In 1820, in his first lecture on the origins of representative government, the young François Guizot began with a striking image. The French Revolution had shifted the ground beneath the historian’s feet, revealing a new landscape of interpretive possibilities: “the actual spectacle remains the same; but it is viewed by another spectator occupying a different place—to his eyes all is changed” (History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe, 2002, p. 4). In 2020, Kevin Duong’s The Virtues of Violence: Democracy against Disintegration in Modern France makes a similar claim about mysteries buried in the subsequent two centuries of Europe’s evolution toward democracy. Duong argues that observers have long viewed the spectacle of this history through the retrospective lens of twentieth-century political catastrophe, interpreting previous eruptions of democratic violence as premonitions of totalitarianism. But now we are spectators in a different place, able to see more clearly the hopes and fears of historical actors who called on the demos to assert its full agency in a thunderbolt of regenerative force. Most important, we can now see how these attempted assertions of popular will were conjoined to deep fears about the disintegration of social bonds and the need to overcome social divisions.

The contemporary wave of democratic energy, riding on a new apprehension of the festering social divisions embedded in an illusory liberal democratic stability, has only made it more urgent to understand the history of democratic protest. Though far from endorsing violence, Duong nevertheless urges us to appreciate a long-standing impulse to square a mysterious circle—that democracy means both a set of equal and separate individuals and an integrated social body—by asserting popular agency through force. To begin to understand this enduring proclivity, he offers us a new interpretation of the French republican tradition in the long nineteenth century, from Maximilien Robespierre to Georges Sorel. I should say at the outset that Duong is an innovative, intuitive, and insightful guide who leads us through complicated historical episodes in a compelling voice. The Virtues of Violence is an important book that will likely change the contours of debate about the meaning of nineteenth-century democratic contestation—no longer seen primarily as a looming problem for liberalism but rather as a deeply ingrained pattern of thought and emotion with its own powerful force field. Duong not only describes this force field in fluent and accessible prose, but also is sensitive to the ways that visual culture can clarify how ideas that now seem quite distinct were once conjoined.

In what is arguably the most original and arresting chapter in the book, Duong begins with a reinterpretation of Jacobinism and its moralizing language of extralegal violence. He locates this language not in an anachronistic attempt to revive ancient republicanism, but in a specific appropriation of late Enlightenment conceptions of natural disaster. The central image here is the lightning bolt, at once violently destructive and mysteriously regenerative. The Jacobins, on this telling, both “sacralized regicidal violence” and “naturalized democratic agency” (p. 40). Duong analyzes these dual impulses in a fresh discussion of debates over the trial of Louis XVI, in which the Jacobins ignored ultimate grounds of right in order to “reassert the moral bases for social cohesion” (p. 32). They argued that the French should execute the king as an enemy combatant, thereby fully acknowledging his symbolic strength as the representative of a corporatist society now in ruins and asserting their own power to create a specifically democratic solidarity. Unlike many interpreters of Jacobinism, who see it as a doomed attempt to colonize “the social” by making everything political, Duong argues that it was the revolutionary current most attuned to the needs of the concrete social body.

After using Jacobinism to illustrate the fusion of redemptive violence and popular agency, Duong attempts to show in the rest of the book how this metaphoric language passes into the hands of intellectuals of many political persuasions facing the common task of creating democratic social cohesion in a world in which the practice of democracy appeared to erode any such bonds. He first analyzes Tocqueville’s reaction to Algeria, then the mentality of the Communards in 1870, and finally various critics of the Third Republic on the eve of the Great War. All, he argues, were attracted by the lightning bolt.

Provocative and unsettling accounts of issues that have previously been confined within stable interpretations always stimulate pushback and fundamental debate. I mention just two areas where I expect that scholars will engage critically with Duong’s impressive intellectual reconstruction—two interpretive “sins,” as it were: one of commission (the enlistment of Tocqueville as a fellow traveler) and one of omission (the curious absence of 1848).

It is understandable that Duong would turn to Tocqueville to illustrate his claim that even liberals could be attracted to the notion of redemptive violence. Tocqueville clearly worried about democratization as an experience of social disintegration. Moreover, he explicitly condoned the violent conquest of Algeria to bolster French international standing, in part to counteract the individualism pervading the July Monarchy by giving citizens a common sense of pride and greatness. Nevertheless, several of the claims that anchor this chapter appear to me overdrawn and subtly misleading, if not false: that Tocqueville justified total war because of an essentializing view of the Arab character; that he found in the martial virtues of the African army a model of democratic glory; that he embraced Indigenous extermination as a solution; or that he ever “comfortably invoked the Napoleonic legacy” (p. 65). A careful consideration of Tocqueville’s views on violence in Algeria in the context of contemporary debates would put it closer to the “cruelty of strategic necessity” (p. 12) or “a strategy of domination” (p. 5)—perspectives that Duong uses as foils for redemptive violence—than to a romantic celebration of regenerative popular agency. Tocqueville always distrusted revolutionary violence, precisely because it bequeathed bitter memories that made the creation of new social bonds difficult. Yet in the choices he thought were available to the French in Algeria, he judged violent conquest to be the lesser evil.

Rather than turning to Tocqueville, Duong might have trained his sights on 1848: that quintessential moment of radical hope and possibility in which violence (in the June Days and in the insurrection of 1851) was again fused with the hope for democratic renewal. The Revolution of 1848 destroyed settled social hierarchies and romanticized a new egalitarian social order based on fraternité that first looked for salvation in the suffrage. The idea of the “redemptive ballot” that Duong discusses to very good effect in chapter 3 was born in 1848, in the first experiments with universal manhood suffrage, as were important iterations of the opposition between democratic law and democratic violence. The Communards were rejecting not only the plebiscitary democracy of the empire, but also the model of a democracy based on electoral competition forged in 1848. They were channeling republican activists—workers and peasants—who distrusted the abstractions of the ballot. Social historians have taught us much about new forms of collective violence and insurrectional citizenship during this key period, whereas political scientists have illuminated the fragile and contested evolution of electoral politics. With his perceptive eye and analytical acumen, Duong could surely help us see more clearly what was at stake for democratic theory in these early struggles.

Despite these caveats, I would urge anyone interested in the complex relationship between democratic aspiration and the turn to violence to confront Kevin Duong’s lucid, sharply observed, and thought-provoking book.