tempered his praise. The historian must not be deprived of vision by his tears—they are precious, but equally precious are lucidity and reason. Lamartine did not envisage compassion as the historian's vehicle for mystical communion with the People, the celebration of the collective national Passion. On the one hand, he resembled other Romantic humanitarians in his praise for unity, his claim that he possessed an "instinct for the masses," his recognition of humanity's unbearable sorrows and his hope that Providence would furnish a Savior who, on more than several occasions, he seemed to believe was himself.89 But this member of the provisional government and minister of foreign affairs in 1848 was less interested in national spiritual communion than in politics. His goal was to establish a moral and just polity, not a mystical body, to transcend vengeance, not political factions or individuality. Compassion could be expressed through political and moral solidarity rather than through an emotional cult of suffering and Passion, and it could be incorporated in the text of history in the form of an exemplary act of pardon. In the 1830s, Lamartine had chosen political and rational values ("I trust in rationality; in politics as well as in all other matters, I believe in nothing else." 90 ), however he conceived of rational politics as inseparable from morality and poetry: politics could be effective only if it subordinated itself to the poetic and spiritual truths that led to God. His dream was of a union of politics and poetry that would bring about the social regeneration of humanity. "Poetry is reason put to music. . . . Be it philosophical, religious, political, or social. . . . Poetry shines its beacon on the Utopias of the mind—imaginary republics or cities of God—and breathes into man the courage to construct them on earth. . . . We are in one of those great periods of reconstruction, of social renewal. . . . We will decide whether morality, religion, and Christian charity will replace selfishness in politics and whether God's humanitarian message will come to dwell in our laws." 91 88

Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:10 (italics mine). See Benichou, Les Mages romantiques, 32—42. 90 Lamartine, Correspondance generak de 1830 a 1848, ed. Maurice Levaillant (LilleGeneva: 1943 and 1948), 29 March 1832, 1:265. 91 Lamartine, "Des Destinees de la poesie" (1834), in his Meditations poetiques, Oeuvres completes (Frankfurt: 1854), 3:52-53 and 58. 89

REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

91

When Lamartine wrote these lines in 1834, looking back at the early years of the Restoration, he regarded the Romantic renaissance of French poetry as intertwined with the return of the Bourbons; it seemed an age of poetry, thought, freedom, and morality92 in which the role of the politician-poet was to contribute to the transformation of society by making government responsive to morality, charity, compassion, and generosity. Thirty years later, disabused of his enthusiasm for the Restoration, he still retained belief in the moral mission of the politician and the poet. In his Critique de PHistoire des Girondins, he stated clearly his intention as a historian: "I wished . . . history to be a course in morality."93 The antihistorical and poetic act of forgetting constitutes a lesson in the moral meaning of Lamartine's vision of historiography. Implicit in his resolve to forgive judges and forget a history of vengeance is his disappointment in the Restoration's failure to live up to its ideals, a disappointment that led to the conviction that, in the absence of political leaders who, through amnesty, could unite a divided nation, the historian himself might fulfill that conciliatory role. Louis XVPs message of pardon and reconciliation would become the historian's—if not the king's or the politician's— moral guide. The historian can repair history; if history's text reveals cruelty and vengeance, the historian's text can offer pardon and amnesty, performing the essential reconciliation of politics and religion. In a somewhat different light, Gossman described the nineteenth-century historian's work of remembering as a prelude to his real mission of forgetting. The task of the Romantic historian was to resolve the problem of the discontinuity the Revolution injected into French history by bringing to light that which the historical record had often tried to repress (injustice, violence) and interpreting it in terms of a higher form of continuity, usually called "Progress." In this way, a troubling past, tied to the traumatic memories of Revolution, regicide and Terror, was transcended: Only by acknowledging what had not been admitted to public memory could the past (behind which it is not difficult to discern the still fresh outlines of the French Revolution, the execution of the King, and the Terror) be exorcised, the present (the postrevolutionary order of constitutional monarchies)firmlyfounded, and the forces of life released from guilt and repetition to evolve freely toward the future. Remembering, paradoxically, is the condition of forgetting.94 This kind of remembering in order to forget is not quite the same as Lamartine's symbolic textual act of forgiving in order to forget. Remembering the traumatic events of the past and interpreting them in terms of progress are intellectual processes, but forgiving is an explicitly moral gesture as well as a 92 93 94

Ibid., 3:30. Lamartine, Critique de I'Histoire des Girondins, 15:21. Gossman, Between History and Literature, 260.

92

CHAPTER THREE

political act of reconciliation. Whereas Romantic historiography can offer a form of social catharsis, it can also articulate a new ethical basis for society and the expression of a humanitarian ideology. Forgiving and forgetting signified the incorporation of compassion and pardon into politics and historiography. Gossman's description of historiography as a form of purgation, however, accurately captures Chateaubriand's intention as politician and historian. In 1814, when the Restoration found itself confronted with the attempt of Lazare Carnot to justify his behavior during the Revolution and especially to exculpate himself for having voted for the king's death, Chateaubriand also discovered that it was necessary to remember in order to forget. While pro-royalists and pro-revolutionaries hurled accusations at each other about which camp had actually been responsible for the king's death, Chateaubriand, although absolutely opposed to Carnot's playing any active political role in the Restoration government, proposed not just amnesty but voluntary amnesia, an intentional forgetting of the past as a means of transcending past divisions and painful memories and creating a sense of national unity and family. Ah! how much better it would be to avoid these recriminations, to erase these memories, to destroy the names of ever)' last emigre, royalist, fanatic, revolutionary, republican, and philosopher. It is time for them all to disappear within the heart of this great family! . . . Here ends the painful part of our task: there are no other disturbing matters for us to recall.95 As historians, Lamartine and Michelct became the advocates for the moral and spiritual values that they believed could shape history. In that postrevolutionary and post-Empire period of political turmoil when there was no consensus as to the national identity and when competing factions struggled to give a new definition to French nationhood, these historians were creating precisely that sense of collective past and collective moral identity. In the historian's text, the nation would discover a new ethical foundation for society. In the wake of Jacobin pitilessness and the regicide, Michelet and Lamartine pursued compassion and amnesty as essential elements in their humanitarian ideology and as guideposts in the writing of history. Their intuition that pity and compassion were the supreme form of justice, central to politics, nationhood, as well as to historiography, was born, not just from general reflections on the Terror, but also from personal encounters of historians and the executed king. 95 Chateaubriand, "Reflexions politiqucs, decembre 1814," in his Melanges politiques, Oeuvres completes, 7:69 and 83.

PART II LITERARY MYTHS

Chapter Four LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

A

LTHOUGH Michelet and Lamartine were guided by their own moral values and personal visions as they shaped their historical narratives, they were nevertheless first and foremost historians who were bound to consider and respect historical evidence. Writers of fiction, on the other hand, felt no such constraints or compunctions. Several of them imaginatively embellished historical reality to create their own conceptions of the meaning and consequences of the regicide. In the fiction of pro-royalist and Catholic writers such as Chateaubriand, Ballanche, Balzac, and the young Victor Hugo, the relatively weak figure of Louis XVI is consistently eclipsed; instead the spotlight unexpectedly illuminates a more dramatic and sanguinary personage—Louis's executioner, Sanson. As the man who put the king to death, Sanson stands for a violent and irrevocable breach with the past. Yet, for pro-royalists, Sanson is far from an entirely negative character. Pro-royalist writers who mourned the king and the Old Regime could also be (and were) forward-looking and socially liberal. If they deemed the regicide an unspeakable act of transgression, their faith in progress and belief in Providence also led them to interpret this traumatic death as a fructuous event that made possible the birth of a modern constitutional monarchy. In this scenario, the executioner played a necessary role. In addition, pro-royalists felt that, for an enlightened Restoration to provide effective leadership for a nation deeply divided by the ideologies and loyalties of Revolution and counterrevolution, it would have to formulate a progressive social agenda that could integrate at least some of the ideals of the Revolution into the traditional moral vision of the Catholic Church. Interestingly, here too the executioner plays a significant role, for he will be portrayed as a mediator between Revolution and Restoration. This man who embodies revolutionary terror will surprisingly become the advocate for a progressive, charitable, and nonviolent social agenda for the restored monarchy. Any discussion of the figure of the executioner must begin with Joseph de Maistre. Although his executioner, unlike that of the others, was surely never repentant, de Maistre's vision of the ccntrality of the executioner is fundamental to any examination of this figure. De Maistre was not an enlightened pro-royalist. This profoundly reactionary theocrat believed that political power was divine in origin and that all social institutions and laws were sacred and therefore immutable. Ideas of progress and change, human

96

CHAPTER FOUR

reason and freedom were anathema to him. Not only was de Maistre fanatically devoted to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, he also believed in the divine right of executioners. This passionate believer in original sin accepted—with enthusiasm rather than resignation—the inevitability of crime and the necessity of punishment. In his strange version of Christianity, in which the violent spilling of blood resulted in purification and redemption, the executioner played a fundamental role, performing God's will by punishing transgressors. The executioner only appeared to resemble other humans, for he was a sacred being created by God: "He is an extraordinary being, and so that he may exist within the human family, a particular decree was necessary, a FIAT made by the power behind the Creation." 1 De Maistre's Christianity had little or nothing to say about love, faith, forgiveness, pardon, or grace; instead he glorified violence, punishment, and human sacrifice. In fact, he went so far as to assimilate the executioner with a son of God. Since Christ emphasized pardon rather than violent punishment, de Maistre was obliged to turn to Indian mythology to postulate the divinity of the executioner. He cited the tale of Brahma, who, "in the beginning of time, created for the use of kings the god of punishment, and he gave him a body of pure light: this demiurge is his son; he is justice itself and the protector of the entire creation." In a strange reversal, de Maistre imagined a son of God who saves by inflicting violence—not the traditional Christian prince of peace. "When Punishment, dark-skinned and eyes aflame, comes forward to destroy crime, the people arc saved."2 It is easy to see why moderate royalists considered de Maistre a pre-Christian thinker. Translated into social terms, it was the executioner who alone stood between anarchy and order; the survival of society hinged on his brutal mission. Even the throne depended for its existence on the agent of punishment. The principles of monarchy and punishment were inextricably linked; the king could not expect to rule without the executioner. "Deprive the world of this incomprehensible agent; in that very second order is replaced by chaos, thrones comes crashing down and society disappears."3 The king and the executioner, sacred beings who were God's representatives on earth, reigned together, their lives subtly and powerfully intertwined. When, on 21 January 1793, the executioner decapitated Louis XVI —an act that de Maistre justified as human sacrifice for the salvation of France and expiation for the crimes of the Enlightenment and the Revolution—they were both playing their parts in a holy drama of punishment and expiation. One sacred being executed the other, intimately and mysteriously joined together in a cult of punishment, blood, and purification. Other royalists had a less sadistic vision of the executioner, and they were 1 2 3

De Maistre, Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, Premier Entretien, 1:30. Ibid., 28-29 (italics mine). Ibid., 32.

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

97

more inclined to sec him as a repentant rather than triumphant figure. In his Essai sur les revolutions, published in 1797, Chateaubriand established the myth of an executioner who recognizes his own guilt in putting to death an innocent and Christ-like Louis XVI. In a lengthy footnote in this rambling history of ancient and modern revolutions, Chateaubriand sought to discredit the description of the king's death traditionally given by partisans of the Revolution. This revolutionary version of the execution inevitably showed a nervous and cowardly king who, up to the last second, hoped that his followers would rescue him from his fate and, even on the scaffold, desperately cried out for help. The royalist-mystical version, on the other hand, always depicted a divine ruler who calmly and religiously offered himself as a sacrificial victim. 4 This was of course the mode in which Chateaubriand himself described the king's death in the Essai sur les revolutions: "The fatal 21 January 1793 was the dawn of the eternal mourning of France. The monarch, informed that he would have to die, prepared himself with serenity for this great act of his life."5 Chateaubriand used a letter written by Sanson, describing the last moments of the king, to refute the republican account and prove the authenticity of the royalist version of the king's death. As Daniel Arasse points out, this letter became a central document in royalist hagiography after the death of Louis XVI. 6 Chateaubriand described the awesome, terrible experience of holding the infernal paper that had been gripped and inscribed by the bloody hand that had decapitated the sacred head and displayed it for the horrified people to behold. The entirety of Sanson's letter is transcribed in the Essai. The end of the letter, however, contains its most crucial information: The king mounted the scaffold and tried to force his way to the front, as if wanting to address the crowd. But he was told that this was impossible. He let himself be led to the place where he was bound. Turning toward us, he told us: "Gentlemen, I am innocent. I hope that my blood will cement the happiness of the French." These, Citizen, were his last, true words. And to tell the truth, he spoke with a calm and a resolution that astonished all of us. I remain very convinced that he drew his strength from the principles of his religion with which no one could have been more imbued than he. 7 One can hardly overestimate the importance of this letter—"the last ray of light to be added to the crown of the King-Martyr"—for Chateaubriand. First of all, the description of the king's courage at the moment of his death permitted Chateaubriand to call him "this other Christ," which left no 4 5 6 7

See Daniel Arasse, La Guillotine etl'imaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Hammarion, 1987), 75. Chateaubriand, Essai sur les revolutions, 331. Arasse, La Guillotine et I'imaginaire de la terreur, 78. Chateaubriand, Essai sur les revolutions, 331—34.

98

CHAPTER FOUR

doubt about the sacred character of king and kingship or about the nature of his sacrifice. In addition, the letter was itself a tangible relic that recorded Louis's last words, which were the most sacred of all relics. But for Chateaubriand, the last words of the executioner were almost as important as the final words of the king, for Sanson's closing remarks concerning the king's unshakable faith echoed the words of one of the Romans who guarded Jesus. The comparison transformed Sanson into the double of a man who was present at Christ's death and who announced his recognition of the overwhelming and undeniable innocence and goodness of the man/king/Christ. At the same time that Sanson was assimilated with a Roman guard, Louis XVI was assimilated with Christ. Sanson's acknowledgment of the greatness and holiness of his victim was "one of the greatest triumphs that religion had ever wrought." Chateaubriand's Sanson thus gave shape to a new myth of a remorseful executioner, a myth that posited an intimate bond between the executioner and the king and the conversion of the executioner to royalism.8 Thirty years later, Chateaubriand wrote a new preface to this essay on revolutions, insisting that, if he could, he would expunge this retrograde text, written by a young man whose heart belonged entirely to king and country and who had not yet had the leisure to reflect about Enlightenment principles of political freedom.9 By 1826, he had abandoned his ultraroyalist faith in sacral kingship. In a speech made in 1830, he told the House of Peers: "I do not believe in the divine right of monarchy, and I believe in the power of revolutions and events."10 In the place of political absolutism and the doctrinaire Catholicism it implied, he advocated "representative monarchism," a fusion of royalism, constitutionalism, democracy, and Christianity that embraced liberte, egediti, and fraternite.11 When Chateaubriand looked back on the writings of his youth, he recognized the distance he had traveled between his early portrayal of a Christ-like 8

A similar myth had arisen concerning the executioner of Joan of Arc. Many historians describe her executioner, Geoffroy Therage, as desperate and repentant after her death. They quote him as having said, "I fear that I am damned; I have burned a saint" (Albert Sarrazin, Le Bourreau de Jeanne d'Arc [Rouen: Cagniard, 1910], 57). Sarrazin and others accepted the version of events given by a witness, Isambard de la Pierre, who described Therage as traumatized by the fear of eternal damnation: "Inconsolable after the execution, the executioner came to me and my companion, Brother Martin Ladvenu, overcome by the most astounding repentance and awesome contrition, frantic in his fear that he would never be able to beg God's forgiveness and indulgence for what he had done to this holy woman" (ibid., 58). For these historians, the remorse of the executioner is the final "condemnation of the trial of the heroine" (ibid., 82). 9 Chateaubriand, preface of 1826, Essai sur les revolutions, 14-15. 10 Chateaubriand, Discours du 7 aout 1830, in Mimoires d'outre-tombe (1841; reprinted Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 2:470. 11 "There is no real religion without freedom, nor is there real freedom without religion" (Chateaubriand, preface of 1826, Essai sur les revolutions, 28).

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

99

king and repentant executioner and his later liberal political ideas. But could the two visions be reconciled? Was it possible to unite a faith in the quasidivinity of the king and a commitment to progress and social justice? Interestingly, Ballanche and Balzac would attempt just such a reconciliation of monarchism, Catholicism, and liberalism, and the vehicle in their experiment was none other than the mysterious character of the king's executioner. In returning to and embroidering upon Chateaubriand's Sanson, Ballanche and Balzac created a figure who could repudiate the violence of the Revolution, repent for the regicide, acknowledge the quasi-divinity of the monarch, and call for social progress, thus simultaneously representing Revolution, monarchy, and faith in a just and nonviolent future. This, in fact, was Ballanche's mission; he fervently believed in a quasi-divine Louis XVI, but attempted to integrate the supernatural elements of royalism into a progressive historical and social vision. His originality is that, already in 1820, he could unite Chateaubriand's ultra-royalist portrait of a repentant Sanson with the liberal principles Chateaubriand would later adopt, thereby creating, albeit within a royalist framework, a political marriage of Restoration and Revolution. In 1820, Ballanche wrote UHomme sans nom, a story devoted entirely to the problem of the shame and anguish of the king's executioner. Instead of portraying Sanson, however, Ballanche assimilated the king's executioner with one of the many members of the revolutionary Convention who voted for the execution of Louis XVI. The central character in this fascinating work was a delegate to the Convention, a weak man who was dazzled and corrupted by the Enlightenment, who became caught up in the fervor of the moment, and who, against all of his better judgment, his royalist inclinations, and good intentions, cast his vote for condemnation to death. De Maistre had already suggested this subject of the members of the Convention who let themselves be persuaded, manipulated, or threatened into voting for the beheading of the king. They were the passive victims of evil men and collective hysteria. De Maistre had set up a kind of two-tiered hierarchy of "high guilty men"—regicides for whom no punishment would be too great—and mere "guilty men" for whom expiation and redemption were still a possibility. The "high guilty" ones created the supernatural frenzy that took hold of the meeting. Their victims were caught in a nightmare and could not explain to themselves why or how they committed the crime of regicide.12 Ballanche similarly distinguished among those who voted for capital punishment, suggesting that some of the men who cast their votes for death were like priests in a cult of human sacrifice. Among the members of the Convention, Ballanche wrote, there were odious executioners and somber fanatics, but there were also others who, without even realizing it, carried 12

De Maistre, Considerations sur la France, 155.

