| For the past few centuries, historians have divided along ideological lines in their estimation of the role played by rhetoric in the escalation of extremism during the French Revolution. François Furet brought the issue of rhetoric into focus in the late 1960s with his theory concerning the role of discourse in the acting out of politics, arguing that the Terror was inherent in the language of the Revolution from the start. Furet, in fact, helped initiate a new trend in discourse analysis that would be adopted by numerous other scholars; one of the most recent being Keith Michael Baker. Like Furet, Baker saw discourse, specifically the lofty discourses of reason, justice, and will, as an indicator of political attitudes in the different stages of the Revolution with the discourse of reason marking the initial stage, justice signifying the most notable feature of the middle stage, and general will suffusing the language in the months leading up to and including the Terror. This paper will offer another view of discourse, one based on the more lowly expression of vengeance.;Vengeance was not only a discourse shared by all classes and ranks; it was also inherent in the very discourses described by Baker. Moreover, both the Right-Wing press and their Left-Wing counterparts diffused the language of vengeance with their own political purposes in mind. The people of Paris, deluged daily with political information via these journals, polarized, dividing along political lines. Once unleashed, the natural response to violent rhetoric was increased violent rhetoric. It becomes apparent in investigating this discourse that meaning traditionally associated with vengeance underwent a change from in 1789 to 1792. The struggle to determine meaning also reflected a struggle for political power. That great effort can be traced through the escalation and changing emphasis placed on inherent concepts of vengeance as it appeared in the radical newspapers of both the Right and the Left. |
