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Book Review
| Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Pp. 480. $45.00 (ISBN 0-8139-2546-0).
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| We live in interesting times. As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear appeals in Boumediene v. Bush (06–1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06–1196), it is difficult not to read contemporary events into Howard Brown's historical analysis of 1790s France, during which he reports: "In 1793–94, almost sixty military commissions carried out over eight thousand executions.... The legislation establishing the jurisprudence of military commissions proved little more than a fig leaf for the operation of [these] instruments of extermination..." (393 n. 60). |
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Others have certainly exposed what they view as the Revolution's self-defeating character, whether from an institutionalist perspective (Burke famously condemned the project of destroying order in the name of liberty), or an ideological one (J.L. Talmon, publishing in the same year as Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, found the seeds of despotism in the Rousseauean idea of a general will). Brown focuses on the "economy of violence" during the relatively neglected years between the Terror and the Empire. He presents a meticulously researched and methodologically eclectic examination of the local and regional cycles of violence that destabilized France during this period, from the "near-anarchy" of 1795 to the August 1802 plebiscite that established the lifetime rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. This is not a story about Paris, but about the countryside, where the Revolution "not only destroyed the institutional constraints on popular violence, it eroded many of the cultural ones as well" (50). The resulting proliferation of criminal banditry and "counterterror"—politically motivated violence by royalists against republicans—"challenged the regime's ability to ensure public order within the framework of its new liberal institutions" (64). In Brown's estimation, this dynamic was largely responsible for the French public's ultimate acceptance of dictatorship over democracy. |
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This book encompasses an unusual breadth of approaches to the subject of violence, justice, and repression, from detailed case studies of selected episodes to statistical analyses of indictments, verdicts, and sentences. Brown uses these different camera angles to capture what he calls the movement from "community policing" to "policing communities," that is, the transition from the ancien régime society of self-regulating communities to an overarching "security state." The details of this transition, which Brown recounts with color and lucidity, are likely to be of greatest interest to those who study this period. But the book's themes resonate broadly across disciplines, reminding us that we cannot study and build political and legal institutions that aim to promote liberty without taking account of the basic need for security. |
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In Brown's account of the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, "liberty was sacrificed not to glory but to security" (325). The political legitimacy that the Consulate gained by using the army as the principal tool of counter-insurgency amounted, in Brown's assessment, to "apply[ing] enough repressive force to make local inhabitants more afraid of the security forces than they were of those who resisted them" (318). In Brown's words, Hobbes triumphed over Rousseau. But the outcome remained suboptimal: "While delivering the security that many had good reason to want, the Consulate produced a state that few would have chosen" (344). |
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"Hobbes" (a state in which citizens accept state authority as legitimate because it provides security, even at the expense of personal liberty) was the consolation prize for citizens who belatedly cooperated with government troops and military commissions to quell the local violence that had spun out of control. In Brown's view, "Rousseau" (here, a state in which constitutional limits constrain the exercise of governmental power) was never given a fighting chance. The revolutionary deputies, an "overwhelming number" of whom were lawyers, erred by making "a fetish of the law" and by creating "the liberal fallacy that the law, by starting with a constitution and filling in the gaps, could create a set of institutional arrangements that would liberate individuals to satisfy all of their needs" (67). Lawyers and policy-makers then, as now, underestimated the distance between prescribing liberal legal and political institutions, and the social, cultural, and material circumstances that constrain their implementation. |
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Describing France in 1795, Brown indicates that "[a] free society does not experience fear as a salient feature of public life" (25). The observation is timely. The good news is that liberal democracy can emerge from the ruins of a society plagued by seemingly uncontrollable violence, which Brown's valuable research reminds us was the condition of much of France in the late 1790s. The bad news is that it can take many decades and might entail repressive measures fundamentally at odds with democratic ideals. How to convince those who have consolidated their hold on political power through such "exceptional measures" that they should then embrace constitutionalism is another story. |
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| Chimène Keitner
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University of California,
Hastings College of the Law |
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