by W. E. Gutman
In a letter to his king, Louis XIV, François Fénelon, a French theologian and writer and the king’s almoner, had warned:
“Sire: For thirty years your ministers have violated all the ancient laws in the state so as to enhance your power. They have increased your revenue and your expenditures to the infinite and impoverished all of France for the sake of your luxury at court. They have made your name odious. For twenty years they have made the French nation intolerable to its neighbors by bloody wars. We have no allies because we only wanted slaves. Meanwhile, your people are starving. Sedition is spreading and you are reduced to either letting it spread unpunished or resorting to massacring the people that you have driven to desperation.”
A sharp critic of the monarchy, the very politically incorrect Fénelon was fired by the Sun King for uttering truths the king did not want to hear. Less than 100 years later, the long simmering embers of misery and discontent ignited the Revolution. Two centuries later, George Orwell would define freedom as the right to tell people what they don’t want to know.
When the truth is ignored, history has a habit of repeating itself.
*
The French Revolution was an extraordinarily complicated affair rooted in centuries of mismanagement, extravagance and war, and ignited by the rising friction between the three Estates -- a bloated nobility, a corrupt and dissolute clergy and a crushing mass of dirt-poor, illiterate and downtrodden people.
Unlike the American Revolution, which has been likened to an act of defiance by a prodigal son against his mother -- and much like the Russian Revolution, which had already begun to simmer -- the French Revolution was a genuine insurrection against small, all-powerful, ruthless elites. In 1789 France was a nation of 26 million. Society was made up of three distinct and unequal groups. The nobility of the sword (some 500,000 people or about 2 percent of the total population, among them the high aristocracy -- 4,000 families close to the throne, hangers-on and sycophants; the petty nobility, composed of provincial gentlemen of lesser means but matching greed; and the nouveaux-riche, the parvenus, those who bought nobility titles and who, despite their wealth, were scorned by the traditional bluebloods for their miserly origins.
Next was the clergy -- 120,000 strong, among them 139 bishops, and also divided between high clergy (members of the aristocracy) and the common clergy, all corrupt, depraved and decadent.
Last was the Third Estate, the vast majority of the people -- 98 percent -- representing day workers, farmers, peasants, craftsmen, and the bourgeoisie -- bankers, lawyers and trades people.
The king’s power was absolute, limitless and issued from none other than God. The king hired and fired his cabinet at will. All authority was centralized in Paris and, as the Revolution simmered, in the hands of Louis XVI, a meek and irresolute monarch who would have rather flown kites and repaired locks than governed. Injustice, ineptitude and corruption were rampant. Louis would have liked to redress these problems; instead, he tightened his authority and the kingdom surrendered to the kind of despotism in vogue in Russia, Austria and Prussia at the time. Louis hid behind his neurotic piety (and a bad case of phimosis -- a condition in which the foreskin of the penis of an uncircumcised male cannot be fully retracted, thus causing pain, especially during an erection). He neglected his wife in favor of hunting dogs, locks and clocks. He was drawn neither by royal duty, love, sex, politics, or war, which he entrusted to pompous and inept generals. Deaf to facts, unwilling to heed advice, incapable of making a decision on his own, he took solace in his wife’s opinion of him, “Pauvre homme, il est bon” -- “poor man, he is good.” Goodness in 1789 was apparently not enough.
For her part, Marie-Antoinette wielded little influence on her husband. A spendthrift with a colossal disregard for the well-being of her people, her reputation further sullied by the famous Necklace Affair and allegations of infidelity, she had become not only unpopular but loathed. Apparently, neither Louis nor Marie-Antoinette had read The Prince, or they had both ignored Machiavelli’s counsel to avoid being hated and mocked by one’s subjects.
*
Since 1777, with Lafayette and his volunteers, then in 1779 with Rochambeau and the French Royal Expeditionary Corps, France fought alongside the Americans against the British, culminating in the 1781 victory at Yorktown and the surrender of General Cornwallis. This little adventure cost France two billion gold pounds.
This was the twilight of the 18th century, the era of Enlightenment, and France was tired of the ancient and traditional monarchical order in which the king is commander in chief, judge, jury and executioner, and wary of a system that calls for the nobility to defend the nation with the sword, the clergy to pray for victory and the rabble to work and pay taxes until they drop. But King Louis was an inept military strategist; his officers had lapsed into mediocrity and the Church, fat and corrupt, made a mockery of religion. The clergy paid no taxes but charged tolls on behalf of the crown, and sold indulgences and first-class passage to paradise, with much of the monies collected diverted and adding to the personal fortunes of dozens of “princes of the Church.” The commoners -- peasants and bourgeois alike, crushed by unfair and exorbitant taxes and levies, were fuming. Soon, they’d open the shutters wide, lean out their windows and shout, “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore….”
My teachers should have known all that. They probably did but they never allowed fact to interfere with their faith. As Nietzsche wrote, “Faith” means not wanting to know what is true.”
A revolution is less an act of insubordination against despotism than a rebellion against inequality and discrimination. It’s a social, not a political movement. Social movements rarely prevail.
