With two world wars and the waves of violence that defined the twentieth century, European political development unraveled. The unprecedented scale of violence in the first half of the century—its trenches, its firebombing, its camps—seemed to defeat nineteenth-century notions of humanism, civilization, and progress in irreversible ways. An estimated 1,400 people died at the height of the Jacobin Terror in the spring of 1794. But in the trenches of Verdun in 1916, more than seventy thousand soldiers were dying each month, with almost a million casualties by the year’s end. The violence was of such a scale that observers in and beyond Europe openly doubted whether the political thought of the preceding century could grasp it. How could thought so blind to this coming historical mutation explain its significance?1
In other words, many twentieth-century observers surmised that the experience of world war not only introduced a break in the history of European political development, but also in its history of political thought. As George Kateb has recently put it, such are the “awful events” of the twentieth century that our inherited canon of political theory may not be able to “take in and comprehend” its dizzying catastrophe, comprised as it is of “World War I, World War II, the use twice of atomic weapons, their repeated threatened use by the United States, the theories of nuclear deterrence, the gulags, the Holocaust, induced famines, such American wars as the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and numerous massive massacres.”2 Before so much death, what can political theory say? It was a state of confusion shared by a generation of European thinkers. From the Frankfurt School to Cold War liberals, postwar journalists to newspaper critics, intellectuals everywhere cast the two world wars as a rupture in the nature of knowledge itself. Where there was once light and perspicacity in the Age of Enlightenment, after 1914, Ira Katznelson observes, there seemed to be only darkness and mystery.3
At the heart of this perceived rupture in European political thought lay political violence, for it, too, appeared to have evolved into something unrecognizable from the perspective of a St. Just, a Michel, or a Péguy. To be sure, political violence in the twentieth century continued to borrow the redemptive terms of its predecessors. It even continued to borrow the authority of the peuple and patrie to authorize its illegality. But that all seemed to be beside the point. Technological transformations of violence had rendered these qualities accidental rather than essential. However regenerative Hitler viewed German expansion to be, it was its blitzkriegs and its gas chambers that made it what it was. Napoleonic France may have invented the theory of total war, but it was in the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe where fourteen million people died between 1933 and 1945 that theory became practice.4 The Franco-Prussian war may have witnessed the ascendance of the mitrailleuse, but its gunpowder was nothing compared to the tanks, aerial strafing, and atomic bombs of the Second World War. It was the changed character of violence in the twentieth century that, above all else, broke the chains of tradition connecting nineteenth-century political theory to its twentieth-century successors. Confronted with that divide, what can a study of redemptive violence in nineteenth-century France teach us?
It teaches us that there was a reason French revolutionaries in 1789 made fraternité as important to modern democracy as liberté and égalité. Democracy has never simply been a regime-type, a set of laws or institutions, or a more just social order—although it has been all of those things, too. “Democracy,” or “the Republic” in the case of France, has also named a battle for solidarity, a fight to create a set of social bonds that could make us collectively free. What democratic social bonds ought to look like has been contested, and how they could be forged has been equally controversial: spontaneous insurrection, the pursuit of glory, general strikes, total war, the guillotine, or the barricade. But the history of popular redemptive violence only makes sense if we bring this original, fundamental meaning of democracy back into view. Indeed, my aim in analyzing pieces of that history has been to remind us of that original meaning.
As these previous chapters have shown, democracy was perceived as a series of abstraction procedures imposed upon society: first, the procedures which produced the individual as the bearer of the rights of man, and later those which underlay the market, the electorate, and representative parliamentary politics. These procedures of abstraction were indispensable to the struggle for democracy in France because they eroded the hierarchical corporatism of the ancien régime and pointed the way to a national sovereignty. At the same time, these procedures were unable to satisfy a second, equally important demand of revolutionary democracy: the demand for a new type of social bond capable of binding together a self-governing people. Hence, generations of thinkers fretted over the fact that France seemed to be realizing the ideal of “the people rule” at the cost of dissolving the people back into a fragmented multitude of atomized individuals. Without a social cohesion that transcended a modus vivendi, France could have a democratic regime, but not a society of equals.
Even if this dilemma had to be confronted in specific times and places, it was at bottom a theoretical impasse rooted in the wider historical experience of democratization. If the customary bases of association are no longer valid, then from what is the social bond made? How can a society of equals be created that transcends a quantitative aggregation of individuals? These questions were raised everywhere touched by democratic revolution, but it became especially acute in modern France. That was why the French struggle for democracy was never simply about replacing monarchy with republican government, subjects with citizens. It was also about rethinking the social bond.
