Ruling the Lives of Little Lambs
By: Charz
Tags: Culpability, Despotism, Enel, Fear, Jacobin, Lambs, Law of Suspects, Liberty, One Piece, Political Terror, Proto-Communism, Robespierre
When people are told they are committing criminals actions, they become weak.
Political Terror & Citizens’ Sense of Crime
The distinctive use of the word ‘suspect’ is highly characteristic of the jacobin period, primarily because it seems deliberately intended to provoke fear throuh its elision of the difference between what it might mean to be suspected of a crime and what it might mean to be guilty of it.
It presented the citizens of the First Republic with a stark choice : either to suspect or to be a suspect; it did not appear to recognise the possibility that one might occupy a passive position between the two.
Robespierre was always to maintain that good citizens had no reason to be afraid of revolutionary government. As he said to the Convention in his infamous speech on political morality of 5 february 1794 : ‘The first maxim of your political creed must be to lead the people by reason and the enemies of the people by terror’.
But in many ways his language of political terror actually seems to have been designed to call the civic virtue of each and every citizen into doubt, encouraging every man and woman into a potentially endless round of anxious self-questioning, precisely on account of the equation it made between fear and culpability.
Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, Gregory Dart, page 38
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