by Ann Coulter
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.”36
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.”37
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.38 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.39
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.40 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.41
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.42
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.43
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.”44 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.”45 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 Baghdad46 (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!”47
Thousands of the sansculottes ruffians poured into the streets during the trial, shouting for the king’s death,48 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.”49
The vote inside went back and forth for 72 hours,50 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.”51
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.52
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.53
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.”54 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—”55
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!”56 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!”57 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.58
&n
bsp; 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!
By 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.”1
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.2
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.”3 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.”4
Revolutionaries smashed church art and statues.5 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.6 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.7 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.8
The word “vandalisme” had to be invented to describe the wanton destruction of the abbey church of Saint Denis.9 French mobs defaced the prized Gothic architecture, trashing archaeological treasures dating from the seventh century. They ripped open the tombs and threw the skeletons of kings and queens into lime pits.10
Deeming any gold and silver held by the churches “an insult to reason,” the revolutionaries stole it, either for the “national melting pot” or for their personal use.11 Churches that were not burned to the ground were turned into headquarters for some of the revolutionary clubs,12 much as would happen years later to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where they now worship a giant whale. The revolutionaries shredded sacred books, using the paper as wadding for their cartridges, and burned confessional boxes for fuel. The relics of martyrs were ripped from their sacred resting places and thrown in a common pit, with one revolutionary leering about the bones of a male and a female martyr “making out together.”13
Sacred vessels of the sacristy were thrown to the ground by the French mobs. Church bells, deemed a “relic of fanaticism,” were forbidden from being rung, and were sometimes forcibly removed and melted down for armaments.14 Altars were destroyed or renamed “altars of Reason.” The cross, deemed counterrevolutionary, was forbidden from display, with women being required to remove cross necklaces.15 Street signs, parks, and even cemeteries were stripped of crosses. One revolutionary club proposed outlawing celibacy.16
Joseph Fouché had been the headmaster at a Catholic school, but during the Revolution, he switched sides and became a leader of the de-Christianization campaign. Denouncing religion as “superstitious and hypocritical,” he proclaimed a new “religion of the republic.”17 He traveled from town to town to snuff out any remnants of Christianity, publicly dressing down priests as “impostors who persist in continuing to perform their religious comedy.”18 In September 1793, Fouché actually did outlaw celibacy and gave priests one month to get married.19
In the town of Nevers, Fouché ordered that religious imagery on cemetery gates be replaced with the phrase “Death is an eternal sleep”—a proposal enthusiastically adopted in Paris.20 In Lyon, the archbishop refused to swear allegiance to the republic and so he was removed, replaced by revolutionary bishop Antoine Lamourette.
The people of Lyon responded to the de-Christianization campaign by clinging to their guns and religion. On account of the resistance, Convention deputy Bertrand Barere moved that Lyon, the second-largest city in France, be destroyed, and a monument erected on the ashes that would proclaim: “Lyon waged war against liberty; Lyon is no more.”21
Fouché happily accommodated him, working day and night for months to annihilate the entire city, saying he was doing it “for humanity’s sake.” Fouché famously proclaimed, “Terror, salutary terror, is now the order of the day here.” He arranged for “batch after batch of bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, and wealthy merchants and their wives, mistresses, and children” to be dragged from their homes and killed by firing squad.22
Fouché personally stripped even the revolutionary bishop, Lamourette, of his fake vestments and rode him through town on a donkey with a miter on its head and a Bible and crucifix tied to its tail, so the rabble could spit at and kick Lamourette. When Fouché was done, he proudly wrote to the Convention that Christianity in the provinces had “been struck down once and for all.”23
Just a year earlier, at the beginning of the new Republic, Lamourette’s idea had been to fuse revolutionary principles with Catholicism, much like today’s pro-life Democrats. Even in the earliest days of the revolution, church property had been confiscated by the state, priests expelled from their posts, and the priesthood put up to popular vote.
But Lamourette thought they could all still get along. And so, prattling about “men of goodwill,” in July 1792 Lamourette had asked members of the Assembly to embrace one another. There was hugging and kissing all around … and, one year later, Lamourette was being ridden through town, like a clown, on the back of an ass. So in addition to “counterrevolutionary” and “vandalisme,” the French Revolution gave us the expression for a false truce: “the kiss of Lamourette.”
Fouché’s siege of Lyon became the revolution’s standard operating procedure in the rest of France.
In October 1793, the powerf
ul Paris Commune decreed that ministers were not allowed to perform religious services or wear religious garb in public, forbade the sale or display of rosaries and other “objects of superstition,” and overturned the blue laws.24 That same month, the Committee of Public Instruction banned priests from being teachers25—nearly two hundred years before our own Supreme Court did.
In lieu of religious holidays—which were banned—the revolutionaries put on “Fetes of Reason” with parades, dances, and public burnings of the symbols of nobility “on a scale as never before.”26 The first and most spectacular of these pagan rituals was held in November 1793, in the Notre Dame Cathedral or, as it was renamed, “The Temple of Reason.” The words “To Philosophy” were carved into the façade of the magnificent Gothic cathedral. Stripped of crucifixes and other religious insignia, its altar was renamed the “Altar of Reason,” decorated with broken crowns and a shredded Bible. It was an ACLU fantasy come true!
As a special highlight, Madame Momoro, a nun turned prostitute, portrayed the “Goddess of Reason” at the pagan festival of reason and paraded through the cathedral for all to worship.27 Four months later, the Goddess of Reason was guillotined.28 Fouché, Saint-Just, Barrere—the very revolutionaries who had propelled Momoro’s ascent as a “goddess” to celebrate an end to religion—were on hand to applaud her beheading.29
At the fetes of reason being held throughout France, mannequins of priests were tied backwards on donkeys and ridden through the street. There were also obscene parodies of the clergy, with performers dressed as priests delivering mock sermons and dispensing scatological communions. “Come receive your God,” they taunted, wiping their behinds with paper “hosts” and throwing the host in a chamber pot. “Here is your divinity. Come adore him for nothing. Here is a present of him.”30