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Appendix 10 – The Revolution Devours Its Children
Well, we all knew this one was coming eventually: the point in the revolution when a small clique of radical fanatics who seize control of the government in the second wave of the revolution embark on a reign of terror to purge the enemies of the revolution. At the moment of maximum crisis, surrounded by enemies on all sides, they turn to firing squads and guillotines and chopping blocks to ruthlessly eliminate all perceived threats. And as the radical clique now in charge of the government is inevitably composed of a teeny tiny minority of the population, the vast majority of the population might find itself plausibly targeted as enemies of the revolution. Not just conservatives, reactionaries, and restorationists, but anyone deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the radical program, or who have ever so slightly different opinions about what that revolutionary program should be about. And this includes, of course, those who helped make the revolution in the first place, the leaders of that first wave, like the hapless moderates, so recently overthrown in our second wave. So we have reached the phase when our revolution begins to devour its children.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t always go like that. Not all revolutions wind up at a reign of terror phase; in fact, most of them don’t. It seems like they do, because the two biggest, most famous and most influential revolutions — the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution — both progressed to a phase of terror. And since we take those to be our model revolutions, we think that all revolutions must progress to a phase of terror. But as we discussed last time, that radical second wave challenge to the moderates fails as often as it succeeds. So oftentimes there are no radicals in power to launch such a reign of terror. And as we know, moderates would never dream of using excessive violence to cement their control amidst revolutionary chaos.
Oh wait, of course they would.
So even though plenty of revolutions do not wind up at a radical reign of terror phase, they nearly all wind up at a point when top-down violence by the revolutionary government is deployed against its own people. We don’t have a dramatic name, such as “reign of terror” for top-down violence committed by moderate revolutionary regimes, so I’m gonna take a page from a different period of French history to give that a name. Let’s call them bloody weeks, after the infamous suppression of the Paris Commune — because here too, the revolution is devouring its children.
So what I wanna do today is go through both kinds of top-down revolutionary violence, both reigns of terror and bloody weeks. Establish the who, what, when, where, why, and how of both types of revolutionary child-devouring, and mark out how they are different — because they are different — but also notice how they are very much the same.
Let’s start with the “what” question, as in: what are we even talking about here? So let’s define our terms. A reign of terror is when a revolutionary government, captured by a radical faction, uses the power of the state to carry out a campaign of political violence. It involves an intrusive mechanism of surveillance, encouragement of citizen mutual denunciation, mass arrests, flimsy rules of evidence, and often, though not always, concludes with summary execution. The ultimate goal of a reign of terror being the liquidation of perceived enemies of the revolution, and a final consolidation of power by those in power.
This is in contrast to a bloody week, when a revolutionary government, successfully defended by the moderate leaders against the radicals, uses the power of the state to carry out a campaign of political violence against the defeated radicals. It involves the declaration of martial law, mass indiscriminate arrest, and often though not always concludes with summary executions, the ultimate goal being the liquidation of perceived enemies of the revolution, and a final consolidation of power by those in power.
So as you can see, these are different, but they are also the same. The particular political sins being rooted out and punished are obviously gonna be different varieties whether the violence is perpetrated by radicals or moderates, but in both cases, we are looking at top-down state violence perpetrated against its own people for the purpose of defending the political power of the perpetrators.
So let’s move next to the when question, as in: when do reigns of terror happen, when do bloody weeks happen? Well, in both cases, they obviously happen after the contest between moderates and radicals has been decided. We also obviously need to have advanced to the point in the wider revolutionary event where an ongoing existential crisis has created emergency conditions that seems to justify the harshest possible measures, measures that in other cases would be considered beyond the pale. The question of when this happens is when we find our revolutionary leaders exhausted, stressed out, and afraid. They need to be deeply fearful and not a little bit paranoid of what will happen if their rivals win, so they cannot allow their rivals to win. We don’t find reigns of terror or bloody weeks happening after the initial first wave of revolution. In the honeymoon period that follows that first wave, everyone is excited about the limitless possibilities of the revolution, and that isn’t exactly fertile ground for a reign of terror or a bloody week, because the prevailing emotional vibe is hope, optimism, and unity, rather than fear, bitterness, and division.
