Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Terror and its Representations

Studies in Social History and Cultural Expression in the United States and Beyond

Larry Portis and Joseph Zitomersky (dir.)

DOI: 10.4000/books.pulm.15598

Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Place of publication: Montpellier

Year of publication: 2008

Published on OpenEdition Books: 25 March 2022

Series: Horizons anglophones

Electronic EAN: 9782367814155

https://books.openedition.org

Printed version

EAN (Print version): 9782842698416

Number of pages: 320

Electronic reference

PORTIS, Larry (ed.) ; ZITOMERSKY, Joseph (ed.). Terror and its Representations: Studies in Social History and Cultural Expression in the United States and Beyond. New edition [online]. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2008 (generated 28 mars 2022). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/pulm/15598>. ISBN: 9782367814155. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.15598.

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Illustration de couverture : Marie-Pierre Boyer, PULM, 2008.

This text was automatically generated on 28 March 2022.

© Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2008

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Abstracts

What are the origins and nature of terror and terrorism in the United States and beyond? This book of essays about the history and contemporary reality of terror reveals little-known aspects of a compelling subject. Since the American and French Revolutions, governments and their opponents have used terror and terrorism for different political reasons. We learn how terror and terrorism have marked the evolution of social values and have entered into cultural expression of all types - literature, music, television, cinema - and have influenced the formation of ideologies and political institutions. The authors of the introduction and eighteen chapters comprising Terror and Its Representations show how a sensitive subject can be treated with conviction while maintaining the critical distance necessary for serious debate.

Quelles sont les origines et la nature de la terreur et du terrorisme aux États-Unis et ailleurs ? Cet ouvrage composé d’essais sur l’histoire de la terreur et sur sa réalité contemporaine met en lumière des aspects peu connus d’un sujet captivant. Depuis les révolutions française et étatsunienne, les gouvernements et leurs opposants ont utilisé la terreur et le terrorisme pour différentes raisons politiques. On apprendra ici comment la terreur et le terrorisme ont marqué l’évolution des valeurs sociales, comment ils sont entrés dans les expressions culturelles de tout type - littéraires, musicales, télévisuelles, cinématographiques - et comment ils ont influencé la formation des idéologies et des institutions politiques. Il est possible de traiter un sujet sensible en gardant la distance critique nécessaire à un débat de fond : c’est ce que les auteurs de cet ouvrage ont voulu montrer.

Larry Portis (dir.)

Portis Larry is Professeur at the Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier 3). His most recent book is Histoire du fascisme aux États-Unis, Paris, Éditions CNT-RP, 2008.

Joseph Zitomersky (dir.)

Zitomersky Joseph is associate professor American Studies at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France. He has worked on North American and Swedish history in different subject areas including French colonial Louisiana and ethnic/Jewish history. Among his publications are “In theMiddle and on theMargin: Greater French Louisiana in history and professional historical memory” (2001), Colonies; Territoires, Sociétés: L’enjeu français (co-ed., 1996), “Espace et société en Amérique coloniale française dans le contexte comparatif du Nouveau Monde: Essai interprétative” (1994), and French Americans-Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana: The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s-1760s, Lund, University of Lund Press, 1994).

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Larry Portis and Joseph Zitomersky

Introduction

Languages of Terror

Larry Portis

Part I. Terror during the Age of Democratic Revolution

La Terreur révolutionnaire : Enjeux historiographiques et idéologiques

Serge Bianchi

La Terreur : cerner un concept historique ?

