Demonic (19 page)

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 powerful 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 teachers
²⁵
—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

Religious marriages and funerals were discouraged and in some places banned entirely, replaced with civic versions of the same. The already-married were encouraged to remarry in revolutionary ceremonies. One club proposed that eulogies at the civic funerals include attacks on the recently departed, to distinguish them from religious funerals.
³¹

This was not the American Revolution. This was the revolution of a mob.

France’s new leaders—fishmongers, cobblers, and butchers, and lots of lawyers and journalists—also set out to invent a new, nonreligious calendar. Created by the Committee of Public Instruction, the “revolutionary calendar” is exactly what one would expect from a government commission.

It began with “Year 1,” which, for simplicity, was the previous year, 1792. Based on “reason” and “nature,” the revolutionary calendar had twelve 30-day months, divided into three 10-day weeks. Inasmuch as this didn’t account for all the days in a year, the leftovers were tacked on as complimentary days: Virtue Day, Genius Day, Labor Day, Reason Day, Rewards Day, and, on leap years, Revolution Day. George Orwell had it easy in some ways.

The years were further divided into four-year spans called “Franciades.”

Each month was given a crackpot name that was supposed to sound like a Greek or Latin word for seasonal attributes: Vendémiaire (harvest); Brumaire (mist); Frimaire (cold); Nivôse (snow); Pluviôse (rain); Ventôse (wind); Germinal (seeding); Floréal (flowering); Prairial (meadow); Messidor (summer harvest); Thermidor (heat); and Fructidor (fruit). (The new calendar also included an observance known as “Kwanzaa,” which to this day no one has ever been able to explain.)

The British recast the new French months as “Slippy, Nippy, Drippy; Freezy, Wheezy, Sneezy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Heaty, Wheaty, and Sweety.”

Napoleon mercifully abolished the French Revolutionary Calendar on January 1, 1806, twelve years after its creation. Only the strong arm of a military dictatorship could save the French from themselves.

Even clocks and personal names weren’t spared this out-with-the-old insanity. Clocks were redesigned in decimal time, with a second being equal to 0.864 normal seconds, 100 seconds making one minute (which was now 86.4 seconds), and 100 minutes making an hour (144 minutes to the rest of the world). This is why freedom lovers everywhere detest the metric system.

Citizens were forced to drop their Christian names, which were deemed tyrannical and superstitious. One revolutionary proposed that the Convention issue a decree abolishing all Christian names at once.
³²
The clubs urged people to adopt “civic” names, such as Brutus—the Roman who assisted in the knifing of his friend Caesar, prompting the dying Caesar to ask (in Shakespeare’s words), “Et tu, Brute?” But then in another instant the adopted Roman names fell out of fashion, were duly renounced, and were replaced with names from the preposterous French
calendar, leading to such names as “Fig-Pumpkin Ligeret.”
³³
You know Figgy? He’s my cousin! I’m Brie Surrender-Vomit
.

Yes, the French Revolution was just like the American Revolution.

The mob’s consuming hatred of Marie Antoinette would finally be satiated with her public execution during the Reign of Terror. The revolutionaries had already come for the queen’s eight-year-old son, Louis XVII, in July 1793. (In other important business that summer, the Convention decreed that William Pitt, prime minister of the United Kingdom, was “the enemy of the human race.”)
³⁴
Antoinette put up a fight, refusing to relinquish her son, but young Louis was literally torn from her arms. Six months earlier, the morning after the king had been guillotined, Antoinette had wiped away her son’s tears, instructing him that a king should not cry. She then set him down, stood, and saluted him as the new king.

What awaited her young son was worse than the guillotine. He was turned over to an illiterate cobbler, Simone, who was instructed to reeducate the boy into hating his parents and loving the revolution. Young Louis was dressed in revolutionary clothes and made to curse his mother and sing revolutionary songs. Under the influence of the extreme left-wing journalist Jacques Hébert, Simone beat and brainwashed the boy into saying his mother had committed incest with him.
³⁵

By the fall, Marie Antoinette was ill, hemorrhaging constantly, and possibly dying from tuberculosis. She was only thirty-seven, but her hair had turned nearly white and she appeared a much older woman. On August 1, 1793, she had been moved to a filthy prison called the Conciergerie, where she was “prisoner 280.” The former queen was put on display like an animal for “inhuman wretches” to stand outside her cell “continually vomiting forth” insults against her.
³⁶

Antoinette had found out her husband had been guillotined when a guard mockingly called her “the widow Capet.” She found out her best friend, the Princess Lamballe, had been executed when the princess’s head was bounced on a pike outside her prison window. Her son had been torn away from her. Now she sat trapped in a prison cell with riffraff hurling invective at her, in the liberal style.

But the mob still saw Marie Antoinette as a threat to their “liberty.” This is how liberals would treat Sarah Palin.

On October 13, Antoinette was informed that her trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal would begin the next day. Her written request for time to prepare was ignored. And so the trial of Marie Antoinette commenced on October 14, 1793, before a jury of eleven men, chosen from the lowest classes.

To the delight of the spectators, Antoinette was accused of presiding over plots, conspiracies, and “midnight orgies,” and of being the “scourge and the blood-sucker of the French.”
³⁷
In the words of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, the witnesses against her were “Patriot Washerwomen,” with “much to say of Plots [and] Treasons.”
³⁸

Antoinette answered each accusation with politeness, calmly revealing the emptiness of the charges against her. As Carlyle reports, “Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You persist then in denial?’—‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that.’ ”
³⁹
Among the charges was the accusation by Hébert that she kept a religious book containing a “counterrevolutionary” image of Jesus inscribed with the words “Heart of Jesus! Have pity on us!”
⁴⁰