The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought

Abstract

The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. By Jesse Goldhammer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 218p. $45.00. The problem of how to found a political regime is one of the oldest and most vexed in the history of Western thought. The founding act has often been drenched in blood because certain forms of violence actually help to foster political foundation. This is the illiberal starting point of Jesse Goldhammer's study of the French discourse on sacrificial violence, a theme that he rightly describes as “anathema to mainstream political theory” (p. x), which tends to divert its glance from what it sees as unseemly anachronisms like this. Undaunted, Goldhammer bravely plunges in, turning to 1790s France and the theorizing about sacrifice that it spawned for insight into the violence that he claims is “necessary for political beginnings” (p. 1). While the French revolutionaries engaged in “sacrificial practices and interpretations” such as the beheading of Louis XVI, they never actually developed a theory of sacrifice. That was the contribution of notorious postrevolutionary writers, such as Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille, who well understood that violent sacrifice “facilitates the process of conferring moral legitimacy to political power and setting boundaries for political identity” (p. 192).