The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French
Thought. By Jesse Goldhammer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005. 218p. $45.00.
The problem of how to found a political regime is one of the oldest
and most vexed in the history of Western thought. The founding act has
often been drenched in blood because certain forms of violence actually
help to foster political foundation. This is the illiberal starting point
of Jesse Goldhammer's study of the French discourse on sacrificial
violence, a theme that he rightly describes as “anathema to
mainstream political theory” (p. x), which tends to divert its
glance from what it sees as unseemly anachronisms like this. Undaunted,
Goldhammer bravely plunges in, turning to 1790s France and the theorizing
about sacrifice that it spawned for insight into the violence that he
claims is “necessary for political beginnings” (p. 1). While
the French revolutionaries engaged in “sacrificial practices and
interpretations” such as the beheading of Louis XVI, they never
actually developed a theory of sacrifice. That was the
contribution of notorious postrevolutionary writers, such as Joseph de
Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille, who well understood that
violent sacrifice “facilitates the process of conferring moral
legitimacy to political power and setting boundaries for political
identity” (p. 192).