Demonic (17 page)

This “lovely woman with the gentle eyes,” as Antoinette biographer Stefan Zweig called her,
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told her mother that what had touched her most about the cheering crowd for her in Paris “was the affection and zeal of the poor people, which, though crushed with taxation, was overflowing with joy at the sight of us.” She called such love “infinitely precious.”
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Even years later, when the masses abused her, Marie Antoinette still described them charitably as “persons who declare themselves well-intentioned, but who do and will continue to do us harm.”
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Marie Antoinette never uttered the words “Let them eat cake.” Fittingly, that phrase came from the revolutionaries’ philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed he overheard it on the lips of some nameless princess. This was written in his
Confessions
, sometime before 1769
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—back when Marie Antonia was still a preteen making mud strudels in Austria. But the masses were upset by a hailstorm that had damaged the crops and impaired the food supply, so the French seized on this myth and it has lived on forevermore—just as it will live on forevermore that Dan Quayle apologized on a trip to Latin America that he never learned to speak Latin.

The mob was riled up; there was no time for calm reflection or consideration of the evidence.

And so, on October 5, 1789, angry fishmongers and other market women stormed the Versailles Palace intent on offing the queen. Called “8,000 Judiths,” the rabble included some men dressed like women.
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They were armed with pikes, axes, and a few cannon, hollering that they would “cut the Queen’s pretty throat” and “tear her skin to bits for ribbons.”
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Rallying outside the palace all day, by evening the rabble was half-naked, having taken their clothes off on account of the rain, much like the audience at a Rage Against the Machine concert. Early in the morning, around 2 a.m., a gaggle of women broke into the palace, decapitating two guards on the way. They made a wild dash toward Antoinette’s bedroom, shouting, “Where is the whore? Death to the Austrian! We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out! I’ll fry her liver and that won’t be the end of it! I’ll have her thighs! I’ll have her entrails!”
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The dulcet shrieks of the fishmongers call to mind George Washington exhorting his men, “Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of Liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men.” This was not the American Revolution.

The queen fled her bedroom one step ahead of the howling mob. The crazed women proceeded to smash all the mirrors in the queen’s boudoir and slash her bed to bits. After a standoff between the palace and the mob, the king capitulated, and the royal family was marched to the Tuileries Palace in Paris by triumphant hoi polloi. Leading the procession were the heads of the decapitated guards bouncing along on pikes. The king and his family were effectively put under house arrest at the Tuileries, with a guard stationed in Marie Antoinette’s room at all times, even when she dressed and slept. The family would never see Versailles again.

The king signed a new constitution, relinquishing most of his power, and the French people lived in liberty and happiness from that moment ever after. No, wait—it didn’t happen that way.

The political clubs, once gentlemen’s debating societies, suddenly assumed actual political importance during the revolution. The Jacobin Club went from being a prestigious institution of distinguished individuals with little power to a motley collection of left-wing radicals that launched the monstrous revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. Soon, respectable members quit the Jacobin club, leaving only the reprobates behind—much as happened to the American Bar Association in the 1980s.

On the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, some of the political clubs built model Bastilles, so that they could again be
sacked by the people.
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If there had been a Franklin Mint back then, the “Storming of the Bastille” chess sets would have been a bestseller.

The rabble, often led by the Jacobins, proceeded to smash every trace of the past—religion, law, the social order, eventually even the weights and measuring system and, most absurdly, the calendar.

On November 2, 1789, just a month after the storming of the Tuileries, the Assembly declared everything owned by the Catholic Church to be property of the state. Three months later, the Assembly severed the French Catholic Church’s relations with the pope, dismissed about fifty bishops, dissolved all clerical vows, reorganized the church under the civil constitution, with priests to be elected by popular vote, and required all the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. Convents and monasteries were seized and turned into prisons to house any recalcitrant royals and priests.
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A few years later, the Assembly would pass a law forbidding priests to be seen in public wearing clerical garb.
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Having a general idea where this godless fanaticism was headed, the royal family attempted to flee Paris on June 20, 1791. They got lost and stopped to ask directions from a young boy, whom the king tipped with a gold louis d’or. The boy recognized the king from his visage on the coin and quickly ratted-out the fleeing royals to revolutionary authorities.
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The royal family was marched back to the Tuileries under a rain of stones, with effigies of the king dangling from trees along their path.
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A few months after the royal family’s flight, the leftist Jacobins and the comparatively moderate Girondists forced the king to sign yet another new constitution. Louis XVI was reduced to a mere figurehead—and a prisoner.

The mob had no fear of punishment, certainly not from Louis XVI, the David Dinkins of kings. So they exploded in animalistic fury. The bourgeoisie had riled up the masses to storm the Bastille and Versailles. Now they would pay the price. As historian Erik Durschmied says, the king “had been the only constitutional instrument that could stand up to the extremists,” but now the moderates had “opened the door to raging madmen willing to use mob brutality.”
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On August 10, 1792, Parisians were out of sorts over more military setbacks in France’s war with Austria and Germany—not to mention the
absence of an “exit strategy”—so an armed mob stormed the Tuileries, forcing the royal family to flee to the National Assembly for safety. From there, the weak king, frightened by the sound of cannon fire, ordered the Swiss guards who were defending him to surrender. (This strategy, known as “unilateral surrender,” would later become the cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s national security policies.)

Refusing to believe such an insane command, the guard’s commander went to see the king for himself, telling him, “The rabble is on the run! We must vigorously pursue them!”

