The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution

by Dan Edelstein

Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.

A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, French Revolution, Politics, European History, Philosophy

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting study of radical Jacobin thought as a coherent apparatus based upon French understanding of natural law rooted in Montesquieu and various other French philosophes drawing upon fictional and contemporary proto-anthropological accounts of "golden ages" of virtue and republics. Edelstein uses this understanding to elucidate the Jacobin democratic anti-constitutionalism as well as reliance upon "republican institutions" like the Cult of the Supreme Being.

Edelstein, in dealing with concepts of ideology, unfortunately opposes the Marxist school of historiography and draws upon prime revisionist thinkers like Furet and Schama. The work would benefit instead from an Althusserian reading that contextualizes these ideological apparatuses as a radical bourgeois understanding of morality and struggle for a new social order. Book unfortunately ends with a conclusion that accepts the Arendt-esque "totalitarian" school, making an identity between Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR in terms of judicial policy that allegedly makes similar use of concepts like "outlawry" and political "justice."

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The idea that unwritten, natural laws alone might provide the basis for a viable republic was inconceivable. Natural right might constitute a foundation for civil laws, but it was never seen as sufficient.” (page 2, eBook)

...until 1793 when the newly formed French government basically tried to what we moderns may call “divide by zero” which generally leads to things breaking.

Half a year ago the concept of reading a book about “just war” would have been alien to me, but since then even such lofty figures as Hugo Grotius have been on my radar. While Grotius and “The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & the French Revolution” may not at first have much in common, the treatment he got in surprisingly great The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (2017, Simon & Schuster) and his concept of the aforementioned “just war” bears strong similarity to the Jacobins and their concept of a “natural right”. When is a war “just” and when are rights “natural”? And who gets to decide? Obviously—and my last Grotius plug—one can say his writings probably left a more positive mark on mankind than the Terror where “natural right” turned into “kill anyone who even mildly disagrees with us”, but having a book that takes this concept and tracks where it went from just an idea to the idea that held a tyrannical government in place for a short time is downright fascinating.

The Terror of Natural Right is not an easy read. I will be honest that while the book’s Introduction and Preface (yes, it’s one of “those” books and yes, there is a Conclusion and also two Parts) were intriguing and I went heavy on highlighting, the first part that covers in so many words how natural right became what it is less so than how it was applied specifically during the Terror may have been above my paygrade. Closing in, but thankfully not DNF’ing, I plowed through knowing that if I had more pre-existing knowledge on Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others, I’d have been able to digest it with more ease. It’s almost embarrassing to say, but my closest anchors in these sections were Greek philosophers and Grotius (oops, there he is again!) and the latter I only know from prominent mention in the above The Internationalists book.

But still—and not the historical concept but the legal and almost theocratic angle as to how the Jacobins assumed and made use of power is just too interesting to put this down. Yes, other books have focused on the French Revolution and the Terror, but none have zeroed in on doing so from such an untraveled yet fruitful perspective as this one. Thus, in a way this is not a “book about the Terror” but more of a “book about an idea that the Terror made use of more infamously than anywhere else”.

It’s actually interesting in a way just how the idea of “natural right” is traced to its natural, fraught endpoint, I find a similarity in another book published just two years before this one by Rémi Brague called The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (2007, The University of Chicago Press) that traces the idea of how the Law became the law—in other words how the word of God became the word of man to enforce.

Or as Spinoza noted when referring to an earlier treatise by Maimonides: “By human law I mean a rule of living which serves no other purpose than to preserve life and the state”; divine law is “one whose sole object is the supreme good, that is, true knowledge and love of God.”

Brague, Rémi. The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (p. 238). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Obviously, the Jacobins may have not been up to date on their theological-political treatises or (most likely) chose to ignore them as they gained more power. It’s understandable if one is fond of the guillotine and a literal eye in the sky Supreme Being I guess.

The Terror of Natural Right is in some ways just really, really odd. There are parts that were terribly difficult to understand for those who don’t have a pretty hefty background in the intellectual causes that may have led to the French Revolution, but this was balanced—nay, eclipsed by parts that were clear as day and both enlightening and frightening. The footnotes (and there are a ton) help immensely and that in fact becomes an issue of the book: a lot of what’s in there should have simply been added to the text.

And finally, there is the issue of squaring a circle, something I feel may be a slight weakness in this book as I’m all but certain the author did not have French Revolution newbies in mind when writing it. From our modern day where (to some extent) liberal democracies rule the land, the entire concept of monarchy seems almost obscene, but back in the 18th century, anything but monarchy may have been seen that way. We have hindsight, they had legends of a “golden age”. We know how it turned out, they basically had to break things and put them together again using one part Enlightenment reasoning and the other an almost too cloying devotion to “natural right”...whatever that means.

[Aldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply, the best book I have ever read, part history, part philosophy, part political theory, part French language analysis, this book unlocked a whole new way of thinking about the history of ideas.

[Sean Chick · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has an interesting point, but he fails to connect some of his thoughts, such as how Voltaire's ideas influenced the rise of the terror. It also hurts that the book is poorly written.

[Roy Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

smart, readable but edelstein pushes his argument too far.

[Mills College Library]

944.044 E219 2009