So now let’s move on to a bigger question of who. And the who question has two aspects: who perpetrates the reign of terror or bloody week, and who are the victims of a reign of terror or a bloody week. Now I wanna set aside the latter aspect for a moment to focus on the former. Who is doing this? And we already know part of the answer because of the inherent distinction between reigns of terror and bloody weeks. Reigns of terror are perpetrated by radicals, bloody weeks by moderates. But the who is doing this question also involves the wider personnel carrying out the project, because it’s obviously not gonna be enough for uncompromising leaders of some executive committee or provisional government to order mass arrests and executions without anyone to carry out the orders. So we must also note here that in both cases, there’s gonna be a loyal apparatus of police and military and lawyers and judges who do the actual rounding up, arresting, arraigning, sentencing, and carrying out of the sentences. These people must have some kind of ideological motivation for not just going along with all this, but actively and eagerly partipating.
So we can give the reign of terror a name and a face like Robespierre, and we can give a bloody week the name and face of Adolphe Thiers, but absent thousands of willing subordinates and collaborators, it’s never gonna happen. Carrying out a vast project of political violence is a team effort.
And before we go on, I also wanna mention here that everything we’re talking about here today is distinct from white terrors. A white terror is perpetrated by reactionaries, conservatives, and restorationists, that’s a whole separate can of worms. What we’re talking about here today is still revolutionary on revolutionary violence, because the revolution is eating its children.
Now, I wanna briefly set aside the other big who question — who are the victims — because that question will make a lot more sense after we’ve talked about the why question. Why embark on political massacres, what’s the point? This isn’t something you just haul off and do on a whim. Even fanatics have justifications beyond just a mindless thirst for blood. Mindless thirst for blood is actually a far rarer condition than one might suppose; even historical actors with the most blood on their hands can point to a thing they were trying to accomplish that somehow necessitated all that blood.
So let’s start with the reigns of terror. For reigns of terror, I see five broad categories that have shown up historically, all of which are mutually reinforcing, and so we’re gonna talk about these in no particular order.
But first, we have a thing called winning the war. Why have a reign of terror? Because we need to win the war. What war? Well, whatever war the regime happens to be fighting at the time. In both Russia and France, the perpetrators of revolutionary terror, whether Jacobin or Red, were waging both civil wars and foreign wars. The very existence of the revolution seemed to hang in the balance — it did hang in the balance. It wasn’t even irrational paranoia that led them to see spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists trying to undermine them from within who needed to be purged, spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists were absolutely trying to undermine them from within! They probably did need to be purged. And with victory or defeat in the field determining the whole fate of the revolution, the revolution’s own soldiers and officers needed to display iron discipline. If anyone slacked off or failed in their duty, it wasn’t just a mistake, it was treason. So the implementation of terror was justified by its leaders as a vital response to the exigencies of war.
Second, related to the exigencies of war, was economic mobilization and the marshaling of resources by the state. Among those most frequently targeted by revolutionary terror were not just political partisans or foreign enemies, but something else. Hoarders, speculators, profiteers, people who were undermining the revolutions’ economic mobilization. People who refused to hand over grain or sell at a price below what they thought reasonable. People who would not give up their tools or their livestock or their fodder to some passing army or political agents. If a revolution comes under radical control, there’s also usually an amount of confiscation and redistribution of land going on, and anybody who opposes that is often gonna find themselves on the wrong side of a machine gun or a guillotine.
Now, in those economic cases, we’re often dealing with people motivated by economic self-interest rather than political ideology. So to turn to our third point is the necessity of clearing out those rival political factions and parties, the people who are driven by political ideology. This is the liquidation of the Girondins, the trial of the SRs. It’s very important to paint these rival groups as totally illegitimate, so as to not challenge the hegemony of those radicals who have seized power, whether it’s the Mountain or the Bolsheviks. It’s vital for the radicals who, as we have noted, are a very small group, to identify themselves one to one with the greater revolutionary struggle. No other group can be allowed to have a legitimate claim to the revolution, and anyone who does is liable to find themselves on the wrong side of a machine gun or a guillotine.
Now, this relates to the fourth point, which is that the regime must eventually establish its own preponderance of force over the society. That’s the whole basis of political sovereignty. The first wave of the revolution broke the ancien regime’s claim, but eventually the post-revolutionary chaos is going to have to give way to something resembling a new order. If the radicals won their contest with the moderates, then obviously the moderates were unable to establish such a preponderance of force for themselves. And as the radicals take over in a hostile, dangerous, and chaotic time, they need to bring down some kind of violent hammer to establish that we are now sovereign, and the way that you know that we’re sovereign is that we can lock you up or kill you whenever we want A reign of terrors, that’s partly about making society well and truly afraid of challenging them. That’s what sovereignty’s all about.
