The French Revolution did not create French nationality, but neither did it demolish it. The will to open a new era - the Year I of Liberty - was not a will to wipe out the slate. The enlightened majority of the National Assembly from the Estates General of 1789 initially agreed enthusiastically to keep Louis XVI at the head of the state and Catholicism as the official religion. It was up to the king to accept innovations which had nothing yet of the characters which they were to assume in Year II. The fact that he did not accept is a decisive, though too little analyzed, aspect of things. Because if we no longer ignore nothing of the radical, and perhaps potentially tyrannical, ideologies of Rousseau and his followers, we too often fail to consider that the head of Louis XVI, after all, was not empty of ideology.1789 is therefore not the source of our ideological schism. This is the point of origin of the violent political forms that this schism has taken or aroused. Here again, in the quest for responsibility on which value judgments are based, the choice of the king seems decisive: the fight against a still peaceful Revolution is at the origins of the chain of violence. War and Terror seem to me to be less programmed in a hyperrationalism which would be inherent in the Jacobin ideology than resulting from the great |