French political thinkers quickly discovered that not all forms of violence were capable of reconstituting a social body. On the contrary, violence motivated by instrumental calculations exacerbated social disintegration. Nineteenth-century thinkers often perceived a tight connection between the atomized individual and utilitarian reasoning. It is hard to understate how much modern French thought developed its concern with the social in opposition to English liberal utilitarianism. Because of that defining opposition, French thinkers believed that instrumental perspectives on violence conformed to rather than resisted contemporary forces of disintegration. What could reinstitute social cohesion, they believed, were expressivist and noninstrumental acts of violence which escaped the cut and thrust of interest politics or means-end rationality. Unlike the superficial opportunism of power politics or raison d’état, redemptive violence manifested the concrete moral principles that bind us together in society. In contrast to the mediated agency of the law, it expressed the spontaneous unity and agency of the people. With their violence, the people entered into history not as an abstract ground of public authority but as a concrete agent of moral redemption.
It can be tempting to see this constellation of ideas as anachronistic on our side of the twentieth and twenty-first century. But representations of revolutionary violence as redemptive circulated both beyond France and the nineteenth century. It was invoked by the Russian terrorist group Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will) when they assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881.5 It figured in the writings of Italian futurists, as when Filippo Marinetti claimed, in 1915, that “we believe that only a love of danger and heroism can purify and regenerate our nation.”6 Even Frantz Fanon appealed, in 1961, to the regenerative power of anticolonial violence, writing “violence . . . binds them together as a whole . . . a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction.”7 Today, sectors of the American far right have made a credo out of Thomas Jefferson’s remark that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Brandishing this quotation like a catechism, conservative nationalists have posited a causal relation between violence by “the people” and national renewal.
Bringing this longue durée of revolutionary, redemptive violence into view provides a better vantage point for understanding its enduring appeal. It has been, and continues to be, easy to condemn these claims as antidemocratic deviations from a democratic political culture. But situating these twentieth- and twenty-first-century claims within a wider historical aperture reveals that they are symptomatic of a familiar problem that has dogged democratic politics since the French Revolution: How to make a people? As troubling as it may be, contemporary allusions to redemptive violence should be grasped as continuous with, rather than deviations from, the most prominent tendencies within modern political thought—and not just conservativism. After all, American democratic thought has long nurtured its own idiom of redemptive violence. Developed in dialogue with its French counterpart, the American idiom was grafted onto a mythology of westward expansion’s regenerative effects.8 And it was turn of the century liberals like Theodore Roosevelt in “The Strenuous Life” and “The Winning of the West” who, upon the closing of the frontier, recast military service and imperial expansion as a source of regeneration. These liberals, together with American revolutionaries, French Jacobins, Russian anarchists, Italian fascists, and anticolonial nationalists, may be seen as antecedents for present invocations of redemptive violence. The point is not to group them all into a homogenous “illiberal” tradition to be condemned; it is to situate the contemporary trope of redemptive violence in its proper context, which was always transatlantic and modern rather than national or simply reactionary: the ongoing conflictual and socially disintegrating experience of democratization.
Grasping this fact brings into focus why contemporary solutions to the problem of social cohesion put forward by liberal political theorists have not fared well. The case of “constitutional patriotism” is a case in point. Designed by German intellectuals as a secular and postnational basis for postwar reunification, constitutional patriotism has come to attract the attention of liberals everywhere concerned with reinventing the normative bases for European integration. It promises to supply an alternative to racial or religious sources of social cohesion by emphasizing our shared attachments to procedural and institutional principles, often enshrined in a constitutional document.9 It holds out, Jan-Werner Müller explains, the hope that “another form of social cohesion is possible,” one nourished by a minimal moral universalism instead of the exclusionary national or ethnic creeds which marred the twentieth century.10
The past decade of European politics is a sobering reminder that constitutional patriotism has been unable to provide an effective source of social cohesion for postwar democracy. Where its vision of integration has proved successful, it has been in national contexts that have enjoyed demonstrable economic prosperity. Otherwise, the social cohesion forged through continental constitutional democracy has shown itself too fragile to withstand the combined assault of demographic diversification, economic crisis and dispossession, and suspicions that popular sovereignty has been usurped by impersonal technocratic rule. The ascendance of international governance has not fostered a transnational attachment to core constitutional procedures, but the resurgence of chauvinistic nationalisms that constitutional patriotism promised to make obsolete. The beneficiary of the new European order has not been a minimalist moral universalism, but reassertions of “the people” that resemble the “blood and soil” of Barrèsian conservatism.11
