Seven
Saint-Just and the Problem of Heroism in the French Revolution

Miguel Abensour

Translated by Frank Philip

De La Nature . . .: Late 1791–1792

In 1947, Professor Carnot, a descendant of the great Carnot, presented to the Bibliothèque Nationale a collection of Saint-Just's unknown manuscripts, De la nature de l'état civil, de la cité ou les règles de l'indepéndance du gouvernement ("On the Nature of Civil Society, the City, or the Rules of the Independence of Government"). Albert Soboul first published them as "Un manuscrit inédit de Saint-Just" in Annales historiques de la Révolution française (vol. 23, 1951); a second edition followed in a bilingual collection of Saint-Just's writings published in Italy under the title Frammenti sulli Istituzioni repubblicane seguito da testi inediti (Einaudi 1952).^[1]De la nature . . . is fundamental in the strictest sense of the term: it is Saint-Just's first, incomplete expression of the principles of his political philosophy, one in search of a foundation. These writings throw new light on the enigma of Saint-Just, who shines through his myth. His intentness of mind, his dawning philosophical development, and his will to base revolutionary action on truth, demand that we consider an often overlooked aspect of Saint-Just as theorist. This is important even though certain figures like Brissot, Marat, and Dezamy, who compared him to Billaud-Varenne, and Edgar Quinet, who compared him to Fichte, as well as Lucien Febvre, recognized him as a thinker. Can we still cling to the classic interpretation of Saint-Just as embodying the contradiction between the theory of Social Contract and revolutionary practice? Thanks to this discovery of one of the most coherent theoretical formulations of Jacobinism in the making, should we not rather perceive the continuity between Saint-Just's theory of nature and his action, or better yet, by taking "the force of circumstances" into account, inquire about the actual political effects of what seems to be a dogmatic conception of nature and the state of nature? Up to

what point may we see the failure of the Jacobins (admitted by Saint-Just in the formula, "The Revolution is frozen") as reflecting the inadequacies, the blind spots of their theory? Rather than taking to task the divorce of theory from practice, viewed as an irremediable fate, would it not be better to discern what is at fault in the theory?

First we need to date the manuscript. Albert Soboul, the first publisher, proposed three possible dates of composition: first around 1790–1791; then the first few months of the Convention, between September 1792 and April 1793; finally between April 1792 and 9 Thermidor. Based on an internal critique of the manuscript, we have proposed another dating that seems to have gained current acceptance.^[2] Taking as our point of reference the issues of slavery and divorce, we maintain that the manuscript must have been written between 24 September 1791 and 20 September 1792, the date slavery was abolished in France and divorce introduced. De la nature . . . would thus date from midway between L'esprit de la Révolution et de la Constitution de France (1791) and Fragments sur les institutions républicaines , probably written in Year II. This is an important point, for as we note the repetition of certain themes characteristic of De la nature . . . in the Discours sur la Constitution de la France (24 April 1793) and in the second Fragment des institutions républicaines , we can better appreciate the distinctiveness of Saint-Just's political style. Unless we take De la nature . . . as a philosophical starting point from which the young revolutionary leader's thoughts and actions flowed, we shall inevitably be dumbfounded by the continual interaction between his political theory and his practice, and between his actions and his principles, where his concern focused on not letting action distort principles. For the inner rhythm of this movement depends on the periodic recurrence of a philosophy of nature, which serves as a kind of springboard for each new plunge. Hence the central role that De la nature . . . occupies in Saint-Just's development, and thus, regarding this kernel of his doctrine and vital representation, we need to grasp the modulations of meaning that punctuate Saint-Just's story.

Reconstitution of the De La Nature . . . Manuscript

For Saint-Just the state of nature meant, in the usage of the political theory of the time, "the state of man before civil governments were instituted." He describes this state as social, for society, a natural given and a fundamental and historically prior phenomenon, precedes the individual and not vice versa. The individual only appeared when the social body began to disintegrate. This natural human society accounts for a universal phenomenon manifested on every level on the scale of creatures, with certain differences of intensity varying from species to species, depending on the intelligence and sensitivity of those subjected to the society. Man, the most sensitive and intelligent creature, is born for an enduring society, for he is born to possess an ensem-

ble of natural relations originating in human needs and affections. There are two kinds of possession, personal possession, which originates in man's affections—including the relations arising from the ties between person and person—and real possession, which originates in needs and includes relations arising from the self's occupation, the exchange of goods, and business in general.

