Enlightenment & terror

The belief that with Enlightenment, the people gained knowledge, the people gained reason, rationality, science, and humanism, would be misleading—and that was never the whole story of the revolutionary era. If reason was regarded as the most important driving force, then how was unreason articulated? Reason was said to be light; that is to say, Enlightenment constituted itself as reason by saying what it was not. The question arises: what was darkness? What was not the domain of political reasoning? The purpose of this essay is to probe the ideas of different thinkers to see whether the events of the Terror were inspired by their ideas, or whether those events departed from the ideas themselves. Here, the claim is that the Enlightenment as an event took place during the French Revolution—not before or after.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Here's one who thinks he is the master of others, yet he is more enslaved than they are…”

Maximilien Robespierre, a principal figure of the Reign of Terror, was profoundly influenced by Jean‑Jacques Rousseau (H.Lewis 1849, 26) and regarded Rousseau's Social Contract as the bible of the revolution. Rousseau validated—if not supported—the ideas of Voltaire. Voltaire succeeded in turning the focus of history from the struggle of nations to that of civilization, placing emphasis on people rather than government. The problems faced by the revolution were, in structure, the same as those Rousseau examined, although not in the same timeframe. His selective rhetoric in the Social Contract gave revolutionary leaders the potential for fetterless condemnation of virtually anyone. The leaders drew support from the successful bourgeoisie, who felt they should achieve the class level of an sometimes bankrupt nobility rather than remain second‑class citizens. A question arises: how did the bourgeoisie become rational so suddenly? Or how was this transition from private being to reasoning public so swift?

Constituting the French people as a nation

Censorship meant repressive mechanism. Yet repressive mechanism did not necessarily articulate complete muteness. The moment philosophers or writers were repressed, new ways emerged: how to write what one wanted without being censored—a reinvention of language. The attitude of the philosophers was printed and made available to the desiring subject (the public), thus becoming increasingly more literate. The public, inundated by propaganda, accepted even the most incredible rhetoric as factual. Increased literacy, brought forth by the Enlightenment, gave people the ability to read or hear the news, but did not teach the populace to separate rhetoric from fact. Enhanced literacy heightened the effectiveness of political pamphleteering. Hence the recognised effectiveness of published rhetoric increased the use of printed media. While official censorship in central Europe banned many books, 'truth' was everywhere seeping through every veneration of images receding.

The distinction between public reasoning and private reasoning soon perished. Everyone engaged only with reason. In private, one follows rules. In public, one engages in debate, discusses, disagrees, questions. The public cast itself loose as a forum in which private people came together to form a public, ready to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion. The publicum developed into the public, the subjectum into the (reasoning) subject, the receiver of regulations from above into the ruling authorities' adversary. (Habermas 1991, 25‑26) While the citizens of France united, the consequences paved a way to split inside authorities—a discourse wherein Enlightenment ideologies played the major role.

Two enlightenments, one terror

Two fundamentally different conceptions of progress—radical democratic and materialistic determinist (alternatively Christian‑Unitarian) on one hand, and “Moderate” and Deist or Religious, championing the monarchical‑aristocratic order on the other—were diametrically opposed in their social and political consequences. They were also, from the outset, philosophically and theologically incompatible and indeed opposed each other. (Israel 2010, 12) Spinoza, with his one‑substance doctrine—body and soul, matter and mind are not distinct substances but a single substance viewed under different aspects—extends this “revolutionary” tendency metaphysically, politically, and regarding man’s highest good further than Descartes, Hobbes, or Bayle. On Spinoza’s principles, society would become more resistant to manipulation by religious authority, aristocracy, powerful oligarchies, and dictatorship, and more democratic, libertarian, and egalitarian. (Israel 2010, 1‑3)

Thus emerged two contesting tendencies during the revolution: Revolutionary and Counter‑revolutionary. The chance that the then‑Enlightening French could effect a rational change from monarchy to constitutional republic washed away in a rain of blood—the Reign of Terror. Not only individual violence but also the violence of place. Particular violent killing by the mob, showing the killing in a place where violent killing used to take place: violence had already been ritualised by the state. The mob took over the violence. Then the state, the citizens, the slaves—everyone realised the need for such a violence that took over all France. It was a united thought, seasoned with reason. One might disagree on grounds of immorality. But given the ideologies that swept over Europe, thanks to Enlightenment writers like Sade, it wasn't so simple.

Hence any action of the crowd could be justified as volition. To determine oneself to produce a representation with the consciousness of one’s own activity is called volition: the faculty of determining oneself with this consciousness of self‑activity is called the faculty of desire. (Fichte 2010, 9‑10) I would also like to answer: What would have been the desire of the subject at a family (private) level? As per Rousseau, the relation between father and children was subject to their preservation. Once the need of the children ceases, or the father is incapable of providing for them, the natural bond dissolves. The children are not answerable to the father, nor is the father responsible for the children; both become independent. Here we can compare the crowd as children and the monarch/government as father. When the ruler was unable to cater to the preservation of the public during the Great Fear or the Revolution, the natural bond between them dissolved and both entities became independent—thus making a rift inside the family (France).

Reign as mental revolution

I started by claiming that Enlightenment was still unfolding during the Revolution. By that I mean: the philosophical ideas were already in print well before 1793, but they did not fully reach the desiring subject (the public). Call it the unorganised censorship of France or an ignorant public. Although the Enlightenment writers had died before the eve of the French Revolution, their ideas were discussed and debated. The leaders of the revolution studied Rousseau’s work, as I said earlier, and used those texts to justify their most horrendous actions—like the attack on Danton, and so on. One could make a strong case that Voltaire and Montesquieu and others had cultivated the French psyche, that they had sown the seeds harvested during the Reign of Terror. As far as my title is concerned, Enlightenment ideas acted as a catalyst in many revolutions since the French, and it was because of this event that the French Revolution is also symbolic of mental revolution or the revolution of the mind.