The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought

by Jesse Goldhammer

In The Headless Republic, Jesse Goldhammer explores how the French revolutionaries retrieved a set of ideas about founding violence from the classical Romans and early Christians and incorporated it into postrevolutionary debates that echoed into the twentieth century. By linking sacrifice as expressed in revolutionary practices to modern French theory, Goldhammer shows how ancient ideas of violent political renewal made their way into the contemporary age. Goldhammer elucidates the theoretical and practical significance of sacrificial violence during the Revolution, and then turns his attention to postrevolutionary intellectuals whose work is inspired by the founding sacrifices of the French Republic. Showing how Georges Bataille, Joseph de Maistre, and Georges Sorel adapted concepts of sacrifice to their own particular political agendas―whether reactionary or revolutionary―Goldhammer challenges conventional readings of these three thinkers as "bloodthirsty intellectuals." Instead, he argues, their work reveals the limits of violence as an agent of political change and attacks the forms of violence later adopted by fascist regimes. More broadly, Goldhammer makes the case for including ancient concepts of collective bloodshed in the modern lexicon of political violence.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who watch the watchers, and who set the rules? old issue that is, really, and Goldhammer -a scholar of political theory- tells us he came to it via Machiavelli, but the same ungraspable law-giver throws his shadow over much of the Western tradition (and a good deal of the Eastern one too, apparently); Goldhammer suggests that there exists a specifically French line of thought that associates or discuss the relationship of sacrifice and political foundation.
He examines three somewhat sulphurous thinkers and their engagement with sacrifice (De Maistre, Sorel and Bataille) but starts with the sacrifitial discourse of the French revolutionaries. Goldhammer displays a good grasp of the thought and a very up-to-date knowledge of the scholarship on Sorel and Bataille, but the first chapter concerned with revolutionary violence and their rhetoric of sacrifice is a bit light, while the one on Maistre (about whom I must admit I know very little) was not exactly convincing either, in part because Goldhammer fail to place him in his proper theological context.
The originality of the book is that Goldhammer is unreservedly revisionist: he seize the occasion of the book to dress a short list of the scholarship on each of his three authors, which for all three is very polarised. To pick an example: Sorel, famously Sternhell's 'forefather of fascism' is put in relation to the scholars of Mille-neuf-cent who did so much to rehabilitate him in France, and Goldhammer then proceed to argue that the 'violence' of Sorel's 'Reflexions sur la violence' is not the totalitarian bloodlust claimed by those too eager to find in him the missing link between communism and fascism, but rather a form of personal self-sacrifice (martyrdom, in Goldhammer's typology) precisely meant to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
To conclude neither in it's thesis, nor in it's execution, is the book extremely ambitious: it discusses known authors and a known theme, but argues for unexpected positions, against the grain of traditional historiography. For anyone interested in either of those three, or in political religion/theology, or in the French revolution I would imagine this makes for a nice, short book, not overly demanding if you are familiar already with the concepts. For anyone else, I think this might not be a necessary read.