Apart from this, from man to man, everything is identity. Identity, the affective and psychological underpinning of social life, has a fundamental place in Saint-Just's political thought, and an analysis of this concept helps us define the societal state and provide a diversified picture of it. Saint-Just's first proposition describes the societal state as a harmonious alliance between independence and life in society. The basis of this complementarity is membership in a species: "Everything that breathes is independent of its species, and lives in society in its species."^[3] Identity of origin, the precondition for this state, and its corollary, equality, make it possible to rid social life of every instance of domination caused by some difference in power. Unflagging vigilance is needed to preserve identity and equality, and thus to maintain the harmony of the societal state. Inequality of any kind destroys the original identity and introduces into the species or society a heterogeneity that is necessarily a catalyst of dissolution and which fractures the unanimous society into so many distinct and hostile groups. As a result, otherness is the source of an antisocial state, namely, the "savage" or "political" state. In fact, the social state disappears when we are thinking not of the relations between creatures of the same species but the relations between species, for the emergence of difference breeds rivalries and the will to dominate. Every social body thus presents two aspects, depending on whether it is viewed from the inside or the outside. Within a homogeneous society, independence is allied with sociability. But when this society confronts a different society, the societal state vanishes, giving way to the law of politics or preservation, along with its characteristic phenomena of resistance and force. Saint-Just expresses this in a second proposition: "Everything that breathes has a law of politics or preservation against what is not its society or species."^[4]

Thus, the two different states coexist. The localization of each of the states depends on which group one envisages. According to Saint-Just, up to the level of the group "people" (peuple), all groups, family, the tribe, are recognized as more identical than different. Thus they live in the societal state. We find the point of transition from identity to otherness at the level of the people, and that is where the solution of continuity intervenes to create the political state. Saint-Just makes the following terminological distinction: "The societal state is the relation between men and men. The political state is the relation between one people and another."^[5]

This contrast gives rise to a fundamental idea: force or constraint is to be proscribed, for it destroys social unity. When we replace a relation of identity

and equality with a relation of constraint or domination, the prior unity breaks up, giving way to a conflict between those using force and those they oppress; the binary category of master and slave appears. This is why the definitions of the societal state and the political state are transformed. In ridding themselves of any precise content, they lose their original meaning and become general and theoretical concepts, with the aid of which Saint-Just defined relations other than those between men and the state of nature, or between peoples. The societal state becomes a normative or regulative concept, and the political state a descriptive category. Saint-Just clearly affirms the autonomy and specificity of the social by contrasting a society , an immanent and internally experienced unity, with an aggregate , which is an apparent society and a purely formal unity, an externally imposed and not internally experienced cohesion. The political state designates every relation based on force, inequality, and constraint. And Saint-Just unhesitatingly equates so-called civilized life with savage life. He describes history as the disappearance of the social under the impact of the generalization of the political, which, not restricted to the relations between peoples, has also ruled those between cities, and eventually destroys the relations between men.

This evolution involves two orders of causes: the theoretical causes, and the more specifically historical causes. Humanity has reached the savage state because of two fundamental errors. In the first place—and this is the main cause—men have ignored the distinction between the internal and the external relations of a society, the former being destined to unanimity, the latter to division and war. Men have confused social right and political right. As a result, the city (civitas) has been based on principles that are foreign to its kind, and its internal structure has approached that of the general society of people, separated by a quantitative difference instead of, as in the beginning, a qualitative difference. Ever since, men have lived among themselves in the relation of a people to another people. The primordial phenomenon of participation has faded away; we only see an order of juxtaposition. The principal manifestation of this confusion between the social and the political is the creation of the complex forces of government. The second and more moral cause of this development has to do with man's increasing estrangement from nature, first through ignorance, then through the systematic will to denaturalize man. The leading role in this disfigurement of man's image is played by religious law, which lent its support to all the encroachments of domination and bondage.

The historical description is much more concise. In the earliest societies—Saint-Just is thinking of the Franks and the Teutons—the people had no magistrates; acting as both their own princes and their own sovereigns, the peoples had only chiefs to ensure external preservation. The political state emerged with the divorce of the roles of prince and sovereign from the people, and with the creation of the magistrate, who never ceased to oppress the

people. This separation came about when the people lost their penchant for assemblies and turned away from the life of the city to dedicate themselves to commerce, agriculture, or conquest. It was then that the political contract, which Saint-Just conceived as a twofold convention, intervened in history, including a pact of union by the citizens among themselves and a pact by the citizens to submit to power.

