The Death of a Lawmaker

Abstract

Maximilien Robesplerre, who had held an immense political power as a Jacobin leader of the French Revolution and declined suddenly and easily by the Coup d'Etat of Thermidor in the summer of 1794, seems to have identified himself with the figure of the legislators in antiquity whose history fascinated this revolutionary as a young student through the reading of Plutarch or of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and continued to be related by him on many occasions since the beginning of the Revolution. He may have also known that a lawmaker, as was the case of Lycurgus of Sparta or Romulus of Roma, is subjected almost necessarily to the collective violence or persecution at the moment when (or more precisely because, it may be said) he brings the law or the norm to his community. Thus locating Robespierre among the “extraordinary” (so Rousseau-called) lawmakers will afford not only an interpretation of the historical affair but several sociological implications : verification of Rene Girard's thesis on violence and social order, comprehension of Weberian type of charismatic domination not as deriving from leader's own mysterious quality but as based on the situation of a community which expects the realization of any order or stability beyond the crisis of dismemberment, and reconfirmation of Durkheim's concept of the“effervescence collective”as a violent process of producing of the sacred and finally reconstituting of the social. In spite of reticence by the founder of the modern French sociology, who was also obliged to respect the principles of 1789 as one of the eminent spokesmen of the Third Republic, about the bloody aspect of the Revolution as well as the death of Robespierre, the French Revolution, especially the Coup d'Etat of Thermidor will present us a precious clue in constructing a religious sociology of the politics or a political sociology of the religion.