The Joyous Monsters of the Romantic Era (original) (raw)

If the mainspring of the popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; and terror, without which virtue is impotent." On Political Morality, Maximilien Robespierre, February, 1794 1.) Amidst the joi de mort of falling heads and falling heads-of-state, those who wrote and spoke themselves into positions of command were overtaken by the tide of violence they incited and commandeered, as the shifting frame of what was radical and what wasn't radical enough jiggered like a film coming loose on its reel. And while war and civil war produced many ways and means for the men and women of Revolutionary France to meet their ends, it was a singular mechanism that was adopted by the State (and by those who acted on the State's behalf) for the dispensation of capital punishment.