Saint-Just envisaged the reconstruction of the legitimate city (civitas) from a theoretical viewpoint and a political viewpoint. From a theoretical point of view, we need to reverse the course of history and recover for the social the domain that rightly belongs to it, and thus limit the political to the relations between peoples. Social right must inform the reconstruction of the "city," basing it on nature, that is, on integration and participation in an organic totality, as contrasted with coordination and, a fortiori , subordination. That is why Saint-Just denounces the idea of a social contract at the origin of society. By its very structure, the contract is just a means for achieving a compromise between various antagonistic forces. Furthermore, to enact a contract is bad in itself, for it is an attempt to constrain nature and ignore the natural harmony that rests on the reciprocity between, on the one hand, sociability—the basis of possession and ownership of the national territory—and, on the other hand, property and possession, the most certain guarantees of society's preservation. This natural harmony is, however, the fruit of hierarchical laws according to the relations engendered by the society. At the top of the hierarchy Saint-Just places social relations—the direct relations of men in the simple quality of being human—and their more complex relations as citizens. The laws of these relations are independence and ownership, which means that each man is the owner of his body, his will, and himself. These two most abstract laws constitute the fundamental norms with which all legal rules must be consistent. Thus, the civil laws governing possession must follow the rule of equality that translates on the civil plane as the norm of social right. Because of certain matters of fact, Saint-Just grants the lawmaker a latitude in the practical arrangement of the conformity between the social state and the civil state in a somewhat more concrete manner. When this harmony is respected, society regenerates and perpetuates itself, and there seems to be no need for external and authoritarian intervention. And Saint-Just emphasizes the possession that progressively becomes the surest catalyst of social spontaneity as it reveals how decisive civil relations are in strengthening or crushing the social body if they are not based on independence and equality. The anthropological and legal notion of possession issues in a nonantagonistic and harmonious solidarity whose primary source is affinity, and which finds itself confirmed in the set of natural and necessary mediations deriving from the needs and affections of men. From a political viewpoint, the very title of the manuscript, whatever the grammar suggests, indicates how the rule of independence from the government should

be based on "nature," which is understood in the narrow Rousseauistic sense.^[6] Saint-Just's mistrust gives rise to a solution as direct as it is negative: the "city" must have no separation between the magistrate and the sovereign; it is enough to exclude the magistrate from the "city" forever. This, however, is more a matter of logical and ideal conclusions than of real political solutions. Saint-Just formulated other negative imperatives like the creation of a public force that is not an organ of oppression or division. The government must be limited to the exercise of one function only: external preservation. Thus, it involves an ad hoc military leader more than a genuine government.

From a strictly political point of view, De la nature . . . is decidedly unsatisfying. Positive solutions are lacking, and here Sain-Just's ideas reflect the incompleteness of the manuscript. This incompleteness, however, is not alone responsible for the lacunae. We need to reckon with the deeper proclivities of the young and doctrinaire Jacobin. Torn between the demands of the social law that "does not tolerate either the elevation or the abasement of anyone" and the necessity for self-preservation, Saint-Just affirmed his resolute opposition to the domination to which, in his view, politics was in the main reduced. Several times over, in lapidary phrases, he condemns the phenomenon of power. Social right imposes a ban on the distinction between the governing and the governed, which damages the original cohesion and builds the city on the disastrous opposition between the weak and the strong. This radical critique, revealing that Saint-Just belonged to a minority in the tradition that knew how to separate the being of the social from the division into masters and subjects, is not aimed at any particular political form. Nevertheless, he absolutely rejects politics as such, including the rule of force. Ignorant of the creative spontaneity of the social state, politics institutes violent ties instead of natural ties. Political law is to be proscribed, for within the city it separates, while social law unites. Surprisingly, the reader senses a genuine hatred of politics in someone who aspires to appear on the world's political stage, as though he were judging politics only on the basis of the monarchical experience. Saint-Just writes, "I'll speak of political law no more, I have struck it from the state."^[7]

Naturalism, Primitivism, and the Theory of Social Right

Now that we have reconstructed his thinking, what is its overall significance? Saint-Just uses a collective tool: he thinks in terms of the idea of nature. What is his conceptual field? What are its harmonic elements?

Saint-Just is clearly aware of the topicality of the theme and its ambiguity. Rather than calling the very concept of nature into question, however, he asserts its primacy and atemporal character. "Sovereign nature is the chief right, it is for all time!"^[8] Determined to establish the unequivocal and ahis-

torical truth of this concept, Saint-Just meant by nature "the point of exactness, justice, and truth in the relations between things or their morality," which exists outside of any human intervention, in contrast to the artificial. An objective moral order is implied here into which convention does not enter. Society should be based on nature, for it is not the product of artificial creation, the work of man, but a natural given that exists prior to man and exists independently of him. Saint-Just considers that this social order or "natural morality," which exists parallel to the physical order, is ruled by laws producing not necessary relations but intelligent relations that provide some purchase for human action, even though this nonautonomous objective order is not foreign to a divine order. Nothing, then, is more foreign to this idea than legal voluntarism, and it is more akin to classical natural right than to individual or revolutionary natural right. The human mind should content itself with "reading" the laws of the natural order that are imposed on it from the outside; however, the faculty is granted to it to arrange its different elements and to project the arrangements between the social law and the practical exigencies of the civil state.