100

CHAPTER FOUR

out the holy mission of immolating an expiatory victim.13 For his part, Ballanche's conventionnel was aware only of the nightmare quality of his role in the trial of Louis XVI, his inexplicable passivity in the face of evil. He had been a royalist who adored the virtues, the strength of character, and the inexhaustible goodness of the king. At the Convention, he struggled against the force of evil but, forsaking morality, ultimately yielded to crime, parricide, despair, and remorse. 14 When the story begins, years have passed since the execution of the king, and this former conventionnel is living a life of complete solitude, guilt, and torment. Although he did not actually kill Louis XVI, he considers himself, nevertheless, the king's ignoble executioner. As a way of expiating his sin, he no longer uses his own name and wishes only to be identified as "the Regicide," thereby making himself the "son" of his crime by carrying the name of the father he gave himself. Tying his destiny to that of the king, his name expresses his sin, his responsibility, and his infinite guilt. He has renounced his family and is too remorseful and abject to assume any role in society. "Alas! having become the vile refuse of humanity, I was alone on earth. . . .Even in my own eyes, I was nothing more than the despicable and stupid accomplice of a mob of assassins."15 Nothing can assuage his suffering; he is convinced that he is beyond redemption. He reasons that Christ forgave those who put him to death because they did not know what they were doing, but he would not have forgiven a willful, lucid murderer: "I was beyond any hope for forgiveness. For I knew what I was doing." 16 The "Man without a Name," nevertheless, longs for pardon, wistfully recalling Louis's last moments and final paternal words of forgiveness. Eventually two priests visit him in his solitude and gradually make him understand that now his only crime is his refusal to believe that God and the king, in their infinite goodness, have pardoned him. "Louis XVI, in heaven, has not ceased being the minister of God's pardon. . . . The brother of the martyr-king seems to have acceded to the throne for the sole purpose of reassuring you. . . . You have experienced remorse, now all that remains for you is to experience the return to innocence and virtue. You endured disgrace, now endure the grace of pardon." 17 At the end of the story, the 13

Ballanche, L'Homme sans nom, 1:391. "I struggled against the force of evil. . . . I was hoping that, either because of some people's sense of justice or other people's feelings of pity, somehow the dreadful parricide would not take place. . . . I know not what taste for crime, I know not what appetite for remorse and despair gripped this pathetic, forsaken creature with pincers of iron. . . . Stripped of my own conscience . . . 1 was a being entirely without morality. As soon as I stepped down from the podium, horrified by myself, I wanted to ascend it quickly again to retract my words, to abjure the crime my own lips had pronounced" (ibid., 331-39). " Ibid., 359 and 362. 16 Ibid., 374. 17 Ibid., 384, 386 and 393. 14

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

101

conventionnel finally accepts this pardon. He gives up his solitary life; he timidly attends church once again and participates minimally in the life of the village. Up to now, Ballanche's Regicide appears a padietic and despondent character, a victim of the calamity he brought upon himself, a repentant criminal tragically bound to the past. But, in the last pages of the second part of UHomme sans nom, the Regicide evolves into an active and forward-looking individual whose sorrow becomes anger, whose self-accusations turn into an indictment of an unjust and cruel society. During the last years of his life, the Regicide calls for progressive social change, demanding equal justice for all and equal access to all "social hierarchies."18 But his most compelling mission is to argue forcefully for the abolition of the death penalty: he has become the persuasive and eloquent advocate for the king's message of forgiveness. He devotes himself to the memory of Louis XVI, who, he reminds the reader, had already begun in 1780 to move in this direction by eliminating the death penalty for certain offenses, by taking measures to stop official torture, and by initiating prison reform. For the Regicide, as for Ballanche, abolition of capital punishment is one of the most crucial stages in social progress: "The abolition of the death penalty is inevitable. Let us hasten to usher in this new era, which in the annals of humanity will be an era equal to that of the abolition of human sacrifice. . . . In the name of the death of Louis XVI and of so many innocent victims, abolish the death penalty."19 In addition, the abolition of capital punishment would also signal the redemption of the Revolution and the Terror. The Regicide reminds his listeners that, at each stage of the Revolution, there had been futile but persistent proposals to end the death penalty. The humanitarian ideal of the Revolution might thus ironically be realized by the Restoration. 20 18

Ibid., 402. Ibid., 423. Ballanche explicitly rejected Joseph de Maistre's violent cult of the executioner: "M. de Maistre has absolutely no pity for mankind. H e is as inexorable as destiny itself, and without the compassion of Providence. . . . M. de Maistre remained backward and ignorant of the law of clemency and grace! . . . H e had only one more idea to acquire . . . in order to know that the holy blood that stained Golgotha had abolished the law of salvation by blood, that the great ransom of humanity had been paid. . . . H e said, this apostle of the past, that the scaffold is an altar erected on public squares. That was true before the promulgation of the law of clemency and grace" (Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Palingenesie sociale, in his Oeuvres, 3:267— 69). 20 "At every stage of the Revolution, . . . there was an attempt to abolish the death penalty. Did not the Convention itself once recommend this measure? While thousands of victims were being slaughtered in the prisons and on the streets, while tremendous massacres were being planned, while brutal war was being declared, humanity's wish for the end of the death penalty could alone be heard, but only because it was a sterile wish, a futile aspiration. And yet its persistence was not entirely fruitless. For although it was so ironically suspended, it survives nonetheless in the immortal charters of humanity" (Ballanche, L'Homme sans nom, 4 2 5 - 2 6 ) . 19

102

CHAPTER FOUR

On a social level, the Regicide expresses disgust for capital punishment because he views it as an archaic form of human sacrifice. On a religious level, it is also horrifying because it precludes the possibility of personal redemption. Had he not been able to atone for his sins and had he not been pardoned, he would not have found redemption. You who wish to deprive the criminal of his repentance, why are you convinced that no guilty man ever recaptured his innocence? Yes, it is my own case that I am pleading. What would have become of me if death had stricken me at the moment of my fatal vote, if I had instantly appeared before the supreme Judge? God, more compassionate than you; God who saw deeper into my conscience than I myself; God wished me to live long years so that I might have the time to expiate my sin and to tell others about my expiation.21 Capital punishment, moreover, condemns the souls of the judges and the executioner as well as that of the criminal. These fallible humans, elevating themselves to the role of gods who make life and death decisions, may also sacrifice their own consciences if they mistakenly sentence an innocent person to death. 'The criminal will still have his conscience; but you, what will you have when it is proven that you were wrong?" 22 Thus, the Regicide stands not only for a violent and fearsome past, but also for a just and peaceful future. His opposition to capital punishment ultimately reconciles at least one aspect of the generous humanitarian agenda of the Revolution and the charitable and nonviolent Catholic spiritual vision. Themes of expiation, pardon, and redemption, however, are also associated with certain political problems that were at the heart of the issues faced by the Restoration government. In a sense, the priests' pardon of the Regicide and his acceptance of their pardon constitute the necessary conditions for postrevolutionary national reconciliation. Indeed, on one level, UHomme sans nom is, as Ballanche himself indicated, a political fable. The Regicide, symbol of the Revolution, must accept his pardon and reenter society. The magnanimous Restoration forgives the defeated and repentant Revolution and France is unified once again. Through his death, the king paid the debt of France, and France, in its turn, through its disavowal of the violence of the Revolution, can expiate the murder of the king. This is Ballanche's wish for France, that politically as well as theologically it be a nation of charity. Through pardon, order is restored and crime erased. All return to innocence, virtue, and the restoration of the monarchy. The desire for reconciliation and national unity expressed in UHomme sans nom may have been, in part, Ballanche's response to certain political events of the Restoration that raised the question of the validity of the 21 22

Ibid., 426. Ibid., 425.

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

103

Revolution and the problem of the regicide. During the so-called "Liberal Restoration" of 1816—19, when Liberal political influence was at its high point, Liberals tried to consolidate their power and prestige by forcing the Restoration to recognize the moral and political legacy of the Revolution, in part by permitting some men who had taken part in the Revolution to participate in the government. In 1818, the Abbe Gregoire, one of the most important radical leaders of the Revolution, was elected to the Assembly. Gregoire had been one of thefirstmembers of the Convention to advocate trying the king, and there was no doubt that he believed the king to be guilty of various crimes. Conservatives were violently opposed to Gregoire, and there was an important debate over seating him. The Liberals believed that an Assembly seat for a former revolutionary would validate the Revolution by bringing "a regicide within Restoration grace."23 They defended Gregoire by maintaining that the entire nation—not individuals—was responsible for the execution of the king. They pointed out that Gregoire had been an opponent of capital punishment, and they argued that, because he was absent during the vote on the death of the king, he could not be considered guilty of regicide. In actuality, Gregoire did vote in absentia for condemnation of the king without appeal, but it was unclear whether or not he was opposed to the death penalty. Although his writings on the subject are ambiguous, it is hard to imagine that a vote for condemnation could have meant anything other than condemnation to death.24 For the Conservatives, the election of Gregoire represented "a fundamental attack upon the very nature of the Restoration."25 Lamartine was horrified by the idea of seating Gregoire and wrote that the Liberal committees of Paris could not have found in all of France a man more directly guilty of the execution of the king, adding that Gregoire must have been chosen because of the repulsion his named inspired.26 Guizot agreed with Lamartine that Gregoire was being used to attack the Restoration.27 When the Assembly finally voted on whether to permit Gregoire to occupy the seat to which he had been elected, Liberals retreated and joined Conservatives in voting it down, and this political and symbolic effort to forgive the regicide failed. Several years earlier, in 1814, the revolutionary leader, Lazare Carnot, 23

24.

Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958),

24 After voting for the condemnation of the king, Gregoire wrote: "I abhor the death penalty: society should find it sufficient that the guilty person can no longer do harm. If you abolish the death penalty, you condemn him to exist, so that the horror of his deeds besieges him ceaselessly and pursues him even in the silence of his solitude. . . . But is repentance made for Kings?" (quoted in J.-B. Enard, L'Abbe Gregoire jugepar lui-meme [Paris: n.d.]). 25 Mellon, The Political Uses of History, 37. 26 Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire de la Restauration, vol. 5, in his Oeuwes completes (Paris: Chez l'Auteur, 1862), 21:122. 27 Francpis Guizot, Memoirespourservir a I'histoire de mm temps (Paris: Michel Levy, 1858), 1:223.

104

CHAPTER FOUR

had also tried to defend his conduct as revolutionary and regicide. Chateaubriand responded to Carnot's pamphlet by saying that there could be no reconciliation with those who played a part in the regicide. He refuted the Liberal assertion of the nation's collective responsibility for the regicide, insisting that, whereas all the other errors of the Revolution were collective mistakes, individuals and not the nation were responsible for the king's death, the one true crime of the Revolution. 28 Chateaubriand envisaged an insurmountable obstacle between Louis XVIII and the judges of Louis XVI—Carnot, Gregoire, and others—that made it impossible for these regicides ever to participate in the political life of the Restoration. Although he had no forgiveness to offer the regicides, he believed that their voluntary exile from politics and society would permit them "to exit from the class of the guilty and enter the class of the unfortunate." Carnot failed in his attempt to have the Restoration recognize his merit as a revolutionary and as a soldier. When a biography of Carnot was published in 1817, its author, Rioust, was sentenced to two years in prison for defending Carnot and the Revolution, and Carnot himself died in exile in 1823. Regicide remained a taboo subject. The Liberals could defend the Revolution, but they could not go so far as to defend the regicide. Ballanche's L'Homme sans nom, written two years after the Abbe Gregoire affair, implicitly criticized the positions of Lamartine, Chateaubriand, and others, for Ballanche was extending an olive branch to the Liberals. His story is a kind of liberal-monarchist scenario for the events surrounding the Restoration debates over Abbe Gregoire and Lazare Carnot. The ideal of the progressively minded Ballanche was the reconciliation of Restoration and Revolution. In his story, the Restoration forgives the Regicide and welcomes him back to the nation. Ballanche imagined a Restoration willing to pardon the Regicide and a Regicide who reluctantly but gratefully ends his self-exile. Ballanche seems to be teaching a lesson in royal clemency to the Conservatives and a lesson in humility and expiation to the Liberals. Ballanche's desire for national reconciliation reflects more than a longing for unity for unity's sake. He was committed to the preservation of the monarchy as well as to social progress and was convinced that only a monarchy that undertook significant social reform could survive politically and morally. The human spirit was not a stationary one for Ballanche. Progress, in fact, was divinely ordained, and a do-nothing monarchy would necessarily fall. Looking back on the Old Regime, Ballanche considered Louis XVI a progressive monarch who made a number of significant reforms, but who was too weak to carry out all the changes that would have saved his regime. The Restoration would have to provide an effective liberal govern28

21.

Chateaubriand, Reflexionspolitiquessur qudques ecrits du jour (Paris: LeNormant, 1814),

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

105

ment. Ballanche admonished reactionaries who dreamt only of a return to an antidemocratic past, attempting to teach them a lesson about the progressive movement of history: "Heed this inexorable truth: When a dynasty no longer represents society, it cannot survive by resisting the force and movement of things; even its divine origins cannot rescue it; its mission is over."29 Ballanchc's theory of leadership seems unusually forward-looking, if not radical, for he believed that it was not sufficient for ahead of state to keep up with his times; on the contrary, he had to precede them. In his Palingenesie sociale, he remarked that French kings "were always in step with their times, but they were never ahead of them. That is why they never had any respite. If one governs only the present, one gives oneself up to the storms." 30 Reconciliation, amnesty, and especially the abolition of capital punishment—all these, for Ballanche, were essential. Anything less would jeopardize the Restoration government, virtually making another revolution inevitable. "Today the abolition of the death penalty is demanded with the kind of unanimity that will before long triumph, because it is the unanimous voice of those who have a sympathetic understanding of this century."31 The question of the validity of the Revolution and the value of its legacy in relation to the Restoration were still important issues in 1862, when Victor Hugo finished writing Les Miserabhs. The tenth chapter of this great novel again deals with problems of Revolution, regicide, forgiveness, and national reconciliation and is probably Hugo's response to Ballanche, to the Abbe Gregoire affair, and to the myth of the repentant executioner and conventionnel.32 In this chapter, entitled 'The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light," written between 1860 and 1862, Hugo's Bishop Bienvenu visits a dying conventionnel, but instead of pardoning him as Ballanche's priests pardon the Regicide, the Bishop, recognizing the moral superiority of the Revolution, requests the benediction of the revolutionary. If there is to be a 29

Ballanche, Elegie, in his Oeuvres, 1:465. Ballanche considered the calls for vengeance emanating from the ultra-right retrograde and ultimately destructive for the monarchy: ' T h e bitter and continual diatribes of certain newspapers, as well as certain speeches in the legislature, have taught me the sad truth that the magnanimous Testament of Louis XVI has been completely forgotten. . . . [Certain people] have wanted the monarchy to adopt their implacable resentments. . . . Dare we speak the truth? One party, that nothing can appease, wanted to make the death of the duke de Berry the rallying cry for an illegitimate Restoration" (Ballanche, Reflexions diverses, in his Oeuvres, 3:404). 30 Ballanche, Valingenesie sociale, 3:311—12. 31 Ibid., 3:284. 32 O n the relation between Ballanche and Hugo, see Joseph Buche, "Ballanche et Victor H u g o , " Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France (March-April, 1927); Jacques Seebacher, "Eveques et conventionnels," Europe (February 1962); Bernard Barbery, Mercure de France, 1935 (cited in Hugo, Les Miserables, in his Oeuvres completes, 11:76n). According to Barbery, "it is clear that the revolutionary imagined by V. H. is a myth with no model and no source."

106

CHAPTER FOUR

reconciliation of Restoration and Revolution, Hugo wanted its terms to be defined by the Revolution, not by the Restoration. The conventionnd whom Monseigneur Bicnvenu visits, like Ballanche's Man without a Name, lives alone in an isolated spot in the country, with the difference that the life of Hugo's character is a dignified one of meditation and study. Both are men without names, although Hugo's hero has the initial "G," which could refer to Abbe Gregoire. 33 The central issue for Ballanche was regicide and guilt, but Hugo avoided dealing overtly with this problem by promptly exculpating his character. "This man was more or less a monster. He had not voted for the death of the king, but almost. He was a quasi-regicide."34 Walking a verbal tightrope between revolution and regicide (that recalls Gregoire's own elusive words about Louis's death), the quasi-regicide states proudly that he voted for "the end of the tyrant," but, lest one think that he was guilty of regicide and of betraying Hugo's absolute opposition to capital punishment, he explains that the name of the tyrant was "ignorance:" "As for Louis XVI, I said no. I do not believe that I have the right to kill a man; but I feel that I have the duty to exterminate evil. I voted for the death of the tyrant. That is to say, the end of prostitution for women, the end of slavery for men, the end of night for children. . . . I voted for fraternity, harmony, dawn!" 35 The death of Louis XVI and the disturbing problem of political violence thus fade into the background. This "quasi-regicide" is a revolutionary hero to be admired, not a terrorist to be pitied and forgiven. "I have always supported the onward march of the human race toward the light, and at times I resisted pitiless progress." 36 He inhabits a mystical world of humanitarian ideals; his Revolution is a new religion, a perfected, more advanced form of Christianity, "incomplete, but sublime." 37 It is this knowledge and insight that the conventionnd will pass on, for he is the teacher and the Bishop is his astonished pupil. 33 \nQuatrevingt-Treize, H u g o had, however, ambivalent things t o say a b o u t Gregoire. I n this novel, D a n t o n announces: " W h e n priests are g o o d , they are w o r t h m o r e than others. It was the A b b e Gregoire w h o instigated the abolition of royalty." But later o n , we find this cryptic characterization of Gregoire: "A Bishop, worthy at first of the primitive Church, but w h o later, u n d e r the E m p i r e , erased the republican Gregoire with the C o u n t Gregoire." This critical c o m m e n t seems a strange o n e t o have been m a d e by H u g o , w h o was named peer of France by Louis-Philippe. 34

H u g o , Les Miserable! (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 1:60. = Ibid., 1:64. 36 Ibid., 1:70. H u g o , the antiroyalist, w o u l d have agreed with T h o m a s Paine, w h o , in his speech t o t h e Convention in favor of exiling rather than executing Louis XVI, said that "the kingly trade is n o less destructive o f all morality in the h u m a n breast, than the trade o f an executioner is destructive of its sensibility" (Speech of 7 January 1 7 9 3 , quoted in Walzer, ed., 3

Regicide and Revolution, 209). 37 Hugo, Les Miserable!, 1:65.

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

107

Roles and values are reversed. The man who almost killed the king becomes himself a king, one who believes in the sovereignty of the people and who sits in the sun on a peasant's throne. 38 To make his point more explicit, Hugo compares the invalid revolutionary in his wheelchair to a king in an oriental tale, the upper half of his body flesh, the lower half marble. 39 Once again there is a kind of union between "executioner" and king, but here there is a "quasi" executioner who becomes himself a "quasi" king. The death scene completes the subversion of established values: —What have you come to ask of me? —Your blessing, said the bishop, and knelt down. When the bishop raised his head again, the conventionneh face had become majestic. He had just died.40 The Church is not in a position to offer absolution or the sacrament of death to the morally superior representative of the Revolution. The myth of the remorseful regicide-executioner, that served the pro-royalists as a symbol of the guilt of the Revolution and the failure of revolutionary ideology, is transformed in Les Miserables into the myth of the sublime revolutionary. Nevertheless, what takes place in this chapter is not the simple triumph of the Revolution, but again an attempt at a reconciliation of Church and Revolution, for not only does the Bishop ask for the conventionnefs blessing, the conventionnel also begs the Bishop to pardon him for his own arrogance. Like his pro-royalist counterpart, Ballanche, Hugo's hopeful vision for nineteenth-century France is one of national reconciliation. Attempting to heal the continuing antagonisms between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary traditions, Hugo dreams of a France united through a universal commitment to humanitarian ideals. Whereas Hugo's glorification of the revolutionary "quasi-regicide" was an anomaly in the nineteenth century, Balzac's 1830 portraits of the remorseful executioner with royalist sympathies corresponded to the myth created by Chateaubriand and Ballanche. The executioner Sanson was the central character in two of Balzac's works, the story "Un Episode sous la terrcur" and in Souvenirs d'un paria. "Un Episode sous la terreur" deals once again with the guilt of the executioner and the bond between him and the king. The ominous first sentence locates the story in time—22 January 1793, a day of mourning— and in space—a silent Paris, filled with terrified people, suspicious and fearful even of their neighbors. A stranger penetrates the hiding place of a priest and two elderly nuns who have remained loyal to the monarchy. 38

"Outside the door, in an old wheel-chair, a peasant's chair, there sat a white-haired man smiling at the sun" (ibid., 1:62). 39 Ibid., 1:64. 40 Ibid., 1:70.

