Una progenie totalitaria? Le proiezioni metastoriche della Rivoluzione francese

The essay aims to reconstruct the debate on proto-totalitarian interpretations of the French Revolution, by retracing its main stages. A debate which initially had its starting point in the link between 1793 and 1917, before extending to the analogies between Terror and totalitarian regimes. A metastorical projection which, in its various declinations, emerged in the reflections of the first half of the twentieth century and then reached its peak, especially after the publication of the volumes by Hannah Arendt and Jacob Talmon on the origins of totalitarianism, in the new scenario of the Cold War. In particular, the concept of totalitarian democracy, the fulcrum of Talmon’s thesis, became the favourite interpretative paradigm of anti- communist historiography, which found the matrix of the Soviet dictatorship in the Jacobin experience. As known, in France such debate was fired up by François Furet and later slowly began to disappear from the historiographic debate with the end of world divided into blocs. However, some recent studies in political philosophy and politology attest to a partial recovery of the Talmonian concept of totalitarian democracy, although, most of the time, in terms of mere speculative utility.