Saint-Just pushed his social naturalism quite far; society finds not only its basis in nature, but also a solution to the complex relations it begets and the guarantee of its robustness, no matter what its stage of historical development. The spontaneous harmony of nature is the opposite of force, the real basis of contemporary societies. On the note of a studied idyllic optimism, and an even more rigorous and coherent naturalism, Saint-Just excluded reason, an artificial faculty, from the conceptual field. At the end of De la nature . . ., we observe a clear drop in tension; after pitting himself against common conceptions and aggressively reversing their usual meanings almost entirely, "savage state" meaning for him "civil" or "political state," and "social state" meaning "state of nature," Saint-Just returns to the standard terminology of his time: "In nature men love each other. In social life they take care of each other . . . . I have called social life the life of men united by a written contract, not to be misunderstood."^[9] Saint-Just denied that reason was a natural faculty, maintaining that in the state of nature it virtually did not exist and emerged in history only as a substitute for and as a degenerate form of the earliest intelligence. Thus reason, a mere a posteriori to the accident by which humanity proceeded from the social to the savage state, is the only tool left to man for working out the political contract and organizing society on relations of force. This conception of reason as generator of political or savage life, a tool for constraining nature, shows how far Saint-Just distances himself from rationalism, even if his writings seem not to altogether exclude some good use for reason. The precedence given to the original intelligence over reason betrays a tendency toward a quite radical primitivism.

Indeed, in Saint-Just's thought, novelty is synonymous with error. He chose the attitude of regret; his mind, his awareness, are irresistibly turned

toward what is no longer. His is an essentially chronological primitivism: the perfect state of humanity existed at the origin of the human race; history is merely a long decline. This is why Saint-Just rejects history, for history is evil and alteration is a key word in his philosophy of history. Every society turns corrupt as it gets away from its earliest state. Though he professess a theory of decline, Saint-Just is convinced of man's natural goodness. What is actualized in the change from the social to the savage state is not a defect in human nature; there was no fall owing to some innate corrupting passion of human nature, but merely an accident, for which the sole factor responsible was theologico-political subterfuge. There is therefore an antinomy between the deterioration of the human soul and its original innocence. This contradiction can be resolved only by the discovery of a socially created unreason at the base of contemporary societies. Thus a kind of temporal breach opens between the social and the savage states; we necessarily rediscover the latter if we move in the opposite direction. The result is the prescription of static imperatives, without any search for a dynamic means that would point a way to the social state. No vision of the future appears in De la nature . . . . Both the word and the idea of progress seem unknown to Saint-Just; historical time seems to be unfamiliar.

Historical indeterminism at least does not preclude hope; nature is associated with the earliest society, which does not prevent nature from ordering and ruling the current society. Nature was not created just for the wilderness. Cognizant of a certain growing economic complexity in the society of his time, Saint-Just still asserts that it must not be concluded from "some relations that business, agriculture, and industry have established among men, that they cannot be governed naturally."^[10] Men are thus free to return to a natural social form and, if present society is based on nature, "relations will arise from each other, and business and industry will again find laws in nature."^[11] A clear cultural primitivism—the rejection of a form of civilization—takes on and enriches itself with Saint-Just's social values. In the face of nascent capitalism, which he opposes, Saint-Just exalts the earliest society where men did not suffer from greed but achieved happiness by rest and the meeting of primary needs.

In the face of this radical repudiation of every form of power and authority within the city, are we warranted in thinking Saint-Just is arguing for anarchy? This interpretation ignores the still rough idea of rights that permeates De la nature . . . and culminates in the idea of a necessary harmony between social right and civil right. Saint-Just himself explicitly denies the charge that he is a theoretician of anarchy: "Where there will be no powers, there will be no anarchy."^[12] At first blush this answer seems specious, but it puts us on the right track; we must dissociate right and power, and we can conceive of a legal order free of constraint and authority. Saint-Just's political ideas belong to the stream of social right that George Gurvitch defined as follows: "The

autonomous right of communion in which each active, concrete, and real totality embodying some positive value is integrated objectively."^[13] The analogy is not merely terminological but involves the form of sociability and the essence of right that Saint-Just advocated as the basis of the city. This is confirmed by the critical aspect of Saint-Just's thought. The form of sociability Saint-Just is arguing against as the rule of political law clearly contains the obverse of the one for which he was striving. The political tie results in a sociability via interdependence where essentially distinct individuals are reciprocally delimited and have merely an external connection. When political law enters the civil state, most natural relations are experienced as conflict, and relations of union are replaced by those of dependence. Because in this society others are seen as impediments and one's relations to them as antagonistic, the city becomes a mere assemblage of hostile and divided citizens, caring for one another in terms of the balance of forces and connected only through the state, which superimposes itself on them from the outside.

