From Black Mass (John Gray, 2007) p26-7
During much of the nineteenth century, utopianism was embodied in voluntary communities that were often ridiculous but usually harmless. These communities lived in hopes of a fundamental alteration in human affairs, but they did not try to bring it about by force. Twentieth-century revolutionary movements were shaped by a different utopian tradition. It was the Jacobins who first conceived of terror as an instrument for perfecting humanity. Medieval Europe was no oasis of peace it was wracked by almost continuous wars. Yet no one believed violence could perfect humanity. Belief in original sin stood immovably in the way. Millenarians were ready to use force to overthrow the power of the Church but none of them imagined that violence could bring about the Millennium only God could do that. It was only with the Jacobins that it came to be believed that humanly initiated terror could create a new world.
The Jacobins began as a radical club, which soon exercised a powerful influence on the course of the French Revolution. Through leaders such as Maximilian Robespierre himself a casualty of the Terror who was guillotined in 1794, and who in 1792 delivered a prophetic warning against the dangers of trying to export freedom by force of arms they made terror an integral part of the revolutionary programme. Influenced by Rousseau’s belief in innate human goodness, the Jacobins believed society had become corrupt as a result of repression but could be transformed by the methodical use of force. The Terror was necessary in order to defend the Revolution against internal and external enemies; but it was also a technique of civic education and an instrument of social engineering. To reject terror on moral grounds was unforgivable. As Robespierre put it in a speech to the National Convention in Paris on 26 February 1794, ‘Pity is treason.’ A higher form of human life was within reach – even a higher type of human being but only once humanity had been purified by violence.
This faith in violence flowed into many later revolutionary currents. Nineteenth-century anarchists such as Nechayev and Bakunin, the Bolsheviks Lenin and Trotsky, anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, the regimes of Mao and Pol Pot, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Guard in the 19805, radical Islamic movements and neo-conservative groups mesmerized by fantasies of creative destruction these highly disparate elements are at one in their faith in the liberating power of violence. In this they are all disciples of the Jacobins.
The French Terror of 1792-4 is the prototype for every subsequent millenarian revolution. Tens of thousands lost their lives through execution by revolutionary tribunals and death in prison. Once we include the deaths resulting from quashing the counter-revolutionary insurgency in the Vendée (a region of western France where counterrevolutionaries were killed by methods that included mass drowning) the human casualties of the Terror run far higher. In all, up to a third of the population of that region may have been slaughtered a level of mass killing that can be compared with that which occurred in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Like many revolutionaries after them the Jacobins introduced a new calendar to mark the new era they had begun. They were not mistaken in believing it marked a turning point in history. The era of political mass murder had arrived.
An Enlightenment thinker such as the Marquis de Condorcet – who died in prison a day after his arrest by Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety – may have been horrified by the manner in which his belief in human progress came to fuel political terror. Yet the fact that terror came to be used to promote Enlightenment ideals was not surprising. It followed from the belief that human life could be transformed by a human act of will. Why shrink from violence? Throughout history it had been used to sustain tyranny. In the hands of revolutionaries it could be used to liberate humanity.
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