Conclusion

This conclusion reviews the importance of studying redemptive violence in nineteenth century France in light of the political history of the twentieth century. It argues that, despite the increased intensity of violence in the twentieth century, a study of redemptive violence in the nineteenth century is still important for us today. That is because it emphasizes that all democratic revolutions are social revolutions. All democratic revolutions pose the problem of reconstructing democratic social bonds. Redemptive violence’s history underscores that fraternité was always as important as liberty and equality in the French tradition. Critics of fraternité today ignore the importance of democratic solidarity at their peril.

Regicide and Redemptive Violence in the French Revolution

This chapter describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of violence during the trial and execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution: the language of redemptive violence. The execution of the king served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. Regicide as redemptive violence helped bypass that obstacle. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence’s enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War

This chapter studies how an image of irrationalist redemptive violence saturated French intellectual culture on the eve of the First World War. It links the proliferation of that image of violence to the popularity of Henri Bergson. It draws attention to the way his philosophy was adapted into a political theory of decadence and degeneration across the political spectrum after 1900. The chapter highlights the writing of Georges Sorel because a conceptual reconstruction of his Reflections on Violence dramatizes how so many French thinkers could link voluntaristic violence with moral regeneration. It concludes by describing the nationalistic fate of Sorel’s argument as it travelled in and beyond France.

Introduction

This chapter introduces redemptive violence and situates its appeal in a paradox intrinsic to modern revolutionary democracy: enthroning the people as sovereign came at the price of dissolving them into a multitude of abstract individuals. It focuses readers’ attention on redemptive violence in nineteenth-century French thought, outlines the structure of the book, and formalizes the book’s main claims. It shows why this book’s argument forces us to rethink inherited accounts of political violence, especially those generated during the Cold War. Where liberal antitotalitarian critics have drawn teleological connections between redemptive violence and totalitarianism, this chapter resists those connections to invite readers to consider what redemptive violence can reveal about democracy.

From the Ballot to the Barricade in the Paris Commune

This chapter analyzes socialist aspirations for social regeneration as they evolved from the 1840s to the Commune. It contrasts the political culture of the 1840s with that of the Commune to bring into view a conceptual mutation: where socialists had once pursued social regeneration through pacific methods and universal manhood suffrage, by 1871, they linked social regeneration with republican militarism and the reincarnation of “the people in arms.” This mutation is excavated through writers such as Louise Michel, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, and Jules Vallès. Although this mutation was contingent, once realized, it bonded socialist dreams of regeneration to popular redemptive violence.

From Glory to Total War in Algeria

This chapter analyzes the relationship between Tocqueville’s passion for glory and his endorsement of total war in Algeria. It is now commonplace to acknowledge Alexis de Tocqueville’s support for Algerian colonization. Less well understood, however, is why he also endorsed the French strategy of “total war” in the regency. How was Tocqueville’s liberalism linked to the specific shape of violence in Algeria? This chapter situates Tocqueville’s Algerian writings in the intersecting intellectual contexts of the 1840s to argue that his apologies for total war were shaped by the lingering legacies of revolutionary republicanism and Bonapartism which defined glory in terms of national defense. By tethering modern liberty to this conception of glory, Tocqueville provided resources for rationalizing settlerism’s exterminationist violence.