It follows that the legal expression taken by this form of sociability must be an order of coordination, namely, the contract, the necessary tool of mediation between separate individuals. Conversely, the desirable form of sociability is spontaneous. Its distinguishing sign is the network of union, all the more intimate because the whole precedes the parts, and each person lives for all. Interpersonal relations are experienced as friendship or love—because it is a form of sociability by interpenetration in which, despite differences, identity prevails and generates a resolutely anticontractual right of integration: social right.

It thus seems that Saint-Just's contrast between social right and political right exactly matches the contrast between social right (right of integration) and individual right (right of coordination) and, in terms of specific legal expression, between statutory right and contractual right. By placing Saint-Just in the stream of social right, we get a clearer view of the main features of his thought: doctrinaire naturalism, anti-individualism, and opposition to any theory of the contract.

Let us pursue this analysis a bit further and get a clearer view of the theory of social right. After questioning the city's need of civil laws and concluding in the affirmative, Saint-Just writes: "The city will thus have its laws, so that each, following the rule of all, is connected to all, and for the citizens to have no connection to the state, but only between themselves, they form the state, and the source of the laws will be possession, not the prince or the convention."^[14]

This sentence expresses principles essential to the overall interpretation of Saint-Just's thinking: first, the principle of the distinction between society and state, and the assertion that the state is based on society and not vice versa. The state, the contractual mediation of wills, does not create society; society, the relations of affections and needs that are concretized in posses-

sion, creates the state. Society is conceived as an organism, an organic totality: "The social body resembles the human body, all its mechanisms contribute to harmony."^[15] The social body spontaneously secretes a common social right, the end result of the relations of human needs and affections, of Hegel's "civil society." "In all engagements the civil rule should be copied from the social rule. Because they are confounded, the social nexus is tightened and, as I have said, all parts of the society that subsists of itself by a natural principle is connected by the civil rule."^[16] The social order thus exists as autonomous, independent of the statist order that merely disturbs the initial spontaneous order.

Finally, and above all, the main function of social right is integration. The totality, the "social body," is immanent; it does not externally transcend the members of the city but emanates from the experienced reciprocity of needs and affections, from possession, which begets union—a concrete, dynamic, endlessly renewed participation from the whole to the parts and from the parts to the whole. "The right of man to nature or independence, the right of citizen to citizen, is possession, the right of a people to people is force. In these relations and in the correspondence of these things we find the unity of the social body. The social body preserves itself because in these relations it is united ."^[17] Any individualism is thus clearly excluded: the man who is bound in a network of natural and nonviolent bonds lives spontaneously for all, and with all the greater ease when the community to which he belongs has a task to perform, that of its own preservation and defense from outsiders.

Hence Saint-Just's radical opposition to a contractual and artificialist conception of society and to any theory of individual right. In this respect the theory of law in De la nature . . . is symptomatic. Any voluntarist basis for right is to be forsworn; thus the law expresses not the general will but nature. And the role of expressing nature falls to the lawmaker, sage, or philosopher, but not the prophet.

Finally, Saint-Just conceived of possession as a defective right (the jus abutendi is missing), checked, harmonized, relative, functional—in short, a social property. It is the prototype of the theory of social right according to which the needs of the community guide the regulation of possession, quite unlike the property born of Roman right. Saint-Just's conception of man's owning himself does not come under the category of possessive individualism, for the individual is conceived as part of a larger whole whose organic unity he must strengthen by his economic or affective projection.

We cannot fail to be struck by an almost systematic anti-Rousseauism at the three successive levels of the philosophy of history, the theory of society, and the basis of rights. And above all, like Billaud-Varenne in his Éléments de républicanisme (Year I), Saint-Just criticizes Rousseau for rejecting the thesis of natural sociality.

The Paradoxes of Saint-Just: From the Revolution as Restoration to the Revolution as Abyss

How does De la nature . . . shed light on Saint-Just's action, his revolutionary development? His conversion to the Terror and his anguish in the face of the glaciation of the Revolution?

