Carla A. Hesse, Ph.D.

Project

The Spirit of Revolutionary Law: Foundational Justice and the Politics of Legitimation in the French Terror of 1792-95

"The Spirit of Revolutionary Law" is a study of the legal origins and practices of the French Terror. Despite the unquestioned centrality of the Terror to the French Revolution and the foundations of the French Republic, we still know remarkably little about the intellectual and institutional origins of the key legal instruments of repression during the Terror, "revolutionary law" and the tribunals devoted to its execution, nor about how these courts actually functioned during their brief but critical history (1792-1795). This study will reconstruct the intellectual, political and cultural sources of the key concepts of revolutionary justice (terror, suspicion, revolutionary law, exceptional tribunals, etc.) and examine their legacy for modern political culture in France and the world more generally.

Recommended Reading
Hesse, Carla A. Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
-. "La Preuve par la lettre: pratiques juridiques au tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris (1793-1794)." Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (1996): 629-642. German translation: "Das französische Revolutionstribunal, Gerichtsverfahren und die kulturelle Konstruktion des modernen politischen Subjekts." In Bilder der Nation: kulturelle und politische Konstruktion des Nationalen am Beginn der europäischen Moderne, edited by Ulrich Bielefeld, 331-350. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998.
-. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Colloquium, 07.02.2006

The Spirit of Revolutionary Law: Foundational Justice and the Politics of Legitimation in Republican France

In the first part of this seminar I will present an overview of the main argument, themes and approach to my topic. I will begin with the contention that Republican France, for all of its many Constitutions, is distinguished among modern democracies by the relative weakness of its constitutional tradition, and conversely the relative strength of legitimation practices born out of revolutionary law. I will suggest that the explanation for this singularity is to be found at the moment of the French Republic's inception, the revolutionary crisis of 1792-95. My title plays on the title of Montesquieu's masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws. According to Montesquieu the laws of a nation endure as long as the nation itself. As Montesquieu understood, every constitutional government requires a legal mechanism for states of emergency. But in contrast to an existing state, a revolution must bring a new state into being and give it legitimacy. Herein lies the difference between "emergency law" and "revolutionary law," between a "state of emergency" and "revolutionary government." The use of emergency law in a revolutionary setting takes on a novel meaning and has novel consequences. Revolutionary law is foundational.

During the period of revolutionary government (1792-95) more laws were decreed in France (about 40,000) than had been promulgated by the French monarchy before 1789. But between 1792 and 1795 France had no constitution. In place of a constitution-which proved impossible to put into place in the midst of civil and international war-the French revolutionaries turned to their Penal Code in the hope of guiding the nation through crisis in a lawful manner. That is, they attempted to use penal law to bring a constitutional regime into being-or at least to create the circumstances in which it might be possible to do so. One crucial implication of this observation is that it was as much the criminal tribunal as the legislative convention that served as the foundational site of the French Republican tradition, and it was the tribunal that established a set of foundational practices that legitimated it. The French Republic, I will argue, has, since 1793, kept itself alive by keeping itself "on trial."

My book is at once a history of legal concepts-a conceptual history of the idées forces of revolutionary law-and at the same time an ethnographic study of revolutionary trial procedures and their reincarnations in the broader setting of modern French political life. It is better described as a history of legal culture than as a legal history or history of the law. In the second part of the seminar I will examine one of these idées forces and its legacy in detail-the purloined letter. I will show how it emerged as the central form of evidence used in the Revolutionary Tribunals as a means of discovering counter-revolutionary intentions. I will then examine how this romantic trope of authenticity-the unwitting revelation-functioned in the trials of Louis XVI and of Danton to persuade both jurors and the world of the legitimacy of their conviction and execution as traitors to the nation. In the last section of the seminar I will show how seized letters, more generally, were used first as legal evidence, then as political propaganda, and finally, through their display in the French museum of national history, as public relics whose display and visitation, to this day, serves to legitimate Republican government in France.

Publications from the Fellows' Library

Hesse, Carla A. (New York, 2018)

Bodies visible and invisible : the erasure of the Jewish cemetery in the life of modern Thessaloniki

Hesse, Carla A. (Princeton, N.J. [u.a.], 2003)

The other enlightenment : how French women became modern Princeton paperbacks

Hesse, Carla A. (Princeton, NJ, 2001)

The other Enlightenment : how French women became modern

Hesse, Carla A. (Paris, 1996)

La preuve par la lettre : pratiques juridiques au tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris (1793 - 1794)

Hesse, Carla A. (Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.], 1991)

Publishing and cultural politics in revolutionary Paris : 1789 - 1810 Studies on the history of society and culture ; 12