I. Pervasiveness of the Terror

“August 8, 1775. Riflemen took a man in New Milford, Connecticut, a most incorrigible Tory, who called them d—d rebels, etc., and made him walk before them to Litchfield, which is twenty miles, and carry one of his own geese all the way in his hand. When they arrived there, they tarred him, and made him pluck his goose, and then bestowed the feathers on him, drummed him out of the company, and obliged him to kneel down and thank them for their lenity.” The Jacobins of Rodez in southern France drew up a list of “damned dogs of noblemen” and others unworthy of wearing a mustache, the new symbol of patriotism, republican virility and orthodoxy. It then ordered its committee of surveillance to see that any such persons daring to wear a mustache were seized and shaved, “taking good care to get the job done without soap, and with the dullest razor available.” Shaving seems in some ways a ritual performance lifted above the ordinary acts of the toilet, for on October 3, 1775, the New York Sons of Liberty “in solemn Congress assembled” took a vote of thanks: “to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, barber, for his firm, spirited, and patriotic conduct in refusing to complete an operation vulgarly called shaving, which he had begun on the face of Captain John Croser, commander ... of one of his Majesty’s transports.... It is to be wished that all gentlemen of the razor will follow this wise, prudent, interesting example.”

The undignified little details are important, for they help bring home to us the pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror. There is not only the melodrama of the block, the guillotine and the firing-squad, not only the heightened struggle for power among the great of the new order, not only the tension of foreign and civil war, there is also the tragi-comedy of thousands of little lives invaded by heroic concerns which are ordinarily not theirs at all. The Terror touches great and small with the obsessive power of a fashion; it holds men as little of the common weal ever holds them, unless they are professionally devoted to the study or practice of politics. During the Terror, politics becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable for John Jones or Jacques Duval as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather. Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.

This participation in the common thing, in the drama of the revolutionary state, means different things to those we may call outsiders and those we may call insiders. The opposition is purely one of convenience. No doubt there are insensible gradations from the ardent revolutionary extremist—the admirably drawn Evariste Gamelin of Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst, for instance—through the neutral and colorless Center to skulking and repressed anti-revolutionaries. But in broad lines the division between the many outside the revolutionary cult and the small active band of orthodox believers in the new dispensation is worth making. Let us look first at the Terror as it affects the life of the outsider.