Fifth and finally, a reign of terror has its own ideological logic, outside immediate threats to the power of the radicals, whether it’s real or perceived. The reign of terror is an extension of the radical’s willingness to liquidate and destroy old institutions, and start their revolutionary society off with a clean slate. Defenders and beneficiaries of the old ways can and should be cleared out ruthlessly, so that a good and pure new society can be built. And because they are radical, that list includes not just people actively conservative or reactionary, but anyone insufficiently committed to new beginnings.
So broadly speaking, those are the justifications for reigns of terror. They answer the question, why do we need to have a reign of terror? And it’s not that we have to accept those justifications, it’s just that those are the justifications the radicals themselves believe.
Now bloody weeks, on the other hand, have subtly different justifications. To follow up from that last point about the desire to start new and destroy everything old, the top-down state repression that goes along with a good bloody week is the other side of that coin. They must arrest and deport and confiscate and kill not to ensure a year zero fresh start, but to prevent a year zero fresh start. Moderates, as we’ve defined them, often love a good political revolution, but they hate the possibility of a social revolution, and they’re absolutely willing to kill to prevent the world from being turned upside down. In fact, they’re perfectly willing to compromise and reconcile with many parts of ancien regime society, but unwilling to compromise with the most radical wing of their own revolutionary coalition. So it’s pardons for conservatives and firing squads for radicals.
But the principle justification for a bloody week is order. Where a reign of terror is tied to the continuing advance of the revolution, bloody weeks are all about restoring order. The radical challenge and further extracurricular activities by revolutionaries out there must be declared out of bounce for all time. And so, the radicals who keep challenging and pressing the new modern regime are condemned for their criminal behavior, for their rioting, their disturbing of the peace, destruction of property, and treason. The justification for a brutal smackdown on the radical wing of the revolutionary coalition rests on the need to restore order.
But just like a reign of terror, this restoration of order is about establishing the moderate regime holds a preponderance of force and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The time has come for people to stop taking up arms, stop manning barricades, and stop with all these irregular solutions to their political problems. The moderate regime that’s in charge right now is in charge. You are playing by our rules, and if you don’t like it, there will be fatal consequences.
And this is related to the same kind of clearing out of political rivalries that we see in a reign of terror. The moderates need to poison the legitimacy of the radicals to make sure that whatever standing they once had amongst the people is destroyed. And as much as we think that such behavior is only the purview of a radical, moderates can get up to some pretty shady business in the interest of preserving their own position against ideological rivals. Radical leaders claiming to represent a better, truer, or less compromised version of the revolution must be swept off the table. The people must not be allowed to hear their alternatives to the moderates. And if they suggest that revolutionary solutions are the answers to their problems, there must be fatal consequences.
So, now that we have a sense of the whys, we can return to the second part of the who question: who are the victims? Because the question, why are we doing this, sets the stage for, who are we doing it to? So let’s talk about who winds up a victim of a reign of terror.
These terrors, of course, involve famous names like kings and queens and high princes: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Romanov family. And this is usually the most common popular understanding of what a reign of terror is — it’s the people rising up and dispatching once and for all the hated benefactors of the former regime, ruthlessly killing the blood-sucking parasites who had been rightly overthrown by the revolution. But when you actually go through the numbers and the list of victims, we find that those people generally make up a small minority of the victims. Aristocrats are not the most common victims of a reign of terror, for a very simple reason that by the time the revolution has reached the reign of terror phase, most of those original benefactors of the ancien regime like the old nobility have fled into exile. They are beyond the reach of the revolution. Most of the French aristocracy had taken up residents elsewhere by the time the reign of terror came along, same is true the old Russian nobility. So if they’re not around to get killed, who is getting killed?
Well, obviously we should talk about the fact that a lot of people getting killed are revolutionary leaders, who were simply rivals for power of those who now happen to be in charge. This is Jacques Pierre Brissot and the Girondins against Robespierre and the Mountain. This is the leadership of the SRs against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This is where the colloquialism about the revolution eating its children comes from: it’s the Girondins talking about the Mountain. And most especially, it applies to those overthrown moderates now rebranded as reactionaries. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who stood at the center of the Oath of the Tennis Court, was then hauled out to the Champ de Mars to get his head chopped off for crimes against the revolution, most especially, the massacre of the Champ de Mars. We have the Duc d’Orléans, turned Philippe Égalité, whose ambitions and money had played such a huge role in 1787 and 1788 and 1789 eventually executed for treason. They didn’t give him so much as a thank you note.
