Demonic (18 page)

The “great attraction” of the September massacres, according to French historian G. Lenotre, was the grotesque execution of Marie Gredeler, a prisoner accused of murder. She was bound to a post, her breasts chopped off and her feet nailed spread-eagle on the ground, and a bonfire was lit between her legs.
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But for my money, the most chilling murder of the September massacres was that of Princess Lamballe. This wealthy young widow had been Marie Antoinette’s best friend and superintendent of the queen’s household. For the Jacobins, she was the Karl Rove of the Louis XVI administration. The mob accused the prudish and sensitive princess of all sorts of monstrous depredations, including a lesbian affair with the queen.

After the mob attacked the Tuileries in August 1792, Lamballe had been moved to La Force prison, away from the royal family. A year earlier, the princess had gone to England to appeal to the British to save the French monarchy. She had returned to France out of sheer loyalty to Marie Antoinette. The fact that she wrote her last will and testament while in England suggests she had an inkling of what was to come.

On September 3, 1792, Princess Lamballe was dragged from her prison cell and brought before a revolutionary tribunal presided over by the brute Jacques Hébert. Hébert had nothing but admiration for the “sacrilegious excesses” of the revolution, cheerfully announcing that the universe would soon contain “nothing but a regenerated and enlightened family of atheists and republicans.”
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He demanded that the princess swear “devotion to liberty and to the nation, and hatred to the king and queen,” threatening her with death if she refused. Lamballe replied that she would take the first oath but never the second, because “it is not in my heart. The king and queen I have ever loved and honored.”
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In the next instant, she was thrown to the howling mob, gang-raped,
and sliced to pieces. Her head, breasts, and genitalia were chopped off by the sansculottes multitude and her mutilated corpse was put on public display for the crowd to jeer at and further defile. One beast cut out her heart and ate it “after having roasted it on a cooking-stove in a wine-shop.” One of her legs was hacked off and fired from a cannon.
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Her head was taken to a café and placed on a table for the patrons to laugh at. The princess’s head and genitalia were then stuck on pikes and paraded past Marie Antoinette’s prison window, with the mob shouting for Antoinette to kiss her lover.
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Isn’t that what George Washington would have done?

The Convention decreed that France was a Republic on September 21, 1792. One week later, the renowned seventy-three-year-old French author Jacques Cazotte was guillotined for counterrevolutionary writings.
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According to two contemporaneous accounts, in September 1792, a Jacobin named Philip presented a box to the legislative assembly containing the heads of his mother and father, whom he said he had slayed in a burst of patriotism because they refused to attend a revolutionary church.
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This was not a revolution that was likely to end—as the American Revolution did—with the motto
“Annuit cœptis”
(He [God] has favored our undertakings) on its national seal.

Being totalitarians, the French revolutionaries were anxious to inflict their ideas on other perfectly nice countries. In November 1792, the Convention issued the “Edict of Fraternity,” calling on the people of other countries to overthrow their rulers.
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By the end of 1792, the Jacobins were demanding the king’s head. Louis XVI had already tried to flee Paris, but the French wouldn’t let him. The entire royal family had been held captive, under constant guard, behind multiple locked doors in the Temple prison for four months, and in the Tuileries before that. But that wasn’t enough. Louis XVI was such an object of hatred for the masses that, at some revolutionary clubs, members with the “hideous” name “Louis” were forced to change their names to “Montagnard,” as a tribute to the most liberal political faction.
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The trial of Louis XVI—or “Citizen Louis Capet”—took place in December 1792, before the entire National Convention. Erstwhile
American patriot Thomas Paine attended as a member of the Convention. Unknown to the hapless Paine, he was watching the original show trial. Citizen Capet was charged with a series of crimes that he knew, “as did his accusers, he had never been party to.”
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Of course, the principal accusation against him was treason for having been king—though it was not a crime to be so until that very moment.

Robespierre was putatively opposed to capital punishment, but like our liberal friends, he was willing to make exceptions on a case-by-case basis depending on the defendant. Fiercely championing death for the king, he argued that even holding a trial was “counterrevolutionary” (the French version of “politically incorrect”). Robespierre said that Citizen Capet was “a criminal toward humanity” and killing him was merely “a measure of public safety.” The king “must die,” he said, “because the country must live.”
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Johnnie Cochran’s summations made more sense.

The Convention debated the king’s fate much the way the UCLA faculty debated a resolution to condemn the Iraq War five days after the fall of Baghdad
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(180 for; 7 against; wild applause). After a unanimous vote of guilt, the Convention then debated whether Louis Capet would be sentenced to detention, deportation, or death. “Give us the head of that fat pig,” yelled the Jacobins. “The nation demands his death!”
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Thousands of the sansculottes ruffians poured into the streets during the trial, shouting for the king’s death,
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because this is how liberals participate in civic affairs. Some wandered inside to the public seats in the upper balconies to cheer deputies who called for death and heckle those leaning toward imprisonment. Seeing the bloodthirsty mobs in the streets, Madame Roland, a supporter of the Revolution, commented wryly, “What charming freedom we now enjoy in Paris.”
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The vote inside went back and forth for 72 hours,
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indicating that even the French revolutionaries were more evenhanded than the typical college faculty. Finally, the king’s own cousin, with the promising revolutionary name “Phillipe Egalité,” swung the vote by standing and saying, “I vote death.”
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The Convention ordered the king to be guillotined the following day. So on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI became the only French king ever to be executed. It will not surprise close observers of the Left to learn that the deputies had engaged in vote fraud, with thirteen votes
cast illegally, including that of the bloodthirsty “angel of death,” Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just, who was too young to vote.
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The night before his execution, the king said good-bye to his family, giving his children religious instruction and telling them to forgive his assassins. The next morning at 5 a.m., he took communion. A few hours after that, the drums began. Hearing the drums, signaling the coming execution, Louis XVI’s priest said, his blood ran cold.
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Arriving to take the king to the guillotine was a former priest, Jacques Roux, who had renounced his faith and joined the most radical revolutionary sect, the Enrages, or “the Rabid.” The king handed him a package containing some personal effects and his last will and testament, asking that it be given to his wife. Roux responded, “I have not come here to do your errands, I am here to take you to the scaffold.”
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The king was taken by cart to the guillotine, trailed by a sneering, catcalling mob.

