The Revolution Between Justice and Revenge

Amar Murray

In my previous essay, I traveled back in time to witness momentous events and sweeping changes in France. I entered one of those vast windows in history that open from time to time, shaking the world and transforming its familiar landscape. The journey was as illuminating as it was compelling. I resolved to continue, passing through other open windows to witness great transformations as they unfolded, to see them for myself and, as far as possible, to feel them.

To inhabit a historical moment is to begin to understand its events, its conflicts and the actions of those who lived through it. It allows us to judge people in the circumstances they faced, rather than exclusively through our own circumstances, our own age and the concepts that distinguish one time and place from another.

Consider slavery in ancient Rome. To feed an enslaved man or woman from one's own table, and to refrain from beating them, could count as an act of humanity. Someone who behaved in this way might be praised for compassion. In our own time, the very idea of slavery evokes revulsion: a crime and a profound disgrace. Such is the distance between historical worlds. To judge another age, we must first enter its moment and grasp the concepts and assumptions through which its people understood their lives.

This matters all the more because I have come to share a conviction held by many people I know: the history handed down to us was written by the victors, and its accounts need not correspond to what actually happened. How often do we hear, see or read something that strikes us as exaggerated, implausible or impossible to reconcile with reason?

Let us, then, enter the time machine, pass through the window that opens onto 1789, and arrive in Paris.

Paris, the City of Light: a city alive with music, literary gatherings and intellectual debate, a city steeped in culture. Its beautiful streets, elegant palaces and venerable libraries are burning. Murder and plunder roam the streets. Death quickens its pace, sweeping people of every station into its harvest. Hatred and revenge drown out every other voice. Blood stains the pale city. Shops are looted or set ablaze; libraries and museums are destroyed.

Surely the monarchy must be destroying Paris, prepared to let the world drown rather than relinquish its place in it. Yet the shock is that the revolutionaries themselves are doing this. Questions begin to trouble me. Is this the revolution? Where are liberty, justice and equality? Freedom cannot share a dwelling with slaughter, nor can the two inhabit the same heart. One must extinguish the other.

But I catch myself. Once again, I am judging what unfolds before me through the concepts of the twenty-first century. That is precisely the fault in judgment I have already acknowledged. Let us keep watching, gather as much evidence and explanation as we can, and only then attempt a judgment.

A man leads the crowd. He is known as the revolution's leader and orator: the celebrated lawyer Robespierre. “The republic is the will of God,” he declares. It is as though he were saying that the revolution he leads, calling for a republic in place of monarchy, carries a divine command. He clothes it in religion and appeals to the people's religious feelings. His decisions acquire a sacred mantle, something for which death becomes easier to embrace and through which even criminal acts can be justified. As the philosopher Gustave puts it: “When a new belief spreads among people, men gather around it who care for it only as a means of satisfying their appetites and ambitions.”

I find myself reflecting on Robespierre's rhetoric, so saturated with religious feeling. It runs against the familiar claim that the revolution removed religion entirely from politics and the state. How can such a separation be reconciled with his assertion that the republic is God's will?

The question is legitimate, and I need to hear more. I decide to seek out leaders from every side: revolutionaries, clergy and representatives of the monarchy. I want to understand their perspectives and set them alongside one another, in the hope of reaching conclusions that come closer to explaining this period. Those encounters will follow in later essays. For now, I shall continue to describe what I see.

I return to Paris and to a scene that has become a defining image in the history of nations. An angry revolutionary crowd surges toward the Bastille, the prison we were taught to regard as a symbol of tyranny and oppression. The act promises a new age of liberty, justice and equality. The crowd releases all the prisoners: men who will shed blood in Paris, set fire to its history, and behead scientists such as Lavoisier, men whose work helped make scientific progress possible. All this is done on the pretext that they are enemies of the revolution of justice.

Among those leaving the Bastille are prisoners of conscience and liberty. But many are criminals, murderers or thieves. People whose conduct is already corrupted find an opportunity to unleash their destructive impulses in the name of revolution and freedom.

In the tumult, reason disappears. Emotion drives the crowd. The conviction takes hold that anyone who calls for thought or restraint is a traitor who must be killed. Criminals can now spread destruction beneath the banner of revolution.

I tell myself that this can happen in any revolution. There will always be those who betray its purposes. Surely its leaders cannot approve of such conduct. So I return to Robespierre, who has proclaimed the revolution's victory and the establishment of a republic in place of what he calls the tyranny of an all-powerful king. Yet Robespierre himself becomes history's first despotic president with absolute powers. His rule is called the Reign of Terror, a period that some sources identify with the first use of the term “terrorism”. Six thousand of his opponents are killed, including many revolutionary leaders. They are accused of hostility to the revolution; beneath the accusation lie personal enmities and competing interests.

Absolute power, absolute corruption. France retreats into an upheaval of a magnitude it has not known since the religious wars.

Five dark years of Robespierre's rule end, ironically, at the hands of his revolutionary comrades. They kill him in the legislative assembly, the very symbol of the new justice. Successive regimes follow, ruling with a despotism worse than the monarchy's own.

Here our romantic image of the French Revolution shatters. Are human beings so savage by nature, so criminally divided against themselves, that they demand liberty and justice only to kill and destroy others in the name of defeating the revolution's enemies?

What I see in France is hatred, revenge, murder and terror. It is the Reign of Terror.

Is this truly the revolution that brought us to our present civilization and the values by which we seek to live: democracy, freedom and humanity? We must look further and, as promised, continue our encounters with the other forces that shaped this period. Perhaps we can come to understand more, leave false romanticism behind, and face what actually happened.

Until our next journey.

Publication and translation

The Arabic original appeared in Canadian Days on 18 January 2018. Read the original publication.

This English translation was prepared directly from the Arabic in September 2026. It preserves the historical claims and interpretations of the original archival essay. Quotations are translated as they appear in the Arabic text.