It does no good, either, to insist that the problem of the social bond is a false problem, one we are better off leaving behind. Fraternity is justifiably criticized in contemporary political theory. It is always gendered, even when women want it for themselves. When Louise Michel or André Léo demand fraternity, they demand the right to shoot and kill reactionaries alongside other men. They want to share the battlefield. Moreover, universal fraternity has never existed, and there are good reasons to think it never will. As feminist critics have pointed out time and again, universalisms are always particularisms; they will always come with constitutive exclusions across multiple axes of social ascription.12 Even more, the ideal of political fraternity tends to exaggerate commonality by drawing attention away from conflict, which is itself a technique for bracketing out voices challenging the boundaries of the demos. Michaele Ferguson rightly argues that it tends to pathologize diversity and can invite a passive, even antidemocratic view of democracy.13 In a cutting recent essay, Jacob Levy has gone so far as to say that “When it comes to the fraternal solidarity aspired to by many theorists, we can’t have it, and we shouldn’t want it; and those aren’t truly problems, because we don’t need it.”14
These are powerful criticisms, and many seem true enough. Nevertheless, this book asks skeptics of fraternal solidarity to recall that there is nothing maximalist or supererogatory about expecting fraternity in democratic politics, just as there is nothing minimalist about arguing that we should not want it. For people who have traditionally seen themselves as parts of communities, and for people whose memberships in social bodies seem primary, there is nothing “minimalist” about the claim, as Levy puts it, that at bottom, “the inhabitants of a political community are more like strangers . . . locked in a very large room together than they are like an extended family or a voluntary association united in pursuit of a common purpose.”15 In fact, that self-evident “moral truth” will appear as an extraordinary, maximalist act of social reengineering—because it was. Liberal individualism is only minimalist in an established liberal political culture; namely, when its worldview has been naturalized (and gendered) as simply “moral psychology.” But in places where the struggle for democracy sought to replace an old social body with a new one—say, modern France—nothing could be stranger than the idea that, at bottom, we were strangers to one other. When Jacobins created a cult of fraternity after 1793, they did not do so as utopian social engineers imposing insuperable demands. They did so as revolutionaries who understood that democracy was being forged among people, many of whom had never understood their relations with one another as primarily individualistic or civic. From their point of view, as a matter of simple “moral truth,” they were members of society. It would have been incomprehensible to insist otherwise by normative fiat.
Neither the importance of fraternity nor the contemporary difficulties of constitutional patriotism would have surprised the thinkers studied here. Indeed, it was their keen appreciation of the role of “the social” that drove them toward redemptive violence. As French revolutionaries understood, neither constitutionalism nor natural law theory offered persuasive answers for why democratic citizens ought to share a life together. They may have provided a common source of right, but they offered unconvincing visions of the social bond. Even liberals in nineteenth-century France accepted that fact, despite contemporary liberal disavowals of social cohesion as a proto-totalitarian expectation.16 Third Republic liberals devoted decades to creating social cohesion by inventing a new republican political culture: the creation of a national education system, the standardization of the French language, the construction of modern railway networks, the expansion of the civil service, and the implementation of laïcité.17 This liberal pursuit of social cohesion was no more minimalist or nonviolent than that of the Jacobins and their mocked Festival of the Supreme Being. The Mur des Fédérés in Père-Lachaise ought to remind us of that fact. Adolphe Thiers was deluding himself when he conceded that “the Republic is the form of government that divides us the least.” As Sorel and Péguy soon countered (and the enthusiasm of war mobilization in 1914 confirmed), the Republic could never be reduced to a modus vivendi. If twentieth-century liberals like John Rawls believed that “the hope of political community must indeed be abandoned,” that is only because historical amnesia concealed how hard they once had to work for it.18
Studying redemptive violence in France’s long nineteenth century underscores how democratic politics has never been reducible to a competition between principles of right. It has also involved, and will continue to involve, reimagining the social bond. Agreement on that fact connected liberals, socialists, Jacobins, anarchists, and even some Catholics in nineteenth-century France as they each searched for a path to modern republican democracy. Once we appreciate the crucial role of the social in modern republican democracy, we can better appreciate the situation confronting contemporary critics: the point is not to abandon fraternal solidarity as too demanding, but to fight for it to mean something better than it has. Instead of signifying prepolitical or natural grounds of filiation, it can name the struggle for common life and common power.19
Jacques Lacan, it is said, teaches us to never give up on our desire. He did not mean desire for a specific object, but desire itself: an analysand should never give up on her desire for desire.20 We, too, should not give up wanting to want democratic social bonds. The contemporary tide of nationalism will not be resisted by discrediting the desire for fraternal solidarity as irredeemably illiberal, utopian, or totalitarian, but by putting forth a convincing democratic and egalitarian alternative. We do not need to endorse redemptive violence to appreciate how its history clarifies for us this demand left by the age of democratic revolutions and which modern democratic politics must still answer.