During his 1995 presidential campaign, Jacques Chirac described France as a nation suffering from “social fracture.” Increased hostility between “cosmopolitan” elites and ordinary people threatened to tear the republic apart at its seams. “Social fracture” gave Chirac’s campaign its tenor and pathos, a way to discuss decreasing social mobility in a language other than class struggle. The campaign retrieved this arresting refrain from a 1994 policy paper given by Emmanuel Todd at the Fondation Saint-Simon, a think tank pursuing a truce between the left and free market policies. In fact, Todd did not coin the phrase. He borrowed it from Marcel Gauchet, an eminent political theorist who warned that popular feelings of exclusion and abandonment would outlive the dissipating prestige of French communist politics since 1990.

Under review here is Gauchet’s recent book, Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most. Published in 2018 by Gallimard, it comes to us beautifully translated by Malcolm DeBevoise and introduced by David Bell and Hugo Drochon. Robespierre is a lively addition to an already spirited world of French revolutionary biographies. It is, more importantly, a work stamped with the intellectual preoccupations of the man who coined “social fracture” in Le Débat 30 years ago.

How one tells the story of Robespierre is obviously a matter of political conviction and historiographical tradition. The worst approach is still the most common: the tale of a bloodthirsty dictator murdering the revolution that gave him life. Gauchet’s biography builds on generations of historical research discrediting this myth of a diabolical mastermind singlehandedly sending thousands to the guillotine. In truth, the “demythologized Robespierre” (p. 5) was a puritanical but frail man, frequently bedridden, sipping bowls of lukewarm milk for breakfast or running to the Convention in a threadbare olive-green coat—no doubt capable of virtue and terror, but no more nor less than countless others who, in their numerable ways, made the French Revolution what it was.

Gauchet’s Robespierre is “demythologized,” but he is still an “exceptional” figure (pp. 5, 182). Herein lies the book’s distinctive argument. Across six substantive chapters covering 1789–94, Gauchet reveals a man so absorbed by “sacrificial narcissism,” so desperate “to disappear behind a higher calling” that his own person became a medium for the incarnation of larger forces. Robespierre always put the revolution above himself. That is why, paradoxically, his very person could “personify the impersonality of revolutionary ideals in its purest form,” its contradictions included (p. 55). Gauchet is emphatic that Robespierre cannot be compared to self-seeking demagogues (pp. 32, 55, 66, 168). This is not populism avant la lettre. Robespierre was exceptional because he exercised an “unconscious dictatorship” on behalf of an idealized people (p. 183). His unchosen power lay in sincere self-abnegation, “the impersonal truth of his purpose” as a “moral guide disdainful of the actual exercise of power” (p. 160). Gauchet’s Robespierre is more like C. L. R. James’s Toussaint Louverture than Caesar or Stalin. He is a revolutionary whose fidelity to idealism puts into motion “the political tragedy that the French Revolution represented and that it was Robespierre’s true destiny to embody” (p. 188).

Theorists will recognize in this “tragic” Robespierre some hallmarks of Gauchet’s thought. There is the refusal of social history. That was the signature move of François Furet’s 1978 Penser la Révolution française, a historiographical landmark from which Gauchet once drew inspiration. Robespierre shows Gauchet still committed to the irreducibility of politics (le politique) to social conditions; that in politics, as François Furet (Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster, 1981 [1978]) put it, “new mode[s] of historical action” emerge independently of “the logical sequence of cause and effect” because they are mutations in historical causality “totally unrelated to anything that came before” (pp. 22–23). Democratic revolution was a mutation in the grammar of politics, not an outcome of income distribution. Bread prices did not cause the French Revolution, however much they may have conditioned it.

The book’s periodization underscores this point. Other biographers have emphasized the formative importance of Robespierre’s childhood and legal training. Peter McPhee’s Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2013) and Jean-Clément Martin’s Robespierre, la fabrication d’un monstre (2016) come to mind. But Gauchet begins in Paris in 1789, not Arras in 1758. Of “Robespierre before the Revolution,” Gauchet writes, “it is futile to look there for insight into the Robespierre of the Revolution” (p. 9). Robespierre is a creature of revolution, and it is from there that his life gains in importance. Gauchet speaks frequently of Robespierre’s “conversion” and “metamorphosis” (pp. 10, 54, 88, 91). Whoever Robespierre may have been prior, the fact was “the events of 1789 made him another man” (p. 10). Politics is primary and Robespierre is proof.

What to make of this arresting entry in philosophical biography? Academic books are usually significant for what they argue. What Robespierre argues is that Robespierre was tragedy incarnate. But the book is more significant for what it reveals about Gauchet and his evolving thought since coining “social fracture.” It is one thing to concede the relative “autonomy of the political,” to use contemporary political theory’s cumbersome prose. It is another matter to call the French Revolution a political tragedy of the highest order. Calling it a tragedy is a retrospective judgment. It requires, Hegel emphasized, the critic to look upon the past from a settled historical present. Nobody experiences a revolution as tragic in the moment. It is not a category of experience or action. Only a postrevolutionary consciousness reconciled to defeat can spot the workings of “fate”—Gauchet alternately speaks of “destiny”—after the fact. Gauchet insists that the revolution was always doomed. Neither Robespierre nor his “faux-realist” counterparts, like Sieyès, ever stood a chance. The failure of the revolution was “the failure of a plan that could not possibly have succeeded” because no permanent foundation for an idealized united people will ever be found (p. 179).

From what standpoint can the French Revolution be judged a tragedy rather than a promissory note for future generations? Gauchet is clear. “It has taken two centuries,” but the French have at last broken free of the revolutionary spell. By 2018—notably the year after Emmanuel Macron became president—the means to balance liberty and equality “have been firmly established” (p. 3). Robespierre is written, if not at the end of history, at least at the end of French history. “All these disputes” between revolutionaries and reactionaries “now belong to the past” (p. 2). That is why Gauchet can appreciate the revolution’s tragedy—its necessary impossibility—with solemnity rather than condescension or angst.

The man who once diagnosed runaway “social fracture” has at last spotted a fragile liberal consensus: We must live with social division rather than transcending it. That is the standpoint from which Robespierre retroactively embodies tragic necessity. Gauchet has written an extraordinary history of Robespierre because he hopes it is dead history. His writings after 2020 attest he is already less sanguine now. Future dangers, the book warns, will come from social movements that weaponize the rights of man “with a view to perfecting the workings of the existing order” and so unleash, despite themselves and like Robespierre, “a destabilizing potential whose consequences are liable to be every bit as grave as those of the first eruption” (pp. 189–90). It’s true: Young radicals have a habit of surprising even fate itself.