After having his hands bound and his hair cut above the nape of his neck, King Louis XVI ascended the platform, motioned for the drummers to pause, and began to address the crowd. He said, “I die innocent of all the crimes imputed to me. I pardon the authors of my death, and pray God that the blood you are about to shed will never fall upon France—”
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But like an audience of college liberals, the audience began shouting and the drummers resumed their banging, so the king could no longer be heard. They could hear the king any old time, whereas who knew when they might get to yell and hit drums again?

Once the guillotine blade fully severed the king’s thick neck, an attendant yanked the head from a basket and waved it before the crowd while making obscene gestures. The people whooped and cheered, threw their hats in the air, and lined up to dip their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood. His carcass was dumped in a pit and the body dissolved with lime.

Within the next year, the king’s backstabbing cousin, Mr. Equality, Phillipe Egalité, would himself be guillotined, with the less illustrious final remark: “Merde!”
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Madame Roland was also executed, after bowing to the statue of Liberty next to the guillotine, saying, “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”
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Thomas Paine would
narrowly escape the guillotine and be imprisoned instead. On the one-year anniversary of the king’s execution, the revolutionaries presided over fetes of celebration, including one in Grasse that featured the guillotining of a Louis XVI mannequin.
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They had executed a king, but the French had not yet begun the Reign of Terror. The fact that, after all this, the Terror was still to come begins to explain why all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have drawn inspiration from Rousseau and the French Revolution.

SEVEN
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
PART DEUX:

COME FOR THE
BEHEADINGS, STAY FOR
THE RAPES!

B
y June of 1793, the radical Jacobins had seized total control of the Convention and begun instituting left-wing government policies, such as price controls and a general draft. Yet another constitution was adopted by the Convention and then immediately suspended by the Convention. Instead, a revolutionary government was decreed “until the peace.” Robespierre dominated the tyrannical—and ironically named—Committee of Public Safety. (Similarly, in 2003, Libya was made chairman of the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights.) Thus began the “Reign of Terror,” purging all “enemies of the revolution.”

The enforcers, Robespierre and his allies, demanded death to traitors, spies, moderates, and anyone who disagreed with Robespierre. Saint-Just, Robespierre’s ally on the Committee of Public Safety, called for “unlimited war,” saying the Republic “owes the good citizens its protection. To the bad ones it owes only death.”
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There were up to fifty executions a day, by a guillotine set up next to the statue of Liberty in the “Place de la Revolution,” formerly “Place Louis XV.” More than three thousand aristocrats were sent to the guillotine, with huge crowds on hand to cheer the carnage. The victims
often had to be dragged up the stairs of the scaffold. Programs called “menus” were distributed, listing the names of the condemned, the better to heckle them. Street jugglers entertained the crowds by staging mock executions with puppets.
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With the Jacobins in control, the “de-Christianization” campaign kicked into high gear in 1793. Inspired by Rousseau’s idea of the
religion civile
, the revolution sought to completely destroy Christianity and replace it with a religion of the state. To honor “reason” and fulfill the promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that “no one may be questioned about his opinions, including his religious views,” Catholic priests were forced to stand before revolutionary clubs and take oaths to France’s new humanocentric religion, the Cult of Reason (which is French for “People for the American Way”).

Only a bare majority of clergy, called “nonjurors,” refused to take oaths to the republic. About 20,000 priests did so and another 20,000 left the country. Many ex-priests publicly denounced their religion, swearing they had never believed it, and “vied with each other in ribaldry and blasphemy.”
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Vicar Patin stood in front of a revolutionary club and said the “earmarks” of a priest were: “To bestialize humans in order to better enslave them, to make them believe that two plus one is one and a thousand other absurdities, to enter into a compact with our former tyrants to share with them spoils taken from the people.”
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Revolutionaries smashed church art and statues.
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One explained that he had broken the noses off church statues because they were “hideous apes” that deserved to be crushed and used for pavement.
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At the Cathedral of Notre Dame, hundreds of medieval sculptures of prophets, priests, and kings were yanked from their pedestals and decapitated or hurled in the Seine.
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The cathedral’s priceless thirteenth- and fourteenth-century stained-glass windows were smashed.

Notre Dame fared better than the Third Abbey Church at Cluny, once the most magnificent monastery in the world. Revolutionaries torched the archives and sacked the Romanesque building, leaving behind nothing but a pile of rubble.
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