Reflections on the Terror - French Revolution

National Review, July 14, 1989 by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

FOR MORE than a century, the French Revolution has been presented in an idealistic light, and in its earliest phase it did indeed have a somewhat elitist character. Rousseau's sentimental foolishness, the anti-religious writings of Voltaire, as well as the perpetual strife between the Jansenists and the official Church had planted leftist notions in the minds of the uppermost social layers.

But the real character of the Revolution was soon revealed in the storming of the Bastille. This was in a way instigated by the Marquis de Sade, whose numerous and rather boring pornographicessays contain long philosophic, political, and anti-religious tirades. Upon his mother-inlaw's request, Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wound up sharing a cell with a few card sharpers, money forgers, and similar crooks. Through a funnel that he used as a megaphone, he appealed through the grilled window for the liberation of "innocent prisoners." The governor of the Bastille submitted a petition to the King, asking for the removal of this highly inconvenient prisoner, who was thereupon transferred, on July 4, 1789, to the hospital for the criminally insane in Charenton. Ten days after his removal from the Bastille his appeals bore fruit. The prison surrendered to the raging mob and a ghastly massacre followed.

The "storming" and its consequences highlight the Revolution's moral breakdown. De Launay, the commander of the Bastille, had achieved a promise of safe conduct for the small garrison consisting of Swiss mercenaries and a few military pensioners. But as soon as these men left the fortress they were brutally killed. De Launay's head did not come off easily and a butcher's apprentice had to be found to finish the job; when he had done his work, the head was carried triumphantly through the streets of Paris.

There ensued a frantic attempt to transform the absolute monarchy into a constitutional one, but once the flood had started, it could not be stopped. Goethe was probably right when he wrote: "Had the kings been kings, they would still stand today." The egalitarian passions were heading for a climax.

That climax-the Terror-came during the rule of Robespirrre and his Committee of Public Safety. Terror was the solution to every kind of inequality or even difference. The Ripublique une et indivisible should be all of one piece, a nation of faceless, undifferentiated masses. The demand for equality leads in the end to the murderous demand for sameness. The Alsatians and Lorrainers, for example, did not speak "la langue republicaine." Some Jacobins therefore proposed that their children should be taken from them, while others suggested that the two populations should be scattered all over France. But the solution proposed by a few fanatics was their total extermination. It was only Robespierre's fall that prevented further "reforms" in the manner of Pol Pot and Ceausescu. The "sea-green incorruptible" had not only envisioned uniforms for every Frenchman and Frenchwoman (remember Mao's "blue ants"), he also made plans to destroy all church towers because they offended against equality. In Strasbourg preparations were already under way on the cathedral when he was killed at the age of thirty-six.

The French Revolution was the overture to our "Age of the Gs"-guillotines, gallows, the Gestapo, gas chambers, gulags. The guillotine marks the first step toward a mechanical/technological mass extermination, toward genocide.

The horrors of the French Revolution were undertaken in broad daylight before a frantically applauding mob. La Terreur held no mysteries: it was openly intended to spread paralyzing fear. It would be difficult to explain these horrors any other way. There was the ghoulish slaughtering of the Princesse de Lamballe, an intimate friend of the Queen. This frivolous lady had courageously refused to give the oath on the constitution, whereupon she was brutally killed, eviscerated like an animal, and her private parts made into an "arrangement" which was carried in triumph to the Tuileries to be shown to Marie-Antoinette.

This crime opened the series of September Massacres instigated by th "moderate" republican Danton. The avowed purpose of those massacres was to dispose of political prisoners; but in fact, prostitutes and juvenile delinquents, some of them mere children, were also dragged out and sacrificed to the "republican virtues." In the same year the Tuileries, too, were stormed, although the Swiss Guards, faithful to their oath, fought to the last man. (The magnificent dying lion carved in stone in the city of Lucerne is dedicated to their memory.) Whichever of these "mercenaries" fell into the hands of the mob alive was tortured to death. A young cook's apprentice who had tried to defend his king was coated in butter and roasted alive.

The beheadings became a favorite amusement for the crowds. But not only the nobility was brought to "notre chere mere, la guillotine"-soon wealth alone sufficed as a reason. Actually only 8 per cent of those formally condemned to the guillotine belonged to the nobility; more than 30 per cent were farmers. Lyon, Toulon, Toulouse, and Bordeaux-cities that had revolted against the radical Jacobins-were laid waste. (Napoleon, at that time a Jacobin and close friend of Robespierre's brother Augustin, was "the slaughterer of Toulon.")