Reflections on the Terror - French Revolution

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.")

The chouannerie, the revolt in the Vendee and Bretagne, was a genuine peasant revolt which the nobility and the clergy joined only later. But it was brutally crushed. Robespierre demanded quick, severe, and inflexible justice as a dictate of virtue and a consequence of the democratic principle. In the Vendee, whose name was officially changed to "Vengee" (avenged), the furor of the republicans was directed indiscriminately against the entire population. Even dyed-in-the-wool blue-white-red patriots were not spared. Saint-Just's declaration (October 10, 1793) that not only "traitors," bu "indifferents" too, should be done away with was a driving factor, and Danton declared that aristocrats and priests, by their very existence, constituted a threat to a better future.

What was done there and what the Jacobins wanted to achieve can be gleaned from the report of General Westermann to the Committee of Public Safety: "The Vendee is no more, my republican comrades! With her women and children she died under our sabers. I have just buried them in the swamps and forests. As you ordered, the children were trampled to death by our horses, the women butchered so that they no longer can give birth to little brigands. The streets are littered with corpses which sometimes are stacked in pyramids. Mass shootings are taking place in Savenay because there brigands keep turning up to surrender. We do not take any prisoners because they would have to be fed the bread of freedom, but pity is incompatible with the spirit of revolution." Westermann soon got his just reward; he and the infamous Carrier were guillotined together with their good friend Danton.

The ghastly events in the Vendee prove Dostoyevsky's words: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." The massacres, once committed, seemed to remove the final human restraints, and the Revolution turned into a colossal sadistic sex orgy. In Arras the Jacobin Lebon and his wife were seen watching the guillotine at work, rejoicing with the raving crowd at the sight of naked, headless corpses arranged in obscene positions, the so-called batteries nationales. Equally hideous were the noyades, the drownings in the Loire (overseen by Carrier) of naked men and women coupled and fettered in pairs.

But eventually the Revolution, like all leftist revolutions, devoured its parents. Andre Chdnier, the great liberal poet, was beheaded shortly before Robespierre fell. The Marquis de Condorcet, whose philosophy the moderates had adopted, committed suicide in order to evade the "national razor," and Madame Roland de la Platiere shouted from the scaffold: "O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name." One can hardly imagine a more tragic fate than that of Chretien de Malesherbes, a liberal royalist and counsel of the King in court, who was forced to watch his daughter, his son-in-law, and their children beheaded before his own turn finally came.

A revealing exchange of words took place between Lavoisier's counsel and the judge at his trial: COUNSEL: "YOU are condemning a great scholar!" JUDGE: "The Republic does not need scholars."

It must be remembered that almost everything the Revolution had originally aimed for-liberality, humaneness, tolerance-existed under enlightened royal absolutism. Not many years lay between the abolition of capital punishment by Catherine the Great in Russia and Grandduke Leopold in Tuscany, and the invention of the guillotine. As for fraternity, Metternich remarked at the time that, if he had a brother, he would prefer to call him cousin.

DID THE French Revolution leave us anything positive? Only the metric system, a very apt legacy, since democracy is principally preoccupied with numbers and measurements. Obligatory military service, ethnic nationalism, and class hatred, on the other hand, were barbed gifts. Simple minds might regard the Declaration des Droits de I'Homme et du Citoyen as a positive contribution, whereas it only shows what somersaults a godless humanism can perform. About the Terror one can still read in French schoolbooks: La Terreur etait terrible, mais grande. That many "moderates" were among its victims can only be called tragic justice, since they had not taken into consideration the fact that it is always risky to destroy an existing order.

The Age of the Gs! Reading Crane Brinton's The Jacobins (New York, 1930), one might get the impression that the Harvard professor had a prophetic vision of Hitler's Third Reich. Only a few years later Goebbels declared to the Petit Parisien that the Umbruch (revolutionary change) was a counterpart of the French Revolution, and Hitler confirmed this. Jules Romain, in his les Hommes de bonne Volonte (Vol. 15), defined a dictatorship of the Nazi type as a later cancerous outgrowth of the French Revolution. Lenin, meanwhile, praised the Jacobins, and the two largest battleships of the young USSR in 1918 were baptized Marat and Danton. Without the leading men of 1792-1794, Marx and Engels are hardly imaginable.

The philosophies of these three revolutions-the French, the Russian, and the German-all show certain parallels with the course of syphilis. As with the physical disease, we can distinguish three phases, a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary. After the slow development through the first two phases, we inevitably reach the madness of the bloody tertiary phase: the Vendee and the noyade of Nantes, the enforced starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry and the Armenian massacres, Auschwitz and Belsen. The words of Benjamin Constant come to mind: "In certain epochs one must run the whole cycle of madness in order to return to reason."

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