July 14, 2020 - 10:46am
Today is Bastille Day, celebrating the moment in 1789 when Paris’s notorious prison was stormed, marking the end of the Ancien Régime and the start of the revolution.
In that sense it also marks the start of politics; the subsequent pamphlet war between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke articulated the division between radicals and conservatives, while in Paris itself the positioning of various factions in the National Assembly gave rise to the notions of Left v Right wing.
What followed became the template for subsequent revolutionary movements, driven by what we would now call a “purity spiral”, the competition to adopt purer political positions driving ever more extreme outcomes.
As with many revolutionary movements, the initial moderate reforms of 1789 were followed by a second, more extreme upheaval, with the 1792 September massacre foreshadowing the Terror of 1793, when over 15,000 were executed for being insufficiently revolutionary, including many of the leaders themselves.
Priests and nuns were especially targeted, and 20,000 were forced out of holy orders — it wasn’t so much that the revolutionaries disliked religion in that they wanted to replace it. Religious moments and masses were replaced by secular-religious events and churches became Temples of Reason. A Festival of Reason was held at Notre Dame, with soldiers parading around with busts of revolutionary “martyrs”.
Iconoclasm, once unleashed, proved almost impossible to contain, and vast amounts of France’s enviable cultural heritage was destroyed, including the tombs of the kings of France in the chapel of Saint-Denis. Paris’s theatres performed comedies mocking the now powerless Catholic Church, but when a play at the Comédie-Française offended a watching Jacobin with one line the entire cast were arrested.
With the birth of ideology – a new coinage – many religious pathologies were transferred to secular politics. Belief in a world of good and evil people, the idea that minority beliefs were potentially dangerous, and the competition to appear more righteous. One Parisian recalled that houses were decorated with inscriptions calling for ‘unity, liberty, equality, fraternity or death’ for it has become dangerous ‘to be considered less revolutionary than your neighbour’.
And although aristocrats and priests were targeted, much of the bloodletting was committed against other revolutionaries. The Girondin Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud is credited with the famous phrase: ‘It is to be feared that the Revolution, like Saturn, will end by devouring its own children’ – and it certainly turned out true in his case. Vergniaud initially supported a limited monarchy, but became increasingly extreme as the revolution went on, and more and more accepting of violence.
When republicans in Avignon lynched 60 suspected counter-revolutionaries in March 1792, he downplayed the seriousness of the crimes and called for an amnesty. Slowly but steadily tolerance for political violence became normalised — so long as it was for the right cause — with catastrophic results.
Inevitably in October 1793 Vergniaud and the other Girondists were sent to the guillotine, singing the revolutionary song Les Marseilles as they were consumed.
So, happy Bastille Day, and here’s to revolutionaries — cancelling people since 1789.
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SubscribeWell we didn’t ‘cancel’ our annual Bastille Day wine tasting on Sunday. A truly great line up of French wines:
Whites
2016 Saint Aubin 1er Cru Le Charmois, Jean-Claude Bachelet Et Fils
2010 Chablis 1er Cru La Forest, Vincent Dauvissat
2017 Chassagne-Montrachet, 1er Cru La Maltroie, Bruno Colin
2017 Jura, Tissot, Rose Massale Chadonnay
1982 Graves, La Louviere
2017 Muscadet, Gaia
2016 Chinon, Fabrice Gendrol, Les Mains Rouges
Rose
2019 Cotes de Provence, Minuty, Prestige
Reds
2006 St Julien, Beychevelle
2001 Cote-Rotie, Rene Rostaing
2017 Meursault, Thierry et Pascel Matrot
2016 Corsica, AC Ajaccio Protégé, Domaine de Vaccilli, Granit
2003 CdP, Clos des Papes
2013 Gevrey-Chambertin, Benjamin Leroux
1999 Medoc, Potensac
2017 Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru Les Norots
2004 Margaux, d’Issan
2003 St Emilion, Monbousquet
Competition Wines
1979 Margaux, Dauzac
1979 Sauternes, Rayne Vigneau
Soundtrack (all on original vinyl)
The Damned, New Rose and Neat, Neat, Neat
Stiff Little Fingers, Alternative Ulster
The Skids, Masquerade
The Jam, Going Underground
Bow Wow Wow, Chihuahua
Buzzcocks, Spiral Scratch EP
Tim Buckley, Dream Letter Live In London 196
Well, Mr Bailey, I disagree with a number of your views, but I approve wholeheartedly of your admirable selection of French wines! À votre santé!
Usque ad mortem bibendum!
Brilliant!
I’m pretty sure it was the 1979 Margaux I bought a case of from Laithwaites in the 80s. It was marvellous then – I can only dream what it tastes like now.