I should also add at this point that revolutionary terrorists are not directing their terror solely from the left against everyone to their right. What we actually find them doing is creating their own new middle, and launching themselves against their right wing, yes, but also against their left wing. So, obviously, many people caught up in the terror are caught up because they’re conservatives or because they’re moderates, but others are caught up in the terror because they are too radical and too extreme. The terror is coming from a new center of gravity.
So in Russia, for example, we could talk about Left-Communists and SR Maximalists and anarchists, who were targeted by the Bolsheviks, along with liberals and Whites for the same reason: that their activities were undermining the unity of the revolution at a time of foreign and civil war. When Robespierre launched the Great Terror in 1794, who did he target before he even got to the Cordeliers gang? Left wing Hébertists, who were actually more radical than the members of the Committee of Public Safety.
So beyond ideological rivals, we often find a good number of foreigners being targeted in all of this. It is typically a very dangerous thing to be a foreigner inside of a revolutionary event, because though you might find temporary excited encouragement, and a universality of fellow feeling early in the revolution, this is often eventually gonna be met by a paranoid style of revolutionary nationalism, where you now might be identified with enemies of the revolution because of your foreign connections. Revolutions are very dicey times for even the most apolitical of expatriots.
But most of the victims? Most of the victims are simply poor, anonymous commoners — peasants, workers, lower class randos who run a foul of the regime in one way or another, or who simply live in an area that happens to be in a state of acute unrest, and the government decides to order in some infernal columns. The official tally of the official Reign of Terror is packed with victims from Vendée, for example, whether they were engaged in the uprising or simply picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those who are subject to such summary executions, whether by drowning, hanging, cannon fire, guillotine, or machine gun, their names escape our notice because they were nobodies. For every execution of a famous celebrity historical figure, there are hundreds or thousands of executions of unknown commoners. Partly, this can be the result of ratcheting up draconian capital punishment for the simplest of crimes. Lots of victims of the French Reign of Terror were like pick pockets and thieves, people who had just broken the law. If you think about the September Massacres, which were a prelude to the official Reign of Terror, something like half the people who were killed were not aristocrats or enemies of the revolution at all, but people simply being held for having committed some regular old crime.
A bloody week, meanwhile, tends to be a little bit more focused than all of that. It’s less about a prolonged period of repression hitting out multiple directions at once and more about a brief and sharp blow against the radical wing of the revolutionary coalition. And it is hitting out especially against those who have recently attempted to take up arms against the government in the second wave of the revolution. So after the June Rebellion of 1832, or the June Days of 1848, or the suppression of the Paris Commune, or like after the Spartacist Revolt in Germany, the victims tend to be politically radical. They are targeted for trying to move the revolution beyond whatever center the moderates have tried to establish, and unlike a reign of terror is not accompanied by a similar attack against conservatives, reactionaries, and restorationists, unless some group of them also attempted to stage some kind of violent counter-revolution.
In terms of economic class and social standing, the victims of a bloody week tend to come from the lower middle classes and lower classes, so students, artisans, rank and file soldiers and sailors, possibly a few professionals and intellectuals if they got a little too enthusiastic about the radical second wave of a revolution. But unlike a reign of terror, which can find a number of rich, or at least formerly rich aristocrats, as well as lots of comfortable ladies and gentlemen, the victims of the bloody week are gonna be coming from the poorer districts. Which doesn’t exactly set bloody weeks apart from reigns of terror, since reigns of terror also involve lots of lower class victims, but those victims do seem to come exclusively from the lower classes, and that is different.
Now finally we come to the question of how they did it. What are the mechanisms and procedures undertaken by the who — who are perpetrating top-down state violence, and the who — who are the victims of that top-down state violence?
Well, when it comes to the reign of terror, the mechanism is usually some kind of revolutionary tribunal, to at least give a nominal appearance of revolutionary justice. Now, during the French Revolution, revolutionary tribunals were set up to do more than just give the appearance of justice, and there were rules of evidence. But when the law of suspects came down, those rules were suspended and we get to infamous kangaroo court style tribunals. Evidence no longer really matters, accusation carries all before it. So even as there are judges and prosecutors and defendants all playing their parts, the verdict is predetermined, and with ruthless efficiency, the accused are turned into the executed.
