To understand liberals, one must understand the French Revolution.
It’s difficult to track the precise chronology of the French Revolution because there is no logic to it, as there never is with a mob. Basically, the mob would hear a rumor, get ginned up, and then run out and start beheading people. Imagine CodePink with pikes. From beginning to end, the French Revolution was a textbook case of the behavior of mobs. As Le Bon described mobs about a century after the French Revolution: “[A] throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence. A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength, become at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.”1
Liberals don’t like to talk about the French Revolution because it is the history of them. They lyingly portray the American Revolution as if it too were a revolution of the mob, but merely to list the signposts of each reveals their different character. The American Revolution had the Minutemen, the ride of Paul Revere, the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, and the Liberty Bell.
The markers of the French Revolution were the Great Fear, the storming of the Bastille, the food riots, the march on Versailles, the Day of the Daggers, the de-Christianization campaign, the storming of the Tuileries, the September Massacres, the beheading of Louis XVI, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, the Reign of Terror, and then the guillotining of one revolutionary after another, until finally the mob’s leader, Robespierre, got the “national razor.” That’s not including random insurrections, lynchings, and assassinations that occurred throughout the four-year period known as the “French Revolution.”
Here are the highlights of the French Revolution to give you the flavor of the lunacy.
As with most rampages during France’s revolution, the storming of the Bastille was initiated by a rumor. The mob began to whisper that the impotent, indecisive Louis XVI was going to attack the National Assembly, which had replaced the Estates General. For some reason, the people were particularly enraged over the king’s firing of his inept finance minister, who had nearly bankrupted the country with Fannie Mae–style accounting. The rabble needed weapons to defend themselves from this imaginary attack on their new populist assembly.
Massing in the streets for days after the presentation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to the Assembly, the people became more and more agitated. By the morning of July 14, 1789, about 60,000 French citizens armed with pikes and axes were running back and forth between the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall), and Les Invalides, a barracks for aging soldiers, demanding weapons and ammunition. Finally, the mob broke through the gate of the Invalides and ransacked the building, seizing 10 cannon and 28,000 muskets, but they could find no ammunition.
Then they rushed off to the Bastille for ammunition—and also because they considered the Bastille an eyesore. Once a fortress, then a jail, the Bastille was in the process of being shut down. It held only six prisoners that day. But the Parisian mob irrationally feared the Bastille based on its menacing appearance and false rumors of torture within its walls.
With legions of Parisians banging on the gates of the Bastille and demanding ammunition, the prison’s commander, Marquis de Launay, invited representatives of the mob inside to negotiate over breakfast. They requested that the cannon be removed from the towers because mounted guns frightened the people. De Launay agreed and the cannon were withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the mob outside became more frenzied, believing that their representatives inside, lingering over breakfast, had been taken hostage. The mob interpreted the withdrawal of the cannon to mean that the cannon were being loaded, in preparation for firing into the crowd.
As the mob grew larger and angrier, the Bastille’s guards warned them to disperse, shooing them away by waving their caps and threatening to fire. The people interpreted the waving of hats as encouragement to continue the attack.
And so it went, with periodic gunplay interrupted only by De Launay’s repeated attempts to surrender. The mob secured its own cannon and began firing at the prison, hacking at the drawbridge, and scaling walls into the courtyard of the Bastille. Facing tens of thousands of angry citizens, De Launay made a final offer to surrender total control of the Bastille to the mob, provided it be accomplished peacefully. He threatened to blow up the entire city block unless his demand for a bloodless transition was agreed to.
His offer was refused amid angry cries of “No capitulation!” and “Down with the bridge!” De Launay surrendered anyway.
The mob poured in and ransacked the entire fortress, throwing papers and records from the windows, killing some guards, and taking others as prisoners. One captured guard who was marched through the street said there were “masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,” as “women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.”
De Launay was triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris with the people cutting him with swords and bayonets until he was finally hacked to death, whereupon the charming Parisians continued to mutilate his dead body. A cook was given the honor of cutting off De Launay’s head, which he accomplished with a pocketknife, kneeling on his hands and knees in the gutter to do it. De Launay’s head, along with the head of a city official, Jacques de Flesselles, who had failed to assist the mob’s search for weapons that day, were stuck on pikes and waltzed through the streets of Paris for more celebratory jeering.2
This is the revolutionary event celebrated by the French—the murderous barbarism of a mob.
