Abstract

Why bother today with Robespierre ? There is at least one reason: he remains, to this day, one of the scarecrows used to turn people away from radical democracy. Following the historiographical triumph of François Furet, hostility to Robespierre has even spread to the Left, with Mouffe and Laclau’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy being predicated upon the rejection of Jacobinism, conflated with Stalinism. Paradoxically, Mouffe and Laclau aimed to hegemonize the French Revolution’s democratic discourse while conjuring the threat of its only radical proponent. They wanted, to quote Robespierre, ‘a revolution without a revolution’ – an inconsistency that can be traced, decades later, in Mouffe’s difficulty, within her ‘agonistic pluralism’, of naming the enemy. Yet this inconsistency has disappeared from the works of one Pablo Iglesias who, whilst drawing upon Mouffe and Laclau’s work, does not hesitate to quote from Robespierre. Podemos is but one example of a massive reinvestment of the French revolution’s heritage by radical movements. What does the return of Robespierre contribute to radical politics? I will argue that it opens access to untapped theoretical resources, and powerful mobilizing symbols.

Bio: Olivier Tonneau is a Lecturer in Modern Languages at Homerton College, Cambridge. He is currently exploring anti-colonial uses of the French revolution, especially in the works of Aimé Césaire, Kateb Yacine and Alejandro Carpentier (see his article in the January issue of Radical Philosophy).