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destroy the English constitution, said Burke, whose whole conservative philosophy
was mapped out in 1784. The Geneva Burghers of 1782 were the victims of “false
philosophers of the age.” “The cause of all legitimate governments” was at stake.
Whether the American revolutionaries had employed “terror” is a question of what
one chooses to mean by terror. The French revolutionaries used a kind of terror as
early as 1789. But terror—meaning forced oaths, legal proceedings against politi-
cal offenders, repression of the press and the right of assembly, imprisonment, ban-
ishment, exile—had been employed for more conservative purposes, in the little
terror at Geneva at the end of 1782, the “rod of terror” that Harris advised for the
Dutch in 1787, the very real terror against the Belgian democrats in 1790. The
point is not to justify or impugn or recriminate, but only to make clear the division
and the struggle, not wholly latent, that already existed at the end of what is called
the Age of Enlightenment.