Les grands courants historiographiques

L’interprétation « classique »

D’une terreur à l’autre

Michel Vovelle

The Roles of Stereotypes on Terror and the French Revolution

Erica Mannucci

Employing Terror and Terrifying Acts in the American Revolution

Loretta Valtz Mannucci

From destruction of the body to its appropriation

Competing Visions of Terror: Indians and Whites on the Frontier, 1790-1840

Michael Bellesîles

Part II. Terror and cultural expression

Terror and Territoriality: Imperial Sovereignty and Jurisdictional Ambivalence in Early American Discourse

Gesa Mackenthun

“Terror long remembered:” Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883)

Simone Pellerin

Langston Hughes, Shakespeare in Harlem: Socialist Poet in the Desert

Barry David Horwitz

Mississippi did Burn: The Film Industry and Internal Terrorism in the USA

William T. Martin Riches

The Changing Shades of Terror: How Music Reflected the Nuclear Scare (1962-1979)

Matteo Ceschi

Preaching power: Terror and the Good Soldier

Thérèse Smith

The Sermon Tradition

With God on our Side: Dispensationalist Eschatology in Popular Culture

Anne Urbanowski

The Origins of dispensationalism

The specific dualistic pattern emerging from dispensationalist thinking

Dispensationalism today

The impact of dispensationalism on American popular culture

Part III. The politics of terror

Fear of Organization — Organized Fear: Terror and Its Representations in the Southern Labor Movement

Mark Fannin

The Logic of US ‘Concentration Camps ’ during the Second World War: The Case of the Nisei

Francis McCollum Feeley

Problems with Terminology

How should we label what we are doing to them?

What classifications will be useful to differentiate the people we have incarcerated?

Justifications, Explanations, and the Chronology of Events

Lessons from history: genocides as historic spirals

Historiography of American concentration camps

Imagined Geographies: Property Rights, Land Improvement and the Origins of State Terror in Palestine

Gary Fields

The Argument

Property and Imagined Imperial Geographies

Locke and Native Americans

Locke and British Enclosure

Locke and the Origins of Israeli State Terror

Zionist Ideologies of Entitlement and Improvement

Removing Palestinian Anchors

Erasing The Farm

Demolishing The Home

Terror and Revolution: The Italian Marxist Left Deals with the Twentieth Century

Fabrizio Fiume

The Many Uses of Terrorism and Counterterrorism in the Bush Era

Pierre Guerlain

Safety Under the USA PATRIOT Act

Robert Harvey

Are We Safer?

What’s in a Name?

A Nation in Denial

Home Safety

The Invention of Terrorism and the Age of Fear

Ronald Creagh

State and the definition of terrorism

State terrorism?

Anarchist violence and anarchist theory

A very short history

The Age of Fear

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Larry Portis and Joseph Zitomersky

Most of the essays included in this book have their origins in the international conference held on June 21-23, 2007, organized by the Milan-Montpellier Group for the Study of United States History and Culture (formerly the Milan Group for the Study of Early United States History, created in 1979 by Loretta Mannucci, Herbert Gutman and others) in conjunction with the Centre de recherches et d’études nord-américaines (CRENA). This conference was held under the auspices of the Équipe d’accueil 741 of the Département d’études anglophones of the Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier 3). Financial and logistical assistance was provided by the Conseil Scientifique of the Université Paul-Valéry, the Pôle universitaire européen, the Mairie de Montpellier, and the Région de Languedoc-Roussillon. In addition to contributors and participants who performed extraordinary roles (especially Matteo Ceschi), the editors thank all who contributed to this project, and most notably Gianmaria Bergamaschini, Elodie Chazalon, Jack Goodfellow, Nora Halfaoui, Maylis Konnecke, Zahra Oughebbi and Isabelle Ronzetti for their many-dimensioned contributions before and during the conference. Other distinguished participants included Susan Castillo, David Grimsted, Rhys Isaac, Marco Sioli and Sylvia Ullmo. We also express our appreciation for the help of the editorial services of the Presses universitaires de la Méditerrannée (PULM).

Authors

Larry Portis

Professeur at the Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier 3). His most recent book is Histoire du fascisme aux États-Unis, Paris, Éditions CNT-RP, 2008.

Joseph Zitomersky

Associate professor American Studies at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France. He has worked on North American and Swedish history in different subject areas including French colonial Louisiana and ethnic/Jewish history. Among his publications are “In the Middle and on the Margin: Greater French Louisiana in history and professional historical memory” (2001), Colonies; Territoires, Sociétés: L’enjeu français (co-ed., 1996), “Espace et société en Amérique coloniale française dans le contexte comparatif du Nouveau Monde: Essai interprétative” (1994), and French Americans-Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana: The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s-1760s, Lund, University of Lund Press, 1994), .