108

CHAPTER FOUR

Mystery surrounds the identity of this man, who throughout the story is never named—another "man without a name." He is described as "sinister," "cold," "taciturn," and "terrible," but also as a "secret friend." After reassuring the frightened threesome of his good intentions, he hesitatingly explains the reason for his visit: he would like the priest to celebrate a funeral mass "for the eternal peace of the soul . . . of. . . of a sacred person whose body will never rest in consecrated ground." 41 Balzac describes the mass in detail, focusing on religious ritual and sacred objects as well as on the stranger's anguish. 42 Mystery and tension are heightened when Balzac indicates that present at the mass were not only the Monarchy but "possibly the Revolution too, represented by this stranger whose face revealed such tremendous remorse that it was impossible not to think that he was fulfilling the vows of a boundless repentance." 43 During the mass, the stranger is overcome with emotion when the priest asks God to forgive the regicides as Louis XVI forgave them. Noticing the man's reaction, the priest assumes that he played some role in the king's death and imagines that he was a member of the Revolutionary Convention who voted for the king's execution. In other words, he identifies this stranger with Ballanche's Man without a Name. The priest offers to hear his confession, but the stranger insists that he is the most innocent of men. As payment for the mass, the man offers the priest a sacred relic, a handkerchief stained with sweat and blood and marked with the royal seal. A year goes by, and the priest is seen next as he watches the ominous charrette taking prisoners—this time followers of Robespierre—to the guillotine. The priest notices one person standing up on the charrette and faints, for he has recognized the stranger who had asked him to say mass for the king: it is the executioner. When he recovers, the stunned priest says, "Poor man! . . . the steel blade had a heart when all of France had none." 44 Like Chateaubriand's Sanson and Ballanche's Man without a Name, Balzac's executioner also collaborated with the Revolution, and yet he risked his life to express his devotion to the monarchy. When he is last seen, he is conducting the leaders of the Revolution to the guillotine, this time helping the Revolution to destroy itself, closing the cycle of violence, perhaps a way of atoning for his sin. 41 Honore de Balzac, "Un Episode sous la terreur," in his ha Comedie humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 8:443. 42 "Noticing the black cloth covering the chalice and crucifix (for the priest had placed God Himself in mourning), he was stricken by a memory so dolorous that beads of sweat appeared on his brow" (ibid., 8:445). 43 Ibid., 8:445. 44 Ibid., 8:450. In French, "to have a heart" (avoir du coeur) has two meanings: to have tender feelings, as well as to have courage. The executioner who, during the Terror, found a priest loyal to the monarchy to say mass for his victim, had both courage and love.

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

109

The executioner in "Un Episode sous la tcrreur" is a sympathetic character, even heroic. He places the priest and nuns under his protection and provides for their material needs, and they, in turn, revere him. "He became the object of a kind of cult for these three beings whose one hope was in him and who lived only through him." 45 In one sense, Balzac creates the ironic situation of monarchist clerics who pray at the altar of the regicide; in another sense, he unites the executioner and the king by making both saviors and the objects of religious devotion. The executioner, moreover, believes that he has taken over the role of the king, for when he offered his help to the priest and nuns, he told them: "You need not fear to make use of me. I, and I only, perhaps, am above the law, since there is no longer a King." 46 In the absence of the king, the king's executioner defends Christian and monarchist values. But perhaps the most profound bond between executioner and king is their mutual innocence. "Father, no one is more guiltless than I of the blood shed," protests the executioner. His innocence mirrors that of the king: both executioner and monarch, born into their dynasties, had no choice but to assume the roles diat birth, history, and duty imposed upon them. 47 At the end of the story, mystery still surrounds the executioner and his motives. Is he a repentant revolutionary who has converted to royalism? a true royalist and believing Christian hidden among the ranks of the Revolution? or a revolutionary whose love and compassion rehabilitate a heartless Revolution? Balzac's Souvenirs d'unparia make a different, although not contradictory, political statement. In these fictional memoirs, Sanson describes his family, who, for two centuries, were obliged to pass down the job of executioner from generation to generation. He recounts the lives of ancestors who were also executioners and, with profound sadness and anger, tells of his own vain struggle to free himself from the shameful work that befell him, excluding him from society. Comparing his own family to that of the king, he complains that society's eternal reprobation hung over his family just as legitimacy hung over the royal dynasty.48 Although Sanson draws the comparison between the two dynasties and calls himself an underworld king, at the same time he takes pains to demystify the role of the executioner. In "Un Episode sous la terreur" there was a secret bond between executioner and king, but here the executioner 45

Ibid., 8:448-49. Ibid., 8:442. 47 When the priest suggests that passive acceptance of the regicide was as much a crime as active collaboration, the stranger replies: "Do you believe . . . that even indirect involvement is punishable? . . . Is the soldier who is ordered into line also guilty?" The priest is unable to reply, torn between respect for the king's person and the dogma of passive obedience that informs military conduct. 48 Honore de Balzac, Souvenirs d'un paria (1830), in his Oeuwcs diverses (Paris: Conard, 1935), 1:220. 46

110

CHAPTER FOUR

revolts against his condition and is revolted by it; he vehemently denies any commonality between his abject self and a divine monarch. He explains that originally the monarch was the instrument of justice as well as of punishment, but as civilization advanced, the monarch passed die task of punishment down to the people, who in turn became more civilized and also sought to free themselves from this burden. They designated a few individuals to be executioners and, in bad faith, tried to convince them that diey were the agents of God. Sanson expresses his opposition to de Maistre's deification of the executioner ("I read such blasphemy in authors who brag about being royalists and Christians"49) and insists that there is nothing sacred about the ignominious work that society imposes upon the executioner. Whereas de Maistre's sadistic executioner performs his task with pleasure, joy, and peace of mind, 50 Balzac's pariah lives in his own nightmare world of murder and guilt. People shudder when they see him; execrated and desolate, he flees into a world of darkness and shadows inhabited by ghosts, shrieks, and wails and by a bloodthirsty ferocious crowd. 51 He yearns to join the fraternity of men, but has discovered that society will not forgive him his birth into the dynasty that inflicts capital punishment. Like Ballanche's Regicide, he feels that he has committed unpardonable sins and that he is beyond social and spiritual redemption. Yet, like the executioner in "Un Episode sous la terreur," he is aware of his own innocence: society leaves him no choice but to carry out the death penalty. He reflects that the fault lies with a society ashamed of its system of criminal justice, a society that projects that shame and hatred upon the executioner. He reasons that, if the executioner is a hated man, it follows that the penalty he inflicts cannot be justified, that it performs the opposite function of what the criminalist had proposed. Balzac's executioner scornfully mocks the bloodthirsty de Maistre and asserts that all advanced civilizations have an aversion to blood. This executioner has norfiing but contempt for de Maistre's cult of purification through punishment: "Society does not know how to punish or purify. It avenges itself, defiles itself, and diat is all."52 On the subject of capital punishment, Balzac is critical of both Revolution and monarchy. His Sanson excoriates the Revolution for its failure to abol49

Ibid., 1:230-32. "Someone throws him a man who poisoned, who blasphemed, who committed parricide: he seizes him, stretches him out, binds him on a horizontal cross. . . . Only the scream of bursting bones can be heard. . . . He has finished: his heart beats, but with joy; he congratulates himself. He goes home, sits down at the table and eats. Then he goes to bed and sleeps" (De Maistre, Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, Premier Entretien, 1:31). 51 Balzac, Souvenirs d'un paria, 1:219-20. 52 Ibid., 1:220. 50

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

111 53

ish the death penalty and fulfill its promise of a humanitarian religion. But he is equally critical of his victim, Louis XVI. Had the king acted to end capital punishment during his reign, he would have proven his beneficence and created a moral example that the Revolution could not have set aside.54 A more enlightened monarch would have abolished the death penalty, thereby saving his own life as well as the lives of all the other victims of the Terror. 55 Although Balzac is morally repelled by the death penalty, he also founds his opposition to capital punishment on his political conservatism. Arguing that a monarchical state is necessarily powerful and stable, he asks how the state-sanctioned executions of any individuals could possibly accrue benefits to such a well-anchored society and be anything but a source of moral degradation. "Because of one individual's misdeed, however serious it might be, the social body is not sick; it is only vexed, and the prosecutor who demands a murder for a murder offers society poor comfort: murder cures nothing." 56 Thus Balzac's conservatism does not preclude social and moral progress. Although he conceives the political and religious worlds as static, he fully recognizes the inevitability and desirability of social change 57 and is able to integrate humanitarian values into an otherwise authoritarian political vision. 53 ' T h e Revolution has come and gone, and, from the abyss into which it sank, n o titanic meditation emerged; the most flagrant abuse was n o t abolished. . . . T h e law still demands h u m a n sacrifice" (ibid., 2 2 1 ) . Balzac is truly repelled by capital punishment. ' T h e death penalty heads the list of all h u m a n depravities; every social turpitude gathers a r o u n d the scaffold; they all revolve a r o u n d the bloody law that rallies and fosters the most atrocious monstrosities" (ibid., 320).

54 " W h a t degree of villainy w o u l d n o t have been attributed t o the person w h o sought the reestablishment of this abominable p u n i s h m e n t " (ibid., 2 2 1 ) . 55 Ibid., 2 2 1 . Interestingly, Victor H u g o w o u l d make the same argument twenty years later: "If Louis XVI had abolished the death penalty, as he had abolished torture, his o w n head w o u l d n o t have fallen. Ninety-three would have been disarmed of the guillotine; there would have been one fewer bloody page in history: the mournful date of 2 1 January would n o t have existed. W h o I ask, in the presence of the public conscience, face t o face with France, face t o face with the civilized world, w h o w o u l d have dared rebuild the scaffold for the King, for the m a n of w h o m it w o u l d have been said, It is he w h o tore it d o w n ! " ( H u g o , " P o u r Charles H u g o " (1851), in Actes etparoles. I, in his Oeuvres completes, Politique [Paris: Laffont, 1 9 8 5 ] , 313). 56 Balzac, Souvenirs d'un paria, 1:219. 57 Balzac's desire t o balance tradition, continuity, and reform are reminiscent of Burke. Balzac w r o t e that "in order t o exist, society m u s t be religious, political and civil. Everything that concerns religion m u s t be immutable, everything that concerns politics m u s t be excessively difficult t o change, everything that concerns civil society must follow social transformations" (Untitled essay, in Balzac, Oeuvres diverses [Paris: Conard, 1940] 3:701). Unlike Ballanche, Balzac was n o t a believer in the divine right of kings. A pragmatist, he clings t o monarchy only because he sees it as the best solution t o the problem of political legitimacy and stability. Similarly, his religious conservatism implies the same desire for a stable moral community.

112

CHAPTER FOUR

At the same time that Ballanche and Balzac were addressing the problem of capital punishment in the context of political and social progress, many other people were also voicing opposition to the death penalty. In fact, between 1820 and 1830, the question of capital punishment was one of the most burning political issues in France. Political executions were in particular condemned, and the abhorrence they aroused was, to a considerable degree, associated with memories of the regicide. In his essay of 1822, De lapeine de mort en matierepolitique, Guizot called for the abolition of the death penalty for political crimes, making an argument similar to the one the Girondins had advanced against the execution of Louis XVI. Guizot points to the illusory thinking behind the claim that the execution of a political adversary can cause the disappearance of the political principles he espouses. Neither political ideology nor political mythology can be decapitated as easily as a person: "Where arc these all-important leaders . . . whom it is sufficient to destroy in order to destroy their party? Power no longer resides in individuals. . . . ; it permeates all of society. Power belongs to interest groups, to ideas, to public attitudes, and no one person can control them or so completely represent them as to make their destiny depend on his." 58 Attempting to demystify political executions just as the Girondins had attempted to demystify regicide, Guizot reminds his readers that "the death of an enemy is today nothing but the death of a man." 59 Guizot at the center of the political spectrum and Ballanche and Balzac on its right were anxious to dissociate the Restoration not only from the arbitrary absolutism of the Old Regime but also from the principle of political murder, which was the principle of the Terror. Whereas Guizot's polemic concerned the question of state power in political retribution, the plea against the death penalty that Victor Hugo would make a few years later moves beyond the issue of the punishment of political adversaries. In the 1832 preface to his novel, LeDernierJour d'un condamne, Hugo passionately addresses the issue of the social injustice of capital punishment. He recalls that, in 1830, certain legislators pleaded for the abolition of capital punishment because the lives of four high-ranking political conspirators were at stake. Admonishing these self-serving legislators, Hugo writes that it would have been preferable had they argued for an end to the death penalty in the name of the wretched poor who are society's victims: One of those miserables whom you hardly notice when they pass you by in the street, . . . [who] scrounge around in piles of garbage for a crust of bread that they wipe off before eating, . . . [who have] no other entertainment than the free spectacle of public festivities for the king and public executions; poor devils, 58

Francois Guizot, De la Peine de mort en matierepolitique, 102. 59 Ibid., 103.

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

113

whom hunger drives to theft and theft to everything else, disinherited children of a cruel step-mother of a society, whom reform school gets when they're twelve, prison when they're eighteen, and the guillotine when they're forty; . . . the desperate poor whom, with a school or a workshop, you could make good, moral, useful.60 Woven into Hugo's pleas for progressive social legislation, for kindness and forgiveness instead of punishment and the death penalty, are allusions to royal pomp and public executions, ambiguous images that remind the reader that splendorous kings as well as wretched outcasts can be both tormentors and tormented. Those who approve or even relish cruelty may also be the victims of society's violence. This humanitarian position on capital punishment and on the responsibility of society to care for and rehabilitate the weak and unfortunate was made not by Hugo the fervent republican of the 1860s and the author ofLes Miserables, but by a Victor Hugo who, in the 1820s and 30s, politically resembled Ballanche and Balzac. This Hugo, still committed to monarchy and the Catholic Church and hostile to democracy and the legacy of the Revolution, 61 believed that Christianity and monarchism were not incompatible with significant social reform.62 Like Ballanche, whose vision of historical progress and social reform was tied to the transmundane event of the regicide, and like Balzac, who opposed capital punishment in the names of both the king and his executioner, Hugo, too, weaves memories of regicide into his case against the death penalty. Although in Ballanchc's work, it is the remorseful conventionnel who makes a humanitarian and theological argument against capital punishment, Hugo's novel about the death penalty, Le DernierJour d'un condamne, is narrated by a "Condemned Man" (who is also a man without a name) awaiting execution. Victor Brombert, however, suggests persuasively that the crime of Hugo's Condemned Man may have been parricide, which is just one step removed from regicide, and that tlie Condemned Man is associated 60

Hugo, preface of 1832, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 376. In his denunciation of political executions, H u g o considered political violence an eminently revolutionary phenomenon. "The scaffold is the only edifice that revolutions do not demolish. In truth, it is rare that revolutions resist human blood, and, inasmuch as they have come in order to prune, truncate, and behead society, the death penalty is one of the saws and hooks they least easily give up" (preface, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne, 371). "In a social crisis, of all the scaffolds, the political scaffold is the most abominable, the most deadly, the most poisonous, the most necessary to eradicate. . . . In times of revolution, take care when the first head falls. It makes the people hungry" (ibid., 373). 62 "Civilization is but a series of successive transformations. What then will you see? the transformation of penaliry. Christ's gentle law will ultimately penetrate the code of criminal justice and shine through. Crime will be considered a disease, and this disease will have doctors who will take the place of judges. It will all be simple and sublime. The cross instead of the gallows. There you have it" (ibid., 395). 61

114

CHAPTER FOUR

with king as well as with executioner. Subtly examining the Condemned Man's complex preoccupation with one king, Charles X, and his identification with another, Louis XVI, Brombert comments that "behind Charles X, the king with the power to pardon, there is the vestigial memory-image of another king, Louis XVI, who was condemned and not pardoned, and who mounted another scaffold in front of another sea of heads."63 Although Chateaubriand, Ballanche, Balzac and the young Hugo were Catholics, monarchists, and antirevolutionaries, they were deeply influenced by early nineteenth-century liberal thought. Like their liberal counterparts, they urge an end to capital punishment and associate their pleas for justice, nonviolence, and pardon with disturbing memories of regicide and with the humanitarian lessons they derived from the execution of the king. If they do not wholeheartedly embrace the fundamental liberal principle of the freedom of the individual, they do demonstrate a faith, albeit circumspect, in social progress, in the rehabilitation of society's outcasts, and in a future defined by collective spiritual communion as well as by Providence, and they manage to reconcile this liberal credo with their loyalty to the monarchy and their belief in a sacred foundation of society. They felt that theirs was an especially privileged point ofview, because it joined a desire for some measure of historical continuity with a commitment to social change. In their writings on capital punishment, these progressively-minded proroyalists demonstrate the abyss that separates them from a true reactionary like de Maistre, either through statements such as "the executioner must go!"64 or through the executioner himself (no longer de Maistre's sanguinary pillar of a repressive social order) who pleads for justice and mercy. This executioner is a pitiful outcast who sympathizes with les misembles. Their writings also prove that, as the gulf between progressive monarchists and reactionaries widened, it narrowed between moderate neo-Catholics and liberals, as modern ideas of freedom, progress, and justice, inherited from the Enlightenment and the Revolution, became more and more the accepted vocabulary for discussions of the future of civilized society. Whereas republicans dealt with the problem of uniting a deeply divided nation by 63 Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3 2 - 3 3 and 4 6 - 4 7 . Brombert suggests a link between Hugo's Condemned Man without a name and the king's executioner: "In the detailed nightmare of chapter 12, in which the Condemned Man is visited by decapitated human figures, each carrying his severed head in his left hand, only the parricide fails to shake his fist at him. Can we not assume that a tragic bond exists between the archetypal parricide and the prisoner? Such a reading would, furthermore, be politically charged, since the notion of parricide was in Hugo's time intimately bound up with the notion of regicide still haunting the collective consciousness in the wake of the Revolution" (ibid., 33). Brombert also believes that, in this novel, H u g o may be expressing an unconscious wish for the death of the king-father. ' T h e death wish and the death guilt remain interlocked" (ibid., 47). 64 H u g o , Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne, 395.

LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

115

integrating into their concepts of civic virtue notions of sacrifice and compassion that they had explored in relation to the death of Louis XVI, royalist writers, too, emphasized similar unifying values of sacrifice, pardon, justice, and fraternity through the unusual character of the king's executioner.65 As will be shown in the next two chapters, this very combination of an abiding desire for political reconciliation and an unwavering preference for pardon over punishment will endure for another century at the heart of progressive and humanitarian thought. Yet, its implications and consequences will be surprisingly unsettling, for a vigorous democracy requires conflict not conciliation, and an equitable system of justice most often requires desert, not pardon. 65

The association of king and executioner left the domain of fiction for reality when LouisPhilippe acceded to the throne in 1830. His father, the duke of Orleans, cousin of the king, had taken the name Philippe-Egalite during the Revolution. As a member of the Convention, Philippe-Egalite voted for the execution of the king. No author of fiction dared to imagine that the son of a "regicide" would become king or that the two "dynasties"—of kings and of executioners—would thus become one. C. Montjoie, in his Eloge historique etfimebre de Louis XVI (Neufchatel: 1796), wrote of Philippe-Egalite thus: "Imbecilic assassin! You succeeded in erecting between you and the throne an insurmountable barrier. The universal hatred in which you cloaked yourself after you voted for the death of your king, your cousin, makes you an object of execration even for your own followers" (ibid., 292). Although Louis-Philippe was seen for the most part as unifying the monarchical tradition and the principles of the Revolution, Chateaubriand stigmatized the new king with his father's guilt, branding him a "regicide." Lamartine also displayed his antipathy for the regicidal Orleans dynasty: "I never liked the House of Orleans. Its popularity during the Revolution seemed to me an unwarrantable reward for the aberrant involvement of the head of this House in the ingratitude of the French people toward the most innocent and most dedicated of kings, and in the murder of this king on the scaffold in 1793. What the people seem to admire today in the new duke of Orleans . . . is the son of the 21st of January" (Lamartine, Critique de I'Histoire des Girondins, 15:30).

