The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France by Ronen Steinberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France by Ronen Steinberg Kate M. Bonin Steinberg, Ronen. The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France. Cornell UP, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5017-3924-8. Pp. 222. Of course, the French Revolution did not end on 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794). This was, however, the date of Maximilien Robespierre's arrest. It marks the end of the eighteen-month Reign of Terror, which left tens of thousands of French dead, hundreds of thousands imprisoned, and the rest of the nation struggling to come to grips with the legacies of atrocity and mass violence. How this struggle played out forms the subject of The Afterlives of the Terror, which analyzes the immediate Thermidorian Reaction through the Napoleonic Empire and the Bourbon Restoration's heavy-handed efforts to reconstruct, restitute, and re-sacralize. In an era when governance had become the shared responsibility of all (or most men, rather), which individuals were to be held accountable for mass crimes (other than the excoriated Robespierre, already dead)? In the years after 9 Thermidor, subsequent regimes debated financial reparation for victims' families; restitution of victims' tarnished reputations; and what to do about mass graves (focal points for commemorating the past that threatened to ignite opposition to current authority). Ronen Steinberg has an eye for choosing obscure documents and episodes that both elucidate his point and grip readers' attention. For instance, the chapter that opens with a somewhat-dry meditation on the origins and meanings of "accountability" is livened by its account of the trial and execution of Joseph Le Bon, the last of the government functionaries to be guillotined for his actions during the Terror. Moreover, Steinberg is conscientious in his use of modern tools to discuss historic events. For example, he proposes to examine the Thermidorian Reaction as a period of "transitional justice," or the search for greater equity in societies that are newly emerging from periods of oppression and violence. "Transitional justice" is a term more typically applied to liberal regimes in South Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, emerging in the 1990s. The value of applying this modern concept to the revolutionary past is in highlighting an ineluctable dilemma of the post-Thermidor period: the need to demonstrate that the Terror was safely in the past, balanced against the fact that dealing with the Terror was still very much the business of the uneasy present. Similarly, Steinberg avoids using the anachronistic terms "trauma" and "post-traumatic stress disorder" in connection with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men, women, and children who predate these [End Page 258] concepts. Without modern tools to conceptualize and process the events of 1793–94, how did French society work to "liquidat[e] the heritage of the Terror" (118)? To answer this question, Steinberg brings together a series of seemingly-unrelated phenomena, including: the Gothic literary vogue; "phantasmagoria" lantern shows, which purported to "resurrect" the ghosts of Rousseau, Voltaire, Marat, and others; and contemporary medical debates about how long guillotine victims retained consciousness, and whether they felt pain. The very disparateness of these responses evokes the stumbling and irresolution of a society that was far from finished with the appalling spectacle of state-sanctioned mass violence. Gripping reading. Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French