The Cultural Origins of Revolutionary Violence
From Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 193-195.
 

Roger Chartier traced the cultural origins of the French Revolution to determine a certain set of conditions that made the Revolution possible because it was conceivable. In his conclusion, then, he takes the next logical step to figure out how revolutionary violence (in particular, the Terror) became conceivable. It did not, he insisted, develop out of the ideas and events of the revolution, but rather it was possible due to pre-existing forms of violence left over from the Old Regime.

 
The specific forms that the French Revolution took seem anything but necessary when they are viewed within the long-term course of the cultural shifts that transformed the acts and the thoughts of the French of the Old Regime. A first paradox is that the Revolution reintroduced large-scale violence in a land in which, for more than a century, the “process of civilization” (to use Norbert Elias’s term) had made notable advances, radically reducing and circumscribing violence. There seems to have been a clear break between revolutionary behavior, which made broad use of both the spontaneous violence of riots and the institutionalized violence of the Terror, and the pacification in the social sphere that a state monopoly on recourse to force made possible.

Brutality had not been completely eliminated--far from it, as proved by the aggressive behavior typical of relations among neighbors, in the working world, and within the family in rural and urban areas alike. Nonetheless, after the mid-seventeenth century, by obliging individuals to keep a tighter control over their impulses, censor their emotions, and rein in spontaneous acts, the judicial and administrative state considerably lowered the threshold of violence that the body social would tolerate. There are a number of signs of this all-important evolution: blood crimes and violence against persons declined among cases of “legal” criminality (crimes, that is, that were known and punished by the courts of justice, which were increasingly absorbed by crimes against property). The older sort of revolt characterized by merciless fury disappeared and was replaced by confrontations that used the more peaceful means of recourse to the law courts or the expression of political grievances. Private recourse to force to settle personal and familial differences declined. Where violence persisted (ingrained as it was in patterns of popular behavoir), the authorities paid scant attention to it, given that it did not threaten the established order and was seldom aimed at society’s notables.

Even though the French Revolution is far from being reducible to the violence that it employed or authorized, the event brought to the surface behavior patterns that had apparently been eradicated and forgotten. This is not the proper place to measure or interpret revolutionary violence, whether in the riots, the Terror, or in military campaigns, but only to reflect on the possible connections between such contradictory phenomena as the (at least relative) pacification of Old Regime society and the massive use of force during the Revolution. To recognize a total discontinuity between these two facts would be to postulate that in one of its concrete and fundamental aspects the Revolution had no origins, and that, far from being rooted in its century, it broke with its times, and for the worse.

The notion merits discussion. On the one hand, the more spontaneous forms of revolutionary violence clearly show the limits of the effort to eradicate brutality. At the end of the eighteenth century, the civilizing process had not transformed all the inhabitants of the kingdom. The personality structure that instilled in individuals stable and rigorous mechanisms of self-constraint, substituting self-imposed prohibition and repression for exterior constraints, was not yet universal. The rough ways of both peasants and townspeople clearly attest to the persistence of another mode of being with a greater freedom in expressing emotion. With the Revolution, the mechanisms that had kept this half-stifled popular violence within the bounds of the private sphere collapsed, giving ancient habits of punitive behavior a chance to reemerge in the sphere of relations with authority.

On the other hand, in its institutional forms, revolutionary violence brought to its logical completion the movement giving the state a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force. In this sense, neither obligatory conscription nor the mechanisms of the Terror were in contradiction with the monarchy’s long-standing attempt to reserve the use of arms to public power alone. They had two original features, however: they used force to oblige all citizens to use force against the enemies of the nation, and they instituted an administrative violence whose purpose was protection of the civil community, but which became available for political solutions to conflicts in the individual sphere. Just as the courts of the Inquisition had given form, language, and legitimacy to denunciations inspired by totally secular interests, the revolutionary courts made it possible to mobilize state violence to settle (often expeditiously) a large number of private tensions fueled by accumulated bitterness, inexpiable hatred, and rivalries that originally had little connections with the destiny of the republic.