Religious marriages and funerals were discouraged and in some places banned entirely, replaced with civic versions of the same. The already-married were encouraged to remarry in revolutionary ceremonies. One club proposed that eulogies at the civic funerals include attacks on the recently departed, to distinguish them from religious funerals. 31
This was not the American Revolution. This was the revolution of a mob.
France’s new leaders—fishmongers, cobblers, and butchers, and lots of lawyers and journalists—also set out to invent a new, nonreligious calendar. Created by the Committee of Public Instruction, the “revolutionary calendar” is exactly what one would expect from a government commission.
It began with “Year 1,” which, for simplicity, was the previous year, 1792. Based on “reason” and “nature,” the revolutionary calendar had twelve 30-day months, divided into three 10-day weeks. Inasmuch as this didn’t account for all the days in a year, the leftovers were tacked on as complimentary days: Virtue Day, Genius Day, Labor Day, Reason Day, Rewards Day, and, on leap years, Revolution Day. George Orwell had it easy in some ways.
The years were further divided into four-year spans called “Franciades.”
Each month was given a crackpot name that was supposed to sound like a Greek or Latin word for seasonal attributes: Vendémiaire (harvest); Brumaire (mist); Frimaire (cold); Nivôse (snow); Pluviôse (rain); Ventôse (wind); Germinal (seeding); Floréal (flowering); Prairial (meadow); Messidor (summer harvest); Thermidor (heat); and Fructidor (fruit). (The new calendar also included an observance known as “Kwanzaa,” which to this day no one has ever been able to explain.)
The British recast the new French months as “Slippy, Nippy, Drippy; Freezy, Wheezy, Sneezy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Heaty, Wheaty, and Sweety.”
Napoleon mercifully abolished the French Revolutionary Calendar on January 1, 1806, twelve years after its creation. Only the strong arm of a military dictatorship could save the French from themselves.
Even clocks and personal names weren’t spared this out-with-the-old insanity. Clocks were redesigned in decimal time, with a second being equal to 0.864 normal seconds, 100 seconds making one minute (which was now 86.4 seconds), and 100 minutes making an hour (144 minutes to the rest of the world). This is why freedom lovers everywhere detest the metric system.
Citizens were forced to drop their Christian names, which were deemed tyrannical and superstitious. One revolutionary proposed that the Convention issue a decree abolishing all Christian names at once.32 The clubs urged people to adopt “civic” names, such as Brutus—the Roman who assisted in the knifing of his friend Caesar, prompting the dying Caesar to ask (in Shakespeare’s words), “Et tu, Brute?” But then in another instant the adopted Roman names fell out of fashion, were duly renounced, and were replaced with names from the preposterous French calendar, leading to such names as “Fig-Pumpkin Ligeret.”33 You know Figgy? He’s my cousin! I’m Brie Surrender-Vomit.
Yes, the French Revolution was just like the American Revolution.
The mob’s consuming hatred of Marie Antoinette would finally be satiated with her public execution during the Reign of Terror. The revolutionaries had already come for the queen’s eight-year-old son, Louis XVII, in July 1793. (In other important business that summer, the Convention decreed that William Pitt, prime minister of the United Kingdom, was “the enemy of the human race.”)34 Antoinette put up a fight, refusing to relinquish her son, but young Louis was literally torn from her arms. Six months earlier, the morning after the king had been guillotined, Antoinette had wiped away her son’s tears, instructing him that a king should not cry. She then set him down, stood, and saluted him as the new king.