Introduction

Languages of Terror

Larry Portis

Any discussion of “terror” and “terrorism” must be particularly careful to consider the terms and language used. These words evoke such strong feelings that the definition of terms required of any study of social and political life must be done with special care. Because of the emotional contexts out of which any discussion or study of terror arises, the “languages” or “discourses” of terror and on terror are necessarily part of the general phenomenon of terror as a psychic, emotional and physical reality.

Most generally, terror is a willed, intentional effort to influence behavior through the use of intimidation and physical force . As such, terror is essentially political. Although the use of terror for political purposes is often said to be the expression of ideological “fanaticism,” it is more accurate to admit that terror and terrorism are exercised rationally in the pursuit of political objectives. This is true of both antiestablishment terror and terror used as an arm of state policy. Ascribing “irrational” motives to terror is most often simply a way of discrediting the motives of its perpetrators. However, it is also clear that uses of terror and terrorism can and must be understood in relation to specific social and political situations and according to the ideological predispositions of those who use it. Such are the ambiguities of social analysis.

The essays included in the present volume discuss specific historical instances of terror. The overall objective of the book is to provide an implicitly comparative perspective on the reality of the uses of terror and on how these uses have been variously represented. The idea is not to reveal the “relativity” of terror and terrorism, but rather to allow a greater and deeper understanding of political practices that appear to be universal throughout recorded human history.

Because political actors of all political persuasions have used terror— whether progressive or reactionaries, egalitarians or elitists, libertarians or authoritarians—it must be concluded that terror and its uses are universal phenomena. It is for this reason that a certain intellectual honesty should force us to be circumspect when discussing it. To simply denounce terror and terrorism cannot produce greater understanding of the phenomenon.

And yet, it should be obvious that such examinations of the idea and reality of terror in the history of the United States and elsewhere are related to the present political (or geopolitical) conjuncture. This is not simply because George W. Bush launched his “war against terror” in September 2001, but because the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the weakening of the so-called socialist state political systems, created a need for a new ideological focus.

More than twenty years ago, Edward Said published an excellent article, “The Essential Terrorist,” in which he explained how the rhetoric denouncing terrorism is part of the maintenance of social control and political indoctrination in the industrialized countries. He implies that it is not so much a question of defense against outstanding enemies as it is of the effective designation of enemies . 1

The principle of the scapegoat is well known: in order to transcend divisions within one’s group, enmities are projected onto others. However, beyond the notion and the reality of scapegoating, there is a systemic imperative: all systems of exploitation, and thus of authoritarian domination, require the cultivation of the systems’ own deadly enemies. Once designated, the enemies become an object of terror and must be combated not only because of the physical threat they may or may not represent, but also because of the psychic consequences of the malevolence that has been projected onto them. It is here that a cultural dimension of terror and its uses develops. In their imaginations, the perpetrators become the victims. Hannah Arendt makes this point, referring to the Nazi terror and how those who administratively acquiesced to it were led to say: “What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” instead of saying “What horrible things I did to people!” 2

Unfortunately, the general discussion of these realities can easily remain at an excessively high level of abstraction. And excessive generalization is exactly what must be avoided when dealing with such questions. It is for this reason that empirical historical analysis, literary criticism and cultural studies are so important. Only a scholarly examination of the reality of terror and its representations can provide a more informed debate about terror and terrorism as a general phenomenon. To leave this discussion to journalists or to politicians can have dangerous consequences. 3

There are examples of scientifically based research and reflection elucidating terror and terrorism, but that are, regretfully, largely excluded from public discussion. For example, the work of Joel Kovel, historian and psychoanalyst, is important to mention in this regard. Kovel’s book, Red Hunting in the Promised Land , shows the ideological and psychic continuity between the genocidal attitudes and policies concerning Native Americans and “anti-communism” of all types. For him, the United-Statesian mind is afflicted by an “enemy psychosis” of which anti-communism is only one example. This is an identifiable mentality produced by a complex of external events “interacting with a penchant for demonization which has been deeply inscribed in our national experience.” 4

