Abstract
The French Revolution not only transformed political institutions and foundations of political right but also introduced new formations of political violence. From the storming of the Bastille through the execution of Louis XVI to the repeated uprisings of the Parisian working class, the civil war in the Vendée, the September massacres, the Terror, and the Napoleonic Wars, entirely new categories of violence were established during the revolutionary period. The political and moral valence of these formations of violence as well as their historical precursors and afterlives have, as is well-known, been major topics of controversy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, central not only to historical scholarship but also to the struggle between the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary traditions of modern political thought.
It is here, in the context of the French Revolution, that Kevin Duong’s The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France sets in. Examining in particular the debates around the trial and execution of the king, Duong argues that in the crucible of the revolution a new “image” of violence was forged (2). It is an image of popular rather than sovereign, institutional, or legal violence, and as such it expresses the agency of the people—a people no longer chained to royal or aristocratic orders and representations but now in search of a form of democratic agency. This image of violence has a redemptive and regenerative quality, because it promises to “incarnate” the people as a collective moral body and to establish the moral bases of democratic politics (12).
In four superbly researched and richly textured chapters, Duong argues that this image of popular redemptive violence was central to democratic politics in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century France. Following a substantive introduction, each of the four chapters examines an episode in the struggle for democracy in France. Chapter 1 begins with the Jacobins’ theorization of the regicide and their response to the problem of how to replace the transcendental assurance of social unity represented by the king’s two bodies. Chapter 2 discusses the conquest of Algeria during the July monarchy (1830–1848), focusing in particular on Tocqueville’s Algerian writings and his endorsement and exoneration of the slaughters perpetrated by the French colonial army. Chapter 3 turns to the Paris Commune and highlights the regenerative figure of the people in arms. Finally, chapter 4 examines the theoretical debates in the run-up to WWI, concentrating on Georges Sorel and his intellectual milieu. Each of these four skillfully crafted chapters seamlessly incorporates a wealth of historical material, textual exegesis, and conceptual argument, which makes for rewarding and pleasurable reading. The book closes with a brief conclusion that offers a contemporary gloss on the theoretical stakes by insisting that the fundamental problem that redemptive violence sought to answer continues to plague contemporary democracies.
Redemptive violence is a controversial topic, and Duong faces an uphill struggle against dominant contemporary sensibilities, which tend to recoil from the idea that violence could be productive of anything but chaos and fear. One late-twentieth-century intellectual trend in particular has placed significant blinders on our capacity to come to terms with the diverse schemas of political violence: anti-totalitarianism. A theoretical and historical formation that emerged in the wake of François Furet’s work on the French Revolution and that of Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Rosanvallon on republicanism and democracy, anti-totalitarianism sees in the Jacobins the kernel of twentieth-century fascism and suspects that behind every invocation of “the people,” a Gulag may be hiding. Among the many strengths of Duong’s book is its refusal of the anti-totalitarian histrionics about violence, in particular the association of all kinds of popular protest, riots, and violence with totalitarian and fascist movements and ideologies.
What, then, is redemptive violence in nineteenth-century France? To answer that question, it is best to begin with the problem to which redemptive violence professes to offer a solution. That problem is social cohesion. Duong argues that in nineteenth-century France, popular redemptive violence was positioned as a force that could create the social bond in an abstract society of equals. In such a society, characterized by the principles of individual liberty and formal equality (and one should probably add competition, commodification, and exploitation), the sources of solidarity, virtue, fraternity, and belonging are no longer readily apparent. Insofar as modern social disintegration undermines the customary moral foundations of social and political life, it generates a normative deficit at the heart of the social body. Redemptive violence’s conceit, according to Duong, is that it can compensate for that deficit by producing a new type of social bond. This redemptive dimension of violence is perhaps most clearly exemplified in the trial and execution of the former king in 1792–93, where the National Convention faced the problem of how to consummate the historical rupture. The Jacobin response was to present Louis’s execution not only as regicide but to invest it symbolically with the simultaneous destruction of the sources of royal authority and the emergence of the people as a collective actor.
The extensive documentation of the debates preceding the trial and execution of the king provide Duong with a trove of material. Yet it is ironic that the episode of violence that is invoked as a paradigmatic case of popular agency is narrated as an intra-elite debate in the Convention with the pressure from the militant sans-culottes playing only a subsidiary role. What was the role of the Parisian plebs in the formation of this democratic agency, and why do its exploits, whether noble or ignoble, not carry more weight in Duong’s rendition? Is there a plebeian dimension to redemptive violence, or is this image of violence predominantly conjured by elites (with the exception of the Paris Commune)? If redemptive violence is a figure for regeneration in which the people emerge as an actor, I would have liked to learn more about how that popular agency is constituted at each moment, whom it includes and excludes, and who is in a position of authority to speak on its behalf or represent it.
