In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution which does not smell of a revolution. François Furet proposed another liberal approach: he tried to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly. In short, Furet’s aim was to de-eventalize the French Revolution: it is no longer (as for a tradition stemming from Kant and Hegel) the defining moment of modernity, but a local accident with no global significance, one conditioned by the specifically French tradition of absolute monarchy. Jacobin state centralism is only possible, then, against the background of the ‘L’état c’est moi’ of Louis XIV. There was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom, etc., but - as the English example demonstrates - the same could have been much more effectively achieved in a more peaceful w a y . . . Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the ‘passion of the Real’: if you say A - equality, human rights and freedoms - then you should not shirk its consequences but instead gather the courage to say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert A.
Both liberal and conservative critics of the French Revolution present it as a founding event of modern ‘totalitarianism’: the taproot of all the worst evils of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, the Gulag, up to the 9/11 attacks - is to be sought in the Jacobin ‘Reign of Terror’. The perpetrators of Jacobin crimes are either denounced as bloodthirsty monsters, or, in a more nuanced approach, one admits that they were personally honest and pure, but then adds that this very feature made their fanaticism all the more dangerous. The conclusion is thus the well-known cynical wisdom: better corruption than ethical purity, better a direct lust for power than obsession with one’s mission.