The work of Richard Slotkin is also worthy of special attention. His use of literature in demonstrating the emotional and cultural evolution of the population of the United States is fundamental. The very titles of some of his books evoke essential aspects of this culture: Regeneration through Violence ; The Fatal Environment ; Gunfighter Nation . 5 Slotkin reveals how thoroughly cultural expression in the United States came to be infused with a profound existential anxiety rooted in fear of others. Already in the early 1970s, he observed that those attempting to understand the violence that appears to be endemic to life in the United States were only beginning “to say to us what artists like Melville and Faulkner had earlier prophesied: that myths reach out of the past to cripple, incapacitate, or strike down the living.” Slater has documented how “The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.” 6

These are scholars who have done inspiring work in explaining what I call “the culture of violent retribution”—a culture endowed with liberal ideas, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the impulse to apply these ideas in a purifying confrontation with an arbitrarily identified and abstractly defined evil.

In effect, perhaps the most profound responses to the question of the “normality” of terror and terrorism can be made by cultural studies. Whether in terms of the general psychological dispositions of the population, structured by existential conditions of all types, or in terms of how such dispositions and conditions are depicted or suggested in the arts and literature, cultural representations , or rather expressions , of terror go to the heart of the question. Included in this volume are a number of such studies (such as those of Barry Horwitz, Anne Urbanowki, and others) revealing how terror is both an object of artistic attention and an influence on the evolution of literature and popular culture generally.

Seen from a more anthropological standpoint, the practices of terror are part of a cultural matrix that invites and, indeed, demands study. The examples are too numerous to list, although some come easily to mind, such as the practice of lynching, the folkloric “tar and feathering” (explored in Loretta Mannucci’s article), and vigilante justice on the frontier (see Michael Bellesîles’ article). Other examples are less known, but just as emblematic of how the victims of terror have often had the onus of terrorism projected onto them (as in the case of the “Molly Maguires” in the 1870s 7 ).

There are ambiguities and even contradictions in the political and juridical evolution of United States institutions that must be carefully analyzed when attempting to understand the functioning of political democracy in this country. How to explain, for example, the “sacralization” of the United States Constitution and the recurrent tendency to contravene its most cherished principles? And what is the role of religion, as an influence or justification, in the use of terror?

From the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) to the USA PATRIOT Act (2001), infringements on the Bill of Rights and limitations on civil liberties have been periodically legislated or decreed by the Congress and the president and have been upheld by the US Supreme Court. The use of assassination and torture has been accepted, the right of habeas corpus removed, and free speech and association denied. Do these tendencies constitute exceptions or coherence and continuity in the historical evolution of the United States?

In light of these historical experiences, it is essential to begin any debate about terror and terrorism with a look at the French Revolution. In the present book, Serge Bianchi reveals the complexity of the phenomenon through a discussion of the various methodological approaches and political positions they have produced. For most scholars, it seems clear that transition from feudal society to modern political institutions involved a complex of social and economic interests and ideological orientations that still exist today.

To invoke the famous “Terror” of the French Revolution is to define the term itself, the modalities of it as political practice, and its ideological uses. The analyses of Bianchi, Erica Mannucci and Michel Vovelle are instructive in this regard. They provide an essential foundation for considering the evolution of terror and terrorism in the United-Statesian context. To what extent are terror and terrorism “normal” political phenomena produced by conflicts of interest in contemporary societies?

At the very least, it can be said that terror and terrorism are nothing new. Since the French Revolution, the contours of the debate concerning them have remained essentially the same, but we are constrained to continually define and reconsider the terms of the debate. Most importantly, we must understand both the changes and the continuities in the uses of terror and the responses made to it.