The rich allegorical dimension renders the regicide a persuasive case for a type of violence that is imagined to generate a new social bond. But it is less obvious to me that the episodes at the heart of the other chapters (Algeria, the Paris Commune, the debates preceding the Great War) fall into the same category. Take the case of the French atrocities in Algeria under Governor-General Thomas Robert Bugeaud in the early 1840s, which the book discusses in chapter 2. In response to the guerilla strategies pursued by Abd el-Kader’s insurrection, the French developed a tactic of military raids that they called “razzia.” Carried out by rapidly moving cavalry columns, these raids consisted of punitive strikes on villages that terrorized the local population, involved killing and imprisoning civilians, looting supplies, livestock, and valuables. Duong argues that these colonial war crimes are contrived as redemptive by none other than Alexis de Tocqueville. In the Tocqueville literature, one of the major controversies centers on how Tocqueville’s defense of the French atrocities in Algeria can be reconciled with his liberal commitments. For Duong, the reconciliation of these ostensibly conflicting positions hinges on the category of national glory, which Tocqueville regarded as an antidote to individualism, atomization, and social disintegration. To fancy the brutal tactics of Bugeaud in Algeria as an instance of national glory, the conquest of Algeria had to be transposed into a defensive war against native society, made necessary by the intransigence of the Algerian resistance nourished by their “half-savage” (Tocqueville’s term) culture (75). Overall, the chapter makes a compelling case for how to interpret Tocqueville’s Algerian writings, yet in comparison to the regicide five decades prior, the redemptive function of violence seems to have changed gear. Duong suggests that the regenerative function of the atrocities in Algeria was contained in the capacity to inspire national chauvinism in France (80). But if that is the case, does the actual violence do any of the regenerative work anymore? Or is it rather nationalism and colonial ideology that are performing the redemptive function, with violence relegated to a tangential role? In view of the intricate liturgy of royal power, it makes sense that the particular script according to which Louis XVI was tried and executed is of importance for the symbolic constitution of post-monarchic republican and democratic authority, yet does the same hold for the modalities of violence waged against the Algerian population? In view of these questions and of the point I raised above regarding the relation between elite and popular violence in the French Revolution, it might be fruitful to further differentiate between various formations of redemptive violence in terms of the actors, audiences, and narratives.
Similar questions might be asked in regard to chapters 3 and 4, which put forward thought-provoking and controversial arguments about the increasing importance of violence in two separate contexts: socialist revolutionary strategy (chapter 3) and moral regeneration in the run-up to WWI (chapter 4). Chapter 3 interprets the socialist response to 1848 as a transition from ballots to bullets. According to Duong, the lessons socialists drew from the failure of the Second French Republic and its denouement in Louis-Napoléon’s coup of 1851 was a turn away from electoral democracy and toward armed resistance, culminating in the Paris Commune of 1871. In the two decades following 1848, socialists replaced redemption through the ballot with redemption through violence. Thus for the Communards, the “true people were not ‘the electorate’ but ‘the people in arms’” (86). As Duong argues in chapter 4, the same figure of the people in arms also shaped the increasing valorization of violence, both among the saber-rattling that preceded the Great War and in the theorization of proletarian violence by Georges Sorel.
The topos of redemptive violence with its attendant metaphors of rebirth and regeneration is no doubt written all over this period. And yet, given the widely differing moral and political visions animating these movements, one is left to wonder whether “redemption” can adequately capture the conflicting goals pursued in this era. As Duong acknowledges early on, redemptive violence is neither a specifically French conceit nor an idea that originated in the late eighteenth century. Rather, it is a theological category, which according to Duong is secularized and democratized in the French Revolution and thereby transformed from an “act of providential agency” to that of “the collective agency of a society capable of ruling itself” (3). What is specific to the French context in the long nineteenth century, Duong writes, is that redemptive violence becomes associated with popular agency and is conceptualized as a solution to specific problems that arise from democratization. While the mythic sources of redemptive violence (biblical and otherwise) fall outside the confines of the book, it would be worthwhile to reflect on the doctrinal questions in the theologies of redemption as well as on the continuities and discontinuities between what makes certain forms of violence redemptive in biblical, monarchic, and republican contexts. Such a reflection might be an occasion to spell out what it is about violence that allows diverse political movements to imagine it as a catalyst, midwife, or birth canal for a new or regenerated society.
A more detailed investigation into the sources and historical genealogy of redemptive violence would also provide an opportunity to consider the limitations of violence as a regenerative force. Surely, the various theoretical traditions discussed in the book did not all naïvely expect violence to solve the problem of the social bond and the moral foundations of society in its entirety. How did they understand the scope and limits of redemptive violence? How does the figure of redemptive violence intersect (or cut against) the new theories of solidarity that emerge throughout the nineteenth century? And how do these authors and traditions deal with the tensions and contradictions between the conceit that redemptive violence “incarnates” the social bond (a theological locution that recurs throughout the book) and conceptualizations of shared democratic agency that regard it not as a capacity instituted in a single founding moment but as a set of practices that are learned and established over time? In sum, Duong’s stimulating book raises a whole series of questions about the relation between the political theology of redemption and the rise of social theory in the nineteenth century. Yet if redemptive violence is to be taken seriously as a conceptual category, and if it has the historical and theoretical scope that Duong assigns to it, then both its political-theological and social-theoretical dimensions need further elaboration. How do the various traditions that underwrite violence’s redemptive claim grapple with the classic soteriological problems in the Christian tradition concerning the agency, instrumentality, finality, and temporality of redemption? And what are the theoretical implications of conceptualizing social integration and solidarity as effects of violence, not just in terms of the mystification of violence but for thinking society, social cooperation, and collective action?