Guillotine Chic

Bezos donated ten million dollars to the revolution, but they still built a guillotine outside his house. Useful idiot, anyone?

From ARC

By Cathy Young

The new fad on the far left is not cool or funny. Here’s the real story of what it celebrates.

In recent weeks, a new prop has been turning up in the street theater of protest: the guillotine.

It’s showed up outside the White House with an effigy of Donald Trump.It’s been installed outside the mansion of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (In this case, Trump might approve.)

It’s also been paraded through the streets of Portland, with a teddy bear as the victim.

This is not new. The guillotine has been a popular symbol on left-wing Twitter for a while (see hashtag #Guillotine2020). But now it has migrated into physical space. The left-wing magazine Jacobin — named, of course, after the faction that wielded the guillotine during the French Revolution — has been selling a guillotine poster with the words “some assembly required,” based on one of its 2012 covers. And back in June, Seattle’s “CHAZ” (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) changed its name to “CHOP” (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone) as a nod to the guillotine. According to The Seattle Times:

“It is not CHAZ, it is CHOP,” one speaker said outside the precinct. “Has anybody here ever heard of the French Revolution before? That is another revolution (that happened) because people started putting property over lives. They started putting money over people. Does anybody here know what happened to the people who did not get on board with the French Revolution?”

“CHOPPED,” the crowd responded.

“That is the message we need to send,” the speaker said.

Charming.

Of course, the folks at CHOP don’t know much about history. The French Revolution had nothing to do with “property over lives”; it started out as a liberal bourgeois revolution to empower the parliament, give voting rights to people (male ones, at least), and equalize the civil rights of all the estates, abolishing the special privileges of nobility and clergy. Later, it grew more and more radical, eventually falling into the hands of people who believed they could establish a utopia of republican virtue even if many people had to be slaughtered along the way. But even at the pinnacle of its extremism, the French Revolution wasn’t socialist; the closest the Jacobins got to socialism was some land redistribution as well as wage and price controls in response to wartime shortages.

It’s interesting that, nonetheless, the Jacobins (so named after the Jacobin Club’s location on the Rue St. Jacques, i.e., St. Jacob Street) were treated as heroes and forefathers of sorts in Soviet historiography. Never mind the economics; it’s the terror, stupid.

The Jacobin regime, established on June 2, 1793 after the liberal Girondin faction was expelled from the National Convention, was the world’s first experiment in revolutionary totalitarianism. Intent on radical transformation of society, the Jacobins outlawed the Catholic Church, slaughtered hundreds of priests and nuns, and tried to replace Christianity with a deistic “Cult of the Supreme Being.” (Some were atheists, but Maximilien Robespierre, the powerful President of the National Convention and leader of the Committee of Public Safety, despised atheism even more than Catholicism — he considered it immoral and elitist — which meant that outspoken atheists were killed along with recalcitrant priests.) They established a new revolutionary calendar, with the proclamation of the Republic in 1792 as Year One and with new names for the months. And they demanded absolute loyalty to the Republic, equating dissent with treason.

How and why the Reign of Terror happened is a complicated question. Some historians argue it was a matter of desperate times and desperate measures: republican France was at war with the monarchies of Europe and facing domestic insurrections, and paranoia about spies and subversives was an understandable reaction. Others believe that revolutionary extremism spun out of control, acquiring a momentum of its own. Regardless, from September 5, 1793 (when the Revolutionary Tribunal was created) to July 27, 1794 (when the unofficial triumvirate of Robespierre, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, and Georges Couthon fell from power), some 17,000 people were guillotined, more than 2,500 in Paris alone; a further 10,000 or so died in the prisons. Add people in rebellious provinces slaughtered in extrajudicial executions, by methods that ranged from shootings to mass drownings, and the figure goes up by anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000.

As 1794 rolled on, the carnage accelerated. In early April (Germinal), onetime revolutionary heroes Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, leaders of a faction dubbed “the Indulgents” for wanting to put the brakes on the Terror, themselves went to the guillotine. Desmoulins’s 24-year-old wife Lucile was arrested on the day of his execution and beheaded a few days later; her frantic pleas to friends to help break her husband out of prison were construed as a conspiracy against the Republic.