What awaited her young son was worse than the guillotine. He was turned over to an illiterate cobbler, Simone, who was instructed to reeducate the boy into hating his parents and loving the revolution. Young Louis was dressed in revolutionary clothes and made to curse his mother and sing revolutionary songs. Under the influence of the extreme left-wing journalist Jacques Hébert, Simone beat and brainwashed the boy into saying his mother had committed incest with him.35
By the fall, Marie Antoinette was ill, hemorrhaging constantly, and possibly dying from tuberculosis. She was only thirty-seven, but her hair had turned nearly white and she appeared a much older woman. On August 1, 1793, she had been moved to a filthy prison called the Conciergerie, where she was “prisoner 280.” The former queen was put on display like an animal for “inhuman wretches” to stand outside her cell “continually vomiting forth” insults against her.36
Antoinette had found out her husband had been guillotined when a guard mockingly called her “the widow Capet.” She found out her best friend, the Princess Lamballe, had been executed when the princess’s head was bounced on a pike outside her prison window. Her son had been torn away from her. Now she sat trapped in a prison cell with riffraff hurling invective at her, in the liberal style.
But the mob still saw Marie Antoinette as a threat to their “liberty.” This is how liberals would treat Sarah Palin.
On October 13, Antoinette was informed that her trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal would begin the next day. Her written request for time to prepare was ignored. And so the trial of Marie Antoinette commenced on October 14, 1793, before a jury of eleven men, chosen from the lowest classes.
To the delight of the spectators, Antoinette was accused of presiding over plots, conspiracies, and “midnight orgies,” and of being the “scourge and the blood-sucker of the French.”37 In the words of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, the witnesses against her were “Patriot Washerwomen,” with “much to say of Plots [and] Treasons.”38
Antoinette answered each accusation with politeness, calmly revealing the emptiness of the charges against her. As Carlyle reports, “Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You persist then in denial?’—‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that.’ ”39 Among the charges was the accusation by Hébert that she kept a religious book containing a “counterrevolutionary” image of Jesus inscribed with the words “Heart of Jesus! Have pity on us!”40
Then came Hébert’s monstrous allegation that Antoinette’s son had accused his mother and aunt of having sex with him—an idea Hébert had himself implanted in the boy through his vile underling, Simone. Hébert testified:
Simone said to me, “I am surprised at young Capet committing so many indecencies”—(too gross to mention). Astonished at seeing this child so initiated in wickedness, I asked him who were his instructors. He replied, with all the ingenuousness and candour of his age, that he had learnt all these abominations of his mother and aunt. I shall not offend your ears with recounting the impurities which this child related; I shall content myself with saying, that he has had an incestuous intercourse with his mother and his aunt and that young Capet has been ill of a disorder which was brought on by these debaucheries.41
Antoinette ignored the vile accusation, until a juror demanded that she answer it. Antoinette famously replied, “I remain silent on that subject because nature holds all such crimes an abhorrence. I appeal to all mothers who are present in this Auditory—is such a crime possible?”42
According to Carlyle, at that moment, Robespierre cursed the stupidity of Hébert for making such a despicable charge and risking a sympathetic response from the jurors.43 Robespierre underestimated the inhumanity of a mob. For having passionately denied the charge, one spectator complained of Antoinette’s arrogance, another of her pride, while one of the jurors sneered, “A mother like you …”44
When Antoinette said nothing, the jury was enraged by her silence and demanded an answer. When she answered, denying the grotesque accusation, the jury denounced her as arrogant. It’s almost as if the mob would accept no answer she gave. As Le Bon says, a crowd “accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though the
y most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.”45
The proceedings against Antoinette were irrelevant in any event. The verdict was preordained. After two days of the mock trial, Antoinette was declared guilty of treason and given a sentence of death scheduled for the next day. Asked if she had anything to say, Antoinette simply shook her head.
Hours before her execution, the former queen wrote a letter to her sister-in-law, Princess Elisabeth, stained with her tears. An excerpt gives the lie to portrayals of Antoinette as a frivolous airhead. She begins:
16TH OCTOBER, 4.30 A.M.
It is to you, my sister, that I write for the last time. I have just been condemned, not to a shameful death, for such is only for criminals, but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent like him, I hope to show the same firmness in my last moments. I am calm, as one is when one’s conscience reproaches one with nothing.