Chapter Five VICTOR HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

T

HE POEMS of the young Victor Hugo glowed with royalism and Catholicism. Over and over, the adolescent poet glorified kings: they were agents of salvation, divine and inviolable, infinitely forgiving, touchingly paternal. But by 1830, Hugo had disavowed the naivete, the "imbecility" of his monarchist youth, and had embraced liberal principles and humanitarianism. His important poems of the 1850s, dominated by the theme of revolution, bristle with attacks on kings and on divine-right monarchy. His last works, in which he was still defending popular sovereignty and denouncing monarchy, would seem anachronistic had they not been a response to the political climate of the 1870s, sympathetic to monarchism. In these poems and novels, among the kings who are depicted as thieves, depraved monsters, devourers of human flesh, there is one exception. Set apart from all other French monarchs, Louis XVI was the innocent king, the Christian martyr, the expiatory victim. Hugo meditated on Louis's fate inLe Verso de la page and La Revolution as well as in Quatrevingt-Treize, La Legende des slides^ and UAnnee terrible. Although he accepted that violence was a law of historical progress 1 and, like Ballanche, Michelet, and Lamartinc, believed that regicide constituted a necessary divorce with the past, he never mentioned Louis XVI without expressions of deep regret. He recognized that the king's death signaled the birth of the people, but he termed it the "lugubrious childbirth of the twenty-first of January,"2 more an occasion for mourning than rejoicing. In 1872 as well as in 1818, Hugo perceived the execution of Louis XVI as one of the most troubling aspects of the Revolution. Just as Lamartine believed that amnesty, not vengeance, must be the essential principle of a restoration, Hugo was convinced that amnesty, not regicide, had to be one of the founding principles of a revolution. The regicide became an exemplary case for Hugo as he struggled to reconcile morality and politics, mercy and ideology. It was a struggle, however, that led to an impasse, for, in his fiction, his hero chooses sainthood over revolution, and in his own life, he chose to resign from political office, 1

"The road to progress is the way of tombs." ("La route du progres, e'est le chemin des tombes" (Victor Hugo, "Loi de formation du progres" (1858), from UAnnee terrible, in his Oeuvrespoetiques [Paris: Gatlimard, 1974], 3:363). 2 "Lugubre enfantement du Vingt-et-un Janvier" (Hugo, Le Verso de la page (1857—58) in his Oeuvres completes [Paris: Club Frantjais du Livre, 1967—70], 10:262).

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

117

preferring moral authority to political power. Hugo came to recognize what Max Weber would later contend, that politics cannot be a road to salvation.

At sixteen, attempting to discover his identity, Hugo asked the first autobiographical question, "Who am I?" and found that devotion to the monarchy was perhaps the single most significant element in his personality: Am I an ultra-royalist? I know not, though I hate all excess. And yet, when I see a Bourbon, my heart knows it is French.3 He identified with other royalists—Chateaubriand, Andre Chenier, and Louis XVFs secretary and defense lawyer, Malesherbes. Chenier and Malesherbes, in particular, reminded him of their courageous, doomed defenses of Louis XVI. 4 The young Hugo could hardly have been more respectful of French kings. Early poems such as "La Mort du due dc Berry," "La Naissance du due de Bordeaux," and "Le Sacre de Charles X" are deliriously effusive expressions of pro-royalist sentiment. In "La Mort de Louis XVII," he imagined a royalist God reminding French mortals of the quasi-divinity of their monarchs: Earth, remember that it is your Kings to whom you owe your happiness and your splendor; Respect their power and cherish their memory; I want the light of My majesty to radiate from their brows.5 Given this cult of kings, it is not surprising that Hugo considered the death of Louis XVI the most cataclysmic event of French history, the crime that stigmatized modern France: "O France . . . / The murder of a King has disgraced your history, / This century has been defiled."6 Poems such as 3

"Suis-je ultra? jc ne sais, mais je hais tout execs. / Quand je vois un Bourbon, mon coeur se sent franc,ais" (Victor Hugo, "Reponse a Pcpitre au roi de M. Ourry" (1818), in his Oeuvres poetiques, 1:178). 4 Sec Victor Hugo, "Sur Andre Chenier" (1819), in Litterature etphilosophic melees, in his Oeuvres completes, 5:79. 5

Tcrre, dois a tes Rois ton bonheur et ta gloire; Respccte leur puissance et chcris leur memoire; Je veux que sur leurs fronts ma majeste rayonne. (Hugo, "La Mort de Louis XVII" (1818), in his Oeuvres poetiques, 1:140)

6

"O France . . . / Le meurtre d'un Louis a fletri ton histoire, / Ce siecle en est souille" (ibid., 1:141).

118

CHAPTER

FIVE

"Bonheur que procure l'etude" and "Lc Dcvouement de Malesherbes" conserve all the elements of the royalist myth of Louis XVI as Christ and savior: the paternal devotion of the king, his selflessness and clemency, his divine inviolability, his tragic decapitation/crucifixion. Hugo even composed a royalist version of the Nativity: in "Le Bapteme du due de Bordeaux," Louis XVI takes the place of the angel Gabriel and announces the birth of a new Christ whom God gives to France "as in ancient times when He gave us His son." 7 The infant duke will assure the salvation of the nation: "France, rejoice in your victory. / A savior is born." 8 For Hugo, not only was royalism the subject and mission of poetry, it was its very language. The poet's primary obligation was to defend the monarchy against aberrant liberal writers who, moreover, could only misuse the essentially royalist French language, "who call themselves French and know not her language."9 Hugo conceived of Romanticism itself as a pro-royalist literary movement. In the preface to Odes et Ballades, he explained that nineteenth-century France may have been the product of the Revolution, but Romantic literature itself owed nothing to the Revolution: "Our literature today . . . is the proleptic expression of the religious and monarchical society that will doubtless emerge from amidst the rubble of our past." He called for a national literature that would disavow democracy and express the true France, monarchist and Catholic. 10 Still, Hugo harbored some suspicions about the role of unconscious feelings in his political allegiances and wondered whether his devotion to kings was an expression of his attachment to his pro-royalist mother and a rejection of his republican father. Once, in 1820, after talking to his father about counterrevolution, his father turned to a friend and said, "Let time take its course. The mother sways the child; the father guides the adult." Hugo wrote that this reflection left him "lost in thought." 11 During the 1820s, when his political ideas were evolving, he worked and reworked, especially in his plays, problems of kingship, regicide, and repentance. One list of tentative theatrical projects included Louis XVI and Charles I. Instead, he wrote Cromwell, an ambiguous drama that, although dealing with the execution of Charles I and Cromwell's succession, un7 Victor Hugo, "Le Bapteme du due de Bordeaux" (1821), from Odes et Ballades, in his Oeuvres poetiques, 1:323. 8 Ibid., 1:324. 9 Victor Hugo, "Reponse a l'epitre de M. Ourry," in his Oeuvres poetiques, 1:178. 10 Hugo, preface de 1824, Odes et Ballades, in his Oeuvres poetiques, 1:274. Interestingly, in 1864, Hugo reversed himself and described Romanticism as the literary expression of revolutionary values: 'The Revolution, all of the Revolution, this is the real genesis of the literature of the 19th century" ("William Shakespeare," part 3, "Le dix-neuvieme siecle," in his Oeuvres completes, 12:306). 11 Hugo, Litterature etpbilosophie melees, 5:104.

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

119

doubtedly had parallels to French history. Like other French Romantic writers, Hugo was more fascinated by Cromwell and the intriguing combination of English royal history and Puritan fanaticism than he was by the French regicides. Cromwell was dedicated to Hugo's father, and one may wonder whether this sign of rapprochement signifies approval of his father's republican views and, therefore, approval of Cromwell's regicide, or whether it signifies a horror of regicide and transgression against the father. There is evidence, however, in the play that Hugo repudiates Cromwell and the politics of regicide and disruption, that filial loyalty and affection supersede political ideology. When Cromwell erroneously concludes that his son is plotting against him, he discerns the hand of divine justice and acknowledges that parricide is fitting retribution for regicide: "So this is God's punishment! I assassinated my king; my son will kill his father."12 Cromwell's royalist daughter, unaware that her father is a regicide, also communicates to him a message of respect for monarchy and the "martyr" Charles I. As in other works by Hugo, it is the children who offer their father (in this case, in vain) the possibility of repentance and redemption: "My daughter . . . is like a conscience, relentlessly pursuing me at my heels." 13 But most important, Cromwell's failed paternity is a sign of his inability to replace the king as father of the nation and as legitimate authority. Deeply alienated from his own children, he can neither head an authentic family nor reconstitute the lost paternal principle of society. Hugo imagines John Milton, Cromwell's apologist, cautioning Cromwell against his ambition to be king. Ironically, Cromwell, who was determined to cut off Charles's head with the crown on it, that is, to destroy both monarchy and monarch, worships kingship and cannot give up his royalist fetishism or overcome his desire to be king ('These names—King, Majesty—are magicians!"14). Not only is he admonished by his children and by Milton and threatened by royalist as well as Puritan conspiracies, he is a man haunted by demons in the form of a recurring nightmare in which the head of the king appears, still wearing the remains of his crown. Cromwell is ultimately an isolated, lonely figure, obsessed by the dream of legitimate royal power, a prisoner of regicide and nostalgia for kingship.15 12

Hugo, Cromwell (1827), 2.10. Ibid., 3.5. 14 Ibid., 2.5. 15 In Le Verso de la page, Hugo, inspired by Paul Delaroches's 1831 painting, "Cromwell ouvrant le cercueil de Charles Ier," turned again to this episode from English history to express a wish for a revolution free from violence and for liberators who are not also murderers: 'This is Cromwell. A great man; all trembled before him. / So be it. But nevermore such spectacles. I . . . I Nations need a savior who possesses / No curiosity for chopped off heads; I . . . I K liberator who is pure, serene, radiant, / Not an archangel with a vampire's heart." (C'est 13

120

CHAPTER

FIVE

Three years later, Hugo's social and political opinions changed dramatically, for the July Revolution of 1830 marked the beginning of a new period in politics and literature. The neo-Catholic movement was as disappointed with Hugo as with Lamartine. Yet there always remained ambiguity in Hugo's allusions to kingship. In a poem written in 1831, repudiating his "childish" royalism, he enumerated by country the "murderous Christian kings" of Europe; the kings of France, however, went unmentioned and unjudged. 16 This is not surprising since, in the same year, in the preface to Les Feuilles d'automne, he expressed solemn respect for the dethroned Bourbons: "Whatever their errors—or even their crimes, it is crucial, more than ever, that the name Bourbon be pronounced with tact, solemnity, and respect, now that the elderly man who once was king wears on his head nothing but white hair." 17 In 1830, Hugo appeared combative toward the reigning Orleans dynasty, but after 1837, hoping for a government position, he maintained good relations with them and was made a peer in 1845. He approved of the July Monarchy precisely because it united monarchical and republican principles, accepting and deriving its strength from the sovereignty of the people. 18 Even m Les Miserables, Hugo's attitude toward monarchy was ambivalent. In the Imprimerie Nationale edition, he referred to monarchy as a concept as natural as democracy, "both are firmly rooted in the heart of man." 19 Significant social reform was conceivable without political upheaval and without a republic. In February 1848, he advocated an Orleanist regency, and it was only in 1849, after the fall of the last possible royal dynasty, that he finally adopted a strong republican stance. In the 1850s, as Hugo's political vision evolved, his portraits of kings also changed. His unwavering belief in popular sovereignty convinced him that the Jacobins, at least in one respect, had been right; kings were aliens who had no legitimate role in the social contract: "Monarchy is barbarian; oppression is barbarian; divine right is barbarian."20 In "Aux reveurs de monarchic," he denounced kings as thieves ofnational sovereignty. inLe Verso de Cromwell. II fut grand; tout devant lui trembla. / Soit; nous ne voulons plus de ces spectaclesla. I . . . I II faut aux nations un sauveur qui n'ait pas / De curiosite pour les tetes coupees; I . . . I Un liberateur pur, apaise, rayonnant, / Qui ne soit pas vampire en meme temps qu'archange" [Le Verso de la page, 10:283—84]). 16 Victor Hugo, "Untitled Poem XL" (1831), from Les Feuilles d'automne, in his Oeuwes poetiques, 1:807. In Hugo's new social religion, the cult of kingship was replaced by the cult of the nation: "Disabused of everything, nothing remains of my faith / Except you, hallowed nation and blessed freedom!" ("Untitled Poem XL"). 17 Hugo, preface to Les Feuilles d'automne, 1:716. 18 See R. Journet and G. Robert, Le mythe dupeuple dans aLes Miserables" (Paris: Editions Sociales, n.d.), 2 1 - 2 3 . 19 Ibid., 22. 20 Ibid., 6 1 .

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

121

la page, royalty is restored to the people: 'The people sovereign over itself, and each / His own king; legitimacy at last."21 After 1852, as the theme of revolution invaded Hugo's works, kings became progressively more monstrous and personal rule more and more an act of sadism. In 1858, Hugo described Louis XV as the most cruel and aberrant of monarchs, "cynical, ignominious, obscene," whose arbitrary power enslaved and demeaned the world. 22 Hugo's repulsion for kings reached its pinnacle after the monarchist victory in the election of 1871. In "Aux Rois," the poet descends into a nightmare world of degradation, tyranny, and cruelty, in which kings are "depraved, crapulent, lewd, abject," living off the blood and degradation of dicir dehumanized, reptilian victims. "With our blood they try to purge dieir slime."23 Violence, the one constant in the royal world of inhumanity and depravity, was the natural product of monarchy. Hugo was reminded of Joseph de Maistre, who proclaimed that the king could not rule without the executioner. He agreed in principle with de Maistre that punishment and violence were inherent in the nature of monarchy, but Hugo's king, unlike de Maistre's, did not rule with the executioner. Rather he was the executioner himself: "Dc Maistre writes: King. Read: Executioner."24 In Cromwell, Hugo had experimented for the first time with the equation of throne and scaffold,25 but in later works, the relationship was more explicit: To the wood of the scaffold clings the wood of the throne; Each scepter weds a rapier, and the reign of purple drowns Nations in a gruesome sea of blood.26 In "Lc Cercle des Tyrans," cannibal-kings, reveling in persecution, are served by the scaffold: "Who are they? They are the ones who feed on us. . . . / . . . / They have a dark valet who is called the scaffold."27 Arbitrary, vindictive, and brutal, monarchy, however, contains the seeds of its 2

' "Le peuple souverain de lui-meme, et chacun / Son propre roi; e'est la le droit" (Hugo, Le Verso de la page, 10:274). 22 Victor Hugo, La Pitie supreme (1857—58), in his Oeuvres completes, 10:304. 23 "C'cst avec notre sang que leur fange se lave" (Victor Hugo, "Aux Rois" (1874), from La Legende des siecles, in his Oeuwes completes, 15:1174). 24 Victor Hugo, "A un visiteur parisien" (1865), from Les Chansons des rues et des bois, in his Oeuvres poetiques, 3:128. 25 "Covered in velvet, it is the throne; a black cloth, the scaffold" (Hugo, Cromwell, 2.15). 26

Au bois de l'echafaud le bois du trone adhere; Tout sceptre epouse un glaive, et le pourpre descend Sur les peuplcs en mare effroyable de sang. (Hugo, La Pitie supreme, 10:308)

27

Victor Hugo, "Les Mangeurs," "Le Cercle des Tyrans" (1874), from La Legende des siecles, 15:1168.

122

CHAPTER

FIVE

own destruction: "Vindication! the man-eaters arc eaten, O mystery of mysteries!"28

On one level, Hugo's position on the execution of Louis XVI appears clear. The regicide, the result of monarchy's inherent destructiveness, freed France from the terror of kings. An individual was not executed; rather an oppressive, tyrannical form of government was abolished. In England, Charles I had been merely decapitated, but in France, an infernal monarchy was abolished: London killed the king. Paris kingship; There the axe fells just one man, Here it decapitates monstrous and putrescent Monarchy, the past, the night, the demons.29 That is the simple version of the regicide, one that insists that, on 21 January, an idea and an institution, not a human being, were decapitated and that regicide provided legitimate liberation from an ignominious ancien regime. And yet there is more. Even though the elimination of the monster-kings was a major step toward political and social reform, Hugo could not convince himself that regicide was a purely political act. It was still the murder of an innocent human being, still a crime against the father.30 In fact, the respect he felt at age sixteen for Louis XVI remained with him all his life,31 and he never really wavered from the opinion he held in 1837 that Louis was 28 29

Ibid., 516. Londres a tue le roi, Paris la royaute; Ici le coup de hache a l'homme est limite, La e'est la monarchic enorme et decrepite, C'est le passe, la nuit, l'enfer, qu'il decapite. (Victor Hugo, "Paris incendie," from L'Annee terrible, 3:399)

30

Hugo's poem "Le Parricide" (1858) is his version of a Scandinavian myth that deals with parricide and regicide. Kanut kills his father, the king, and becomes himself a powerful king. After his death, Kanut attempts to find God, but instead wanders ceaselessly in a rain of blood: H e kept walking and walking; and from the unfathomable vault Drop after drop blood rained down. Alas! who wept those fearsome tears? God the Almighty. (Hugo, "Le Parricide," in his Oeuwes completes, 10:472) 31

In his 1845 description of the execution of Louis XVI, H u g o described the king "entirely dressed in white;" his "profile, gentle and kind, stood out against the trees covered in mist" (Choses vues [Imprimerie nationale, 1913], 1:3). His account of the consequences of regicide

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

123

32

an innocent king and a Christian martyr. As late as 1871, he was still referring to "the martyrdom of Louis XVI." 33 What was his crime, this foredoomed king, This victim, pensive and pale? He was born. Grave responsibility of the innocent!34 In La Revolution, Hugo again portrayed an innocent Louis XVI, but this time the assimilation with Christ is even more explicit. In this poem, the statues of Henri IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV come to life and cross the city of Paris, finally arriving at the guillotine and the severed head of Louis XVI. Henri IV addresses Louis XVI: What is your crime, O you who goeth, sinister head Paler than Christ upon his dark crucifix? —I am the grandson of your grandson. —And whence cometh you? —From the throne. O kings, the darkness is unbearable! —Phantom, over there, what is that hideous machine? —It is the end, said the head, his eyes gentle and sad. —And who made it? —O my fathers, it was you. 35

and Revolution continued: "A man, his arms bare, m o u n t e d the guillotine. H e filled his t w o hands with globs of blood with which he showered the crowd below. 'May you drown in this blood!' he shouted. Revolutions produce these dreadful tillers of the soil. T h e y plant the seeds of disasters and catastrophes t o come; and a half-century later, panicked generations witness the germination of the awful things that were sown in the earth" (ibid., 4). 32 "Louis the Fifteenth was guilty, / Louis the Sixteenth was punished!" (Victor H u g o , "Sunt lacrymae r e r u m " ( 1 8 3 7 ) , from Les Voix interieures, in his Oeuvres poetiques, 1:931). 33 Hugo, Aaesetparoles. Ill, 15:1322. 34

Qu'est-ce qu'il avait fait, ce roi, ce condamne, Ce patient pensif et pale? II etait ne. Responsabilite s o m b r e de finnocent! ( H u g o , Le Verso de lapage,

10:262)

Q u e l est t o n crime, 6 toi qui vas, tete sinistre Plus pale que le Christ sur son noir crucifix? — l e suis le petit-fils de votre petit-fils. — E t d'ou viens-tu? — D u t r o n e . O rois, l'ombrc est terrible! —Spectre, quelle est la-bas cette machine horrible? — C ' e s t la fin, dit la tete au regard sombre et doux. — E t qui d o n e l'a construite? — O mes peres, c'est vous. ( H u g o , LaRevolution

(1857), in his Oeuvres completes, 10:245)

124

CHAPTER

FIVE

As in other poems, Hugo condemns the monarchy and exculpates the nation in the regicide and Terror. But what is unusual here is that Hugo conserves the traditional royalist assimilation of Louis XVI and Christ. Gentle, grave, and lucid, Louis resembles Christ "upon his dark crucifix." The myth is perpetuated of the king as an innocent, Christ-like martyr who died to expiate the sins of his ancestors. As if to emphasize the resemblances between Louis and Christ and between regicide and the Nativity, Hugo dated the poem "25 December 1857. Christmas." It is surprising that, in a poem supposedly dealing with the Revolution, Hugo is more interested in Louis's expiation for the monarchy than in the revolutionary founding of the republic. The critic Jean Massin expresses understandable amazement that Hugo's sympathy for the ineffectual monarch has displaced the significance of the entire French Revolution: 'The historian can refrain from criticizing Hugo for having deformed history by turning Louis Capet into a Saint Louis with 'eyes gentle and sad' and for having betrayed the realism and true intentions of the regicides who were simultaneously punishing a liar, eliminating a peril, destroying a religion based on superstition, and burning their bridges: all that, and much more, the historian need not mention."36 Massin's disappointment that "the myth of the Revolution is reduced to the sacrifice of a king" serves to underscore not only the unusual vestiges of Christian and monarchist thought that still colored Hugo's imagination but also his unexpected ambivalence toward the Revolution.