Charles Nodier, the enthusiastic publisher of Institutions républicaines (1831), perhaps best described the paradox of Saint-Just: "The unfortunate Saint-Just . . . was not a heartless man . . . he had tenderness and even convictions from which our improved civilization recoiled in contempt . . . he believed, which is much stronger, in respect for one's forebears and in the cult of emotion . . . . He was an extremely backward philosopher compared to the age we live in ."^[18] The Archangel of the Terror made a fetish of ancestors: "Age is what our country worships," he wrote in Institutions républicaines . Let us try to unravel this paradox.

The first element is that this young man, the very embodiment of the Revolution, based his action, strange as it may seem, on classical natural right. Though invoking nature may be in a critical relation to tradition, the idea of limitation peculiar to classical natural right, teleological thought, and an idea of right not based on subjective foundation makes this idea incompatible with the modern idea of revolution. With the logic of a philosophy of freedom and not of virtue, the modern idea of revolution involves a subjective conception of right while also aiming at an emancipation seen as infinite movement.

Now the assertion of natural sociality, positing an objective ahistorical order in the name of nature, the declared mistrust of the individual or general will, the repeated rejection of the contract as a model, the theory of the lawmaker—all these features put Saint-Just, a crafter of the modern world, in the ranks of the ancients. So his appeal to virtue takes on a certain sense. Though Saint-Just associated the revolution with the people, he uncoupled the founding of the Republic from the popular will and assigned the job and the monopoly to the lawmaker, the elected interpreter of nature. This is an odd doctrine in that Saint-Just professed an idea of natural right that tended toward egalitarianism and hence was more Christian than classical in inspiration. This paradox resulted from Saint-Just's anti-Rousseauism; claiming, unlike Rousseau, that "the Golden Age is behind us," and thus making himself vulnerable to Fichte's critique, Saint-Just could not have access to the dialectical view of history in Rousseau's second Discourse ; furthermore, he altered the idea of nature that in Rousseau had served as a critical hypothesis in the affirmation of a past reality that asserted itself as the truth of the earliest society. Dogmatizing Rousseau in this way, Saint-Just took away the

conflictual tension because, for him, the return to the "city" and the return to nature had to be merged.

The revolution is thought of more on the model of astronomy—which implies the idea of a return to an earlier position—than within the strictly political field, from the classical concept of stasis or of modern thinking about the upheavals leading to an idea of conflict and social division.^[19]

But is this idea of revolution a modern idea? Doesn't Saint-Just fatally lack the muse of perfectibility? Divorced from the idea of freedom and married to nature, revolution is directed less at liberation or the invention of a new social order than at "renaturalization," the restoration of a natural order effaced by centuries of monarchical decay that is denounced in the judgment of the king as "a crime against nature." The aim of the revolution is to redirect society into the orbit of nature, returning to an order seen as natural, away from the new, and to set limits that are all the more constraining for they are seen as objective. "I do not sever the bonds of society, but society has severed all those of nature. I do not seek to institute novelties, but to destroy novelties."^[20] This orientation to the past, this hatred of novelty, this "misoneism," helps explain the fundamentalist climate of this idea, which goes along with the Jacobin puritanism oscillating between the images of the hero and the saint. This does not appreciably change the image of the revolutionary; he appears less possessed by a passion for freedom than irresistibly attracted to the founding of an order that, although proclaimed in the name of the revolution, still displays all the features of a generalized codification of the forms of existence.^[21]

There appears an even more striking paradox: not content to associate the revolution with a plan to restore nature, Saint-Just calls for the revolution to be accomplished without politics, even to be opposed to politics. "We should not be afraid of changes, the peril is merely in how they are affected, all the world's revolutions are part of politics. That is why they have been steeped in crimes and calamities. Revolutions that are born of good laws and that are conducted by skilled hands would change the face of the earth without shattering it."^[22] Good laws? He means laws resting on nature.

Must we see in this surprising declaration of the young and doctrinaire Jacobin a resurgence of the Augustinian doctrine that identifies politics with evil? This would imply that Christianity's hold on Jacobinism—the distinctively Christian ways of thinking about politics—is more crucial than has usually been thought. Referring the cohabitation of men to a spontaneity of the social with, moreover, a placing of the polis beneath the societas , leads to the disparagement of politics. This lowering of the political sphere shows how much Saint-Just, despite his reference to classical natural right, fails both to acknowledge the dignity of politics and to recognize an uncircumventable constitutive dimension in the plural existence of men.

As demonstrated, the contradictions are numerous, but the essential con-

tradiction involves making the modern practice of revolution serve a premodern idea of rights and society.