Antoinette raises the incest charge at her trial, asking Elisabeth to forgive her son:
I have to speak to you of one thing which is very painful to my heart, I know how much pain the child must have caused you. Forgive him, my dear sister; think of his age, and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wishes, especially when he does not understand it. It will come to pass one day, I hope, that he will better feel the value of your kindness and of your tender affection for both of [my children].
She concludes by reaffirming her faith and forgiving her enemies:
I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed. Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life. I trust that, in His goodness, He will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to Him, to receive my soul into His mercy. I beg pardon of all whom I know, and especially of you, my sister, for all the vexations which, without intending it, I may have caused you. I pardon all my enemies the evils that they have done me. I bid farewell to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends. The idea of being forever separated from them and from all their troubles is one of the greatest sorrows that I suffer in dying. Let them at least know that to my latest moment I thought of them.
Farewell, my good and tender sister. May this letter reach you. Think always of me; I embrace you with all my heart, as I do my poor dear children. My God, how heart-rending it is to leave them forever! Farewell! farewell!46
The mob had intended to extinguish the idea of the divine right of kings and queens, but Marie Antoinette’s preternatural grace in the face of their barbarism might have caused some Frenchmen to reconsider whether God had a role in choosing their queen.
The humiliations heaped on Antoinette continued to her last breath. To suppress sympathy from the crowd, she was stripped of her mourning clothes and ordered to wear a white smock. Bleeding badly, Antoinette needed to change her undergarments before leaving for the guillotine, but the gendarme guarding her refused to let her out of his sight even for this.
To protect France against a beaten, half-starved, prematurely gray, tuberculosis-ridden, hemorrhaging widow, the full cavalry was called out and the streets and bridges throughout Paris were lined with cannon and bayonet-toting soldiers. Shackled to a rope held by the executioner and surrounded by armed guards, Antoinette rode to the guillotine on a rough cart used to transport hardened criminals. The drive was long and slow, the better to allow the mob to taunt her. Her face was placid, as she continued to pray quietly, showing neither fear nor defiance. On the scaffold, Marie Antoinette uttered her last words after accidentally stepping on the executioner’s foot: “Monsieur, I beg your pardon.”47
After the guillotine fell, the executioner lifted Antoinette’s head from the basket and the crowd cheered, “Vive la Republique!”
Hébert, the revolutionary who had accused her of incest, said, “The whore, for the rest, was bold and impudent to the very end.”48 It’s impossible to win with a mob. The queen was accused of frivolity, stupidity, licentiousness—every possible base quality. For exhibiting serenity in the face of a ravenous mob, she was deemed “impudent.”
Hébert would later be executed himself, as was Antoinette’s prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier de Tinville. Both showed far less dignity in their final moments than Antoinette. Hébert fainted repeatedly on the way to the guillotine, and Fouquier-Tinville cried out, “I’m the axe, you don’t kill the axe!”49
The killings went on, mercilessly, day after day, without reason. Saint-Just demanded that people be guillotined not just for being traitors but for being “indifferent as well.”50 (This roving indictment was unknowingly adopted by key Obama advisers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the SDS’s anti-war pamphlet titled The Opposite of Moral Is Indifferent.)51
Politicians, unsuccessful generals, writers, nuns, the old, the young, the poor, and the well-to-do alike were sent to the national razor. Great scientists and mathematicians were sent to the guillotine, too, on the grounds that the republic “does not need scientists.”52
Before the end of the year, the mayor of Paris was guillotined; 90 priests were drowned; and, in Dunkirk, 150 citizens guillotined. Entire families were guillotined. Girls overheard remarking that the killing was going overboard were sent to the guillotine.53 When one of the accused explained to the Revolutionary Tribunal that they had confused him with his brother, he was ordered executed because “we’ve got him—we haven’t got his brother.” A woman proved to the court that she had been arrested in a case of mistaken identity, but was executed because “since she’s already here we might as well execute her too.”54 In the first few months of 1794, more than 5,000 citizens of Lyon were executed.55
The revolutionaries began executing one another to avoid execution themselves. Consider the cases of Jacques Pierre Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, and Robespierre.
