Abstract
Alongside utopianism and scientism, totalitarianism has a third and final current: revolutionary violence. We have seen so far that, in totalitarian ideology, it is utopianism that defines the terms of community, and scientism that defines the terms of historical justification. Revolutionary violence is the current that defines the terms for political action. Once more, there is a particular intellectual milieu in which one theme in totalitarian thought has found dominant expression: revolutionary violence is the theme accentuated in anti-totalitarian thought in France. Explicit debate about totalitarianism came relatively late to France, only arriving in the late 1970s, in the course of the impact of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Needless to say, therefore, debate about totalitarianism in France was really a debate about the nature of communism. But there was more to it than that. It was also, at the same time, a debate about the continuing reception of the French Revolution: the vital figures in French anti-totalitarian thought are, in many ways, the French Revolution’s revisionist historians.
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Notes
Vittorio Bufacchi, Violence and Social Justice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 128–45.
See also John Keane, Reflections on Violence (London: Verso, 1996), esp. 59–104.
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Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 1. Note that some commentators push the break in the French left back earlier in time. For Tony Judt, 1956 — and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising — is, at the very least, the start of the break. For others, 1968 — and the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring — is fundamental. See Judt, Past Imperfect.
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See Benjamin Reilly, ‘Ideology on Trial: Testing a Theory of Revolutionary Political Culture’, French History, 19, 1 (2005), 28–47.
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E.g., Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 99–102.
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Cited in Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Vintage, 2007), 297.
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The novel contribution of historians like Hellbeck and Fitzpatrick is to have suggested the ways in which this did not only entail the top-down ascription of identity: in a situation whereby some categories of person were privileged, but others persecuted, individuals still had some room to negotiate their sense of self, to exercise agency. Soviet revolutionary violence was, of course, overwhelmingly repressive. But according to this recent thinking, revolutionary discourse, up to a certain point, offered possibilities for individuals to determine their identities for themselves. Shelia Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005);
Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
See Aileen Kelly, ‘Why They Believed in Stalin’, New York Review of Books, LIV, VII, April 26, 2007, 58–62.
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Berman, The Primacy of Politics, 14. Alternatively, for an account that does, in effect, construct affinities between Sorel and Leninism, see A.J. Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 77–136.
Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 60.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 116–17.
Elliot Y. Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (London: University of California Press, 1999), 29, 27.
Cited in Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 28.
Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 87.
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Shorten, R. (2012). Revolutionary Violence. In: Modernism and Totalitarianism. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284372_6
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