But for the most part, the reign of terror likes to keep up the appearance of legality, especially when it comes to trying people who are in the dock for political reasons. People were not hauled before the revolutionary tribunal merely for their political leanings; the accusation was not we disagree with you politically. The accusations, for example, against Danton and Desmoulins were that they were involved in a corrupt self dealing scandal with a certain state owned company, which they had nothing to do with, but it’s not like the Committee of Public [Safety] was just saying, oh, these people pose a political threat to our power, so they must be dispatched with. It was far more that they were corrupt, that they were profiting from the revolution at the expense of the people.
One of the most common accusations we find are “collaboration with foreign enemies,” no matter how spurious or absurd the charge. And so for example, as with Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, you have inner circle Communists admitting that they colluded with the imperialist capitalists to overthrow the revolution. Even if such accusations are literally unbelievable, it is necessary to establish them so as to discredit these leaders, which is, as I said, one of the key goals of a reign of terror: to make sure that the party in power is recognized as the only legitimate representative of the revolution. So you don’t accuse them of supporting the wrong political policies, you accuse them of colluding with enemies of the state.
Now bloody weeks can use the same kind of legal procedures, and though there is certainly quite a bit more fidelity to objective facts and following something like the rule of law in bloody week procedures, there is still something very perfunctory and summary about the nature of the justice being dispensed. Since mass arrests and processing of detainees unfolds quickly and sometimes haphazardly, and it just really doesn’t matter if somebody who’s really innocent gets found guilty. But that said, there is some attempt to limit the harshest penalties to those who were, for example, caught with arms in hand, or who were recognized as the leaders of some insurrection. In these cases, the crimes don’t necessarily have to be manufactured because the bloody week is taking place in the aftermath of a failed revolutionary challenge to the government, and it’s much easier in that case to accuse and prosecute somebody for participation in a failed coup when they are caught with a gun in their.
But it is worth pointing out that those who are rounded up and tried by a moderate regime’s courts and subsequently sentenced to detention or deportation or execution are there after a period when martial law had been declared, and plenty of people who surrendered or laid down their arms were not arrested and processed according to the regular rules of law, but instead came under the immediate jurisdiction of military officers operating under that martial law. And so before the polite niceties of an organized criminal court come into play, many radical leaders and followers find themselves summarily shot on site rather than being processed at all. The vast majority of those killed in action during the Bloody Week were not killed during an exchange of fire, but in summary executions in the street after surrendering or being arrested.
Now, there are plenty of differences between reigns of terror and bloody weeks. A bloody week does tend to be of shorter duration, and more limited in scope, and more limited in who it’s targeting. A reign of terror tends to go on for longer and be a more all-encompassing blanket over society. Now, it’s difficult, given conflicting historical evidence, to know for sure who counts as a victim in a reign of terror or a bloody week, and what the final numbers for such activities actually were. But it also seems that a reign of terror often involves more suspects, more defendants, and more execution than a bloody week will. A bloody week also has a tendency to directly hit a group that has recently attempted to stage some kind of insurrectionary coup d’etat, and so it falls under the purview of a sovereign regime defending itself from an illegal revolt, as opposed to a reign of terror, which is more ideologically driven and is attempting to use their violence to establish entirely new political, economic, and social norms among other things.
So I have not come here to say that reigns of terror and bloody weeks are morally and politically equivalent. But they are both expressions of the same moment in a revolution, when the revolutionary regime uses the power of the state in murderously violent ways in an attempt to establish their permanent ascendancy over the society in question. And more importantly, that these murderously violent acts are committed against other factions of the original revolutionary coalition. In both cases, this is the revolution devouring its children, and that is something that does seem to inevitably occur in every revolution.
So we are approaching the end of this final project of appendices to the Revolutions Podcast. We’ve gone through many stages, and one of the key through lines from beginning to end is that chaos has prevailed. Old political and legal structures no longer have the force that they once did. The society engulfed in revolution grapples with almost continuous uncertainty and insecurity. Violence and criminality rise. Disorder seems to reign.
And so next week, as we approach the final stages of both revolution and the Revolutions Podcast, we will talk about why it is that at the end of every revolution, we always seem to meet a revolutionary dictator.