Blood (25 page)

For years, pamphlets featuring pornographic drawings of her had circulated widely in France, alleging that Marie Antoinette — still seen as a foreigner in France, given her Austrian heritage — had a rapacious sexual appetite for men and women. They alleged she organized orgies in the palace at Versailles. (Words that might have evoked pride among male aristocrats helped hasten the execution of the dethroned queen.) In trial, Marie Antoinette was also accused of sexually abusing her own son. When pressed for an answer to that charge, she refused to discuss the matter and simply said: “If I haven’t answered it is because Nature herself refuses to answer such a charge against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers present — is it true?” While Marie Antoinette stood trial over two long days, she was bleeding profusely. Historians now speculate that she may have been suffering from uterine cancer.
In a letter composed in her prison cell on the morning of her execution to her sister-in-law (who would never receive the letter, and who would soon also be guillotined), Marie Antoinette wrote: “I have just been sentenced to death, but not a shameful one, since this death is only shameful to criminals, whereas I am going to rejoin your brother.” Among the countless thousands of people summarily executed by a regime gone wild with paranoia, the persecution of Marie Antoinette shows perhaps better than most the pitfalls of submitting to rulers who are so rabidly intent on extracting blood that the truth becomes nothing more than a stone to be kicked from view.

Although the rate of public executions fell off as the Reign of Terror came to a close, guillotining remained a fact of life in France as the standard mode of execution. The last people to be guillotined in Paris were Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems in 1972, and the last person executed in France was
Hamida Djandoubi
in 1977.

Considered barbaric by today’s standards, the guillotine was named after Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who had urged the French parliament to consider a more civilized and painless manner of beheading people. Previously, aristocrats had been executed by means of the broadsword or axe, but others were burned at the stake or broken over the wheel, or faced the long, slow strangulation of the gallows. During the Reign of Terror, Charles-Louis Sanson became the official executioner and praised the guillotine. On April 25, 1792, he said: “Today the machine invented for the purpose of decapitating criminals sentenced to death will be put to work for the first time. Relative to the methods of execution practiced heretofore, this machine has several advantages. It is less repugnant: no man’s hands will be tainted with the blood of his fellow being . . .”

Quite apart from debates about whether the guillotine was faster, more painless, and more humane than other forms of execution in vogue at the time, beheading became a public spectacle during the Reign of Terror. Crowds attended in large numbers, some cheering and jeering, others mumbling that the executions happened too fast to allow for much enjoyment of the actual act. As Robert Frederick Opie notes in his book
Guillotine: The Timbers of Justice
, gallons of blood were spilled at the beheadings, and packs of dogs would come to lap it up at night at the base of the scaffold. The audiences cheered the beheadings as a form of entertainment, despite the quantities of blood spilled and the resulting stench. The revolutionaries who sentenced their enemies to death were so pleased with their new instrument of decapitation — and so intent on asserting their power and intimidating French citizens — that in one case, after a man who had been sentenced to death by decapitation managed to commit suicide first, his corpse was hauled to the scaffold, where it was guillotined anyway.

People respected the executioner, but they did not like him. Indeed, the role of public executioner — like many other trades — was assigned to specific family dynasties. Sons and grandsons were trained in the work of their ancestors. It was a living, but it could not have been a happy or comfortable life for the executioner or his family. Opie writes: “Having entered into the profession, a family and his descendants were marked forever. There was no escaping their role; down through the generations brothers and sons were bound to the same employment and had to face the same prejudice. The only friends, associates and potential spouses of an executioner were the families of other executioners.”

I have no difficulty believing Robert Opie. If I were living during the Reign of Terror, the very last person I’d be inviting over would be the executioner. Who wants a figure of death haunting your breakfast table and breathing over your baguette? I’d sooner go hungry than break bread with the man who guillotined my neighbour.

Alas, for the hundreds of years during which beheadings and other forms of capital punishment were carried out routinely in France, people seemed to enjoy the spectacle but they shunned the executioner. Looking back at this time in history, I try to imagine the courage of individuals who opposed the will and the control of the state. Simply living individualistically, or insisting on the right to express political beliefs, would have been enough to expose one’s neck to the falling blade. In revolutionary France, and in so many other homicidal regimes, leaders used the spectacle of blood to exert power and to exact conformity.