While conceiving the regicide as a royal drama of expiation, Hugo also viewed it as a Jacobin drama of moral bankruptcy. On the one hand, Louis's death was a Christ-like expiation that served the cause of progress; on the other, it was a pitiless political murder that negated any hope for progress. Louis XVI was a defenseless victim, rhetorically dehumanized and then decapitated by revolutionaries whose mercilessness was the gauge of their own moral corruption. Regicide was not merely the heavy price a king pays for the transformation of society; it was the even heavier price a community pays for its submission to the unrelenting continuity of violence. Political murder, Hugo insisted, cannot be the instrument of political liberation. This particular stance against regicide may seem surprising for one so deeply committed to doctrines of progress. Indeed, Hugo seems to contradict his position that the regicide was a sacred, time-stopping event that was necessary to introduce a new historical era (see chapter 1). Nevertheless, he was also adamant that political executions testify only to man's imprisonment within a ceaseless and violent master-slave dialectic. In Le Verso de la 36

Jean Massin, "Presentation de La Revolution'' in Hugo, Oeuvres completes, 10:206.

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

125

page, he emphasized that crime cannot be obliterated by crime. Cruelty and vengeance are no more virtuous practiced by the people than practiced by a despot: No! always the sword and death responding to death! No, this cannot be the end. . . . . . . No, this cannot be possible. God, the purpose of your commandment was not to justify the unjustifiable, And to deliver murder and infamy From the hands of the king to the hands of the bewildered people. The people want nothing of so bleak a legacy.37 So strong was Hugo's antipathy for political violence and so absolute his opposition to capital punishment, 38 especially for political crimes, that he provocatively referred to Nero and Tiberius as tyrants worthy of clemency.39 Even the assassinations of such despised despots can upset the balance of the universe, for all violence against fellow men is fratricide: To his own monsters m a n is wed. H e can kill n o o t h e r t h a n Abel! W h e n a head falls, the heavens shudder.

37

Non! lc glaive, la mort repondant a la mort, Non, ce n'est pas lafin.. . . . . . Non, il n'est pas possible, Dicu, que toute ta loi soit de changer de cible, Et de faire passer le meurtre et le forfait Des mains des rois aux mains du peuple stupefait. Le peuple ne veut pas de ce morne heritage. ( H u g o , Le Verso de la page, 10:266)

38

H u g o warned against t h e death penalty in a world in which mortal, fallible judges are unable t o determine guilt o r innocence. B u t as examples of wrongly chosen victims, he selected, n o t a n o n y m o u s c o n d e m n e d men, b u t t h e tyrants of history: Because you cannot see clearly into fate, R u s h n o t t o read a sentence of death, Be it for a king, a master o r a tyrant. Puisquc vous n e voycz rien de clair dans le sort, N e vous hatcz pas t r o p d'en conclure la mort, Fut-ce la m o r t d ' u n roi, d ' u n maitre et d ' u n despote. ( H u g o , Le Vena de lapage, 39

10:270)

La Pitie supreme is a plea for compassion a n d mercy for these monsters of history, deformed by their education, worshipped by their subjects, imprisoned in darkness. T h e m selves victims o f the d e m o n i c nature of kingship, kings inspire H u g o ' s pity: " O redoubtable mystery of woeful kings!" ( " O mystere effrayant des rois infortunes!" [ H u g o , La Pitie supreme, in his Oeuvres completes, 10:310]).

126

CHAPTER

FIVE

You behead Nero, that demented hyena, And through him you wound all human life. Tomorrow, lead Tiberius to the scaffold And Tiberius will bleed the blood of all.40 Whereas in other works, Hugo was concerned with social and legal injustice, with the persecution of the weak and marginal members of society, here his wrath is turned against revolutionary persecution of the powerful. The question is no longer capital punishment as a form of social iniquity, but rather the problem of regicide and tyrannicide, the exemplary executions of symbolic persons, violent acts of sacrificial murder that become the political and mythic foundation of a new social order. 41 Saint-Just's axiom, "the king must die because the nation must live," and its concomitant approval of political violence arc entirely rejected. Although people caught in the vortex of revolution may not doubt their right to strike down their oppressors or even their adversaries, Hugo believed that, without some universal ethical standard, nothing would end the cycle of vengeance. Hugo seemed as saddened by revolutionary violence as he was horrified by the despotism of kings. Whereas kings and tyrants do not attempt to justify the arbitrariness of their own absolute rule, it is in the idealistic names of justice and fraternity that a revolutionary government turns to violence, transforming the guillotine into "an altar for the worship of the new-born progress." 42 A humane society cannot be born in acts of terror, for new assassins merely replace the old ones: "Man slaying the monster is monstrous." 43 No political ideology can justify political executions: "The executioner, whoever he may be, founders in the abyss, / His blade, whatever it does, alas, always commits a crime." Violence is evil, whether it strikes "in the name of the people or avenges in the name of the king." 44 Over and over one reads that violent revolt is morally and politically doomed: "What? You want vengeance, passer-by? against whom? the mas40

Que Phomme est solidaire avec ses monstres meme, Et qu'il ne peut tuer autre chose qu'Abel! Lorsqu'une tete tombe, on sent trembler le del. Decapitez Neron, cette hyene insensee, La vie universelle est dans Neron blessee; Faites monter Tibere a l'echafaud demain, Tibere saignera le sang du genre humain. (Hugo, Le Verso de la page, 10:268)

41

Whether their foreheads bear the mark of divinity (see "La Mort de Louis XVII") or of Cain ("Their foreheads all bear the bloody mark of history" [La Pitie supreme, 10:310]), kings and tyrants are history's chosen, and their executions are cataclysmic events. 42 Hugo, Le Verso de la page, 10:270. 43 Ibid., 10:262. 44 Ibid., 10:268-69.

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

127

45

ter? / If that is all you are worth, what are you doing here?" By addressing the verse to a "passer-by" in revolt, Hugo seems to imply that this transitory figure cannot comprehend an underlying permanent order which should not be disturbed. Thus Hugo criticizes the ignorance of the bloodthirsty mob: Horror does not seize the brutish mob When, punishing what they call a crime In the name of what they call truth, They force eternity to descend, O terror! and put out life!46

There is an opposition between the "brutish mob" and a higher immutable order, "eternity." The people punish not crime, but only what they "call" crime, and not in the name of truth, but only in the name of what they "call" truth. Politically, the poem seems to support the status quo, at least inasmuch as Hugo does not address an alternative to violent change, but, at the same time that the poem seems to approve political stasis, it opens up the higher spiritual dimension of "eternity." Although Hugo did not exclude the possibility that an act of violence could be the equivocal origin of progress and light ("From the head of Louis the Sixteenth, Alas! light flowed forth"47), pure light could issue only from the total renunciation of violence: And when death, opening its fatal ledger, Asks me:—What throw you now into the sinister basket? The head of the people, or the head of the king?— I say:—Neither one nor the other.—My law Is life; and my joy, O God, is the pure dawn.48 Ultimately, Hugo measured historical progress in spiritual terms. Progress signified the recognition of the primacy of humane values, especially of pity. 45 46

Ibid., 10:268. Et l'horreur n'ctreint pas ce noir peuple unanime, Quand ils font, pour punir ce qu'ils ont nomme crime, Au n o m de ce qu'ils o n t appele verite, Sur la vie, 6 tcrreur, tomber l'eternite!

(Hugo, "L'Echafaud," from Les Quatre Vents de I'Esprit, in his Oeuwes completes, 14:903) 47 "De la tete de Louis seize, / Helas! la lumiere a coule" (Hugo, "Rupture avec ce qui amoindrit" (1859), from La Legende des slides, 10:843). 48

Et quand la mort, ouvrant son desastreux registre, Me dit:—Que jettes-tu dans ce panier sinistre? O u la tete du peuple, ou la tete du roi?— Ie dis:—Ni celle-ci, ni celle-la.—Ma loi, C'est la vie; et ma joie, 6 Dieu, c'est l'aube pure. (Hugo, Le Verso de la page, 10:271-72)

128

CHAPTER FIVE

Like Michelet and Lamartine, Hugo too believes that "pity is a law, like Justice." 49 Pity was the source of the pure light that would lead humanity out of darkness: One day an angel sighted men enshrouded in night; And cried down to them from his serene sphere: I pray you wait, for I will fetch you light. And he returned with pity in his hands.50 And so, pity must be extended to all, not only to suffering humanity, but even to those who perform evil deeds: "Only one man knows unhappiness, the wicked man." 51 In fact, Hugo admits that, although he feels pity for the man who goes hungry, his pity is even greater for the king who is banished from the light of reason and truth: "Let us weep for this king, whom God has disinherited of day."52 All are my family, with rights to my tears, their only fortune; But the most dolorous compassion I feel Is for the crippled man holding his scepter And the blind man wearing his crown.53 In LaPitiesupreme, Hugo catalogs history's aberrant bloodthirsty tyrants; at the end of the long, sinister list of sadistic monsters, he arrives, "shuddering," at the conclusion: I studied, I compared their nature to our own; I weighed their deeds, and stripped them naked of their resplendent names, And, shuddering, I come to this: Let us pardon!54 49 50

Victor Hugo, Voyage aux Pyrenees, in his Oeuvres completes, 16:904. Un ange vit un jour les hommes dans la nuit; II leur cria du haut de la sereine sphere: Attendez; je vous vais chercher de la lumiere. II revint apportant dans sa main la pitie. (Hugo, La Pitie supreme, 10:316)

51

Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, book 5, poem 26, in his Oeuvres poetiques, 2:719. The Romantic theme of pity for the evildoer is also found in such works as Vigny's Eloa. 52 Hugo, La Pitie Supreme, 10:314. 53

54

Et je me suis senti, tous etant ma famille, Tous ayant droit aux pleurs, leur unique tresor, Une compassion plus douloureuse encor Pour le boiteux de sceptre et l'aveugle a couronne.

(Ibid., 10:321-22)

J'ai vu, j'ai compare leur nature a la notre; J'ai pese les forfaits, j'ai dedore les noms, Et, fremissant, j'arrive a ceci: Pardonnons! (Ibid., 308)

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

129

The verso of vengeance and violence is forgiveness. Even the devil is forgiven: 0 still night where I draw breath, you know That if, kneeling before me, were my enemy, vilest of all, His Honor Cain, High Priest Judas, King Satan, 1 would fling open my door and say: Take flight! No, of vaster and bleaker cemeteries, O young nations, we have no need.55 Hugo rejects the punishment of iniquitous tyrants, even though he knows them to be guilty. He does not ask whether the culprit is deserving of punishment, whether he feels remorse, whether his crimes were unintentional or excusable, or whether he has already suffered enough. Clearly Hugo is not any more interested in desert and legal justice than in putting Cain, Judas, or Satan on trial. The verb he uses, "pardonner," has to be translated as "to forgive" rather than "to pardon," because, for Hugo, pardoning means having an attitude of forgiveness rather than granting a pardon, an act that requires some justification. Hugo's forgiveness is like a gift that has nothing to do with justice or judging. His attitude evokes God the Father, not God the judge. 56 Hugo's forgiving and nonjudgmental stance can be seen as politically conservative, inasmuch as it can tend to support repressive governments and thwart liberation movements. But Hugo would not have viewed the problem in this way. He would have made the argument that there is a greater evil than the most evil despotism: the evil of the contagion of the despot's violence and corruption. He would have maintained that revolution and political progress are hollow and counterproductive if they are not accompanied by moral progress, that is, by charity and mercy. Although it may Hugo realized that there was some incomprehensible, irrational element in his feelings of pity for humanity's enemies: "Sometimes my pity is unfathomable" (Je me sens parfois des pities insondables [ibid., 10:310]). 55

Quant a moi, tu le sais, nuit calme ou je respire, J'aurais la, sous mes pieds, mon ennemi, le pire, Cain juge, Judas pontife, Satan roi, Que j'ouvrirais ma porte et dirais: Sauve-toi! Non, l'elargissement des mornes cimetieres, O jeunes nations, n'est pas ce qu'il nous faut. (Hugo, Le Verso de la page, 10:270)

56

As Kathleen Moore notes, "even when the relationship between God and miserable sinners is taken to be the model for mercy, it cannot be God the judge who is merciful, but God the Father" (Kathleen Dean Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 192).

130

CHAPTER

FIVE

seem paradoxical that Hugo was willing to make the unequivocal moral judgment that violence and vengeance arc evil but was unwilling to judge and punish those who commit such crimes, one must understand that his refusal to occupy the judge's bench lies at the heart of his concept of social progress. Hugo's solution to the problem of political and social crime is the eventual abolition of all forms of punishment. His fundamental position is that pity must be extended to all—tyrant, criminal, or miserable—for all are victims of society and environment. As he demonstrates in Les Misembles, goodness and kindness, not punishment, convert the criminal. 57 This sentimental theory of justice as mercy poses certain intractable problems. First, it eliminates the concepts of legal guilt and desert. Second, it dispenses with personal responsibility by displacing responsibility onto "Society." Third, Hugo's "law of pity" was psychologically untenable even for himself, for he was quite selective in his offers of mercy. In 1875, he insisted that no mercy be accorded to traitors in France. He even warned historians that understanding and empathy for such traitors are tantamount to pardon and that the historian would then become an accomplice in treason: "Any understanding of the monster excuses him; I . . . I No mercy! Either seek revenge or become an accomplice, I . . . I For the traitor who sells out his country, O wrathful skies!, no pity!" 58 Of course, Hugo was willing to spare the life of Louis Napoleon ("he must not be put to death!") only because he could imagine greater torture for him than 57

See P. Savey-Casard, he Crime et la peine dans I'oeuwe de Victor Hugo (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), chap. 3, "L'Avenir de la peine," 335—60. 58 "Toiite explication d'un monstre l'attenue; I . . . I Pas de grace! il faut etre ou vengeur ou complice; I . . . I Pour qui vend son pays, ciel noir, pas de pitie!" (Victor Hugo, "Aux historiens," Poesiepolitique, in his Oeuvres completes, 16:68—69). As for the German victors after the Franco-Prussian war, H u g o had no feelings of fraternity for them: When we are victorious, then we will see. For now, Let us show them only the scorn that befits our sorrow. Speak not to me of concord at such a time; It is no season for stammered words of friendship For an insolent enemy; Tomorrow men of honor will abandon thoughts of vengeance, Today only cowards forget their trust. Quand nous serons vainqueurs, nous verrons. Montrons-leur Jusque-la, le dedain qui sied a la douleur. Ne me parlez done pas de Concorde a cette heure; Une fraternite begayee a demi Et trop tot, fait hausser l'epaule a l'ennemi; Et l'offre de donner aux rancunes relache Qui demain sera digne, aujourd'hui serait lache. (Hugo, UAnnee terrible, Fevrier, IV, "A ceux qui reparlent de fraternite," 3:362)

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

131

59

death. But although Hugo's equation of justice and mercy may be inconsistent and Utopian (he is, after all, a poet, not a philosopher or a politician), he offers a plausible theory of social reform through mercy instead of through punishment. At the center of his vision of society and history, he places the spiritual concepts of pardon and salvation. The salvation of the criminal depends on society's mercy, and the historical salvation of a new nation depends on an exemplary founding act of mercy. Thus, tyrannicide is a political and historical error, for it binds the future to an unjust past. Hugo's condemnation of punishment may seem exceedingly idealistic, but the same argument was made, a century later, by Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition, Arcndt asserts that forgiveness undoes the damages of the past at the same time that it frees the future from a cycle of vengeance that binds everyone to the consequences of a first misdeed. "Forgiving is the only reaction which docs not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven."60 Max Scheler, in his classic essay, Vom Ressentiment imAufbau derMoralen, had made a similar point. Distinguishing between action and "re-action," he saw forgiveness as an authentic and purifying action and vengeance as a reflex re-action, essentially inauthentic because it is determined by the actions of others. 61 Hugo also saw the regenerative potential in forgiveness: pardon cleanses the agent as well as the object of forgiveness. "Amnesties purify us. They are beneficial to all, . . . to those who grant them no less than to those who 59

See Victor Hugo, "Sacer Esto," fromLes Chatiments, in his Oeuwespoetiques, 2:94—95. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 241. Shakespeare had expressed similar thoughts about mercy: 60

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,— It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest— It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes: 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown. It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself. (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 4.1) 61 Scheler argues that the Christian injunction to "turn the other cheek" does not, as Nietzsche felt it did, make the agent into a passive, humiliated victim. For Scheler, the "individualist" spirit of the Bible should and does discourage us from letting our actions and attitudes depend on the attitudes of others. "An action should evolve dynamically within one's innermost being. . . . Thus, these commandments are not aimed at thwarting our natural reactions, as would be the case if it were commanded: Because someone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well; on the contrary, action that is nothing more than re-action is rejected" (Max Scheler, L'Homme du ressentiment [1912; reprinted Paris: Gallimard, 1975], 90).

132

CHAPTER

FIVE

receive them. On both sides amnesty wondrously bestows mercy."62 If revolution aspires to be a new beginning that liberates the future from an oppressive past, then, Hugo would argue, it is surely more efficacious to found that new social order on an original act of forgiveness rather than on a reflex re-action of vengeance. History had convinced Hugo that political gain, no matter how significant and progressive it appeared, was annulled if founded on violence. He sought to persuade that political ideals—liberte, egalite, jraternite—were meaningless if, in order to enact them, ethical values, such as compassion, were overridden. Amnesty for Nero and Tiberius, Judas and Satan, but not for Louis XVI? Seen in the light of Hugo's approval of clemency for history's monsters, not to mention his belief in the fundamental innocence of Louis XVI, the regicide was a grave moral error. The trial of Louis XVI could have been a true turning point in history, establishing pardon as a political value. The king's acquittal might have liberated the future from decades of political violence. The question of amnesty applied not only to the founding act of a new political and historical order but also to other political situations that called for national reconciliation. Just as Chateaubriand, Ballanchc, and Lamartine repeatedly urged amnesty during the Restoration, Hugo also pleaded for amnesty after the Franco-Prussian War. From 1871 to 1880, he passionately and repeatedly counseled forgiveness for the imprisoned or exiled Communards in the interest of the survival of the Republic: "Amnesty, which will give birth to peace and reconciliation, is now our Republic's most crucial priority."63 One of his speeches recalls Chateaubriand's plea for political reconciliation through a symbolic act of forgetting: "Gentlemen, there is only one form of propitiation, that of forgetting. In the language of politics, gentlemen, this amnesia is translated as amnesty. . . . Only forgetting can pardon." 64 Thus the case for amnesty was made in the name of social solidarity: "What is most admirable and efficacious about amnesty is that it creates human solidarity. It is more than an act of sovereignty, it is an act of fraternity."65 The goal of political morality is pragmatic as well as spiritual, inasmuch as it can promote national reconciliation and fraternity. Embedded in Hugo's pleas for amnesty for dissidents is not only the princi62

Victor H u g o , "Aux redacteurs AaRappeF (October 1871), Actes etparoles. Ill, 15:1319. Hugo, Actes et paroles. Iff (1873), 15:1341. The end of the American Civil War provided H u g o with a positive example of forgiveness in politics. "Confronting the existence of slavery, America followed our glorious example, emancipation; and we, confronting the existence of prisoners in our own civil war, we must follow America's glorious example, amnesty" ("L'Exposition de Philadelphie" (April 1876), Actes ctparoles. Ill, 15:1378-79). 64 Ibid., speech of 22 May 1876, 15:1383. In February 1879, another "Discours pour Pamnistie" repeated the same message: "In politics, forgetting is the highest law" (Actes et paroles. Ill, 15:1449). 65 Ibid., 15:1384. 63

