War & Peace Quote by Georg Buchner

Terror gets billed as a tool of tyrants; Buchner flips the script and nails the French Revolutionary paradox: a republic can brandish fear in the name of freedom, then call it moral necessity. "The weapon of the Republic is terror" doesn’t just describe political violence; it exposes how a state can launder coercion through ideals. The line is blunt to the point of indictment, stripping away the comforting story that only monarchies and dictatorships brutalize. A republic, too, can build legitimacy by threatening bodies.

Then comes the kicker: "virtue is its strength". Buchner isn’t praising civic goodness; he’s showing how "virtue" becomes an ideological fuel that makes terror feel righteous, even hygienic. Virtue is not the antidote to terror here - it’s the battery that keeps it running. The phrase carries a cold theatrical irony: the same moral language meant to elevate citizens can be weaponized to sort people into the pure and the disposable. Once politics becomes a test of virtue, dissent stops being disagreement and starts being contamination.

Context matters: Buchner wrote in the shadow of Restoration Europe, with censorship, secret policing, and revolutionary dreams continually betrayed. In his dramatic world (especially Danton’s Death), the Revolution’s leaders talk like prosecutors of history itself, certain that the future is on their side. Buchner’s intent is surgical: to show how moral absolutism turns political projects into tribunals, and how the Republic’s self-image - virtuous, enlightened, inevitable - can make terror not a lapse, but a method.