Let us not forget that at least 117,000 Vendeens were also massacred by the Revolutionary Army 1793-4.
https://quillette.com/2019/…
Sorry, this link does not work, if you go to Quillette and search for French genocide the article will come up.
I love the idea that guillotining was just cancellation with extreme prejudice – I can hear the tumbrils trundling even now.
Ed, the end of this article would have been more convincing if you’d correctly ascribed the quote about the Revolution eating its children to the correct source. It was not said by Vergniaud at all, but by Jacques Mallet du Pan, who was a staunch Royalist.
Ed gives us some dates, mentioning the September 1792 massacre that “foreshadowed the Terror of 1793″. He tells us Vergniaud and other Girondists were guillotined in October 1793, and one might take from his account that this marked the end of the Terror. Actually it went on until the execution of Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders on July 28, 1794, which marked the beginning of Thermidor. Unfortunately, Ed fails to note that even taking the broadest time line for the period of systematic state terror in France, it went on for 47 months, not even a full two years. So it was a quite different thing from Communist terror, introduced with the Bolshevik revolution, although it was to some extent inspired by the Reign of Terror. As Richard Pipes has written, the Red Terror “now intensified, now abated, but never disappeared, hanging like a permanent dark cloud over Soviet Russia.” It’s a cloud that leftist agitators in Western countries today would very much like to hang over our own heads, and they have already had some success in doing so.
And, to add, history only exists in context ““ it’s that great picture “the wondererabout the sea of fog” by Caspar David Friedrich, perspective from afar. Yes the revolution looks pretty vile now, but for the vast majority of French people at the time it meant the lifting of burdens by which institutionally the French monarchy, with parts of the church and nobility set out to “cancel” everybody else. Louis XIV or the Republic? I think it’s a pretty obvious choice if one has to make one, although one’s lot as English, Dutch or indeed Prussian or Austrian in 1789 would have been better in many ways. Enjoyed the piece though.
My understanding is that the French Revolution made very little difference to the lives of ‘the vast majority of French people’. And I have read a few books on the subject, including one by Richard Cobb, the great chronicle of French social trends etc. The book is called ‘The French And Their Revolution’. Indeed, quite a lot of the French people very soon became very hostile to the Revolution because, as so often happens, the new boss was even worse than the old boss.
FWIW, that’s my understanding too. I’d like to see some sources for this claim about “the vast majority of the French people.” I’ve always thought Yeats had it about right with “Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again,/The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on!”
Democracy and everything that goes with it were a million miles away in 1780 ““ Cobbe himself is highly critical of the lettre to Cachet system, among many other features of prerevolutionary France. Yes, there’s a lot that was wrong in the period after the revolution and certainly the first empire ““ which Cobb reserves for especial contempt ““ (wrongly in some ways in terms of meritocracy, Roberts has a better balance) ““ but the overall trajectory for France towards 1830, 1848 and toward an open society (without regular starvation) was not inevitable and there is little positive to see in the characters of those that ran France from the ancien régime between 1815 and 1830.
One interesting things about Cobb is his aversion to what modern historians might call methodology, but his pointillism of individual stories was brilliant. I am not sure he looked in any deep way at how things were before the revolution and the terror, so the comparative use of Cobbe is difficult ““ but not invalid, he is a historian to praise.
I hear cancel, and fear for my life, in a future much more complex than the old 18th Century. A few can watch what I say and do but I, not privy and perhaps lacking the talents of the modern day tech god, cannot watch the watchers. It’s a one sided game and for a little longer men will continue to reign. But forget not the Pill, and how that one little unimportant to most and little discussed, the Pill broke women free of our “biological destiny” and although it’s been about 60 years, seeming a long time, it is nothing in the world of ideas. Long live cutting the shackles of oppression, at what price, one never knows! But doubt not there is always a price! Beware of destroying what reminds you of the past, as you’re bound to repeat it! The Illuminist period gave us the capacity to invent the Pill, to create the concept of universal schooling which has given us the present. Brighter people than me have spoken at length about its advantages! But “don’t forget the ladies”, because now we might still be a minority in the marketplace of ideas, but you know that once we get up to speed, there is no stopping us. We have been at it quietly, while having 14 children, doing the majority of the work, the shit work, called the “caring” work, having our vaginas cut and sewn, covered up, lest we provoke the weak sex, whose mere glance at us Could drive them into a sexual frenzy, beaten and called dumb. Biology for us is no longer destiny and that’s a story not being very discussed! But hey, no many of us around, yet, to push the discourse. Soon!
“Les Marseilles”? Presumably the Marseillaise.