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

133

pie of charity but also the old Romantic longing for national unity and fraternity. Hugo's concept of political morality as forgiveness echoes Michelet's and Lamartine's spiritual notions of social justice. They could easily have been the authors of Hugo's assertion that "clemency judges justice unjust. Clemency steps in and shows mercy. Pardon is the sublime redress of justice on earth by justice in the heavens."66 It is this higher morality, "justice in the heavens," that Hugo would like to incorporate into politics: "Pity and kindness are good tools of government. Only by raising moral law above political law can we make revolutions subservient to civilization."67 Making morality the precondition for political efficacity, he insisted that a government could be "useful" only if it respected moral principles.68 Morality, and evidently pity and fraternity, are the only basis for effective government. In a sense, Hugo hoped to succeed where Machiavelli, Montaigne, and later Max Weber, had only partially succeeded—that is, in wedding politics and ethics. Machiavelli had advised his Prince "not to deviate from what is good, if possible, but to be able to do evil if constrained." A well-meaning and successful ruler would have to "learn how not to be good." Montaigne agreed with Machiavelli, recognizing that "the public welfare requires that a man betray and lie and massacre," although he hoped that the ruler would be fully aware of the moral compromises he made and that this painful consciousness would weigh upon him. No private utility, Montaigne felt, was worthy of doing violence to one's conscience, but the public utility, yes. 69 Writing in 1919, Max Weber elucidated another dimension of the problem of ethics in politics. He distinguished between two types of political ethics: the "ethic of ultimate ends" and, closer to Montaigne's notion, the "ethic of responsibility." The believer in ultimate ends will accept any means to attain his goal; the responsibility he feels is not for the consequences of his actions, but only for his fidelity to his final ideological objective. The "ethic of responsibility" applies to the politician who may have to employ morally dubious means for the attainment of the public good, but who fully accepts responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Weber, however, also discusses another ethic, that of the Sermon on the Mount. This ethic, he maintains, can have nothing to do with politics, for it 66

Speech of 22 May 1876, ibid., 15:1384. Ibid., 15:1388. H u g o had made a similar statement in "Le Droit et la loi" (1875): "Ah! let us pardon! This cry from our souls is not just a plea for kindness, it is a plea for rationality. Benevolence is not just benevolence, it is mastery. Why condemn the future . . . to the destructive repercussions of rancor?" (preface toAvant I'exil, in his Oeuwes completes, 15:596). 68 "Codes of justice, legislatures, tribunals, . . . these institutions are useful . . . only on condition that all this capacity take as its moral principle a majestic respect for the weak and lowly" (Victor Hugo, "Pour un soldat" (1875), Actes et paroles. Ill, 15:1362). 69 Michel de Montaigne, "De l'Utile et de l'honneste," in his Essais (1588; reprinted Paris: Gamier Frercs, 1962), book 3, chap. 1, 206. 67

134

CHAPTER

FIVE

consists of absolute moral imperatives—one must be saintly in everything and attempt to live like Jesus—whereas politics cannot not involve violence and compromises of all sorts. Yet, that is the ethic that Hugo adopts. So opposed was Hugo to compromising his ideals that he indeed expressed a willingness to sacrifice all political power to remain faithful to his moral principles. His poem, "Pas de represailles," composed in reaction to vindictive demands for the punishment of the members of the Commune, expresses the primacy of ethical purity over political engagement. If I see [my enemies] bound, I do not feel that I am free; To beseech pardon I would grovel on my knees. Never will I yield to vengeance. I am resolved to remain pure, without stain and without power. Never will I relinquish my right to innocence., 70 Political impotence was not too high a price to pay for innocence. Montaigne's and Weber's tragic visions of politics, perhaps no less than Machiavelli's realistic view, would have held little appeal for the Victor Hugo of the 1870s. His writings of that decade suggest that under no circumstances was he willing to sacrifice his conscience for the public good. 71 For Hugo, the real heroes of the Revolution were not the uncompromising regicidal Jacobins who compromised the ideals of 1789, but rather his own imaginary revolutionary idealist who placed his own spiritual salvation above his commitment to politics and the Revolution. In his last novel, Quatrevingt-Treize, written after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the debacle of the Commune, he concentrated on the year of the Terror. Although he did not hold the French responsible for the Terror, which he attributed to God and Destiny, he did consider them responsible for their individual moral deeds. Quatrevingt-Treize presents the dilemma of individuals caught between 70

Si je vois [mes ennemis] lies, je ne me sens pas libre; A demander pardon j'userais mes genoux Ie ne prendrai jamais ma part d'une vengeance. Mais j'entends rester pur, sans tache et sans puissance. Ie n'abdiquerais pas mon droit a l'innocence. (Victor Hugo, "Pas de represailles, L'Annee terrible, 3:384-85)

71

Perhaps Hugo rediscovered Cicero who, in De Officiis, resolved for himself the problem of utilitarianism versus morality: "Nothing can be expedient which is not at the same time morally right; neither can a thing be morally right just because it is expedient, but it is expedient because it is morally right" (Cicero, De Officiis [London: William Heinemann, 1913], 391).

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

135

active commitment to political ideology and a nostalgia for ethical purity. Two characters act out the problem: the counterrevolutionary uncle Lantenac and his pro-revolutionary nephew, Gauvain. The crucial scene takes place at the novel's end, when Lantenac risks his life as well as the success of the counterrevolution to save three children from a raging fire. The children are rescued, but Lantenac is caught and imprisoned. His realization that no political ideology can justify the sacrifice of children places him above politics and makes him an exemplary being. His nephew, Gauvain, dazzled by this heroic act of mercy and self-sacrifice, discerns in Lantenac's actions a truth higher than politics and revolution. Wishing to emulate his uncle and perform a similar merciful deed for the Revolution, Gauvain helps Lantenac escape from prison and is subsequently executed by the Revolution as a traitor. For both uncle and nephew, salvation lies, not in revolution or counterrevolution, but in sacrifice and mercy. As Victor Brombert puts it, "the one who saves is saved."72 Compassion and salvation were one and the same for Hugo. Hugo did not measure the success or failure of revolution in terms of concrete accomplishments; revolutions had to pass a more exigent spiritual test. AsQuatrevingt-Treize illustrates, one does not make moral concessions or sacrifices for political ideology; rather one makes political sacrifices for moral perfection. Sentenced to death and awaiting execution, Gauvain discusses the meaning of revolution with his adoptive father, Cimourdain, a fervent Jacobin and former priest. Cimourdain's goals include proportional and progressive taxation, obligatory military service, and "above all beings and all things, that straight line, the law." Gauvain, unmoved, asks, "Where do you place dedication, sacrifice, forbearance, the magnanimous union of compassion and generosity: love? . . . Above the scales is the lyre. Your republic measures, weighs, and controls people; mine transports them to azur spheres. That is the difference between a theorem and an eagle." Gauvain has transcended the violence of revolution and entered a world of luminous visions, central to which is his own ethical purity. "What difference can events make to me, if I have my conscience!"73 Thus Hugo's fictional characters learn the supreme lesson of mercy; but only in a city of angels can they be exemplary figures, for they have chosen to abdicate political responsibility and its concomitant ambiguities. As Lantenac and Gauvain rise, transcend history, and enter a realm in which salvation is a reality, they leave behind the Terror and a tangle of conflicting ideologies as well as a dead father and king. In this novel peopled by an uncle (Lantenac), an adoptive father (the former priest Cimourdain) who also comes to resemble a mother, and a nephew who is also an adopted son, only 72

Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, 2 2 3 . Victor H u g o , Quatrevingt-Treize ( 1 8 7 4 ; reprinted Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965), 3 6 8 and 3 7 2 . 73

136

CHAPTER FIVE

the father is absent—an absence that is conspicuous and disturbing. The fictional characters of the novel cross the barriers of ideology and, out of compassion and mercy, rescue each other and save their own souls, but the novel's nonfictional father, an invisible, dispossessed king, remains a prisoner of history, violence, and pitilessness. The father-king is executed, Gauvain is beheaded, and Cimourdain, the false priest and false father, can only commit suicide after the death of his beloved adopted son. There is no figure left, neither patriarchal norfilial,around whom a new political and moral order can be constituted, even though Gauvain was the living synthesis of aristocracy, revolution, and morality.74 At the end oiQuatrevingtTreize, all that is left is the antagonistic status quo of revolution and counterrevolution. For Hugo, the essential revolutionary experience is not one of fraternity and communion, as it was for Michelet. It is rather an individual quest for personal moral purity. Ultimately, Hugo was more committed to the salvation of a human soul than to the establishment of a just social order. Faced with the choice between moral compromise for the public good and ethical perfection, his hero unwaveringly selects the latter, absolutely certain that the sacrifice of ideology, political power, and even life for the eternal truths of justice and mercy is the appropriate decision. As in Malraux's La Condition humaine, another novel ostensibly about revolution, in QuatrevingtTreize politics and revolution yield to the opportunity for individual spiritual transcendence. Hugo discovered, as Weber wouldfiftyyears later, that politics and moral purity are mutually exclusive, that "he who seeks the salvation of the soul . . . should not seek it along the avenue of politics. . . . The genius or demon of politics lives in an inner tension with the god of love, as well as with the Christian God."75 Hugo turns away from politics, choosing instead the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. In a sense, it was never really politics, political reform, or a system ofjustice that interested him. The Hugolian vision of the Revolution 74 In a sense, Gauvain is die Revolution's Louis XVI. The description of Gauvain's death, for example, recalls descriptions of the king's death. Just as Louis's last moments were ones of great religious piety, Gauvain's are full of revolutionary piety. Gauvain's execution, like Louis's, is preceded by pleas of "Grace, grace!" which are answered by the hopeful cry, "Vive la republique!" (See Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, 2:129). Like Louis, Gauvain is a voluntary sacrificial victim, put to death by pitiless ideologues but nevertheless willing t o die for the redemption of others. Louis sacrificed himself for historical progress and the redemption of France; Gauvain accepts death, not just for his own salvation, but for the purity of his ideals, especially those of pardon and mercy. As Brombert asserts, "at stake is much more than the conscience and salvation of an individual. Beyond the singular battlefield of a human consciousness, Gauvain glorifies humanity's epic quest for moral perfection" (Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, 219). 75 Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919; reprinted Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1956), 52.

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

137 76

as "an urn of joy" from which spring forth "fraternity, harmony, dawn!" is not a political vision. Hugo was an idealist not unlike his character Gauvain, who confessed to Cimourdain, "My master, I am not a man for politics." As Benichou points out, real political engagement was not Hugo's objective. Even after his twenty-year exile on the island of Gucrnesey, "he willingly continued . . . to refer to himself as 'banished,' to take pride in that distinction, as if banishment had ceased being an episode in his life to become a definition of his being." 77 Hugo's lack of tolerance for the compromises that are part of politics and his discomfort with (if not fear of) political conflict and unruly debate are moreover illustrated by his resignation from the Assemblee, in the face of vociferous reactionary opposition, in March 1871. 7 8 Especially after his experience of the Commune, which would color Quatrevinqt-Treize (written in 1874), Hugo was more comfortable with the idea of having moral authority than with that of wielding political power. In 1870, he wrote in his notebook, "I possess a certain amount of spiritual authority. Do I really wish for anything else?"79 In UAnnee terrible, Hugo explicitly rejects the politician who stoops to compromise. His poem, "Les Deux Voix," presents a dialogue between two voices who illustrate the two poles of political ethics; the pragmatist is identified as the "wise voice" and the idealist as the "sublime voice." The pragmatist attempts to educate the idealist in the ways of politics ("Reason is my last name, Self-interest is my first"), but the "sublime voice" disputes this myopic vision of "petty duties," insisting instead that there must be at least one uncompromising voice of Justice: I am conscience, a virgin; and this Is reason of State, a whore. 76

H u g o , Les Miserables, part 1, book 1, chap. 10. Benichou, Les Mages romantiques, 337. 78 Elected to the Chambre des deputes in 1839, Tocqueville also felt ambivalence toward the political process, but unlike H u g o , he did not resign. Lucidly although reluctantly, he acknowledged the difference between the man who is the "theoretical observer" of politics and the one who is politically engaged. H e wrote his friend Royer-Collard: "When I carefully consider our paltry political world and those who constitute it, nowhere do I discover a place for myself. . . . The only power in parliament today comes either from bringing [Thiers and Guizot] together or from trading upon one of the two. I assure you that I have neither the desire nor the will to join forces with either one. They are both profoundly antipathetic to my way of feeling and thinking. I can have n o respect for them. And yet without them, there is n o way to bring about any noteworthy results in the affairs of our country. Action docs not seem possible. And what is politics without action? Is this not an obvious self-contradiction? Is this not imposing one kind of life on another, theoretical speculation on a life of action, to the great detriment of both? I am constantly colliding with one or the other of these two obstacles" (Letter of 27 September 1841, Correspondance avec Royer-Collard, in Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes [Paris: Gallimard, 1970], 11:107). 79 Hugo, quoted in Savey-Casard, Le Crime et lapeine dans I'oeuvre de Hugo, 353. 77

138

CHAPTER FIVE

But there must be someone who is for the stars! There must be someone who is for fraternity! Clemency, honor, rights, freedom,

To be just, whatever the season or the suffering, To let justice from within the soul stream forth. This is the true luminosity of man.80 That the "voice of justice" may have to be a martyr for his cause is irrelevant. It is more urgent to "contradict the wind and drive back the waves."81 In practice as well as in theory, Hugo conceives politics not in relation to government and the realities of power, but rather in relation to the spiritual order of society, with the Sermon on the Mount as his guide. When, in 1871, he offered his house in Brussels as asylum to political refugees from Paris, only to see it stoned by Belgians who took a dim view of his attitude toward amnesty, he viewed the episode in spiritual terms: "One man dared to embrace fraternity; . . . he dared to remember Jesus Christ; he raised his voice to utter words merciful and humane." 82 In the 1870s, Hugo's political goal was amnesty for the Communards and, for himself, clean hands: his wish may indeed have been to incarnate the supremely just man. But for those who wish to grope their way through the imperfect political arena, Hugo provides no guidance. Whereas Montaigne and Weber were offering a kind of moral guide to the man of politics who "maturely" accepts responsibility for the consequences of his conduct "with heart and soul," 83 Hugo proposes moral imperatives and otherworldly idealism. On the one hand, his willingness to abdicate political power for moral absolutes demonstrates his discomfort with morally ambiguous political situations in particular and with political engagement in general. But on the other hand, his refusal to make moral compromises is more consistent with a Utopian hu80

Je suis la conscience, une vierge; et ceci C'est la raison d'Etat, une fille publique. Mais il faut bien quelqu'un qui soit pour les etoiles! II faut quelqu'un qui soit pour la fraternite, La clemence, l'honneur, le droit, la liberte, Etre juste, au hasard, dut-on etre martyr, Et laisser hors de soi la justice sortir, C'est le rayonnement veritable de r h o m m e . (Hugo, L'Annee terrible, Juillet, "Les Deux Voix," 3 : 4 4 1 - 4 6 )

81 82

Ibid., 4 4 6 . Victor H u g o , "Paris et Rome," preface to Depuis I'exil (1876), in his Oeuwes completes,

15:633. 83

Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 53—54.

HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

139

manitarian agenda than was the Jacobins' espousal of violence in the gentle names of fraternity and compassion. Moreover, when one looks back at the horrors of the collective political crimes of the twentieth century, Hugo's position, which attributes supreme value to the individual moral conscience, appears in a more favorable light. Even if Hugo and his fictional hero choose not to play effective roles in politics, at least they seek to cause no harm. Individuals, Hugo teaches, can be moral agents, when nations or political parties cannot. He refuses to condone any compromise of the individual's moral conscience. In a sense, Hugo is closer to Lamartine than to Michelet, for his ethic of pity is not transmuted into myths of collective sacrifice or into mystical nationalism, but is expressed in relation to individuals—their freedom to act as moral agents and to express compassion for other individuals. Whereas Michelet extolled the value of self-sacrifice for the collectivity, Hugo, like Lamartine, places the integrity of die self higher than collective values and myths. Hugo seemed aware of the terrible threat to morality and civilization posed by die sacrifice of the individual's conscience for new political faiths in Progress and History or for the new God, the "people," and its corollary, nationalism. But he indicates that the individual also pays a price when he chooses moral values over political ones; as in Quatrevingt-Trtize, the person who wishes to live an entirely moral life must sooner or later withdraw from the political arena and inhabit a smaller space where only conscience—instead of progress and violence—reigns. Guided by the Sermon on the Mount, embracing his "banishment" from politics, convinced that "conscience is a virgin and reason of State a whore," and yet hopeful that pity and kindness can be "tools of government," Hugo seems ultimately uncertain whedier any reconciliation of the moral individual and the state is possible and whether ethical principles could really become the basis of political institutions and laws. In the twentieth century, the same questions of compassion, mercy, amnesty, and the relationship between the individual and the state, issuing once again from reflections on die regicide and the Terror, will be posed in relation to the political dilemmas and tragedies of the period— totalitarianism, fascism, collaboration, colonialism—with similar results. Albeit Camus's hopeful words could easily be taken for those of Victor Hugo: "We do not accept the politics of pragmatism. That is not our agenda. . . . We are attempting to introduce into the political life of this country the trial experiment . . . of infusing the practice of politics with the language of morality."84 84

Albert Camus, Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 7 October 1944, 273-74.

Chapter Six CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI: A MODERN ELEGY FOR THE MARTYRED KING

A

FEW YEARS after the liberation of France, a war-weary Albert Camus, facing new cold war realities, looked back at the execution .of Louis XVI and termed it the most significant and tragic event in French history, a turning point that marked the irrevocable destruction of a world that, for a thousand years, had embraced a sacred order. Celebrated by some as man's seizing control of his political and historical fate, the regicide was mourned by others like Camus as the permanent loss of a moral code sanctified by a transcendent God. Camus believed that the regicide had constituted a direct and fatal attack upon the divine mystery that had been the safeguard of certain universal moral, spiritual, and political values. As a consequence, God and religion were irretrievably demoted to a system of rational principles devoid of any references to the sacred and the supernatural. The condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now God was a part of history through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king. Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles.1 Henceforth, reason and history reigned; morality was displaced by expediency. "The sky is empty, the earfii delivered into the hands of power without principles."2 There was no authority higher than man himself; everything that had been God's now belonged to man. During the Revolution, the reign of man and reason had led soon enough to the Terror. But, in the modern world, the deification of man and history seemed to have even more devastating effects. Camus belonged to a generation of antitotalitarian writers, such as Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestlcr, and Hannah Arendt, who traced a straight path from Rousseau's Social Contract to the regicide and the Terror, then 1

Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 120. Ibid., 181. See Maurice Weyembergh, "Camus et Popper: La Critique de 1'historisme et de Fhistoricisme," in La Pcnsee de Camus, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1979), 4 3 - 6 3 . 2

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

141

to nineteenth-century ideologies of historical necessity, and finally to twentieth-century totalitarianism.3 Camus's explicit association of regicide with a direct attack on the moral structure of the universe and with all modern revolutions that, for him, are necessarily and essentially terrorist and nihilist, leaves him very vulnerable to criticism. Michael Walzcr convincingly points out that Camus, in this argument, sets actual history aside, for in England and France, where kings were publicly tried and executed, neither revolutionary nihilism nor totalitarianism has had any triumphs. 4 On the contrary, implicit both in these trials and in recent French and English history is a belief in the principle that "political leaders are 'trusted' with their power and responsible for its exercise to the people they lead."5 The commitment of modern France to rational democratic institutions not withstanding, Camus locates in the regicide the origin of the nihilistic reign of history. Thus in L'Homme revoke, Camus startles his readers not only by presenting the death of Louis XVI as a shattering event that was a watershed in modern history, but also by describing it in terms that would have been warmly applauded by any early nineteenth-century pro-royalist and counterrevolutionary: "On January 21st, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion of Louis XVI. It is certainly a crying scandal that the assassination of a weak but goodhearted man has been presented as a great moment in French history."6 Camus borrows the royalist code word Passion from the nineteenth-century monarchist tradition and refers to Louis as a "King-priest"; but he goes further by viewing the king's death as an "assassination." Even for nineteenth-century republicans like Michelet, the king's death, although terribly misguided, was the clear result ofjuridical process. Camus's choice of words is, therefore, most surprising. Although the legal basis for the prosecution may have been questionable and although the trial was flawed for a variety of reasons, the king had, nevertheless, been represented by legal counsel and his fate voted upon. This elaborately staged and politically motivated cxecu3 Camus sees the regicides as the precursors of the "deicides," Hegel and Marx, who replaced Christianity with the cult of history, which Camus condemned for being a metaphysics spun out of pure reason: "A reactionary in the Old Regime used to claim that reason determined nothing. A reactionary in the new regime thinks that reason determines everything" (Camus, ActudlesI, in his Essais [Paris: Gallimard, 1965], 1583). 4 Walzer notes that "of other kinds of injustice and crime, there have certainly been no lack. But the specific horrors to which he points have been avoided. Not so in countries where kings fared better—as in Germany, where the kaiser went into exile—or worse—as in Russia, where the czar and his family were shot" (Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, 87). 5 Ibid. 6 Camus, The Rebel, 120. Claude Mauriac commented that this passage from L'Homme revoke was "startling but all the more moving" and that "the tone is almost one of complicity" ("L'Homme revoke d'Albcrt Camus," La TableRonde 48 (December 1951): 106).

