“The Rage of the Fanatics”: Religious Fanaticism and the Making of Revolutionary Violence

Abstract

Abstract Fanaticism, along with its offshoots, fanatic, fanatical and fanaticized, was one of the French Revolution’s favourite terms of abuse. This article traces fanaticism’s evolution from its initial emergence in the religious polemics of the early modern period to its everyday use in Revolutionary politics and assesses the idea’s implications for the nature of the violence the new regime was willing to deploy against its enemies. While Revolutionary political culture classified many different kinds of enemy throughout the 1790s, the attribution of fanaticism to an adversary was especially significant because it defined the enemy as irrational, intractable, almost inhuman. In the context of the counter-insurgency campaigns the new regime fought at home and abroad, this definition of enmity and the dehumanization of resistance that it implied served to justify the recourse to extremes of violence that would have been unthinkable in other contexts and against other types of adversary.