Or as Parisians called it, “Tuesday.” The incident at the Bastille was merely a particularly aggressive version of the rampaging and pillaging they had been doing for weeks, all based on this or that rumor.
Apart from the feral viciousness of the attack on the Bastille, the madness of it was that the Third Estate—peasants and the middle class—had already won themselves a Republic. Under the old system, the French people had had a legitimate grievance: The Third Estate, composed of the great mass of citizens, paid all the taxes but got none of the government jobs. Those were reserved for the nontaxpaying nobility and clergy. (It was much like rich Democrats today—Tim Geithner, who failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes but was still confirmed as Obama’s treasury secretary; U.S. senator Claire McCaskill [D-Missouri], who failed to pay $287,000 in taxes on a private plane; Tom Daschle, proposed Obama nominee to be Health and Human Services Department secretary, who failed to pay all his taxes; Nancy Killefer, proposed Obama nominee to be White House chief performance officer, who failed to pay all her taxes; Zoë Baird, proposed Clinton nominee as attorney general, who failed to pay all her taxes; and Charlie Rangel, Democratic congressman censured by the House Ethics Committee for failure to pay all his taxes.)
When the Third Estate walked out on the Estates General and formed the new, classless National Assembly, asserting that only it could make laws, and the king recognized this new legislative body, they had won.
Nonetheless, the people decided the utterly pointless attack on the Bastille had been a tremendous success. And so, a few months later, Parisian peasant women decided to storm the Palace of Versailles and murder the queen, Marie Antoinette.
As Alexander Hamilton politely warned American Revolutionary hero the Marquis de Lafayette, after the storming of the Bastille, “I dread the vehement character of your people, whom I fear you may find it more easy to bring on than to keep within Proper bounds, after you have put them in motion.”3
Initially, the mob had worshipped Maria Antonia, the Austrian princess, christened “Marie Antoinette” upon her arrival in France to marry the future king, Louis-Auguste. Antoinette was young—only fifteen years old—slender, fair, and beautiful. Mobs like that sort of thing, so the people worshipped her. When Antoinette made her first public appearance in Paris, the cheering crowds were so thick, her carriage was frequently stopped for an hour at a time. The besotted Parisians presented the princess with flowers, fruits, salutes, and speeches all along her ride. Most enthusiastic were the common people. As Antoinette stood on a balcony gasping in astonishment at the throng cheering her, a nobleman, Marechal de Brissac, told her, “You have before you two hundred thousand persons who have fallen in love with you.”4
When Louis-Auguste assumed the throne a few years later, the masses hailed a new era of youth, freedom, hope, and change under their twenty-year-old king and nineteen-year-old queen. Though the new king and queen had done nothing and promised nothing, the masses adored them, putting their portrait up in all the shop windows.5 They were the French Obamas!
But as so often happens with mobs, the people’s passionate love would soon turn into equally passionate hate. As described by Le Bon, mobs “only entertain violent and extreme sentiments,” so “sympathy quickly becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred.”6
One sees traces of the phenomenon today in liberals’ love-to-hate feelings toward Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Tony Blair, Joe Lieberman, Israel, the Supreme Court, wood-burning fireplaces, free speech, cigarettes, and warm weather. Liberals went from love to hate with Christopher Hitchens when he attacked Clinton—but then he won them back with his attack on God. (What a Cinderella story!)
Inflamed by ugly gossip as well as food shortages and fiscal crises, the crowd began to detest the queen. She was called “l’Autrichienne,” meaning the Austrian, but with the stress on “chienne,” meaning “bitch.” In pamphlets and gossip, Antoinette was accused of being a nymphomaniac and a lesbian, of holding sex orgies in the palace, and of engaging in unnatural acts with her dog and infant son.7
Antoinette was nearly the exact opposite of the image invented by the mob and passed down in popular mythology. She was genuine, charitable, kind, and good-natured—more like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday than Hillary Clinton pocketing the White House silverware. She was not given to excess, avoided ostentation in her decorating style,8 and was compassionate toward the poor. Antoinette eliminated the class-based segregated seating at the royal palace and often invited children from working-class neighborhoods to dine with her children.
