Welcome to 1789...

Perhaps the key here: he's clearly using the word "violence" differently than most people, who tend to immediately think of physical violence when they hear him talking about it. Mind, I still think he's wrong about the Terror, even if he's speaking of a kind of Gandhian disruption rather than physical violence, since that's really not how anyone at the time thought of it. But there does seem to be some logic to his arguments when considered from that point of view.