Pave: "La justice prompte, sévère, inflexible"

Le jour 341 de Sarko

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

William Wordsworth (1770-1850),
once poet laureate of England and
enthusiast of the French Revolution,
The Friend (1805), 4-8.

The French Revolution is oft celebrated as the first big noise of modernity. [Pause.] In many respects this is -- sadly -- true. Pave correspondent Hervé sent us the below "First Republics" counterpoint quotations, which got us thinking about the French Revolution.

[Hat tip: Hervé]

America has made do with its one Republic, its one establishing constitution.

France has been tinkering with her Republic from the get-go -- there have been five Republics, interpolated with two empires, various communes, syndicalism, and a tributary autocracy (that Vichy thing).

All of the above sanctioned in law by a dozen plus constitutions. Here, from our comments of January 17, 2004:

The French have had between 12-15 constitutions, depending on how you sort them out, since the 1789 proclamation of the Constituent Assemblée constituante (1791 [the First Republic was proclaimed in 1792], 1793, 1795, 1799, 1802 [La Constitution du 16 Thermidor An X, proclaiming Napoléon Bonaparte Premier consul à vie], 1804 [Senatus-Consulte Organique du 28 Floreal An XII, establishing the emperor], 1848 [establishing the Second Republic], 1852 establishing the Second Empire], 1875 [formalizing the Third Republic], 1945 [establishing a French provisional government], 1946 [establishing the Fourth Republic], and 1958 [establishing the Fifth Republic]).

In addition there have been two constitutional charters (1814, 1830) and sandwiched between them a constitutional act regularizing imperial rule (1815).

The Vichy government was legally established under the Third Republic's governing constitution by Constitutional Act No.2 of 07.11.40, Article II of which effectively junked the establishing document. The Vichy government was then regularized by Constitutional Act No.7 0f 01.27.41.

The French constitution then is not so much a document of establishing and perduring national principles of government as a catch-up codification of the contemporary politics in play.

The George Washington quote is from his letter to the Annual Meeting of Quakers, 1789, affirming freedom of religion, some 13 years before Thomas Jefferson famously affirmed the separation of church and state, and 126 years before the French state extended the same courtesy in law to its citizens. By way of contrast, three years after freedom of religion was enshrined in the United States Constitution, Robespierre invented a state religion for Republican France (le culte à l'Être Suprême) and presided over its first (and only) national celebration (la fête de l'Être suprême, June 8, 1794).

The Robespierre quote is from an address to the National Convention on February 5, 1794, and continues:

It is said that terror is the strength of despotic government. Does ours then resemble the one with which the satellites of tyranny are armed? Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects through terror; he is right as a despot. Subdue the enemies of liberty through terror and you will be right as founders of the Republic. The government of revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

To read this rationalization is astonishing. Terror is not some unfortunate and passing accident of government. It is the rightful and ongoing business of a vigilant government. Astonishing, but Robespierre's thinking is deeply stained into the psyche of modern statism, where the abstracted state reaffirms itself by means of forever vanquishing an opposition, real, imagined, or invented.

There is no pretending what Robespierre was about. John Kekes picks up our story at City Journal:

Leading the betrayal of the Revolution’s initial ideals and its transformation into a murderous ideological tyranny was Maximilien Robespierre, a monster who set up a system expressly aimed at killing thousands of innocents. He knew exactly what he was doing, meant to do it, and believed he was right to do it. He is the prototype of a particularly odious kind of evildoer: the ideologue who believes that reason and morality are on the side of his butcheries. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are of the same mold. They are the characteristic scourges of humanity in modern times, but Robespierre has a good claim to being the first.

Robespierre:

There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man.

The vaunted Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen proved to be no protection for the people's party against the twitchy justice of a state eternally beset by eternal enemies. For Robespierre the Declaration was not a bill of inviolable rights, it was a supererogatory dispensation of the state, dispensable at the convenience of the law, which was, of course, whatever Robespierre thought it was on any particular day, at any particular waking moment.

The inconsistency between the Declaration, providing the basis of the constitutional guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, and the actual policies that Robespierre dictated and that his followers enforced, was so blatant as to require an explanation. This Robespierre provided in a speech in December 1793.

Under a constitutional regime little is needed but to protect the individual citizen against abuse of power by the government; but under a revolutionary regime the government has to defend itself against all the factions which attack it; and in this fight for life only good citizens deserve public protection, and the punishment of the people’s enemies is death. [The revolutionary regime] must be as terrible to the wicked as it is favorable to the good.

There was, therefore, no inconsistency between the Declaration and the Terror. Robespierre:

The Declaration of Rights offers no safeguard to conspirators who have tried to destroy it.

The Declaration guided the constitutional regime whose establishment was the ultimate aim. The Terror was merely the means to it, forced on the revolutionary regime by enemies who prevented the realization of the constitutional regime.

This piece of sophistry was then new, but to those who look back on the twentieth century it is depressingly familiar from the use that many murderous regimes have made of it.

Robespierrian terror is terror without flinches, without tears. Olympian in its remove, necessary beyond the claims of justice. [Pause.] Beyond the very citizenry it is said to serve. Beyond the beyond. Unquestionable, unchallengeable, the ready excuse of the enterprising thug-turned-politico.

Every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a "a liberator"; murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people.

Paul Johnson,
journalist, historian, speechwriter, author,
and Medal of Freedom recipient, remarking on
the enduring outcomes of the Robespierrian Republic
Modern Times
(New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001 rev. ed.)

ROBESPIERRE, UNE STATION DU MÉTRO DE PARIS
Murderous Bossling Honored To This Day In France,
Emulated By Murderous Bosslings Everywhere
[Picture credit: Damien Boilley]

Domestic carnage now filled the whole year
With feast-days; old men from the chimney-nook,
The maiden from the bosom of her love,
The mother from the cradle of her babe,
The warrior from the field--all perished, all--
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850),
his reformed opinion of the French Revolution
The Prelude; Book The Tenth; Residence In France
(1799-1805), 356-363.

PFFT (What is this?): French terror without tears 5 | Rayonnement français 0

Posted by Damian at April 20, 2008 11:00 PM