As we have been celebrating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, an epitaph to the ideology we associate with it—Jacobinism—is in order. Ideologies—political ideologies, especially—provide us with telescopes and microscopes through which we look at the world—the world around us and the world that has shaped us, our history, and, in so doing, they distort reality and standardize, so to speak, our thinking and understanding. They form the perceptions in terms of which we judge and know—perceptions that in turn harden into postulates that brook no alternative and no compromise. This has been the case with "Jacobinism"—even more so than with Marxism. No other political ideology, I believe, has shaped so much, so profoundly and so authoritatively perceptions (and misperceptions) about French politics and political history.

The Jacobin "formula": Every political ideology amounts to a vulgarization of theory or philosophy. The vulgarization lies, first, in the simplification that is necessary to motivate political action and to provide for mobilization and, second, in the incorporation of extraneous elements, sometimes incompatible with the theory from which the ideology stems and frequently directly at odds with it. This is the case with what I call the "Jacobin formula." "Jacobinism," no matter what it originally meant, came to mean some or all of the following: the everyday direct rule of a virtuous people acting for the general good (Rousseau); the exaltation of the nation over the individuals that comprise it (a perversion of Rousseau that we can relish in reading Jules Michelet); the rule of one man or an elite to govern on behalf of the general good that may correspond to the supremacy of the legislature or the supremacy of one man—republican Jacobinism in the first case or Bonapartism in the second. Or the government in which one man speaks on certain vital national issues for the will of all—this is the distinction between la Politique as opposed to la politique—and is, I believe, the very essence of Gaullism. Jacobinism has been also used to uphold central governance—the centralized French "administration," speaking for the interests of all.