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At a time when it has become habitual to think of terror(ism) and human rights, or terror and democracy, as polar opposites, as completely distinct forms of politics, it bears some consideration that la Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen was followed by la Terreur, that is, a war on (internal) enemies of the French revolution.

The first thing to note, perhaps, is that terror - in the form of ‘the Terror’ as the name of a government policy - enters the political vocabulary alongside the advent of democracy, human rights, and its declarations. The second thing that might be remarked upon is that, currently, ‘terror’ is regarded as not only outside politics (insofar as politics is defined as democratic), as excess, as the irrational outside of a rational system, but that it is analysed in largely depoliticised or depoliticising terms.

Hegel is of interest, here, insofar as he takes a quite different view of la Terreur to Kant. According to Kant, and in typical liberal fashion, the Terror is understood in a restrictive sense, such that the Revolution can be thereby regarded - in its essence, from a distance, and by and large - as progress.

And so, the Terror, although it is official government policy, is considered as anomalous. Kant will therefore enthuse about the idea (and ideas) of the French Revolution, but not the Terror. To be sure, there is much to be said here, by way of Lacan, on Kant and Sade, or by way of Foucault on the history of madness, of prisons and, not least, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” - but, maybe, more of that later …

On Hegel’s account of the Terror, Rebecca Comay writes:

Terror is thus neither explained away by Hegel on circumstantial grounds — the exceptional security measures improvised by a young republic struggling to sustain itself in the face of an extraordinary array of contingent pressures, from foreign wars to internal counterrevolutionary upheavals, from bread shortages to whatever — nor mystified as some kind of inexplicable diabolical cataclysmic eruption.

For Hegel, unlike for Kant, the revolution is a block: the terror cannot be surgically excised as a local anomaly, deformation, or betrayal of its founding principles, the revolution does not splinter into essential and inessential, structural and incidental. Indeed any attempt to define the chronological boundaries of the terror — to confine it to a sixteen-month interval as a temporary deviation from the revolution — arguably only prolongs the persecutory logic that is contained (a paradox exemplified by the Thermidorian counterterrorist reaction and the virulent culture of denunciation it perpetuated: Thermidor is itself the prototype of every war on terrorism).

For Hegel, therefore, the terror proper begins not with the law of 22 Prairial, not with the law of suspects, not with the regicide in January 1793, not with the king’s arrest and trial, not with the September massacres of 1792, not with the riots at the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, not with the suspensive veto of the 1791 Constitution, and not with the storming of the Bastille. Hegel backdates the terror to the very onset of the revolution, if not before—June 17, 1789, the day the États Généraux spontaneously and virtually unanimously recreated itself as the Assemblée Nationale as sole agent and embodiment of the nation’s will.

With the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers état from “nothing” to “everything” is announced and performatively accomplished: the oath both marks and makes the people’s transition from political nullity to the “complete nation” that it will retroactively determine itself always already to have been. As structurally complete, the nation must eliminate what falls outside it as an excrescence whose existence is a contradiction: the founding act of revolutionary democracy is thus the purge. This literalization of Abbé Sieyès’ formula thus determines political modernity as a fellowship of terror. And with this gesture, writes Hegel, “the undivided substance of absolute freedom ascends to the throne of the world without any power being able to resist it”

[…] Abstract individualism is the principle — the scary link, for Hegel, between the seemingly disparate ideologies of revolutionary decisionism, of social contractualism, of absolutist nationalism, and of free-market liberalism — and can account for the oft-noted and otherwise inexplicable tension within the Declaration of Rights itself between the apparently irreconcilable poles of individual rights and national sovereignty, between the right of each (against all) and the right of all (against each), between the rights of man and the rights of citizen, between private and public liberty (a tension only partially explicable in terms of the revolution’s own split pedigree between Gallic absolutism and an imported modern liberalism). It is in each case, for Hegel, the lost ligature of the social bond which is registered without being acknowledged: the loss of the binding power of religion as religare, the splintering of the community into an aggregate of “volitional atoms,” and the foreclosure of the political — the incarnate divinity of the state itself — within the transparent homogeneity of a civil society sutured together by the anonymous rule of law. With the assumption of mass sovereignty as a sovereignty of immediacy we have the outline of the Sartean “group-in-fusion”: the endless reversibility of democracy and dictatorship within what Alain Badiou has called a “fellowship of terror.”

[…] Although Hegel barely pauses at the regicide, he is perhaps the first to note the link between the terrors of modern democracy and the disavowed fundamentalism on which it rests; he is the first also to make the connection between this disavowal and the compulsive construction of fanaticism as the terrifying fundamentalism of the Other: war on terror is democracy’s own way of abjecting what remains its own darkest secret to itself through ritualistically repetitive projection. Insight needs faith, and modern democracy is just the story of their violent symbiosis within the endless melancholia of an ungrieved loss.

What Claude Lefort calls the persistence of the theological-political might be understood as a kind of fetishism: the filling of the empty place left by the evacuation of the divinely sanctioned monarchy—the self-production of the body politic of the people as power incarnate.24 The sacramental substitution of people for king immediately closes the space it opens up—lack is, perversely, simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed—and can be understood as the prototype for every politics of fusion, in the face of which genuine democracy, in Lefort’s terms, must mobilize itself as a perpetual negotiation to maintain the empty place as an active vacancy rather than as the usual power vacuum into which anything and everything might flow. One might understand this as a kind of mourning. [From “Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror”, SAQ, 103:2-3, 2004.

Comay also discusses much of this in a Slought Foundation panel, the audio of which is here.