analyse linguistique
Bienvenue à notre nouveau collaborateur,
le Professeur Ronen Steinberg
Le Professeur Steinberg est un historien de l'Europe moderne, spécialiste de l'époque de la Révolution française. Il est titulaire d'un doctorat d'histoire de l'Université de Chicago. Ses principaux centres d'intérêt sont l'histoire de la violence, la justice en période de transition et la théorie sociale. Il a publié des articles sur la terreur au XVIIIe siècle et sur la commémoration de la violence révolutionnaire en France. Actuellement, il travaille à un ouvrage intitulé : « Les survivances de la Terreur: Surmonter les séquelles de la violence dans la France post-révolutionnaire, 1794-1830. » Il dirige également un séminaire sur la justice en période de transition qui s'attache à la façon dont les sociétés surmontent les séquelles de la violence collective.
Many people have heard of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France. Fewer people realize perhaps that the English word “terrorism” originated in the French Revolution. It appeared for the first time in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1798, four years after the fall of Robespierre, and was defined as “a system, a regime of terror.” The dictionary included another new word, terroriste, which was defined as “an agent or partisan of the regime of terror, which has taken place through the abuse of revolutionary measures.” [1]
What did terror mean before the Revolution, how did this new definition come about, and what, if anything, does this tell us about our own understanding of terrorism today?
First, a little etymology: The term "terror” is related to the Latin adjective terribilis, which refers to objects or people that inspire dread or awe. The Encarta World English Dictionary [North American Edition] defines awe as “a mixture of wonder and dread: a feeling of amazement and respect mixed with fear that is often coupled with a feeling of personal insignificance or powerlessness.” This mixture of dread and wonder, respect and a feeling of powerlessness, suggests that the term “terror” is quite complex. On the one hand, it has a clearly negative meaning. Powerlessness and personal insignificance are, for most people, negative experiences, and after all, intense feelings of fear and powerlessness are among the triggers of posttraumatic stress disorder. [2] On the other hand, terror has positive meanings too, as can be seen in the allusion to such terms as amazement, respect and wonder. This brief etymology of the term “terror” already contains some interesting implications for our own understanding of terror and its derivative term, “terrorism,” for it shows that the word had both positive and negative meanings, and it is the tension between these two poles which makes the term, and the experience, so complex.
The same holds true for the theological roots of the term. In the Old Testament, God inspires awe but also terror, a duality that is captured in the Hebrew term for the fear of God, yir’at ha-shem, the fear of and respect for the name of the Lord. The definition of terror in French before the Revolution retained traces of this etymology. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defined the term in 1762 as “an emotion caused in the mind by the sight of great evil or of an immediate threat; great fear.” [3] The allusion to evil or mal in the French – a metaphysical category – suggests the theological roots of the term terror.
As a side note, it is interesting to observe that in the case of terror, English rather than French retains the Latin spelling of the term. Whereas the Latin terrorem has become terror in English, it was transformed into terreur in French. Normally it is the other way around. That is, normally it is the French language rather than the English that remains closer to Latin, so this presents a somewhat unusual case. It would be interesting to examine the reason for this, but that lies beyond the scope of our inquiry here.
Another thing that is made clear by the etymology of “terror” is that before the Revolution, it was understood mostly as an emotion, a specific state of the mind. As such, it drew the attention of the philosophes and scientists of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century compendium of scientific knowledge, the encyclopédie, saw terror as an extreme species of fear. Its entry on the subject distinguished between peur, which referred to a general apprehension of coming danger, frayeur, which meant a more immediate sense of alarm, and terreur, which was the most extreme experience of fear and as such was capable of “destroying our mind.” [4] The French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, developed a hierarchical typology of fear based on his observations of human physiognomy.
Le Comte de Buffon
As he put it in his Histoire naturelle, which was published in 36 volumes between 1749 and 1788, “in fear, in terror, in dread, the forehead wrinkles, the eyebrows are raised, the pupils are widened as much as possible… the mouth is open widely.” [5] In pre-revolutionary French thought then, the term terror referred to the most extreme form of fear.
This form of fear was so devastating because often its source remained unclear, vague, operating on the imagination rather than on the senses. Another entry on terror in the encyclopédie related the term to panic, and defined both words as “those forms of dread that have no foundation in reality because they are believed to have been inspired by the god Pan.” [6] The reference here is to the story of the Gallic invasion of the Balkans (280-279 BC) as recounted by the second century Greek geographer Pausanias in his work, Description of Greece. According to Pausanias, the god Pan struck terror into the hearts of the Gallic warriors, so that in a collective frenzy they turned on each other and decimated their own army, hence the term panic.
We can draw several conclusions from this brief survey of the concept of terror in France on the eve of the Revolution. First and foremost, the term referred to an emotional experience. It was the most extreme form of fear and as such was understood to have the ability to overpower reason, to paralyze the mind. Second, the etymology of the term suggests its inherent ambiguity, as a reaction to divine power, which is simultaneously positive and negative. Third, terror was a particularly insidious form of fear because its source was often unclear. Whereas fear is a sensory reaction to danger, terror operates mostly on the imagination and as such is capable of augmenting itself indefinitely and of influencing the mind long after its real source is gone. Finally, and this is most revealing, the relation of the term to panic means that in the eighteenth century terror was seen essentially as a contagious form of fear. In this sense, terror was a collective phenomenon, pertaining to groups and whole societies more than to individuals.
