Dead right: Hegel and the terror

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 103, Issue 2-3, 2004, Pages 375-395

  Comay, Rebecca ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950570339     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-375     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. For some of the details of this decision, see Dale van Kley, "Origins of an Anti-Historical Declaration," in Dale van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 72-113
2. and Keith Baker, "Fixing the French Constitution," in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261-71
3. For the key debates leading up to the adoption of the first Declaration of the Rights of Man, see Antoine de Baecque, Wolfgang Schmale, and Michel Vovelle, L'an 1 des droits de l'homme (Paris: Presses du CNRS, 1988)
4. Comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonerre's report on July 27 to the constitutional committee of the Assemblée Nationale is here emblematic when he identifies the inclusion of a declaration of rights as "the only difference between the cahiers that call for a new constitution and those that call for only the reestablishment of what they regard as an existing constitution" [Archives parlementaires [27 juillet 1789]) vol. 8: 283
5. cited in van Kley, The French Idea of Freedom, 108. Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration makes the connection explicit: "A society in which the guarantee of rights is not secured... has no constitution."
6. For some of the visual representations (both revolutionary and royalist) of both the Declaration and the Constitution as tablets of the ten commandments, see Jonathan P. Ribner, Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), especially chapter 1, 6-28
7. See J.-P. Babelon, Archives nationales. Musée de l'histoire de France, vol. 4 (Paris: Publisher, 1965), 84
8. The decree, presented by Gilbert Romme in the name of the Committee on Public Safety, is quoted by Ribner, Broken Tablets, 15 (together with some photographs of both the mutilated Declaration and the similarly vandalized Constitution of 1791, which was exhumed by the same order in 1793)
9. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner (Munich/ Paderborn: Schoningh, 1958-1987), 366
10. Friedrich Schlegel, "Ernst und Falk," in Kritische Ausgabe 3:96
11. Compare Friedrich Schlegel, Ideen, in Kritische Ausgabe 2:259
12. See the near-identical formulation in Novalis, Christendom oder Europa, in Friedrich von Hardenberg, Werke, Tagebucher, und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel (Munich: Hanser, 1978), 724
13. For a discussion of some of the German romantic efforts to integrate the French Revolution, see Richard Brinkmann, "Fruhromantik und Franzosische Revolution," in Deutsche Literatur und Franzosische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck, 1974), 172-91
14. Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1792), in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidman, 1877-1917), 18:366
15. See Marie-Hélène Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 37
16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraph 545. All subsequent citations are given in the text, by paragraph number
17. On Verkehrung, see Hegel, Phenomenology, paragraphs 551, 563
18. On some of these tensions, see the essays by J. K. Wright, "National Sovereignty and the General Will,"
19. and Keith Michael Baker, "The Idea of a Declaration of Rights," both in Dale van Kley, ed.. The French Idea of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)
20. as well as Marcel Gauchet, La Revolution des Droits de l'homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989)
21. On "volitional atoms" see Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 445
22. This whole formulation owes much to Alain Badiou, Abrégé de la metapolitiqué (Paris: Seuil, 1998)
23. Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989)
24. makes the connection in a particularly flamboyant fashion, but the linkage is implicit in both Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952)
25. and Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
26. For an excellent account of some of the paradoxes of Thermidor and the structural prolongation of terror in the name of counterterror, see Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
27. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 447
28. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1955), 8
29. Daniel Arasse, Le guillotine et l'imaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 70
30. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
31. Walter Benjamin, "The Image of Proust," in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)