Can we see here one of the roots of the Terror? The evils ascribed to politics must entail a downgrading of political mediation, even if Saint-Just declared, in his Sur la Constitution , that "natural polity" was not his aim. What else if not a twofold rejection of politics (the rejection of mediation or confusion with the logic of another order) was Saint-Just asserting when he wrote: "The principle of a republican government is virtue; the alternative is terror. What do people want who want neither virtue, nor terror?"^[23] He called for a return to nature, and not humanity, as the destination of the city, and his conception of the revolution as the way to bring about this return fosters the illusion in which politics is confused with morality. It is important not to expose politics to an "overload" or to derail it by giving it a mission beyond its capacities—in this case, the reform of conscience or the diminution of selfishness. This was Kant's warning in 1793, when he distinguished between the political community and the ethical city, explicitly describing the dangers of a politics of virtue:

We may call a union among men with simple laws of virtue following these prescriptions, an ethical society; and, to the extent that these laws are public, we may call it order, that is, an ethical civil society (in contrast to a legal civil society) or an ethical community . . . . Every political state doubtless desires to exercise domination over minds according to the laws of virtue, for in cases where its means of coercion are insufficient, because the human judge cannot see into the minds of men, virtuous intentions could secure what is wished. But woe unto the lawmaker who wants to use force to secure a constitution for ethical ends, for not only would he thus create the opposite of this constitution, but he would also weaken his political constitution and remove all its solidity."^[24]

Thus when Saint-Just initiated what seemed to us to be "a new march" with the plan of Institutions républicaines , an outbreak of Terror, and, one might say, a critique of Jacobinism from within, he does not elude the movement of a return to a prepolitical state of nature.^[25] The idea of institution, in relation to a critique of the law—"obeying laws, that is not clear," wrote Saint-Just—again points to nature, to the will to reestablish a natural order with access to objectivity. But we cannot fail to observe a hardening in this Jacobin lawmaker determined to shape republican institutions so that an orientation to nature would be combined with an enduring mistrust. Hence, along with the enthusiasm for creating institutions goes the appeal to heroism, to "the soul of the republic": "The day when I am convinced that it is impossible to give the French people manners that are gentle, energetic, sensitive, and implacable against tyranny and injustice, I shall plunge a dagger into my heart."^[26] The suicide of the hero opposes the death of nature.

A new and paradoxical movement is formed: starting from a fundamentalist plan to reestablish the city on natural foundations, Saint-Just couldn't deny himself an act of foundation or, more precisely, of self-foundation. The issue of the French Revolution becomes the issue of heroism. Viewed from political philosophy and not from romanticism, heroism is a constitutive dimension of the Revolution. Heroism is the Revolution's magnetic field. For want of recognizing the existence of the "central sun" (G. Bûchner), of measuring its energetic effects, the magnetization of consciences, according to Chateaubriand a "redoubling of life," the interpreter may fail to understand or even to think of the revolutionary. A modern Brutus, a regicide with the halo of his youth and his name, appearing suddenly on the public stage at the king's trial, Saint-Just exhibited the heroic experience par excellence, that of a rebirth.

Jules Michelet, who had read his Plutarch as well as Vico, had a political understanding of the Revolution. Furthermore, he did not separate this way of understanding from a consideration of heroism. Thus he knew better than anyone how to uncover the logic of heroism as an active, autonomous force in the Revolution. That is why he insisted on emphasizing the incessant commotion that Saint-Just's intervention provoked at the time of the king's sentencing. "This speech had an enormous effect on the trial . . . . Immature or not, exaggerated or not, it was powerful enough to set the tone for the whole trial. It determined the pitch; one continued to sing to the tune of Saint-Just."^[27] It was the experience of a beginning, the start of the Republic, an appeal to the unknown, but also a beginning for Saint-Just, torn from the obscurity of a private citizen and suddenly propelled into the light of public space. "Who was to wield the sword . . . . A new man was needed, unshackled by any philanthropical precedent," wrote Michelet.^[28]

Reading Saint-Just's speech, we see how this event indissolubly mingled the experiences of birth and founding, both necessarily connected with the death of the king. "The same men who will judge Louis have a republic to found: those who attach some importance to the just punishment of a king will never found a republic . . . . For me, I see no middle way: this man must reign or die . . . the mind that judges the king will be the mind that founds the republic. The theory of your judgment will be the theory of your magistratures."^[29] Or again, "the revolution begins when the tyrant ends."^[30]