The shift from this surprisingly sophisticated understanding of terror to terrorism, that is, from terror understood as a kind of emotion to terrorism understood as political violence, can be traced back to the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France.
| Estampe de la Guillotine, « Et la garde qui veille aux Barrières du Louvre n'en défend pas les rois... », durant la Terreur. |
Sans-culottes
Représentation populaire (1789). |
Historians disagree on when exactly the Reign of Terror began but a common starting point is September 5 1793, when France’s legislative assembly, the National Convention, declared “terror is the order of the day.” [7] The most immediate result of this declaration was the passing of the Law of Suspects (September 17 1793,) that authorized local authorities to arrest and try anyone deemed as possessing counter-revolutionary dispositions, a vague accusation at best. Eventually, about seventeen thousand people were sentenced to death during the eleven months of the Reign of Terror, and about half a million citizens were thrown into makeshift prisons on various, unclear charges of political crimes.
The revolutionary authorities that led this campaign under the argument that it was necessary in order to save the young Republic from its internal and external enemies did not define it as a coherent political program. The closest thing to a definition that we have from this period comes from a speech delivered by Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobin leader, in February 1794.
Maximilien Robespierre
Robespierre argued that “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” Robespierre meant by this popular justice, the justice of the people who were putting their collective will into effect by defending the goals of the Revolution and the interests of the Republic. As Robespierre put it, “If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.” [8]
The new terms terrorisme and terroriste did not appear during the Reign of Terror but rather in its aftermath. The Reign of Terror was brought to an end on July 27, 1794, or 9 Thermidor according to the republican calendar developed by the revolutionaries, when the National Convention overthrew and executed Robespierre as well as many members of his closest circle. The men who had orchestrated this coup d’état were nicknamed Thermidorians and the period that followed this event is called the Thermidorian Reaction. It was the Thermidorians who first elaborated a definition of terror as a unique form of power, a political system. Jean-Lambert Tallien, a Thermidorian leader who had been personally involved in the events of 9 Thermidor, defined terror as a political principle, a system of government designed to inspire chronic, general fear in the hearts and minds of citizens so as to ensure their obedience.
Jean-Lambert Tallien
The art of terror according to Tallien consisted in knowing how to “set a trap under each step, place a spy in every home, a traitor in every family,” and in using the public death of the few in order to terrify the many. This was achieved by an ever-increasing application of the death penalty. The result of this policy according to Tallien was the division of French society into two classes: “those who are afraid, and those who make others afraid.” Whereas revolutionary leadership argued that terror was necessary in order to protect the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, Tallien argued that it actually ensured their destruction, for as he put it, terror “de-fraternizes, de-socializes, and de-moralizes.” [9]
The term terrorisme as it was defined in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1798 probably derived from this Thermidorian analysis of terror as a political system. As for the term terroriste, it was applied quite liberally during the Thermidorian Reaction in order to single out certain individuals or groups as having allegedly collaborated with the repressive regime of Robespierre. Those who were labeled as terrorists were subsequently persecuted, and there was even a short-lived wave of popular vengeance against them, mostly in the South of France (the Midi,) which came to be known as the White Terror, in contrast to the Red Terror of the Jacobins.[10]
What can this history of the terms terror, terrorism and terrorist tell us about the phenomenon as we see it today? First, whereas most people today identify terrorism with non-state actors who make use of violence illegitimately in order to achieve particular political goals, in its origins the term referred precisely to violence directed by the state against its own citizens. Second, the origins of the term terrorism present a challenging test case for current understandings of the concept in the social sciences. Political scientists today distinguish between terrorism and terror. The former term refers to subversive terror, which is aimed at transforming the political status quo. The latter term refers to state terror, which is aimed at preserving the existing status quo. [11] Yet the Reign of Terror in late eighteenth century France challenges these understandings of terror, for here we have a case of a state that resorted to terroristic tactics precisely in order to transform, and transform radically, the social, economic and political order of things. Finally, while the term terror today has almost exclusively negative connotations, tracing its origins allows us to see that it possesses, or at least used to posses also positive dimensions. As a form of power in can inspire dread and paralyze the mind, but it can also inspire wonder and raise the human imagination to new levels. It can destroy individuals and societies, but it is also an intrinsic, basic feature of the social and political organization of human life. It would be interesting to trace these changes in the meaning of terror from the French Revolution to our own times, but that is another story, perhaps a terrifying one.
© Ronen Steinberg 2011
Ronen Steinberg
Department of History
Michigan State University
ronens@msu.edu
[1] Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 5th Edition (1798), at http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=terreur (accessed November 27, 2011)
[2] See N. C. Andreasen, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” in Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 4th ed., edited by H. I. Kaplan and B. J. Sadock (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1985), 918-24
[3] Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 4th Edition (1762), at http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=terreur (accessed November 27 2011)
[4] Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Peur, frayeur, terreur,” at http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.11:1091.encyclopedie0311 (accessed on March 25 2010.) The entry is from the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2011 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.
[5] Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière: avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, 36 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749-1789), 2: 532 at http://www.buffon.cnrs.fr/ice/ice_page_detail.php?lang=fr&type=text&bdd=buffon&table=buffon_hn&bookId=2&search=no&typeofbookDes=hn&facsimile=off&pageOrder=532 (accessed on March 15 2010)
[6] Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Panique, terreur,” at http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.10:2530.encyclopedie0311 (accessed on March 25 2010.)
[7] See “Terror is the Order of the Day,” at http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/416/, accessed on November 27 2011.
[8] Maximilen Robespierre, “Report on the Principles of Political Morality,” at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1794robespierre.asp, accessed on November 27 2011.
[9] Réimpression de l'ancien Moniteur, seule histoire authentique et inaltérée de la révolution française depuis la réunion des États-généraux jusqu’au Consulat (mai 1789-novembre 1799), 32 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1858-70), 21: 613, 615
[10] See Stephen Clay, “Vengeance, Justice and the Reactions in the Revolutionary Midi,” French History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2009): 22-46
[11] For the distinction between subversive and conservative terror, see Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed. Death Squad: the Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)
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