COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!Christianity has yielded to these temptations, to which theoretical Christianity neverthe-
less contrasts this salutary antidote, which is its sole law: ‘‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’’
Such a maxim is political, what else? It is political because it is universal: my neighbor
might be living far away, and my fellow humans are all of a kind. Why was the Revolution
less radical than theoretical Christianity in its ideal of fraternity? The obvious and easy
answer is because politics is the art of power, and it would be quite naı ̈ve and sentimental
to base politics on the commandment to love. But this is not the nub: there will always
be unequally distributed power. The real question—which we should try to consider out-
side any legal framework—is the issue of the legitimacy of power. If the Revolution had
carried out its fraternal maxim in a Christian way, it would have placed the legitimacy of
political power in the reference of the brothers—in other words of the sons—to the shared
symbolic father. It neither could nor would do so. Even if it hesitated, in the end it placed
not the legitimacy but the illegitimacy of power in the paternal principle. Regicide was
not unavoidable, but it took place, with, as its immediate consequence, the fantasy of a
society of fatherless brothers. It is obvious that the Revolution was bent on beheading not
a man but a symbol. When a symbol is beheaded, however, the head grows back again,
and sooner or later a tyrant arises to pick up the stake of revolutions betrayed. Robespierre
shows that this happened sooner rather than later.
Something awkward emerges with this first turn of the screw. Not only was the
French Revolution largely unaware of the fact that by inventing the three maxims liberty,
equality, and fraternity it was translating the three Christian theological virtues, faith,
hope, and love, into the political register, it was also very unfaithful in its translation, and
on a point that is not at all theoretical, since it involves the outbreak of violence, more
precisely, parricide. There is nothing very Christian about this, and the question now is
knowing—or deciding—whether the head of the king by divine right rolling in sawdust
represents an advance in the direction of the exit from religion, or not. The least that can
be said is that the execution of Louis XVI was a capital sin against the maxim of love.
Neither morality nor sentiment is involved here; it is simply a matter of testing the hy-
pothesis that the French Revolution did not take responsibility for the three Christian
maxims radically enough and that therefore (I’ll stick with Gauchet’s paradox) it failed to
take the postreligious virtualities of Christianity as far as it might have done. Because love
retroactively gives and grounds faith, it is from faith and from its translation into liberty
that we must embark on the second turn of the screw.
Whereas belief stems from closely held conviction and can cling to it, faith is declared.
An act of faith stands for a declaration of faith, and this is one of the reasons why lay civil
society deceives itself when it expects to see religious convictions confined to the private
domain. Over and above the gesture that releases me from common belief and abandons
me to my liberty, what is at issue in the act of faith? As we have seen: the freedom of the
other. I make an act of faith whenever I surrender, in complete confidence, to the wager
that you will make good use of your freedom. ‘‘You,’’ not ‘‘he’’ or ‘‘she.’’ The act of faith
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