142

CHAPTER

SIX

tion can be termed an assassination only by a writer who wishes to depict Louis's death as a despicable, unjust, and cowardly act. Camus aggressively distanced himself from the Jacobin regicidal tradition he found so repellent and especially from Jaures's vision of a proud France "eternally regicide."7 In fact, his tone of respect for the unfortunate Louis XVI approaches the elegiac mood of monarchist accounts of the regicide: From the moment that he suspected or knew his fate, he seemed to identify . . . with his divine mission, so that there would be no possible doubt that the attempt on his person was aimed at the King-Christ . . . and not at the craven flesh of a mere man. . . . The calmness and perfection that this man of rather average sensibility displayed during his last moments, his indifference to everything of this world . . . give us the right to imagine that it was not Capet who died, but Louis appointed by divine right, and that with him, in a certain manner, died temporal Christianity. To emphasize this sacred bond, his confessor sustained him . . . by reminding him of his "resemblance" to the God of Sorrows.8 Referring to biblical and medieval concepts of monarchy, Camus recalled that traditionally the king had been the compassionate, merciful father of the desperate and dispossessed. "Like God Himself, he is the last recourse of the victims of misery and injustice. In principle, the people can appeal to the king for help against their oppressors. 'If the king only knew, if the Czar only knew . . .' was the frequently expressed sentiment of the French and Russian people during periods of great distress. It is true in France, at least, that when the monarchy did know, it often tried to defend the lower classes against the oppression of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie."9 Of course, the king's mercy and generosity depended on his will alone. His ability and freedom to act with compassion were known as "Grace," the fundamental and essentially arbitrary and discretionary principle of monarchical rule. If and when he wanted to, the king aided and protected his subjects. But no matter how benevolent he might have been, such a system, Camus hastened to add, could hardly be equated with justice, for "even though it is possible to appeal to the king, it is impossible to appeal against him." 10 Yet a king, who could bestow pardon and who incarnated God's mercy, appeared to 7

Jaures, Histoire socialists, vol. 4, pt. 2, 962. Camus, The Rebel, 120-21. 9 Ibid., 141. One of the principles of monarchy to which Bossuet referred was that "the prince must provide for the needs of his people. . . . His obligation to take care of the people is the basis for all the rights that sovereigns have over their subjects. This is why in times of extreme necessity the people have the right of recourse to their prince." As his biblical example, Bossuet cited Genesis 41:55: "When the whole country began to feel the famine, the people cried out to Pharaoh for bread" (Bossuet, Politique tiree des propres paroles de I'Ecriture sainte, 74-75). 10 Camus, The Rebel, 113. 8

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

143

Camus to wreak considerably less havoc on humanity than Jacobin or Soviet myths of infallible and absolute justice. Given the choice between absolute justice and the absolute grace of monarchy, arbitrary grace seemed less threatening and less potentially violent than the Revolution's desacralized principle of rational and merciless justice. Indeed, Camus's positive remarks about Louis XVI and monarchy are not signs of an improbable reactionary embracing of right-wing politics. Camus was never a monarchist and always felt a greater affinity for the political left than for the right. He dwelt on the king's death only to dramatize his point, his hard-line opposition to historicism and totalitarianism. He provocatively expressed nostalgia for a past that never existed, a theocratic regime in which political power was finite and the moral authority of God and king infinite. But it was always the myth, never the reality of monarchy, that attracted Camus. Monarchy was an issue only inasmuch as it was the mythic representation of a charitable, divinely inspired government founded on concepts of grace and mercy. The regicide signified for him the regrettable victory of historicism and ideology over morality. It was precisely those humane, nonideological values—mercy, compassion, love, happiness— that he would seek to reintroduce, with disquieting results, into the political crises of his times: the collaboration and the Algerian War.

Clemency, mercy, and grace had not always been part of Camus's vocabulary, for there was a time when he identified more with Jacobin demands for strict justice than with Girondin pleas for mercy. In the months following the liberation of France in 1944, he was adamant in his support for the punishment of collaborators, known as the "purge." At that time, radical revolutionary measures seemed entirely appropriate to him, and he summoned the most intransigent of the Jacobins: "This country does not need a Talleyrand. It needs a Saint-Just."11 Insisting on the necessity of remembering past crimes, he refused to consider amnesty or pardon: "Who would dare speak here about pardon? Who would ask us to forget? It is not hatred which will speak tomorrow, but justice itself, founded on memory."12 Camus was emphatic that France needed to deal in a stern and judicious manner with French men and women guilty of collaboration: "France carries within her, like a foreign body, a minority of men who yesterday made her suffer and who will continue to do so. These were men of treason and injustice. . . . 11 Camus, Combat, 11 September 1944, quoted in Emmett Varkcr,Albert Camus, The Artist in the Arena (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 67. 12 Camus, Combat, 30 August 1944, in his Essais, 259. Camus was convinced that there were "impossible pardons and necessary revolutions" {Combat, 21 October 1944, Essais, 1534).

144

C H A P T E R SIX

We have never called for mindless or convulsive vengeance. . . . We want France to keep her hands pure. But precisely because of that, we wish for prompt justice limited in time, . . .and then, . . . the rational forgetting of the errors that so many French people nevertheless committed." 13 This eminently reasonable and justifiable desire to confront the past and legally assign guilt and responsibility is oddly tempered with Romantic-sounding references to purity and to remembering as the condition for the evidently more important stage of forgetting and reconciliation. A few months later, Camus again wrote vehemently about the purge, but in those stern remarks too, one could discern latent ambivalence. In January 1945, he took issue with Francois Mauriac who was repelled by the policy of the purge and urged forgiveness. Deriding Mauriac's Christian charity, he declared that 1944 was a year to settle scores: Every time that, concerning the purge, I spoke about justice, Monsieur Mauriac spoke about charity. . . .Charity has nothing to do with this. . . . I see two deadly paths for our country, those of hatred and pardon. One is as disastrous as the other. I have no taste for hatred. But pardon is hardly better, and today, it would be an insult. As a man, I might admire Monsieur Mauriac for knowing how to love traitors, but as a citizen, I deplore it, because this love will result in a nation of traitors and mediocrities and a society of which we want no part.14 This passage, like the preceding one, is less resolute than it appears. It suggests that Camus had not fully resolved for himself the political and ethical issues involved, for he creates a distinction between the moral man, who might forgive his enemies, and the politically minded citizen, who demands their punishment. Although at that point in his life, he identified with the citizen, he nevertheless intimates that the moral man may occupy the higher ground. Indeed, just half a year later, he would decide that the purge was a misguided failure. What was the purge? Not to be confused with the summary executions of collaborators, which did also take place, the purge consisted in the legal trials of tens of thousands of people accused of collaboration. As Peter Novick points out in The Resistance Versus Vichy, the Resistance wanted a sweeping purge of collaborators that would cleanse and regenerate France; de Gaulle, on the other hand, stressed the need to forgive and forget, reminding people that "France needs all her sons." 15 As far as de Gaulle was concerned, the collaborators who should be tried constituted only "a tiny number of scoundrels" and "a handful of'miser-ables." Thus, from the begin 13

Camus, Combat, 25 October 1944, Essais, 1536-37. Camus, Combat, 11 January 1945, Essais, 285—87 (italics mine). 15 Peter Novick, The Resistance Versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 157. 14

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

145

ning, the lines were clearly drawn between those demanding punishment and those wishing immediate reconciliation. The trials presented many significant legal, procedural, and moral questions, such as whether or not Vichy had been the legal government of France, whether the prewar penal code would be used or whether retroactive laws needed to be enacted, whether a jury consisting of resistants could be impartial, whether an individual's acts or character would be on trial, and whether the basis of guilt would be legal or moral. The purge was made all the more difficult because the police and the judiciary themselves would have needed to be purged for the trials to be completely fair. In addition, it was a monumental task to establish 200 new courts, each with its own investigative and prosecuting staff.16 The trials dragged on until 1949. Approximately 124,751 cases were tried: 2,853 death sentences were handed down of which 767 were carried out; an additional 3,910 death sentences were made in absentia,. Also handed down were 38,266 prison and hard labor sentences, and 49,723 people were condemned to "national degradation," that is, the deprivation of their civil rights and property. But because of various amnesty laws, by 1951 only 4,000 people (out of almost 40,000) remained in prison; the rest had been released or pardoned. The purge ended with widespread frustration and disappointment. In general, the trials were criticized for "incoherence:" many important verdicts were capricious, disproportionately lenient or harsh. 17 But for all the imperfections, inconsistencies, and miscarriages of the purge, surely more egregious would have been a refusal to hold any trials at all.18 At the time of the Liberation, Camus had vigorously supported the purge, associating it with his expectations for the wondrous rebirth of France. In his Combat articles of 1944, over and over again he expressed the belief that the victorious, heroic, and fraternal Resistance movement would somehow be transformed into a political and moral revolution, 19 and inseparable 16

Ibid., pp. 140-58. Ibid., 164-66. is p e t e r Novick concludes: "We have seen the moral dilemmas, the material obstacles and political difficulties which faced the leaders of the Provisional Government in carrying out the purge. They dealt with them, I believe, as honestly, as conscientiously, and as well as any group of men could in the circumstances" (ibid., 189). 19 "No one can think that freedom torn from such convulsions will have the calm and tame features that some people enjoy imagining. This dreadful travail will give birth to a revolution" (Camus, Combat, 24 August 1944, Essais, 255—56). Camus scorned those people so lacking in imagination as to wish for nothing more than a return to bourgeois life: "[For] men who do not like to see the world change, . . . the liberation of France meant nothing more than the return to their traditional meals, their cars, and their evening tabloids. . . . But the Resistance asserts that we cannot go back, that everything remains to be done and that the struggle continues" (Camus, Combat, 1 December 1944, Essais, 1542). 17

146

C H A P T E R SIX

from that vision for the future of France was the necessity of the purge. In 1944, he wrote that the purge was "the only chance we have left to prevent France and the rest of Europe from becoming that desert of mediocrity and silence in which we are no longer willing to live."20 But Camus was evidently more interested in a purifying and rejuvenating revolution than in trials that would inevitably be divisive and prey to the fallible procedures inherent in any system of legal justice. Disgusted especially with one sentence he considered too harsh,21 he quickly decided that the purge was harmful to France. In March 1945, he diagnosed the purge as a symptom of the contagion of the Nazis' violence and hatred: "To the hatred of their persecutors, the victims responded with their own hatred. And the persecutors having departed, the French remain on their soil with their hatred in need of an object. They still look at one another with the remains of their anger."22 In August 1945, he concluded that the purge was a disaster. "There is no doubt that the purge in France is not only a failure but entirely discredited. The word purge was already sufficiently painful in itself. The thing has become odious."23 Camus determined that charity, not punishment, should be the order of the day. In 1948, referring to his earlier disagreement with Francois Mauriac, he said: "Concerning the specific subject of our controversy, Monsieur Mauriac was right, not I."24 In fact, in that same speech, he goes so far as to dismiss apologetically his earlier demand for retributive justice by attributing it to nothing more than "the difficult memory of two or three murdered friends."25 Amnesia was preferable to memory, and amnesty and reconciliation were definitely preferable to punishment and divisiveness. It is true that amnesty had historically been used after wars and uprisings to restore harmony. Victor Hugo pleaded for amnesty after the Franco-Prussian War, and, in 1834, after a revolutionary uprising in Lyons that spread to other cities, Lamartine had also sought national reconciliation and amnesty for the insurgents, arguing that one half of the nation could not try the other half.26 20

Camus, Combat, 25 October 1944, Essais, 1537. Camus was very disturbed that the fascist collaborator Albertini received fewer years at hard labor than did the pacifist journalist Rene Gerin. See his Combat article of 30 August 1945, Essais, 290. 22 Camus, Combat, 15 March 1945, Essais, 314. 23 Camus, Combat, 30 August 1945, Essais, 289. 24 Camus, "Fragments d'un expose fait au couvent des dominicains de Latour-Maubourg en 1948," in his Essais, 372. 25 Ibid., 371 (italics mine). 26 In his address to the Chambre des deputes, Lamartine argued: "What government, except for this one, was ever so foolhardy not to exercise . . . its right to grant amnesty ? We cannot try all the guilty people, for this would mean one half of the nation trying the other half. . . .With 21

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

147

Concerning the Nuremberg trials, Camus had made a comment similar to Lamartine's: "Jodl was hanged at Nuremberg. But 70 million inhabitants could not be hanged." 27 But neither in France nor in Germany was the issue hanging half or most of the population; it was a question of punishing collaborators and war criminals. The crimes they committed against innocent people cannot be compared to the politically motivated accusations against the insurgents of Lyons or the Communards. In America, amnesty has traditionally been used at the end of the country's wars, but its purpose has been to signal the end of a war, never to cancel or undermine retributive justice. President Thomas Jefferson pardoned deserters from the Continental Army. Abraham Lincoln pardoned Civil War deserters (on the condition that they return to their units and continue to fight) as well as supporters of the Confederacy.28 As Alexander Hamilton had recommended, it was useful to "restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth" by a "well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels."29 To serve truly the public interest, however, pardon must promote justice as well as harmony. In the case of the Civil War, pardon was a way to acknowledge that the punishment of soldiers who were guilty only of desertion would have been unjust desert; it was equally necessary to recognize that Confederate soldiers were not really traitors. 30 But soldiers who were guilty of crimes other than desertion were punished, as the Andersonville trial illustrated. As for President Carter's 1977 amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, he was recognizing that many of them had done not only what they sincerely believed but also what may have arguably been right; thus amnesty was a way of preventing the punishment of innocent people. 3 x As in the Civil War, soldiers accused of war crimes in Vietnam were put on trial. Amnesty was one voice, this country cries out for reconciliation, peace, and fraternity as another might cry out for vengeance. Could anything be more urgent than pity?" (De I'Amnistie, Discours a la Chambre desDeputes, 30 December 1834 [Paris: Gosselin], 6, 8, and 14). 27 Camus, Combat, 7 May 1949, Essais, 323. 28 See Moore, Pardons, 5 1 . 29 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (New York: Random House, n.d.), no. 74, 484. 30 Moore, Pardons, 2 0 1 - 2 . 31 Ibid., 8 1 - 8 2 . President Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974 was more problematic, since it was a preconviction blanket pardon for "all offenses that he had committed or may have committed." Kathleen Moore comments that "a blanket pardon always gives the appearance of injustice, looking more like an effort to cover up wrongdoing than an effort to match punishment with desert" (ibid., 220). Ford, however, justified the pardon by stressing, in language strongly reminiscent of Hamilton's in The Federalist, that it was important to restore tranquillity to the nation. In addition, Ford addressed the issue of desert when he deemed that Nixon had already been sufficiently punished: ' T h e prospects of such a trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office in the United States" (ibid., 8 0 - 8 1 ) .

148

CHAPTER

SIX

not intended to prevent retributive justice or thwart the punishment of those who were morally or legally deserving of punishment. It was punishment, however, that Camus could simply not countenance. In an article critical of the purge, he wrote that "punishment must be taken into consideration. And this horrible word has always repelled hearts that are in the least bit sensitive."32 Sensitive hearts, however, might be infinitely more repelled by crime and a judicial system that does not hold people accountable for their actions than by just punishment. Even more than Hugo, Camus was appalled by the thought of occupying the judge's bench. Although in that same article he worried that the purge was failing and that "a country that fails in its purification is on the way to failing in its renewal," he concluded by conceding that "we can see clearly that Monsieur Mauriac was right, we are going to need charity." In the name of charity—even after the most evil crimes ever committed against millions of innocent human beings—Camus would have dispensed with legal justice and even with the remorse and expiation of the culprits. This would indeed have been the reign of God the Father, not God the Judge. Pardon would have been as gratuitous, arbitrary, and nonrational as the gift of a king who touches and heals his subjects. Memories of the occupation, Vichy, and the Holocaust not withstanding, Camus stated that hearts poisoned by anger could be cured only through "that superior effort which will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice."33 Disparaging a rightful desire for the legal punishment of collaborators and war criminals by falsely labeling it an "appetite for hatred," Camus indicates that there is a higher form of justice than the rule of law. But what is this new justice? Like Michelet before him, Camus came to feel that unity was preferable to division and conflict. Justice was a means to achieve that unity—if justice were conceived, not in terms of legal procedure, but in terms of "solidarity" and compassion. "If justice has any meaning in this world, it signifies nothing other than the recognition of human solidarity; in its essence, it cannot be separated from compassion."34 Like Michelet, who located justice in the "excellence of the heart," Camus, too, describes justice as an emotional state. In a sentence that Michelet could well have written, Camus declares that "justice is simultaneously an idea and a warmth of the soul."35 Turning from justice to mercy, from remembering to forgetting, from the individual to the group, from division to unity, Camus felt the pull of the old Romantic desire for forgetting and for national reconciliation. He adopted the Romantic values of pity and fraternity that were central to nineteenth32 33 34 35

Camus, Camus, Camus, Camus,

Combat, 5 January 1 9 4 5 , Essais, 1550. "Defense de l'intelligence," Actudhs I, in his Essais, 3 1 5 . Reflexions sur la guillotine, in his Essais, 1052. Combat, 2 2 N o v e m b e r 1944, Essais, 2 6 8 .

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

149

century humanitarianism. Just as nineteenth-century royalist and republican thinkers responded to the deep political divisions created by regicide and Revolution with pleas for national reconciliation, Camus, too, reacted to the bitter division between supporters of Vichy, who took their legitimacy from France's counterrevolutionary tradition, and partisans of the Resistance, who undoubtedly were loyal to the Revolution, with similar hopes for national forgetting and reconciliation. Thus, just six months after the liberation of France and two months before the surrender of Germany, Camus saw fit to displace legal justice as well as any concept of desert with vague notions of "friendship"36 and "warmth of the soul." The position he arrived at was legally meaningless and politically and morally troubling. The primacy of pardon over justice was nevertheless the principle that Camus would defend a few years later in VHomme revoke, both in his remarks about the king's ability to bestow grace and in his allusions to Michelet's reconciliation of Justice and Grace. Indeed, Camus believed that his spiritual evolution mirrored that of Michelet. In the beginning of the Introduction to his Histoire de la Revolutionfrangaise,Michelet had distinguished between Justice and Grace, the warring principles of the Revolution and the monarchy. At the end of the Introduction, however, he reached a new emotional understanding that the two principles were really one. Camus also moved from faith in justice to a feeling that justice had to be tempered with mercy. But, whereas an optimistic Michelet had little doubt that postrevolutionary republican ideology could successfully incorporate the pity the Jacobins had banned, a century later, a disabused Camus had given up hope that the reigning ideologies of the twentieth century could meaningfully synthesize and incorporate justice and mercy. Not only were justice and mercy irreconcilable, the two were irremediably absent. Camus responded explicitly to the problem Michelet had raised in his Introduction: "How to live without grace—that is the question that dominates the nineteenth century. 'By justice,' answered all those who did not want to accept absolute nihilism. To the people who despaired of the kingdom of heaven, they promised the kingdom of men. . . . The question of the twentieth century . . . which tortures the contemporary world—has gradually been specified: how to live without grace and without justice." 37 The question that Camus poses concerning the absence of justice in the modern world is meaningful only ifjustice is conceived in terms of the universal protection of natural or human rights. But contrary to Camus's intimation, the violation of those rights is unique neither to the twentieth century nor to communist regimes; on the contrary, it was everywhere to be found even during the 36 37

Camus, "Defense de intelligence," 15 March 1945, Essms, 314, 315, and 316. Camus, The Rebel, 225.

150

CHAPTER

SIX

reign of monarchical Grace, before the supposedly calamitous and pivotal crime of regicide.