In the following calendar month, Floréal, the guillotine’s monthly toll in Paris more than doubled, from 155 victims to 359; in the next month, Prairial, it spiked to 509. That included the execution of 53 people on 22 Prairial (June 10), for an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Robespierre. A 20-year-old seamstress named Cecile Renault had been detained while demanding an audience with him; she allegedly carried two small knives and admitted wanting to confront “the tyrant,” though denying any violent intent. This incident was inflated into a massive plot; Renault’s father, brother, and aunt went to the guillotine with her. So did dozens of others, among them salon hostess Jeanne de Sainte-Amaranthe with her 16-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter and actress Marie Grandmaison with her 18-year-old maid Nicole Bouchard. It was too much for chief executioner Henri Sanson, who was so sickened by the sight of little Nicole being dragged toward the plank (“so thin and frail she looked no more than 14,” he wrote in his diary) that he felt ill and had to go home, letting his assistants finish the work. Many people in the Paris crowds, generally unsympathetic to the condemned, were also revolted; the disgust with the mass execution even led to rumors — entirely unfounded — that the Sainte-Amaranthes were executed because the daughter, Emilie, had rejected the sexual advances of either Robespierre or Saint-Just.

On the same day, new legislation was enacted to streamline the work of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Prairial Law created new categories of “enemies of the people” and a broad range of vaguely defined crimes: “slandering patriotism,” promoting “discouragement” or “moral depravity,” or seeking to “weaken the purity and energy of revolutionary principles.” The new law also dispensed with defense attorneys and witnesses; tribunal members could render verdicts based on their “moral sense,” and the only options were acquittal or death.

From that point on, it was industrial-scale murder — even though France was already winning the war and the “emergency” justification lost what validity it may have had. The rate of acquittals by the Tribunal plunged from about 30 percent of all cases to 20 percent. Messidor, the month after Prairial, saw a record 796 executions — an average of 27 people a day. The guillotine had been originally intended as a humane alternative to hanging or the axe; now, the executions became gruesome spectacles in which the condemned had to wait their turn watching their fellow victims die one by one — often friends, or even family members. (Madame de Sainte-Amaranthe reportedly shrieked and pleaded to be executed before her children, then fainted after her son’s beheading and was carried to the guillotine unconscious.)

The Prairial Law ultimately proved to be Robespierre’s undoing. One of its clauses stripped Convention members of immunity. (Previously, a deputy could be arrested only after impeachment by his colleagues.) Despite objections, Robespierre strong-armed the Convention into passing the bill; two days later, he and Couthon squashed an attempt to pass an amendment restoring deputies’ immunity. Some Convention members who had clashed with the triumvirate saw the writing on the wall, and for once, an actual plot against Robespierre was hatched. On 9 Thermidor (July 27), a rebellion broke out in the Convention, with demands for Robespierre’s removal from the post of president and accusations of tyranny. When Robespierre struggled to speak amidst the pandemonium, one of the mutineers shouted, “He’s choking on Danton’s blood!”

In the early morning hours of July 28, after a brief last stand at the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris City Hall, Robespierre and his associates were arrested. That afternoon, they were hauled before the Revolutionary Tribunal for an insta-verdict under the Prairial Law (but of course).

Robespierre’s end was horrific. During his capture, his jaw had been shattered by a bullet when he either tried to shoot himself or was shot at close range by one of the soldiers storming the Hôtel de Ville. He spent most of his final day stretched out on a bench with a bandaged jaw. As the tumbril took him and his companions to the place of execution, many workers who blamed the Jacobins’ wage and price controls — the “maximum” — for their privations saw him off with jeers of, “Foutu maximum!” (“Fucking maximum!”). When it was Robespierre’s turn, the executioner had to remove the bandage, and he screamed in agony until the blade dropped.

The Reign of Terror was over.

Its casualties were not merely spoiled aristocrats who had failed to check their privilege. They included numerous common men and women, accused of all sorts of offenses against the Revolution from sending money to an émigré to shouting “Vive le roi!” (“Long live the King!”) while drunk. They included the scientist Antoine Lavoisier, the “father of modern chemistry” who discovered oxygen and hydrogen. They included 16 former Carmelite nuns and lay sisters who had quietly maintained a private religious community in defiance of the ban on monastic orders (two of the women were 79 years old). They included journalist and liberal activist Jacques Pierre Brissot, who several years earlier had founded continental Europe’s first anti-slavery society, the Friends of Blacks (Amis des Noirs). They included the great poet André Chénier, once a liberal supporter of the Revolution who had published caustic verses castigating the radicals. They included pioneering feminist and anti-slavery advocate Olympe de Gouges, author of the 1791 “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen” (in which she presciently wrote that women should have “the right to mount the speaker’s platform” since they have “the right to mount the scaffold”); one of her crimes was a pamphlet advocating a choice by plebiscite between a unitary republic, a federalist system, and constitutional monarchy. Her friend the great scholar and Enlightenment liberal Nicolas de Condorcet, also an early champion of women’s rights and racial equality, avoided execution by dying — possibly by suicide — in prison.