Brissot was a leading philosopher of the revolution—he had even been imprisoned by the king for his revolutionary writings. Although renowned for his incendiary speeches to the Jacobin Club, he belonged to the more moderate faction in the Convention, the Girondists—the Blue Dog Democrats of the day. He had opposed, for example, executing the king, voting to keep him under house arrest instead. For that counterrevolutionary vote, the Montagnards—the Nancy Pelosi Democrats—issued a warrant for his arrest on June 2, 1793. Brissot was promptly guillotined, at the age of thirty-nine.56
Brissot’s principal accuser had been Desmoulins, a fellow writer and habitué of the Jacobin Club. Although Brissot had repeatedly leapt to the defense of Desmoulins and his crazed and often libelous writings, in 1793, Desmoulins turned his acid pen on his former mentor and friend. In a pamphlet titled Jacques Pierre Brissot Unmasked, Desmoulins accused Brissot of being a spy and enemy of the revolution, resulting in Brissot’s beheading.57
Desmoulins’s next tract, Fragment of the Secret History of the Revolution, had helped incite the Reign of Terror, but when he proposed a clemency committee for some of the accused, his high school classmate, Robespierre, denounced Desmoulins. Robespierre referred to Desmoulins and his associates as “les indulgents” and demanded that Desmoulins’s newspaper be burned. Desmoulins was sentenced to death on April 5, 1794, and executed the very same day. He was thirty-four years old. A few days later, Desmoulins’s wife was guillotined.
Robespierre was godfather to the Desmoulinses’ son. Both Robespierre and Brissot had been witnesses at their wedding.58
To speed things along, on June 10, 1794, the Committee on Public Safety issued its infamous “22 Prairial” decree, which dispensed with even the pretense of a trial before execution. No longer would the accused be entitled to lawyers or be asked any questions—unless it was for the purpose of uncovering co-conspirat
ors. Juries were instructed to decide cases on “moral proof,” not “positive proof.” Basically, an accusation was proof of guilt. And there was only one penalty: death.59
The prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, was delighted with these legal reforms, cheerfully reporting that heads were falling “like tiles.”60 (Soon, one of those heads would be his own.) Within the first two months after 22 Prairial, 1,500 people were guillotined. Having already run through the clergy and nobility, by now, most of the executed were peasants.61
Robespierre’s own execution was prompted by a rumor planted by Joseph Fouché. Fouché knew Robespierre was about to condemn him as an enemy to the revolution, so he told all the other members of the Convention that they were on Robespierre’s list. When Robespierre began to give his speech, denouncing traitors and calling for the arrest of “all conspirators,” the entire Convention rose up to demand Robespierre’s execution before he could mention any names. And that is how the worm Fouché survived to serve Napoleon.62
Robespierre had counted on the mob to save him. His allies at the Jacobin Club were so devoted to him, they vowed to drink hemlock should he be condemned to die.63 But when the time for action came and Robespierre needed the mob to rally and prevent his arrest, it rained. The rabble ran indoors and drank spirits instead of hemlock, inspiring Tallyrand’s remark “Rain is counterrevolutionary.”64
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the rest of the leaders of the Reign of Terror were cornered and captured at City Hall. By virtue of the speedy procedures of 22 Prairial, they were sent to the guillotine the next day, July 28, 1794. At Robespierre’s execution, the mob was cursing him as if he were an Austrian queen. That was the end of the Reign of Terror, the Jacobin Club, and the French “Republic.”
But it wasn’t the end of the French Revolution, whose influence would spread around the globe, inspiring catastrophes from Russia and Germany to China and Venezuela. Though it was the inverse of the American Revolution, the ideas of the French Revolution would even take hold in some quarters of America.