The quest to reconcile justice and mercy and ethics and politics would preoccupy Camus for the rest of his life. In his novel, LaPeste, ideology and politics yield to compassion for the suffering of others, to the happiness of the individual, and to the solidarity of the group. As in his writings about the purge, in LaPeste, politics fade into the background as collaborators and Nazis disappear. There is no rush to judgment because there is no one to judge: fascism is portrayed in terms of a nonideological and nonhuman plague. No one is guilty; only victims exist. Again, the only response to a national crisis is charity and compassion. The narrator-protagonist of La Peste, Doctor Rieux, discovers the humanitarian values of pity, fraternity, and love literally under the ambiguous shadow of a dusty and dirty statue of the Republic, a symbol of politics, ideology, and Revolution. His rhetorical adversary is the journalist, Raymond Rambert, who is in Oran to write about the health conditions of the Arabs and who hopes to interview Rieux. But Rieux insists that Rambert print all or nothing of what he, Rieux, has to say. "You speak the language of Saint-Just," Rambert observes with a combination of surprise and dismay.38 Rieux, as if emulating Saint-Just, refuses any compromise or collaboration with injustice. Later, Rambert comes back to Rieux with a second request: a permit, certifying that he is not infected with the plague, which would enable him to leave Algeria and join his girlfriend in France. Rieux declines on the grounds that he has no choice but to obey the law. Rambert accuses him of speaking the language of abstraction and reason, and, at this moment, Rieux looks up at the statue of the Republic, seeking approval for his unyielding stance. After a visit to a dying girl whose mother cries out "Doctor, have pity!," Rieux still does not admit the primacy of pity: "Of course he had pity. But that hardly got you anywhere. . . . One tires of pity when pity is useless."39 Only during a crucial conversation with Rambert and Tarrou does Rieux come to realize that human values—love, happiness, pity, compassion—far outweigh ideology. Camus's spokesman is Rambert who questions Tarrou's commitment to an ideology of abstractions: "You are capable of dying for an idea; that much is obvious. But I'm fed up with people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism. It's easy, and I've learned that it's murderous. What interests me is the idea of people living and dying for what they love."40 Love for other individuals and the happiness of the individual supersede 38 39 40

Albert Camus, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 19. Ibid., 8 6 - 8 7 . Ibid., 1 5 0 - 5 1 .

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

151

ideology and moral absolutes. Although LaPeste concerns the solidarity of a community bound together in common suffering, there is, in fact, no collective hero, only individuals struggling to come to grips with the plague and with their destinies. As Rambert reminds Rieux, 'The public good is made up of the happiness of each person." 41 So important is the individual for Camus, that the happiness of the individual almost transcends ethical concerns. Camus addresses this problem in a conversation between Rieux and Rambert, who announces his decision to stay in Oran and not return to his girlfriend in France. "Doctor," Rambert said, "I'm not leaving. I want to stay with you." . . . "And her?" Rambert said that he had thought about it, that he still believed what he had always believed, but that if he left, he would be ashamed. . . . Rieux said in a clear voice that that was stupid and that there was nothing to be ashamed about in preferring happiness. "Yes," Rambert said. "But I might be ashamed to be happy all by myself."42 Elsewhere in the novel it is clear that, as Maurice Wcyembergh notes, moments of happiness, even brief and fleeting ones, are necessary to remind one of one's humanity and to help one endure the burden of history. In one of the crucial last scenes in La Peste, Rieux does not hesitate to disregard the law and use his pass to leave the city of the plague and swim in the forbidden sea with Tarrou. 43 Camus could never reconcile personal happiness, ethics, and political engagement, and perhaps this irresoluble tension explains in part his final decision to abstain from political action, signs of which were already present in his postwar writings. One can trace the stages of his postwar intellectual and spiritual itinerary as he passed from passionate revolutionary to moderate reformer and then to arbiter and "voice of reason," a position that was barely distinguishable from a withdrawal from politics. In the immediate postwar era, Camus was a committed revolutionary. He was, however, never specific about the nature of this revolution, although he would not have wanted it to follow the paradigm of 1789-94 or be communist-inspired. He described it in vague, apolitical terms: "The Paris that is fighting tonight intends to command tomorrow. Not for power, but for justice; not for politics, but for ethics; not for the domination of France, but for her grandeur." 44 He even attributes to France the messianic mission of exporting this revolution to the rest of Europe. 45 Whether or not this 41

Ibid., 85. « Ibid., 190. 43 See Maurice Weyembergh, "Revolte et ressentiment," in La Revoke en question, ed. R. Gay-Crosier (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1985), 82n. 44 Camus, Combat, 24 August 1944, Essais, 256. 45 "France has a European mission that she cannot elude, because she is the most representative of all the European nations" (Albert Camus, "Remarques sur la politique internationale," in his Essais, 1573).

152

CHAPTER

SIX

revolution would require violence was not entirely clear. In September 1944, he issued the menacing warning that "revolution does not necessarily require the guillotine and machine guns; it requires machine guns when necessary."46 Camus's career as a revolutionary was not a long one. By 1946, when he wrote Ni Victimes ni bourreaux, he had disavowed interest in any kind of political revolution: "1789 and 1917 are still dates, but they are no longer examples." 47 He discovered that, in the twentieth century, unbridled political violence along with Stalinism made the idea of revolution an alternative far less appealing than the status quo. Ideologies had simply all become murderous, and the notion of a humanitarian revolution was a contradiction in terms. The philanthropic proposal to transform the world called for action, but action would eventually include murder. The oppressed, virtuous masses, resorting to violent means of liberation, become themselves the new tyrants. Like Hugo, Camus believed that "man crushing the monster is monstrous." 48 Although Hugo warned that violent revolt was politically and morally doomed, he surely did not repudiate all revolutions; indeed, revolution was part of his vision of historical progress. 49 Camus, on the other hand, transforms Hugo's warning against violence in revolution into an irrefutable argument against all revolutions, an antirevolutionary dogma. On the basis of past revolutions (from which he excludes the American Revolution), he purports to discover that the essential law of revolution is murder and terror. Eliminating the American Revolution from the history of revolution permits him to conclude that all revolutions are violent and counterproductive and to locate the evil and oppressive consequences of revolution in the communist world. This, in fact, was the political agenda of L'Homme revoke. Camus's denunciation of political violence was, as his critics have pointed out, selective. Although in L'Homme revoke he takes a moral stand against all violence, he was politically opposed to state violence that was justified by a totalitarian "philosophy of history." Cruise O'Brien noted that Camus did not consider the question of violence used to defend the status quo, except where the status quo still asserted a legitimacy based on revolution. 50 Thus Camus renounced the concept of revolution in favor of a sincere if vague commitment to reform and a deep commitment to his concept of revoke, which meant a refusal to accept the absurd injustice of the human condition. Unlike Edmund Burke, it was not the tumultuous disorder of revolution 46

Camus, Combat, 19 September 1944, Essais, 1527. Camus, Ni Victimes ni bourreaux, in his Essais, 339. 48 Hugo, Le Verso de la page, 262. 49 For Hugo, the French Revolution was "a furnace, but also a forge. In this vat in which the Terror seethed, progress was fermenting" (Quatrevingt-Treize, 167). 50 Conor Cruise O'Brien, Camus (Glasgow: Fontana, 1970), 59. 47

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

153

that he feared or the legitimacy of tradition that he prized; it was rather political violence and communism that he loathed and History itself that he opposed. History, Camus repeated throughout L'Homme revoke, consists only in violence and nihilism. He considered history so dangerous and antipathetic that, only with the greatest reluctance, would he admit that history was part of the human condition: "It is true . . . that we cannot escape from history, for we are buried in it up to our necks. But within history we can still strive to preserve that part of us that it does not own." 51 Camus writes about history strangely, as if it were some bulky monolithic force that, by itself, has the ability to imprison, bury, control, and possess people. A calmer and more rational approach would view history as complex and multidimensional, recognizing the vast range of its intellectual, economic, political, and social features. But Camus preferred to erect a barricade between people and History, as if events were not determined by human agents and as if the pursuit of happiness could and should take place outside of and in opposition to social reality. In his famous open letter to Camus, Sartre exposed Camus's fundamental dislike of history, politics, and engagement, pointing to Camus's deep resentment at having been forced into the bloody and morally compromising historical arena.52 Camus, however, could not help feeling that "History" was man's temporal prison and that, even if man could not escape from it, he should attempt to go beyond it: "These times are ours, how can we disavow them? Our history may be our hell, but we cannot turn away. This horror cannot be eluded; it must be borne so that it can be transcended."53 It is not clear what he meant by "transcending" history.54 Perhaps he placed individual happiness above a life lived within history.55 Or perhaps, drawn to the transcendent ethical principles that he believed had disappeared from the earth with the execution of Louis XVI and the dawn of historicism, he had in mind a 51

C a m u s , Ni Victimes ni bourreaux, Essais, 3 5 1 . In his insightful letter t o C a m u s concerning L'Homme revoke, Sartre w r o t e : "In short, you choose t o remain in o u r illustrious classical tradition that, since Descartes and with the exception of Pascal, is entirely hostile t o history. . . .You accused the Germans of having wrested you away from your metaphysical struggles, constraining you t o participate in man's temporal battles: 'For years you have been trying t o enlist me in History . . . .' A n d a few lines later: 'You have achieved your aim, we have entered History"' (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Reponse a C a m u s , " Les Temps Modemes 8, n o . 8 2 [August 1 9 5 2 ] : 3 4 7 - 4 8 ) . 53 C a m u s , L'Homme revolte (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 2 9 4 (my translation). 54 O n e could attempt t o "revolt" against History, b u t since it is a part o f the h u m a n condition, revolt against it can be n o m o r e successful than revolt against death. "The rebel, far from making an absolute of history, rejects it and disputes it, in the name of a concept that he has of his o w n nature. H e refuses his condition, a n d his condition, t o a large extent, is historical" (Camus, The Rebel, 2 8 9 ) . 52

55 "There is history, and there is something else, simple happiness, delight in other people, beauteous n a t u r e " (Camus, ActuellesI, Essais, 368).

154

C H A P T E R SIX

life lived according to a morality that he placed in opposition to history: "History is controlled by the law of expediency. . . . In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence. . . . The choice will remain open between grace and history, God or the sword." 56 Certainly he felt that political ethics were a contradiction in terms. Camus would not have been comfortable with Montaigne's and Max Weber's vision of the pragmatically minded, although ethically aware, politician. In his play, Les Justes (1950) and in his chapter on these "fastidious assassins" in UHomme revoke, he suggests that a politician's dolorous knowledge of the moral compromises he makes for the public good is not sufficient atonement for those acts. Camus's scrupulous Russian terrorists paradoxically believe that political murder is both "necessary and inexcusable," 57 and they are fully prepared to accept the consequences of their actions by giving up their own lives. Martyrdom, self-sacrifice, ethical purity, fraternity: all the nineteenth-century humanitarian and nationalist myths are resuscitated in ascetic revolutionary form. 58 Walzer explains how suicide may be an ethical solution to the problem of the politicians's "dirty hands," 59 but it is nevertheless unlikely that the prospect of self-destruction will entice people into the vocation of politics. Even Camus had doubts about this purist "sacrificial" alternative to political ethics, for, in the final act 56

Camus, The Rebel, 287. Ibid., 169. 58 When one of the terrorists, Dora, expresses reservations about their planned assassination because she feels that the victim, the Grand Duke, is still a human being, another terrorist, Kaliaev, answers: "I am not killing him. I am killing a despotic government." Kaliaev's confusion of a human being with a symbolic personage whose role is t o represent a government recalls an issue posed by the regicide. Perhaps Camus wished to suggest that a founding act of regicide is permissible if the perpetrators atone for this crime by giving u p their own lives. Sacrificial victim and "sacrifiers" would thus all die, paying the price for their transgressions and crimes. Camus himself writes that these terrorists are nostalgic for the "supreme sacrifice" (Camus, The Rebel, 168). 59 Walzer argues that the problem Camus presents in Les Justes resembles that of civil disobedience. In both cases "men violate a set of rules, go beyond a moral or legal limit, in order to d o what they believe they should do. At the same time, they acknowledge their responsibility for the violation [of a set of rules] by accepting punishment or doing penance." Whereas, however, in cases of civil disobedience, the state provides the punishment, the "just assassins" will punish themselves in expiation for their crime. They die happy and supposedly with clean hands. For Walzer, this solution is preferable to the one proposed by Max Weber because the only control over the crimes committed by Weber's tragic hero is his own capacity for suffering. Camus's political activists, on the other hand, have not lost sight of their moral code, even when they have had to set it aside. For my part, I wonder whether the just assassins really die with clean hands. Although Camus asserts that "a life is paid for by another life" and that "to die . . . cancels out both the guilt and the crime itselP' (Camus, The Rebel, 169 and 171) and although the terrorists fulfill their own death wishes, their deaths do nothing t o erase the deaths they caused. See Michael Walzer, "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands," in Private and Public Ethics, ed. Donald Jones (New York: The Mellen Press, 1978), 1 1 8 - 1 9 . 57

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

155

of Les Justes, Dora alludes to the inability of the terrorists to accept the contradictions inherent in a mature individual's political and moral life: "It's so much easier to die from one's inner conflicts than to live with them." Yet, in L'Homme revoke Camus portrays their sacrificial deaths as a means to engage in as well as transcend history, the synthesis of revolutionary action and spiritual perfection.60 Camus, too, wished to avoid moral compromises in politics. He felt strongly that political action had become so dangerously ambiguous and morally compromising that one could behave ethically not in acting but only in defending and protecting life. This was the position he would take until the end of his life. He decided that the logical extension of his desire to protect human life would be through opposition to the death penalty. United fraternal opposition to premeditated murder committed by a state appeared to be a moral stance in a world of ideologies that demanded human sacrifice and political systems that legitimized death. He joined Arthur Koestlcr, Ignazio Silone, and others in an international humanitarian protest against capital punishment, which he considered an especially repellent act of state because it alone undermined the one clear form of human solidarity, solidarity against death. 61 The movement against capital punishment appealed to Camus's desire to be neither victim nor executioner, his nostalgia for ethical purity, his distaste for the ambiguities and compromises of politics and legal justice, and his fascination with the idea of revolt against death. Here was political engagement for an unassailable, virtually abstract cause; it was ideologically untroublesome, morally righteous and unambiguous, universal in its appeal, and unrelated to any particular social context. The adversary was not colonialism, totalitarianism, capitalism, poverty, racism, or anti-Semitism, but rather Death. There would be no dirty hands, no compromises, and no complex social reality to confront. Disgusted with political ideology and unwilling to make moral compromises, Camus came to believe that France could do without political revolution and without Saint-Just. Repudiating revolution, he called himself "an eternal Girondin," associating political idealism, moderation, and respect for human life with the Girondin opposition. In 1948, he wrote: "In the world of death sentences which is ours, it is we artists who speak for something in us that refuses to die. . . . And it is this that makes us, the eternal Girondins, the target of the threats and violence of our Jacobins."62 Camus now identified with the moderates of the Revolution, the defenders of Louis XVI, who, like the king, also became the Revolution's victims. But, in truth, Camus was not a Girondin revolutionary: in the context of twentieth60 "The terrorists, while simultaneously affirming the world of men, place themselves above this world" (Camus, The Rebel, 172). 61 Camus, Reflexions sur la guillotine, Essais, 1056. 62 Camus, Actuelles I, Essais, 406.

156

C H A P T E R SIX

century politics, he was a counterrevolutionary—but a counterrevolutionary who would oppose the violence of revolution and the moral compromises of politics with vague and idealistic references to happiness and justice. Unwilling to accept Montaigne's and Weber's visions of the moral compromises inherent in the vocation of politics, Camus was prepared to sacrifice political power for ethical purity; no action, he decided, was preferable to immoral action: "In all events, France must choose the path of rationality over power politics. Today the choice must be made between taking action that is probably ineffective or action that is assuredly criminal. It seems to me that the choice is not difficult."63 Through the personage ofTarrou in La Peste, he demonstrated the irreconcilability of ethics and politics, for Tarrou, aspiring to sainthood, chooses exile from the world of history and politics: "Once I decided to have no part in killing, I condemned myself to permanent exile. Other people will have to make history."64

Ten years later, during the Algerian war, Camus decided not to make history. His antipathy for violence, his ethical stance, and his strong emotional ties to Algeria brought forth so many contradictions that the situation in Algeria became a political, moral, and personal quagmire for him. In 1958, he announced his voluntary withdrawal from the political debate: "I decided to take no further part in the constant polemics that had no result other than to harden the uncompromising points of view at loggerheads in Algeria and to split even wider a France already poisoned by hatred and factions."65 He added that he was personally "interested only in the actions that here and now can spare useless bloodshed." 66 In his writings he was as concerned with the ethical conduct of all sides involved in the conflict as with the political future of Algeria. His disgust with war and terror and his commitment to the protection of the innocent seemed to make passive resistance the only moral form of political involvement. The reference to Gandhi was inevitable: "Gandhi proved that it is possible to fight for one's people and win without for a moment losing the world's respect."67 Having tortuously examined the moral shortcomings and political failures of all factions, Camus renounced active participation and offered himself as a voice of reason. As an intellectual, he could best contribute to the 63

Combat, 7 May 1947,ActuellesI, Essais, 325. Camus, La Peste, 2 2 8 - 2 9 . 65 Camus, Chroniques algerimnes, Actuelles III, in his Essais, 891—92. 66 Ibid., 892. "Even those who are fed up with morality ought to realize that it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them" (ibid., 893). 67 Ibid., 894. 64

CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI

157

Algerian situation by "clarifying definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and calm fanaticisms."68 Although Camus abstained from making an unambiguous partisan declaration, his political position, while not devoid of contradictions, was clear: he supported a French-imposed solution to the war in Algeria and he supported nonviolence. Camus's commitment to the survival of the French community in Algeria and his refusal to countenance Algerian independence have compromised his stature as a political thinker. Only in 1958 did he finally denounce colonialism as an institution, and, even when he came to this conclusion, he still would not entertain the possibility of complete Algerian separation from France; Algerian independence, he wrote, "is a purely emotional slogan." 69 Even more problematic and unacceptable was his remark that the presence of his mother in Algeria was sufficient to counterbalance for him the entire colonial situation: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." 70 His strong personal feelings and emotional bonds to Algeria would seem to indicate the limits of his ability to speak the "language of reason" that he hoped he could. 71 But perhaps, as Walzer suggests, detachment is not necessarily the touchstone of important social criticism. Indeed, Camus's connectedness, his personal loyalty to the French community in Algeria and to his family, hardly disqualify him as a social critic, for, as Walzer aptly notes, Camus was "as much a man of honor as a man of principle, and honor begins with personal loyalty, not with ideological commitment." 72 Embodying the conflicts and the anguish of the situation, Camus was not tempted to reduce it to ideological formulas. As in La Peste and L'Homme revoke, in his writings on Algeria, he attempted to defend human values against violence and the tide of ideologies. Yet, what makes Camus's writings about Algeria problematic may not be his connectedness to the situation in Algeria, which he himself alluded to as a personal tragedy,73 but rather the contradictions in his politics and the 6X

Ibid., 899. Camus, "Algerie 1958," Actuelhs III, in his Essais, 1012. 70 Camus, interview in Stockholm, 14 December 1957, in his Essais, 1883. Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his book on Camus, drew my attention to this quotation. 71 Camus, Chroniques edgeriennes, Avant Propos, Essais, 9 0 0 . 72 Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 150. Defending Camus against charges of particularism in his attachment t o French Algeria, Walzer makes the interesting argument that Camus's universalism was constructed out of repeated particularities, through "reiteration, n o t abstraction" (Walzer, The Company of Critics, 146). Indeed, it is true that Camus was committed n o t just to justice for the European community, but also t o some form—however imperfect—of self-determination for Algerian Arabs: "The 'French reality' cannot be eliminated from Algeria, and the dream of France's sudden vanishing is puerile. But, inversely, there is n o reason why nine million Arabs should live in their native land as invisible men: the dream of the Arab mass expunged forever, voiceless and submissive, is also a delusion" (Camus, Chroniques algeriennes, Essais, 9 6 3 - 6 4 ) . 73 Ibid., 9 9 2 . 69

158

C H A P T E R SIX