In this regard, the remarks made by an observer writing in the recent past can be helpful. Speaking of the 1930s in somewhat nostalgic terms, he said of that time of economic and political crisis: “Those were happy days. People still knew how to read. One could still think aloud. All that seems to be over now. The War has so drained everyone, demanded so much patience, so much courage, has so multiplied glorious as well as inglorious horrors that [people] no longer have the energy even to look violence in the face, to see it at its source.” More pointedly, this observer said, taking the United States as an example: “Respect for law and liberty has served to justify police suppression of strikes in America; today it serves even to justify [...] military suppression in Palestine and the development of an American empire in the Middle East.”

These observations date from 1947, expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the first paragraph of his book Humanism and Terror . 8 He said many other relevant things, as did George Orwell, Victor Serge and others at the time. These were critical voices that stood above the sectarian tensions and ideological rigidities in the “east-west” conflict during the post-war world (notably producing the, perhaps self-contradictory, notion of a “balance of terror”). We are now in another phase of geopolitical change, but the rhetoric and the modalities of terror as a political instrument do not seem to have significantly changed.

The importance of the essays included in this book is that we can go beyond the idea that things “do not seem to have significantly changed” towards a more informed understanding of historical and cultural continuities in the midst of unique situations and structural mutations. In the wake of September 11, 2001, we can more fully appreciate the remark made by Malcolm X concerning the “chickens coming home to roost.” 9 Unexpected, dramatically tragic events often result from the accumulation of ill-considered, insensitive or malicious practices.

The point is that this is a continuing, perennial discussion because our world remains that in which Merleau-Ponty and others struggled six decades and more ago. And yet, at the present time, the planet Earth is confronted by social and political changes in relation to which our reflections about the United States may become useful. Historical scholarship and cultural analysis are needed more than ever in the attempt to understand the Terror accompanying forced consensus and a generalized “dumbing down” caused by intellectual debilitation in the media and certain changes in educational processes. The “states of terror,” whether national, geopolitical or psychic, have united to produce situations that every thinking person must consider seriously.

For these reasons alone, the discussion of terror and terrorism cannot be left to official declarations and to journalists, and it cannot, therefore, be excluded from universities. If most of the essays that follow are first concerned about the United States, no one can ignore the extent to which the history of this country affects, and reflects, the rest of the world. Our objective is to provide knowledge and analyses essential to any informed citizenry.

Notes

1 See Edward Saïd, “The Essential Terrorist,” in Edward Saïd and Christopher Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question , London, Verso, 1987, p. 149-158.

2 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , New York, Penguin Books, 1994 [1963], p. 106.

3 The impact of 11 September 2001 has stimulated interrogations about long-term trends in United States history and culture relative to the phenomenon of terror. Susan Faludi’s about-to-be published book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America , is evidence of this. See Susan Faludi, “America’s Guardian Myths,” International Herald Tribune , September 8-9, 2007, p. 4.

4 Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America , New York, Basic Books, 1994, p. 236.

5 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 , New York, HarperPerennial, 1996 [1973], p. 5. See also Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 , Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America , Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

6 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, op. cit. , p. 5.

7The “Molly McGuires” was a fictitious, secret terrorist organization imagined and propagated in the press by a powerful industrialist in order to justify the brutal repression of a labor-union movement. Nineteen workers were executed as a result. The industrialist himself controlled the judicial process. I discuss this example in my Histoire du fascisme aux États-Unis, Paris, Éditions CNT-RP, 2008.

8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 [1947], translated by John O’Neill, p. xiii.

9 Immediately after the assassination of president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Malcolm X, a key member of the Nation of Islam—the African-American separatist organization—, and then the founder of the Organization of African-American Unity, observed: “the chickens are coming home to roost.” By this, he meant that the violence and hate generated by official US actions in the United States and abroad were producing unanticipated effects within the United States, of which the assassination was one. This perception has been developed more recently by Chalmers Johnson in his books Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire , New York, Metropolitan Books, 2000 and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic , New York, Metropolitan Books, 2006.

Author

Larry Portis

Professeur at the Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier 3). His most recent book is Histoire du fascisme aux États-Unis, Paris, Éditions CNT-RP, 2008.