This “lovely woman with the gentle eyes,” as Antoinette biographer Stefan Zweig called her,9 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.”10 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.”11
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 176912—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.13 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.”14
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!”15
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.16 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.17 A few years later, the Assembly would pass a law forbidding priests to be seen in public wearing clerical garb.18
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.19 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.20
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.”21
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.”22
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.”23 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.24
This bestial attack, it was later decreed, would be celebrated every year as “the festival of the unity and indivisibility of the republic.”25 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.”26 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.27 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.28
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.29 This account was provided by the only survivor of the massacre, Abbe Sicard.30
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 28,000.31
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.32
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.”33 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.34
The “great attraction” of the September massacres, according to French historian G. Lenotre, was the grotesque execution of Marie Gredeler, a prisoner accused of murder. She was bound to a post, her breasts chopped off and her feet nailed spread-eagle on the ground, and a bonfire was lit between her legs.35
But for my money, the most chilling murder of the September massacres was that of Princess Lamballe. This wealthy young widow had been Marie Antoinette’s best friend and superintendent of the queen’s household. For the Jacobins, she was the Karl Rove of the Louis XVI administration. The mob accused the prudish and sensitive princess of all sorts of monstrous depredations, including a lesbian affair with the queen.
After the mob attacked the Tuileries in August 1792, Lamballe had been moved to La Force prison, away from the royal family. A year earlier, the princess had gone to England to appeal to the British to save the French monarchy. She had returned to France out of sheer loyalty to Marie Antoinette. The fact that she wrote her last will and testament while in England suggests she had an inkling of what was to come.
On September 3, 1792, Princess Lamballe was dragged from her prison cell and brought before a revolutionary tribunal presided over by the brute Jacques Hébert. Hébert had nothing but admiration for the “sacrilegious excesses” of the revolution, cheerfully announcing that the universe would soon contain “nothing but a regenerated and enlightened family of atheists and republicans.”36
He demanded that the princess swear “devotion to liberty and to the nation, and hatred to the king and queen,” threatening her with death if she refused. Lamballe replied that she would take the first oath but never the second, because “it is not in my heart. The king and queen I have ever loved and honored.”37
In the next instant, she was thrown to the howling mob, gang-raped, and sliced to pieces. Her head, breasts, and genitalia were chopped off by the sansculottes multitude and her mutilated corpse was put on public display for the crowd to jeer at and further defile. One beast cut out her heart and ate it “after having roasted it on a cooking-stove in a wine-shop.” One of her legs was hacked off and fired from a cannon.38 Her head was taken to a café and placed on a table for the patrons to laugh at. The princess’s head and genitalia were then stuck on pikes and paraded past Marie Antoinette’s prison window, with the mob shouting for Antoinette to kiss her lover.39
Isn’t that what George Washington would have done?
The Convention decreed that France was a Republic on September 21, 1792. One week later, the renowned seventy-three-year-old French author Jacques Cazotte was guillotined for counterrevolutionary writings.40 According to two contemporaneous accounts, in September 1792, a Jacobin named Philip presented a box to the legislative assembly containing the heads of his mother and father, whom he said he had slayed in a burst of patriotism because they refused to attend a revolutionary church.41
This was not a revolution that was likely to end—as the American Revolution did—with the motto “Annuit cœptis” (He [God] has favored our undertakings) on its national seal.
Being totalitarians, the French revolutionaries were anxious to inflict their ideas on other perfectly nice countries. In November 1792, the Convention issued the “Edict of Fraternity,” calling on the people of other countries to overthrow their rulers.42
By the end of 1792, the Jacobins were demanding the king’s head. Louis XVI had already tried to flee Paris, but the French wouldn’t let him. The entire royal family had been held captive, under constant guard, behind multiple locked doors in the Temple prison for four months, and in the Tuileries before that. But that wasn’t enough. Louis XVI was such an object of hatred for the masses that, at some revolutionary clubs, members with the “hideous” name “Louis” were forced to change their names to “Montagnard,” as a tribute to the most liberal political faction.43
The trial of Louis XVI—or “Citizen Louis Capet”—took place in December 1792, before the entire National Convention. Erstwhile American patriot Thomas Paine attended as a member of the Convention. Unknown to the hapless Paine, he was watching the original show trial. Citizen Capet was charged with a series of crimes that he knew, “as did his accusers, he had never been party to.”44 Of course, the principal accusation against him was treason for having been king—though it was not a crime to be so until that very moment.