Minutes ticked by with Louis XVI unable to make a decision. This was the king, after all, who had written in his diary the day of the storming of the Bastille, “July 14th: nothing.” Finally, he repeated his surrender order. The incredulous commander demanded that it be put in writing. The king wrote, “We order Our Swiss to put down their arms immediately and withdraw to their barracks. —Louis.”
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Ordered by the king to surrender, more than 600 Swiss guards were savagely murdered. The mobs ripped them to shreds and mutilated their corpses. “Women, lost to all sense of shame,” said one surviving witness, “were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph.”
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Children played kickball with the guards’ heads. Every living thing in the Tuileries was butchered or thrown from the windows by the hooligans. Women were raped before being hacked to death.

The Jacobin Club, the MSNBC of the French Revolution, demanded that the piles of rotting, defiled corpses surrounding the Tuileries be left to putrefy in the street for days afterward as a warning to the people of the power of the extreme left. (This was easily arranged, as it coincided with a national strike by Paris’s garbage collectors.) The next day, foreign ambassadors fled France.
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This bestial attack, it was later decreed, would be celebrated every year as “the festival of the unity and indivisibility of the republic.”
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It would be as if families across America delighted in the annual TV special “A Manson Family Christmas.”

Back at the National Assembly, the king was arrested and the last flickers of the monarchy extinguished. King Louis XVI would henceforth be known as “Citizen Louis Capet.” This time, the royal family
was locked up in the filthy Temple prison. Mobs gathered outside, night and day, refining their nuanced political philosophy by chanting, “Death to the king!”

Executive authority was vested in the new National Convention, elected by all the people, including foreigners such as Thomas Paine—but no women, which is the only fact taught about the French Revolution in American schools today.

Maximilien de Robespierre, future president of the Convention, was the first among equals in the Revolution, the engine of the terror, who argued, following Rousseau, that a “Republic of Virtue” could only be achieved by “virtue combined with terror.” Alas, the French got mostly terror. He and his fellow Jacobins took the seats high up at the Convention, for which they were nicknamed the Montagnards, or the Mountaineers.

With the royal family rotting in the Temple prison, the mob ran wild. Depressed by the news of their army’s defeat at Verdun, the French went on a murderous rampage in the fall of 1792 known as the “September massacres.”
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Propagandists of the revolution warned that traitors to the revolution were planning a comeback from their jail cells and must be given “prompt justice.” Revolutionary star Jean-Paul Marat wrote in his newspaper titled
L’ami Du Peuple
—Friend of the People, “Let the blood of the traitors flow! That is the only way to save the country.”

On September 2, 1792, a revolutionary mob on the outskirts of Paris surrounded a caravan of twenty-four clergymen being transported to prison and began slashing at the priests through the windows of the carts. One assailant brandished his bloody sword toward onlookers and shouted, “So this frightens you, does it, you cowards? You must get used to the sight of death.” At some point, an “ascetic priest” emerged and tried to calm the ruffians, a few of whom were his own parishioners.
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He was promptly hacked to death.

The rest of the mob joined in the slaughter, until all the carts were dripping with blood. The gruesome caravan, full of mangled carcasses, loped along to the prison, where another crowd was waiting to butcher any priests who had managed to survive the first attack.
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About the same time, another mob besieged a Carmelite convent in Paris, where 150 priests were being given revolutionary trials. Armed
with guns, clubs, pikes, and axes, the hoodlums shot the first priest to approach them and demanded to see the archbishop. After saying a prayer, the archbishop presented himself and was immediately chopped to death by the crowd, whereupon the assailants began indiscriminately murdering all the priests. Some priests escaped to a nearby church just long enough to give one another last rites before the barbarians burst in and began chopping them up, too.

After the first few batches of clergymen had been killed, the revolutionaries decided to hold mock trials for those who remained. One by one, the priests were called to a makeshift court presided over by a grimy sansculottes ruffian named “Citizen Maillard.” Most of the “sansculottes” were lawyers and journalists who dressed like peasants—without the culottes, or knee breeches, worn by gentlemen—but Maillard was the real thing.

He ordered the priests to swear loyalty to the state. Not one would take the heretical oath. And so one after another, the clerics were dragged to the courtyard and sliced to pieces. Their bodies were dumped in fields or down a well, where, seventy years later, 119 skeletons were discovered.
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This account was provided by the only survivor of the massacre, Abbe Sicard.
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One deputy of the Convention, Jean Denis Lanjuinais, estimated that 8,000 Frenchmen were executed on September 2 alone. Another deputy, Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai, put the number at 28,000.
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Rabid bands of men continued the savagery for the next five days, busting into nearly every prison in Paris and carving up the inmates. Not just priests but all prisoners were killed—the poor, the mad, women, old men, and even young girls. Waiting their turns locked in their cells, the prisoners could hear the screams of those who preceded them. The mob spared only two prisons—one for prostitutes and one for debtors, the mob’s “base.” At one prison, La Conciergerie, 378 of 488 prisoners were murdered in one day.
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The killers chopped up humans without pause, except to eat and drink the provisions brought to them by their wives to help the men “in their hard labors.”
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Revolutionary women would sit on the sidelines, enjoying the butchery and cheering the men on. As the bodies piled up, women would poke the corpses and make ribald jokes. Some grabbed
severed body parts, such as ears, to wear as decorations. One revolutionary thug carved into a nobleman’s chest, pulled out the heart, and asked, “Do you want to see the heart of an aristocrat?” He then squeezed some of the blood from the heart into his wine goblet, drank it, and invited others to drink from it, too. One young girl was forced to drink human blood to save the life of her father.
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