A haunting vision - the curse of the French Revolution

In tonight's Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution, BBC2 combined commentary from historians (including Simon Schama of Citizens fame) with dramatic reproductions of the deliberations of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety. While self-confessed Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek attempted to defend the Terror, the programme successfully presented a version of J.L. Talmon's thesis - that the French Revolution Reign of Terror foreshadowed the state genocides of the 20th century, perpetrated by Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, Mao and the Kymer Rouge. In Talmon's words, the Revolution "not only bequeathed a myth and passed on practical lessons, but founded a living and unbroken political tradition".

The anti-Marxist French historian, the late Francois Furet, reminded us that the Terror was no mistake, no peverse development. It was integral to the Revolution itself:

"The truth is that the Terror was an integral part of the revolutionary ideology ... pure democracy culminated in government by the Terror".

In a move which horrified the Republican Left and the Marxists, Furet went further. He affirmed Talmon's thesis. The Revolution led not to liberté, égalité, fraternité but to Stalin's purges and Hitler's Holocaust:

"What sets the Revolution apart is that it was not a transition but a beginning and a haunting vision of a beginning".

It was part of Burke's genuis to foresee that the Revolution of 1789 would end in the Terror. His Reflections, written three years before the Committee of Public Safety initiated the Terror, predicted that the Revolution hostility to custom and convention, its utopian desire to make all things new, would result in mass bloodshed:

"Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge could satiate their insatiable appetites".

It is perhaps a sign that the Marxist interpretation of history has passed onto the ash heap of history that BBC2's programme quite explicitly articulated the Burke-Talmon-Furet thesis. It was Furet who coined the phrase "the Revolution is over", meaning that the academy's benign fascination with the Revolution could no longer go unchallenged. Tonight BBC2 convincingly portrayed why this is so. 1789 gave us not liberté, égalité, fraternité, but genocide, dictatorship and terror.