IN THE PAST FIFTEEN
YEARS
, we have witnessed the publication of two series of books with unprecedented sales. Both series were aimed at children or young adults. And both dealt with blood. Blood didn’t merely spill in the books. These days, it’s hard to find a book or movie where blood
doesn’t
spill. These books — which, combined, have sold well over half a billion copies and have been devoured by children (and many adults) worldwide — turn on the very concept of blood purity. At the very least, hundreds of millions of children in the past decade and a half have been swept away by books in which the characters are fixated on the quality of blood. The books have become so omnipresent that it seems almost redundant to mention their names: the Harry Potter series about wizards, by J. K. Rowling, and the Twilight series about vampires, by Stephenie Meyer.

In
Twilight
, Bella Swan is a “good girl” who falls in love with the vampire Edward Cullen, who, in turn, protects and falls in love with her. Edward insists that she must maintain her virginity by not making love with him until they are married. Edward, because he loves her, must transcend his instincts and help Bella maintain her sexual purity and the purity of her human blood by resisting the very thing that vampires just love to do to young girls: seduce them and suck their blood and turn them into undead who get to preserve their youth and vigour forever.

You would have to be brain-dead, these days, to fail to observe how commercially successful vampires have become in contemporary culture. True, people have been talking about vampires for many centuries. In 1897, Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
helped set in motion contemporary obsessions with the undead who keep their youth and their powers (including legendary sexual prowess) intact by feasting on human blood. But in recent years, the focus on vampires seems almost a prerequisite for commercial success in the fantasy genre.
The Vampire Diaries
,
True Blood
, and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
are just three in a litany of TV shows on the theme.

Is it because vampires are unbelievably sexy, drawing upon centuries of sexual experience each time they bring a young thing to the very peak of pleasure (and remaining wrinkle-free despite their advanced age)? Is it because vampires are all-powerful, and can easily rip out a heart or pull off a limb? Is it the way that a vampire corrupts humans, draws them over to the dark side by contaminating their blood — the ultimate sacred fluid?

Just as many young people are drawn to vampire culture, many are also drawn to cutting themselves as a form of controlled self-abuse. Experts theorize that cutting among young girls is not generally the expression of suicidal impulses, but rather a way of managing pain and anxiety. The vampiric seduction is a private act, as is the act of drawing out one’s blood. People tend to get over their vampiric obsessions as they emerge from adolescence, as do most girls who have been drawn to cutting.

The vampiric attack is irreversible. Once you’ve gone over to the dark side, there is no coming back. You do get to live forever, but no longer as a human. Cutting, however, allows for more control. Who will see the marks, which you can cover up with clothing? How seriously are you to be hurt, by losing a little blood? For some, perhaps, cutting focuses one’s pain in the body, instead of in the psyche. But it is temporary. And most adolescents grow out of it.

THE ONE RECENT CHILDREN’S
literary phenomenon even more famous than Twilight is J. K. Rowling’s seven-part series about wizards, named after protagonist Harry Potter. Harry’s life would have been a lot more peaceful if he could have taken easy refuge from a murderous, powerful, evil wizard named Lord Voldemort. Voldemort, the antagonist who pursues Harry to the very end of the series, is obsessed by notions of blood purity. Indeed, it is possible to read the Harry Potter series as a meditation about good versus evil, along the lines of blood. In Harry’s world, there are wizards (or witches) who descend only from other wizards, and others who have one muggle (human) parent and one wizard parent. There are even muggles who become wizards and can wield the power of wizards, without having a parent who is a wizard. Harry himself is the son of a wizard (father) and muggle (mother). Even though almost nobody in the world of Harry Potter is a pure-blooded wizard, Voldemort (also of mixed background) and his followers are on a vendetta to exterminate wizards with any so-called blood impurities, who are known as “mudbloods” or “half-bloods.” Draco Malfoy, for example, is a wizarding student who sides with Voldemort, considers himself a pure-blood, and insults Harry’s friend Hermione Granger by calling her “a filthy mudblood.”

