The French Revolution began with a great truth — and before the world's eyes turned it into an idol. Reason, the liberator, was raised to a deity: in November 1793 the cathedral of Notre-Dame was reconsecrated as a "Temple of Reason," and where for centuries men had served God, an allegory of the intellect was installed. And beside the deified Reason, the human being paradoxically shrank: the living person was reduced to the abstract "citizen," and anyone who did not fit the scheme, to a "suspect." When an abstraction becomes a sacred thing, the concrete person is made superfluous.
The catastrophe was given a name — the Terror. From the autumn of 1793 to the summer of 1794 the Revolutionary Tribunal sent "enemies" to the guillotine in a steady stream; over those months tens of thousands perished. In the rebellious Vendée, punitive columns drowned and shot peasants and priests by the thousand. The machine built to defend liberty devoured people in the name of virtue — and could not stop, because anyone at all could, if one wished, be declared suspect.
The captivity was a captivity of liberty itself. The Republic, which had proclaimed the liberation of humankind, turned into the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety; fear soaked into everything — denunciation became the norm, and silence the only defense. The "Republic of Virtue" rested not on consent but on dread. The freedom for the sake of which it had all been undertaken found itself bound in the chains of fear more tightly than under the old order.
And yet at the very beginning, before the Terror, a word was spoken that outlived the Terror. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 and the abolition of the privileges of the estates proclaimed what could no longer be rooted out: people are born free and equal in rights, dignity is not conferred by a title but belongs to everyone. This was a genuine remelting of the idea of the human being — it stood firm when the guillotine had rusted and fallen silent. But the event has a darker echo as well: a revolution that made an abstraction its god and the human being its raw material became the prototype of the ideological terror of the twentieth century, where in the name of a radiant future the living would once again be killed.