*
Conceding that Napoleon was brilliant, ruthless, lofty, utopian and flawed, Sister Louis glossed over his triumphs, the idealism of his reforms, his contributions to the arts, science, education and jurisprudence, but ranted about his “impiety and vanity, sins even a great man can never expiate.” She was referring to an incident during his coronation as emperor of France, when Bonaparte “shamelessly and sacrilegiously yanked the crown from the Pope’s hands” and placed it on his own head. There was something offensive about the vilification of a man universally acclaimed for his genius, if not always for the wisdom of his geopolitical objectives. For my part, taking a secular view, I lamented his strategic blunders and stunning military defeats on the frozen plains of Russia and at Waterloo but found myself in no position to criticize his vast and peerless intellect.
Prevalent during history class, this form of propagandizing was absent in geography and science courses. After all, rivers are not readily diverted from their beds and mountain ranges cannot be pulled out by their rocky roots and relocated. Nor are the laws of mathematics prone to falsification, except by a dunce like me who, enjoined from turning in “blank test papers,” filled them with nonsensical algebraic equations -- and flunked. I’m certain that if the Sisters could have put a papist spin on these subjects they would have readily done so.
Outspoken, my teachers’ antipathy toward their fellow Christians -- they scorned Protestants, sneered at Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, mocked the “lesser faiths” of Copts and Maronites -- assumed subtler hues when it came to Jews. Their brand of anti-Semitism was abstruse and furtive, tempered no doubt by persuasive political realities: The convent and school were now seated in Israel, not “Palestine,” as it had been two years earlier, and they were licensed by the State and four-fifths of the pupils were Jewish. I did not feel in any way threatened. Wary of beliefs that defy verifiable fact, intuitively aware that the role of a school is to ossify young minds – I’d already been exposed to the crude encoding methods of Communist pedagogy in Romania -- I didn’t take these digressions too seriously. Instead, I learned to beware of opinions -- hand-me-down convictions usually impossible to temper and often adopted in defiance of manifest fact. Besides, I had enough trouble keeping up with schoolwork, and whatever reflex contempt the nun
s had for “Christ’s killers,” did not seem to be directed at any of us personally. Sisters Louis and Clémence were in fact quite fond of their students. I would be less than honest if I did not acknowledge a measure of esteem for their patience and forbearance, and gratitude for every snippet of knowledge they managed to instill, including, inadvertently, the art of skepticism. Esteem did not prevent me from challenging them on occasion and standing my ground until they relented or changed the subject.
Learning about -- in my case reexamining -- the Dreyfus Affair, gave rise to such occasion. I was ready. I’d read a great deal about it and my father, who had studied the case in depth, had helped sort out documented fact from hearsay and put in perspective minutiae and nuances I’d failed to grasp. The Dreyfus Affair aroused passions and prejudices that divided France and very nearly triggered a civil war. An epic of treachery, intimidation, fraud, and injustice, it revived and widened the philosophical rifts that polarize the French in times of unrest and discontent: the right against the left, the aristocracy against the proletariat, the clerical elite against the secular masses, anti-Semites against liberals and freethinkers. The same antithetical ideologies that polarized the French during the 1789 Revolution, the German occupation and the wars of Algeria and Indochina, would lead to the alarming ascent in the late 20th century of ultra-conservative, xenophobic parties in Western Europe.
*
The Dreyfus Affair begins as a banal case of espionage. On September 26, 1894, the Office of Statistics learns of a memorandum purloined from the German Embassy attesting to the presence of a traitor in France’s military high command. Suspicions focus on a young officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose “race” -- he is Jewish -- offers a military establishment more noted for its anti-Semitism than its prowess on the battlefield the pretext it sought. Two weeks later, on very flimsy evidence, Dreyfus is arrested. French War Minister Mercier, chiefs of staff and high-ranking political figures, aware of the plot against Dreyfus, press on for a trial. Dreyfus is found guilty, condemned to deportation and life imprisonment in a “fortified compound,” a sinister euphemism for the hell hole that Guyana’s Devil’s Island would prove to be. On January 5, 1895, Dreyfus is publicly stripped of his rank; his saber is broken in half as crowds demand “Death to Jews! Death to the traitor! Death to Judas!” Having barely survived five years of incarceration in one of the most infamous penal colonies, Captain Dreyfus is pardoned in 1899, reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1902 and promoted in 1906 largely thanks to the tireless efforts of Emile Zola and others.
The government had first offered Dreyfus a plea deal -- a pardon (rather than an exoneration), which he could accept and go free, thus effectively admitting guilt, or face a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again. Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon. Zola died in Paris in 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62. There is circumstantial evidence that he may have been murdered by political enemies.
Dreyfus, who attended Zola’s entombment at the Pantheon, was shot and slightly wounded by a man who, despite witness accounts, was cleared in court. Unmoved by a growing wave of revulsion sweeping France, most politicians continued to insinuate that Dreyfus was guilty or aligned themselves with factions opposed to his rehabilitation in the court of public opinion. Fresh rumors were circulated to perpetuate and legitimize ill will toward the officer’s defenders.
