After years of research, Richard Cobb realized it was ultimately more interesting to search through the archives on the trail of the counterrevolutionary Terror, more than even the Jacobin Terror. After all, “the Revolutionary Government bureaucratized death in the pursuit of a program of virtue”—and this is enough to guarantee not just horror but also tedium.³⁵⁰ The only limitation on the absolute rigor of this program of virtue related to the age of the victim: fourteen was regarded as the minimum age for the guillotine, except in certain areas where the civil war was particularly merciless. But that was as much as could be said: the Jacobin persecutors, with few exceptions (such as the blustering, tiresome, feral Claude Javogues), turned out to be the first clerks, strutting about with their papers, exemplary above all in their mediocrity, which they wore about them like their tricolor sash. A perfect example of them is an official by the name of Cochon, ready to offer his services as prefect during the Restoration, even though he had voted for the death of Louis XVI. He is much the same as the bureaucrat working away with transparent impartiality in the shadow of all regimes, killing off those who are weak at one moment and favoring those who could be strong the next. Besides, pure, out-and-out Terror generally has the disadvantage of lasting only a short time: a few months. Whereas the White Terror went on, with various peaks and troughs, from 1790 to the Consulate—and some of those involved even had the good fortune to see the second White Terror, in the summer of 1815, almost returning full circle in the space of a few years. “On pouvait s’installer dans la Contre-Révolution—One could settle down in the Counterrevolution,” was a plausible feeling. In short, Cobb felt compelled, at the very beginning of Reactions to the French Revolution, to state with a degree of sarcasm and practicality that “historians of individuality, not to say of crankiness and of the extremes of eccentricity, will be much better off with the Counter-Terror than with the bureaucratic Terror of the summer of 1794.”³⁵¹ The archives, for such people, would be wondrous: no longer the monotonous flow of accusations against various “enemies of the people,” guilty of having raised an eyebrow in the manner of ci-devants (behaving like a pre-Revolutionary aristocrat was punishable by death according to the law of 22 Prairial), but acts of cruel valor, personal vendettas, lavish torments—each one detailed with relish, framed by exuberant novelistic details about women agitators, tribal hatred. The outlaws’ lairs were heaped high with lavish costumes: that bloody nomadic existence had become a refuge for the celebration of luxury, the ultimate nourishment along with the ancient fodder of vendettas.

Postcards from the Quaternary

I

In the deep dust of the earth

a small Magdalenian whistle.

No longer a flint chipped

in a laborious struggle for life.

But tiny notches on three faces