Part I. Terror during the Age of Democratic Revolution

La Terreur révolutionnaire : Enjeux historiographiques et idéologiques

Serge Bianchi

Il serait difficile d’aborder les liens entre les politiques successivement qualifiées de « terreurs » (mis en actes par des individus ou des États) sans une mise en perspective de la Terreur de l’an II de la Révolution française éclairée par des ouvrages et colloques récents1. Il s’agira dans un premier temps de clarifier le vocable, de le définir dans le temps, l’espace, les acteurs et les qualificatifs ; puis de dresser un rapide état des lieux des controverses historiographiques (et idéologiques) ; enfin de vérifier son statut dans la recherche présente, entre une terreur « au cœur de l’histoire » et un concept en voie de redéfinition quant à ses mythes et ses interprétations.

La Terreur : cerner un concept historique ?

La Terreur est une période de la décennie révolutionnaire que l’on peut dater, dans les discours, les institutions, les rouages. Elle s’avère, dès lors, distincte des phénomènes de violence et des journées révolutionnaires (Grande Peur...), qui lui sont souvent associées. Elle peut désigner un mode politique (« le gouvernement révolutionnaire »), des institutions judiciaires, des pratiques, qu’il convient de qualifier et de clarifier.

Les temps de la Terreur

Le premier problème est de savoir quand elle est mise « à l’ordre du jour »2. Si l’on prend les décrets et les lois, la Terreur (avec une majuscule) débuterait le 5 septembre 1793 (C. Mazauric, après J. Guilhaumou et bien d’autres manuels3...) après une journée menée par des sections sans-culottes et les Enragés4. Au mois de décembre 1793 (frimaire an II) est défini (entre le 5 et le 25) le fonctionnement du Gouvernement révolutionnaire. La loi de Grande Terreur, rapporté par Couthon, date du 10 juin 1794 (le 22 prairial de l’an II). Si l’on prend la période du Comité de salut public dirigé par Robespierre, il s’agit de l’année qui sépare le 28 juillet 1793 du 9 thermidor (soit le 27 juillet 1794)5 !

Enfin, s’il s’agit de la délimiter, on sortirait de la Terreur « montagnarde » le 10 thermidor6 (28 juillet 1794) pour basculer alors dans la « Terreur blanche » de l’an III et du début de l’an IV, contre les « terroristes » de l’an II7. D’où la nécessité de caractériser, même sommairement, la Terreur, à travers ses institutions, ses acteurs et ses « victimes », dans un bref état des lieux.

Les rouages de la Terreur

Les linguistes (J. Guilhaumou, A. Geffroy8) montrent l’institutionnalisation du terme, que l’on pourrait dater du renversement de la monarchie, lors d’une « première terreur » (sans majuscules) qui débute en août 1792, avec un discours de Danton, le premier tribunal révolutionnaire, les massacres de septembre, mais qui se termine avant la réunion de la Convention. La Terreur « légale » débuterait en mars 1793, entre le 10 (le Tribunal Révolutionnaire) et le 21 mars (création des Comités de surveillance) jusqu’au 5 septembre, avec les journées du 31 mai-2 juin et la chute des Girondins en point fort.

La Terreur « à l’ordre du jour » irait du 5 septembre 1793 (le 17, la loi des suspects, le 29 septembre le maximum) jusqu’au 10 juin 1794 (22 prairial an II), comprenant les discours de Robespierre la légitimant (du 25 décembre 1793 et du 5 février 1794 — sur la terreur et la vertu), ainsi que ceux de Saint-Just (10 octobre 1793), de Billaud-Varennes (18 novembre 1793). La Grande Terreur irait du 10 juin au 17 juillet 1794, soit plus de cinq décades (six semaines). À chaque fois, des rouages judiciaires nouveaux ont été définis ainsi que leurs rapports avec les pouvoirs politiques.

Au centre politique, on trouve les grands comités de la Convention, puis les représentants en mission dont la connaissance s’est considérablement enrichie depuis une dizaine d’années9. Aux échelons suivants se détachent les directoires de département et de district, les armées révolutionnaires — « instruments de la Terreur dans les départements10 » — ; au niveau local le réseau des comités de surveillance11...