But a question immediately arises concerning what Michael Walzer, drawing on the work of E. Kantorowicz, has rightly described as "public regicide," which he sees has the special feature of an attack on the inviolability of the monarchy, a transgression of the "sacred terror" of theologico-political origin which attaches to the twofold body of the king, both mortal and immortal.^[31] Can we change the face of the earth without shattering it? Doesn't revolutionary action involve uncontrollable effects, all the more so as, in Saint-Just's case, it was not a matter of judging the king but of fighting

him and bringing him down like an enemy? Can one still cherish the illusion of returning to good laws, dependent on nature? Is not the revolutionary experience as a beginning, at the same time an exposure to unpredictability? Saint-Just himself did not fail to compare the revolution to birth: "We have opposed sword to sword, and freedom is founded; it has emerged from chaos and with man who cries at birth . . . . Everything begins thus under the sun."^[32]

Did not the public regicide, an unprecedented rupture owing to the radicalness it required, ruin the very idea of nature? The revolution would leave the comforting shores of a return to the natural order and brave the tempests of freedom to take on the unknown of a new experience of freedom, as freedom to do good and evil. This is the change from a revolution of restoration to a revolution of the abyss. At the same time Saint-Just was seeking the point where the revolution must stop , "at the perfection of happiness and of public freedom by law." He voices his anxiety about the identity of the Revolution which from now on is problematic, that is, disguised, and about the vertiginous movement of freedom, for it is a movement toward the infinite. "We speak of the height of the revolution, who will fix it? It is movable."^[33] Testing the impossible?

In the face of this gap, heroism in turn becomes a paradoxical experience. Though Saint-Just gazes with melancholy at "the beauty that is no longer" (Rome, Sparta), he still confesses to a metamorphosis of heroism, and very consciously draws on what P. Lacoue-Labarthe described concerning Hölderlin as a general crisis of imitatio , following the collapse of a tradition. "The disappearance of every rule and every model, of every codification in art."^[34] And the poet, no stranger to revolutionary disorder, consumes himself "in the practically ex nihilo creation of a pure work or of a new art." On 25 April 1794, Saint-Just announced, "Have no doubt of it, everything around us must change and end, for everything around us is unjust; victory and freedom will cover the world. Scorn nothing, but imitate nothing of what has gone before us. Heroism has no models . It is thus, I repeat, that you will found a powerful empire with the boldness of genius and the power of justice and truth."^[35]

In exactly the same speech, "Sur la police générale, sur la justice, le commerce, la législation et les crimes des factions," Saint-Just limns the portrait, the model of the revolutionary man, "the hero of good sense and honesty," meaning the privileged interpreter, perhaps even the guardian of the Revolution. "As his goal is to see the Revolution triumph, he will never find fault with it, but he condemns his enemies without involving himself with them, he does not violate the Revolution but illuminates it, and jealous of its purity, he is circumspect in speaking of it, out of respect."^[36] With furious speed the cutting edge of the word regicide is followed by an homage to revolutionary exemplariness. This change of tempo displays the paradoxical trajectory of

heroism; the energy of the beginning, propelled by the initium , reverses itself and becomes testimony and force for stopping, becomes a limit imposed on revolutionary élan. A new image is drawn of the custodian of the criteria for good and evil, the judge of moderation and exaggeration. Heroism has no models; when the ground of nature is revealed, exposed to this vacuity, the hero immediately transforms himself into a model, into a force of impossible "modeling."

At this nodal point, the logic of heroism encounters the logic of democratic invention so well elucidated by Claude Lefort.^[37] Deprived of the canon of nature, how can we then determine the line between liberty and license? After the unprecedented dismemberment of the social in and by the king's death—a proof of the vertigo vis-à-vis the unknown of a society that no longer turned to nature but was confronted by the new—after the loss of reference points, how to recodify, remake the criteria of the reference, redraw the identifying frames of reference, remake the body (Claude Lefort), if not by offering the body of the revolutionary hero as the incarnation of a new sacred thing, as the support for an identification, if not by connecting the power to an exemplary body?

The more Athenian than Spartan Camille Desmoulins, who loved to chortle at the gods and idols, said of Saint-Just that he "carried his head like the Blessed Sacrament." The echo comes back to us of Lucile Desmoulins's cry in Danton's Death , "Vive le roi!" hailed as the word of freedom by Paul Celan, who grew up with the writings of Pierre Kropotkin and Gustave Landauer.^[38] Though Saint-Just, by creating his own myth, took part in the invention of what Stendhal called the "beautiful modern," and at this distance still exerts fascination, we should keep in mind the final lines of Michelet's 1869 preface to Le Tyran : "Happily, time passes. We are a bit less dim-witted. The rage for incarnation, carefully inculcated through Christian education, messianism, passes. At length we understand the counsel Anacharsis Clootz left when he died: 'France, be cured of individuals.'"