revolutionary committee of Moulins, Gabriel Perrotin, public prosecutor of Lyon, observed how the “revolutionary commission” of the city was “going to repeat the septembrisade of Paris by the same procedures, and with the approval of an order from the representatives which will promote its work.”581
According to Sophie Wahnich, the anarchic, incoherent platform of public terror waged by the Parisian sans-culottes after the autumn of 1792 was derived from a widespread sense of fear. The charge sheet was lengthy, encompassing a sensation of imminent
destruction at the hands of external enemies, and a fear of internal betrayal, dissension, or simply further disruption – from the defection of Dumouriez in April 1793, and the nascent civil war in the Vendée, to the continued threat of revolutionary upheaval in the capital. By the summer of 1793, France was a Republic unified by a single emotion: effroi.582 The unregulated expression of the popular sense of dread forced the Convention to reterritorialize the sphere of public emotions by declaring a state-sanctioned Terror on 5 September 1793. Popular anxiety would thus be assuaged by the state monopolisation of fear. “We can only govern through fear,” observed Danton.583 This may seem like a justification of Terror, yet as Marisa Linton rightly observes, “to explain is not to justify.” With the perceived speed of historical time racing beyond comprehension, Terror was the only viable system of temporal – and thus political – regulation available to the state. Whilst Wahnich is surely correct to state that Terror “was aimed at establishing limits to the sovereign exception,” she is mistaken in assuming that it was successful in “putting a brake on the legitimate violence of the
people.”584 It unquestionably gave the public an “institutionalized form” of vengeance, but it simply made the state an instrument of a gargantuan, and ultimately self-destructive form of historical acceleration. As a legal simulacrum of popular agitation, the Terror eventually recreated the sense of constant crisis that characterised the impatience of the summer of 1792. The regime of historicity imagined by the curators of Terror was certainly “prompt” and “inflexible,” but it was not meant to be endless, nor endlessly accelerative.585
581 Gabriel Perrotin, cited in Abbé Guillon de Montléon, Mémoires de M. l’abbé Guillon de Montléon (Paris,
Baudoin frères, 1824), p.403-4: “La commission révolutionnaire de Lyon va répéter la septembrisade de Paris par les mêmes procédés, et de plus avec l’autorisation d’un arrêté des représentans [sic] qui favorisera sa marche.” On “federalist” revolt during the French Revolution, see: Paul R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic Under Fire
(Philadelphia, PA., Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp.193-232.
582 Tackett writes that “fear” was the default setting for contemporaries: “fear of invasion, fear of chaos and
anarchy, fear of revenge,” which was increasingly “characterized by a predominant fear of conspiracy”: The
Coming of the Terror, p.7; see: Sophia Rosenfeld, ‘Thinking about Feeling, 1789-1799,’ French Historical Studies
32 (4, Fall 2009), pp.697-706; David Andress, ed., Experiencing the French Revolution (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2013); Lloyd F. Mason, ‘The Psychology of the Terror,’ Social Science 26 (2, April 1951), pp.110-16.
583 Georges Danton, cited in François Bluche, ‘La Terreur dans la Révolution Jacobine,’ in Germain Sicard, ed., Justice et Politique: La Terreur dans la Révolution Française (Toulouse, Place Anatole France, 1997), pp.29-37,
here: p.31: “Nous ne pouvons gouverner qu’en faisant peur.”
584 Wahnich, In Defence of Terror, p.65.
585 David Andress, ‘Living the Revolutionary Melodrama: Robespierre’s Sensibility and the Construction of
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“The enemies abroad coalesce with the enemies at home; a Revolutionary Tribunal is established for more than fifteen days, yet not a single head of a conspirator has fallen beneath the blade of the law.”586 So read the petition of the section des Tuileries, presented before the Jacobin club in March 1793. Amongst many of the Parisian sections, popular impatience reflected a continuing displeasure with the slowness of revolutionary governance. Impatience was also one emanation of a mentalité obsidionale, a pathological preoccupation with encirclement, which, in the context of the autumn of 1792, heightened a commonplace concern that the Revolution was in a race against time – and losing.587 With the external forces of counterrevolution lining along the frontiers of France, apparently in active communication with their internal counterparts, the levers of justice remained impassive.588 As the section des Tuileries intimated, a fortnight was sufficient to create a choking sense of panic.
This perception of legal paralysis was a temporal problem. As Sanja Perovic has observed, the period that separated the fall of the monarchy on 10 August and the declaration of the Republic on 22 September formed a curious “lag-time” between the old regime and the new Republic.589 During this forty-three day period, the Revolution – which so many
observers believed had been historically accelerated by 10 August – seemed to belong to no- time. “I must tell you,” wrote a concerned Adelaïde Mareux to her brother on 6 September 1792, “that since the journée of 10, only three people have been guillotined and that this has disgusted the people.”590 Referencing the obsidionale fear of encirclement, Mareux added: “We are being sold out on every side!” Even the barely functioning National Assembly
of the metaphors of speed, in particular lightning, during the Terror, see: Marie-Hélène Huet, ‘Thunder and Revolution: Franklin, Robespierre, Sade,’ The Eighteenth Century 30: The French Revolution 1789-1989: two hundred years of rethinking (2, 1989), pp.13-32; Miller, A Natural History of Revolution, pp.72-103.
586 Aulard, ed., La Société des Jacobins, V, p.108: “[L]es ennemis du dehors, coalisés avec les ennemis du
dedans…un Tribunal révolutionnaire est créé depuis plus de quinze jours, et aucune tête de conspirateur n’est encore tombée sous le glaive de la loi.”
587 On this mentalité obsidionale, see: Sophie Wahnich, ‘L’enjeu des émotions révolutionnaires, enjeu théorique
ou enjeu thématique?’ Paper delivered at the conference, ‘From Enlightenment to Revolution: Rethinking the Debate,’ Institut d’Études Avancées, Paris (11 March, 2016); Daniel Ligou, ‘Sur la contre-révolution à
Montauban,’ in Jean Sentou, ed., Révolution et Contre-Révolution dans la France du Midi, 1789-1799 (Toulouse, Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 1991), pp.91-106.
588 As early as September 1789, French émigrés had established counterrevolutionary clubs in Turin and along the
German border: David Andress, The French Revolution and the People (London, A & C Black, 2006), p.83; on early émigré activities, see: D. M. G. Sutherland, France 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oxford, OUP, 1986), pp.47-8, 60-8; William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford, OUP, 2009), pp.239-73; Simon Burrows, ‘The émigrés and conspiracy in the French Revolution, 1789-99,’ in Campbell et al, Conspiracy in the French Revolution, pp.150-71.
589 Perovic, The Calendar, p.88.
590 Louis de Launay, ed., Une famille de la bourgeoisie parisienne pendant la Révolution; Toussaint Mareux, membre de la Commune de 1792… (Paris, Perrin, 1921), p.308: “Il faut te faire un remarque que, depuis la journée