“Yes,” Sister Louis orated, “the Freemasons engineered his release and he was returned to France. But his innocence was never proven and….”
This was pure fabrication. What Sister Louis had no way of knowing -- or may have deliberately overlooked -- is that Masonic lodges, not quite ready to open their doors to Jews, had conveniently retreated behind their statutory shield during the “Affair.” The Anderson Constitution, the founding principles and catechism of Freemasonry, declares that Masons are law-abiding citizens who do not meddle in the affairs of state. Sympathizing with Dreyfus, let alone negotiating on his behalf, would have violated Masonic protocols and redirected the Church’s historic anti-Semitism against the fraternal order. Thus, the “fraternity” not only could not intervene, it responded with cowardice and irresolution in the face of gross injustice; and the Widow’s Son was immolated, once again, at the altar of political expediency.
“What about the forgeries by the French chiefs of staff?” I interjected. “What about Count Esterhazy,” -- a name absent from history books at the time. “What about his jailhouse confession, his suicide note?”
Sister Louis smiled with unease. “Well, that proves nothing”
“What about the ‘lion’? The mighty Clémenceau had roared with outrage. The great Zola had thundered and exhorted France to look at itself. And the entire French military high command had been accused of conspiring to pin an act of high treason on an innocent man -- a Jewish officer. None of this is spelled out in here,” I cried out, tapping excitedly on the history book with my forefinger. “But aren’t these the facts?”
I don’t remember ever getting a straight answer.
*
I was nearly 50, now living in America, when in tribute to my father who’d recently passed away, I knocked three distinct times at the door of Freemasonry, seeking initiation. It took no time at all to discover that, unlike Europe, where Masons had long since established a reputation for discreet but effective social activism, scholarship and enlightenment, American Freemasonry was little more than a refuge for the geriatric set. Having once drawn mavericks (George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere, among others) and celebrated gadflies (most of the “Indians” who dumped tea in Boston’s Harbor were Freemasons), the fellowship had since lapsed into irrelevance and become an anachronism. It ceased to be an instrument for reform. It had turned inwardly and evolved into a bastion of religious and political ultra-conservatism; it remains an anemic, insular, closed-circuit, self-serving institution that will limp along but cannot thrive. The democratization, no, the vulgarization of Freemasonry in America has resulted in the adulteration of its original concepts and aims. It has abdicated its traditional role and lost its efficacy as an emissary of universalism. It can never recruit the likes of Bolivar, Garibaldi, Goethe, Kipling, Lafayette, Mozart and Swift, some of the great men who kneeled at the altar and asked to receive a part of the arts and secrets of the Craft -- men of action, shakers, movers, thinkers, creative geniuses and revolutionaries. One is either an agent of change or a victim of inaction.
Those who believe that the revolution is over are doomed to inspire it.
*
It is difficult for schoolchildren to extricate fact from fancy. Teachers, venerated professionals when I grew up, can add to the confusion. Depending on our knowledge and common sense, we see them as champions of Solomonic wisdom or purveyors of deception. We marvel at their erudition or dismiss their asides as the views of demagogues intent on scuttling the truth. It is when these agents of persuasion resort to calumny, when they trivialize or repudiate verifiable fact with outlandish allegations, devious logic and grotesque beliefs, that the truth drowns.
*
Is reality merely what the self perceives? Or is there an immutable reality that transcends deeply held convictions? What emerges from the doctrinal struggles that cleave society is a frenzied tug-of-war between conflicting ideas. The truth is often trampled in the process.
Everybody has opinions. Much of our mental constructs are erected on a vast scaffolding of doctrines -- generally someone else’s. Keen on cramming dormant brain cells, we adopt them, cling to them, claim they are the offspring of our own cogitations because they encourage us not to think, because they shield us from what we fear most: the truth. This explains why there are more opinions than facts and why we are so enamored of them. After all, opinions can blithely ignore, defy and, if need be, corrupt the truth. Tainted fruits of ignorance and self-delusion (or planted seeds of malice) opinions conveniently overlook faulty data or peddle ar
guments riddled with ideological monstrosities. In the mouths of tub-thumpers, opinions assume dangerous dimensions: They are no longer what can be borne out by experience but what opinion-mongers themselves can get away with. Regurgitated by imbeciles, they are promptly espoused by other imbeciles.
Voicing an opinion, especially when unsolicited, is an incorrigible human reflex. Every time we inhale a wisp of fact, we exhale a gust of inferences. This compulsion has been elevated to sacred entitlement in free nations. Which is why, exploiting the rights that democracy grants them – or flouting them -- advocates of extreme political and religious dogma are particularly adept at blurring the truth to advance their own agendas. The greater their zeal in promoting these causes, the more tempting it becomes for them to suggest that freethinkers are not merely factually wrong but actually engaged in blocking verities they would otherwise have to embrace. In practice, this assumption has led to brainwashing, as ancient and modern witch-hunts have shown.