Robespierre was putatively opposed to capital punishment, but like our liberal friends, he was willing to make exceptions on a case-by-case basis depending on the defendant. Fiercely championing death for the king, he argued that even holding a trial was “counterrevolutionary” (the French version of “politically incorrect”). Robespierre said that Citizen Capet was “a criminal toward humanity” and killing him was merely “a measure of public safety.” The king “must die,” he said, “because the country must live.”45 Johnnie Cochran’s summations made more sense.
The Convention debated the king’s fate much the way the UCLA faculty debated a resolution to condemn the Iraq War five days after the fall of Baghdad46 (180 for; 7 against; wild applause). After a unanimous vote of guilt, the Convention then debated whether Louis Capet would be sentenced to detention, deportation, or death. “Give us the head of that fat pig,” yelled the Jacobins. “The nation demands his death!”47
Thousands of the sansculottes ruffians poured into the streets during the trial, shouting for the king’s death,48 because this is how liberals participate in civic affairs. Some wandered inside to the public seats in the upper balconies to cheer deputies who called for death and heckle those leaning toward imprisonment. Seeing the bloodthirsty mobs in the streets, Madame Roland, a supporter of the Revolution, commented wryly, “What charming freedom we now enjoy in Paris.”49
The vote inside went back and forth for 72 hours,50 indicating that even the French revolutionaries were more evenhanded than the typical college faculty. Finally, the king’s own cousin, with the promising revolutionary name “Phillipe Egalité,” swung the vote by standing and saying, “I vote death.”51
The Convention ordered the king to be guillotined the following day. So on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI became the only French king ever to be executed. It will not surprise close observers of the Left to learn that the deputies had engaged in vote fraud, with thirteen votes cast illegally, including that of the bloodthirsty “angel of death,” Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just, who was too young to vote.52
The night before his execution, the king said good-bye to his family, giving his children religious instruction and telling them to forgive his assassins. The next morning at 5 a.m., he took communion. A few hours after that, the drums began. Hearing the drums, signaling the coming execution, Louis XVI’s priest said, his blood ran cold.53
Arriving to take the king to the guillotine was a former priest, Jacques Roux, who had renounced his faith and joined the most radical revolutionary sect, the Enrages, or “the Rabid.” The king handed him a package containing some personal effects and his last will and testament, asking that it be given to his wife. Roux responded, “I have not come here to do your errands, I am here to take you to the scaffold.”54 The king was taken by cart to the guillotine, trailed by a sneering, catcalling mob.
After having his hands bound and his hair cut above the nape of his neck, King Louis XVI ascended the platform, motioned for the drummers to pause, and began to address the crowd. He said, “I die innocent of all the crimes imputed to me. I pardon the authors of my death, and pray God that the blood you are about to shed will never fall upon France—”55
But like an audience of college liberals, the audience began shouting and the drummers resumed their banging, so the king could no longer be heard. They could hear the king any old time, whereas who knew when they might get to yell and hit drums again?
Once the guillotine blade fully severed the king’s thick neck, an attendant yanked the head from a basket and waved it before the crowd while making obscene gestures. The people whooped and cheered, threw their hats in the air, and lined up to dip their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood. His carcass was dumped in a pit and the body dissolved with lime.
Within the next year, the king’s backstabbing cousin, Mr. Equality, Phillipe Egalité, would himself be guillotined, with the less illustrious final remark: “Merde!”56 Madame Roland was also executed, after bowing to the statue of Liberty next to the guillotine, saying, “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”57 Thomas Paine would narrowly escape the guillotine and be imprisoned instead. On the one-year anniversary of the king’s execution, the revolutionaries presided over fetes of celebration, including one in Grasse that featured the guillotining of a Louis XVI mannequin.58
They had executed a king, but the French had not yet begun the Reign of Terror. The fact that, after all this, the Terror was still to come begins to explain why all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have drawn inspiration from Rousseau and the French Revolution.