Ron Weasley, a wizard who becomes close to Harry and Hermione, explains to them early in the series: “Mudblood’s a really foul name for someone who is Muggle-born — you know, non-magic parents. There are some wizards — like Malfoy’s family — who think they’re better than everyone else because they’re what people call pure-blood . . . I mean, the rest of us know it doesn’t make any difference at all.”

The struggle between good and evil in the world of Harry Potter comes down to those (such as Voldemort, Draco, and his father, Lucius) who would exterminate people of impure blood, and those (such as Harry, Ron, Hermione, and their beloved wizarding school headmaster, Albus Dumbledore) who wish to stop the exterminators and live in peace.

J. K. Rowling has noted that in writing the Harry Potter series, she had in mind the obsessions with racial purity held by Nazis and other white supremacists. In answer to the question “Why are some people in the wizarding world called ‘half-blood’ even though both their parents were magical?” she has said:

The expressions “pure-blood,” “half-blood” and “Muggle-born” have been coined by people to whom these distinctions matter, and express their originators’ prejudice. As far as somebody like Lucius Malfoy is concerned, for instance, a Muggle-born is as “bad” as a Muggle. Therefore Harry would be considered only “half” wizard, because of his mother’s parents. If you think this is far-fetched, look at some of the real charts the Nazis used to show what constituted “Aryan” or “Jewish” blood. I saw one in the Holocaust Museum in Washington when I had already devised the “pure-blood,” “half-blood” and “Muggle-born” definitions, and was chilled to see the Nazis used precisely the same warped logic as the Death Eaters. A single Jewish grandparent “polluted” the blood, according to their propaganda.

The books in the Harry Potter series have sold more than 450 million copies. They are among the most influential and widely read — and maniacally adored — children’s books ever published. When my eldest daughter, Geneviève, was ten years old, I took her to see J. K. Rowling read at the SkyDome sports arena in Toronto. Thousands of children were in attendance. It was the biggest literary reading I have ever attended. Every child I looked at in the audience seemed not only enthralled but also thoroughly acquainted with every single word the author read aloud. It still astounds me to think that one of the most famous, bestselling books in the history of human civilization speaks at great length to children about blood and identity.

THE OBSESSION WITH BLOOD
PURITY
is imaginary in the Harry Potter series, but it underpins murderous tendencies and genocidal behaviour that have repeated themselves all too many times in real life. Over and over, in the course of history, humans have invoked notions of blood purity to justify atrocities.

Perched in her seventeenth-century convent in Mexico City, Sor Juana expressed a fear of writing a spiritual analysis that might offend the Holy Office, the Catholic body responsible at the time for carrying out persecutions against Jews and other people deemed heretics in Europe as well as in New Spain. “I want no trouble with the Holy Office,” she wrote, “for I am but ignorant and tremble lest I utter some ill-sounding proposition or twist the true meaning of some passage.”

The Spanish Inquisition, which began in the 1400s on the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), crossed over the Atlantic and continued in the New World in the seventeenth century. Sor Juana would have been well informed about the thousands of Jews, Moors, and others who two centuries earlier had been persecuted, tortured, and — if they hadn’t already been burned at the stake or murdered in other ways — expelled from Spain.

Centuries before the Spanish Inquisition, early persecutors often justified the murder of Jews by falsely claiming that they had killed innocent Christians — generally young boys — and mixed their blood with unleavened bread during Passover rituals. This allegation against Jews came to be known as “blood libel.” Judaism explicitly forbids the consumption of blood. In Leviticus 17:10, God plainly instructs Moses to this effect: “And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.” In addition to barring the direct consumption of blood, Leviticus clearly spells out that blood is to be removed from meat before it is eaten. Jewish dietary laws are replete with rules about blood and food, including the stipulation that one must kill an animal humanely by slitting its throat with a sharp knife and draining the blood quickly. Despite these clear prohibitions, blood libel arises in early medieval times as a pretext to attack Jews.