Olympe de Gouges Statue seen at the National Assembly. (Thierry Le Fouille/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty)

One near-casualty was the great British-born American revolutionary and journalist Tom Paine, who had been elected to the convention as an honorary French citizen but had incurred the Jacobins’ wrath by siding with the Girondins and opposing the execution of King Louis XVI. Imprisoned in December 1793, Paine survived by sheer luck: he missed his scheduled “trial” in July 1794, either because of illness or by his jailers’ oversight. The delay was long enough to keep him until the Jacobins’ downfall.

The men behind the Reign of Terror were often depicted by their detractors as power-hungry, cruel monsters “grown fat on plunder and blood,” as Chénier wrote in one of his poems. Yet it is far more likely that they were genuine idealists. Robespierre, for one, had been a staunch opponent of the death penalty; indeed, early in his legal career, he served as a judge but resigned because of discomfort with capital cases.

In February 1794, in a speech to the National Convention, Robespierre made a chilling case for the necessity of terror:

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue. …

Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right. … The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against tyranny…

Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens. The only citizens in the Republic are the republicans … the royalists, the conspirators are only strangers or enemies. This terrible war waged by liberty against tyranny, is it not indivisible?

These men became ruthless killers because they believed they were killing for a righteous cause — and because they came to see their victims as not quite human. (One excellent fictional work on this subject is The Gods Are Athirst, Anatole France’s 1912 novel whose hero, an idealistic artist, loses his humanity to the Revolution; at the end, he goes to his death with the Robespierristes thinking that their big mistake was being too soft and merciful.)

It’s a warning modern-day Americans passionately involved in politics would do well to heed. Dehumanizing opponents and justifying political violence are signposts on the road to hell. This mindset is repulsive whether it’s people on the right using Second Amendment innuendo to hint at shooting liberals, or it’s people on the left adopting the guillotine as a symbol.

Obviously, a symbol is not a weapon. No one thinks we’re about to see a Reign of Terror 2.0— though enough leftists endorse actual violence to make the symbolism bleed into reality. What’s more, the symbols a movement picks tell us a lot about what it finds inspirational or worth building an identity around.

The DIY guillotine is an endorsement of the cold-blooded mass murder of “enemies of the Revolution”: political dissenters, freethinking writers, 79-year-olds who cling to traditional religion, or children who accidentally get in the way.

It’s also an endorsement of a path that very likely leads its own followers to the chopping block. Even before the death of Robespierre and friends, there was the sorry fate of the radical journalist Jacques René Hébert, publisher of the newspaper Le Père Duchesne (“Old Man Duchesne”) and a great enthusiast of the device he nicknamed “Saint Guillotine” and “the national razor.”

By the spring of 1794, Hébert, an 18th Century “dirtbag left” type who delighted in nasty and vulgar polemics including crude mockery of terror victims (after Marie Antoinette’s execution, he gloated about finally seeing her head “separated from her fucking whore’s neck”), had annoyed the prim Robespierre one time too many. He was seen as an extremist, a rabble-rouser, and a possible atheist; when he criticized Robespierre for protecting the “Indulgents” (whose doom was not far away), it was the last straw, and Hébert was arrested with more than a dozen followers.

In his report on Louis XVI’s execution in January 1793, Hebert refused to mention the former king’s dignified comportment, not wanting to make him sympathetic. His own rendezvous with “Saint Guillotine” was considerably less dignified; all the accounts of his final moment record that he sobbed and repeatedly fainted on his way to execution and screamed hysterically when tied to the plank while the crowd roared in merriment. Scholar Camille Naish writes that Sanson, with uncharacteristic cruelty, prolonged this spectacle by letting the blade linger for a few moments before finally dropping it.

Still want to build a guillotine in the street?