The Duke of Kentucky, Hoisted By His Own Petard Acrylic on paper, 16 x 20”
Here is an excerpt on an study of the French Revolution I wrote (and painted) during the high time of pandemic cabin fever. I was, and am, taking note for the next one:
Neither the storming of the Bastille, nor the Reign of Terror would restructure the French nation-state as much as the polite tennis court abdication of responsibility from Louis XVI to the tiers état—the Third Estate (representatives to 98% of the French population). Within the first few months of mostly peaceful revolution, centuries old feudal ties were outlawed, and the King plucked out of Versailles and delivered to Paris a third-rate monarch to an increasingly bold and ballsy population.
Nice. And all it took was an educated class, blocked from careerism to earn their fair share of privileges, and thousands of hungry, illiterate people, to realize the divine right pact signed by God and King could only work if November promised some bacon in the larder. Needy (greedy?) farmers and lesser bourgeoisie bought their local priest’s property at super discount, taking belief down a peg, justifying state pillage with a Jesus parable or two.
However, things got really bad when a few hundred lawyers assumed control and mass paranoia infected the people’s brains. Certainly hunger made some rats and citizens of Paris wild-eyed and fierce as starving things can get. But I believe it was a lust for self-preservation, induced by a common, group-centered fear of “Oops, we went too far. Better just keep hacking, slicing and setting heads onto a pike”, that turned the revolution into a lunatic, fear-driven killing-spree. To me it appears most of the mob were hard nosed practical types, playing along for fear of their own lives, and justified it spiritually, referencing their guilt as dues-paying members in the ancient cult of God. If they didn’t kill with a fury, then it couldn’t have been a just cause. The religious wars were recent history. Every one knew from familiar stories how gruesomely ancestor groups behaved before a common deity. Catholics were better grovelers to Jesus, so all Protestants must die, horrifyingly!
Once the cause to kill was set, the public justification was the need to keep the revolution alive ; the private one—self-preservation at any price, even absurd events of trial by execution. A fear of mortal retribution rather than heavenly judgement incited petty bourgeoisie to kill or be killed, but not eat their kill, no matter how “starving” historians claim the masses were. Just a broth of boiled heads would have gone a long way supplying protein to the emaciated. However, no evidence exists of steaming cauldrons, set guillotine-side.
So far, in my early study of the French Revolution, I hypothesize that the Terror was a speedy mass murder caused and fed by fear of mortal retribution. When things get out of control, practical people turn desperate very quickly and blindly reach for anyone or anything to scapegoat their own crimes. At one point at the height of the Terror, even the King’s first cousin (who voted and supported Louis’ execution), had these last words before offering his head to the paranoid: “Really, this seems a bit of a joke”.
Furthermore, to execute a King who claimed divine sovereignty… Ho boy! That must have made a cannon of cognitive dissonance discharge in the heads of France proper. Nothing was sacred, not even the village church bells ringing in the news, holidays, death-days, and the hours of school and mass. To take the life of the king put everyone in mortal danger. Kill or be killed, and better to do it running. Publicly support the killers who have the upper hand, or wait an extra week for a loaf of moldy bread. I suspect that the same group guilt and fear of retribution among lawyers and merchants in Paris made co-conspirators out of provincial altar boys and milk-maids. Fear drives all negative action. Fear made timid people outwardly vicious, if inwardly terrified.
There were those sections populated by strong-willed peasants uninterested in Republican (future communist) revolution (mass slaughter). So they rebelled.
What did they get?
Well, in Nantes (slave-trading port in western France), there poured in defeated counter-revolutionary refugees (peasants and townspeople) from the battles of Vendéen who became some gooey genocidal sport for Jean-Baptiste Carrier, one of many revolutionary psychopaths sent by Paris to the districts of France proper to punish the insurgents and influence public opinion.
At first the victims were taken out in groups and then shot: some 2,600 died in this way. Then when that proved too slow and troublesome, Carrier instituted what became known as les noyades, ‘the drownings’, in which men and women were tied together naked, in so-called mariages républicains, and placed in barges which were towed to the middle of the river Loire and then scuttled. These killings took place mainly at night, and carrier also ‘organized nightly orgies, using women suspects from Nantes high society.’ It is estimated that between November 1793 and February 1794, 2,000 to 5,000 people were killed in these wholesale drownings. At the same time, a military committee rounded up 4,000 rebel fugitives from the defeats at Le Mans abd Savenay and had them shot. All told, Carrier may have been responsible for some 10,000 killings at Nante, population approximately 80,000 in 1790. (Italics mine)”
—from The French Revolution by Ian Davidson
Les noyades Acrylic on paper, 20 x 16"
Segue to hash out if these horror stories of French past apply to potential applications in modern America. We make a scapegoat of the government all the time, but kindly, gently—without worry of retribution. The United States has yet to inflict upon its citizenry a similar abrupt terror upon groups of differing political and economic philosophies. This does not count the ongoing abuses of institutional racism and class injustice which maintain suffering on a mass scale, yet kill off populations much more slowly than sinking barges filled with people. The nation has not a Civil War recollection of tying naked men and women rebels together and drowning them in the Mississippi. (The only civilian death at the Battle of Gettysburg was Jennie Wade baking bread). But we know about the living death of slavery. Certainly there are massacres a-plenty in white-supremacist riots and white-supremacist military massacring of indigenous populations. However, the American state openly killing its disaffected citizenry on a mass scale? It just hasn’t happened yet. In modern times, young men are sent overseas to satisfy blood lust (and corporate greed), as any Vietnamese or Iraqi school textbook will point out.
The Reign of Terror instructs us on how people are susceptible to delivering holocaust in a power vacuum. Imagine if these young, idealistic powder wigs had thermonuclear weapons.
Really, all life, and heaven and hell, would seem a bit of a joke.
To publish a history of the French Revolution is safe territory, as long as one doesn’t think out loud the many violent options for fast change available to us in contemporary society. In fact, it’s best to play it safe. “They were crazy to kill their king. But not us. We love his weapons of war (especially the nuclear ones) and his high tech grab bag of instruments for crowd control. We love them so much, we pay for them with our collective figurative bread and dread.” Voice any justification to behead the President, the Senator, the Congressman, or just to think out loud about it to a fair weather friend, with no intention to follow through, and the thought police will arrive at your door quicker than a Donald Trump tweet inciting violence throughout Michigan trailer parks.
I think this is a good thing. As a population of consummate complainers, doubling down on our consumption, we are fortunate to be soft, shallow, and weak of mind. Arrogant ignorance is nearly a virtue in a society that has the means to annihilate itself and everything else before the coffee is done percolating. We must keep our acceptance of superpower alive and well. Nurture it. Feed it regularly with light doses of protest and heavy iron obeyance. But please people, do not ever, ever pose a real threat. We are safe and secure as long as there are 50 brands of breakfast cereals on supermarket shelves. I no longer think we should make political enemies in a modern religious or secular world. The French Revolution shows us how aggressively well-fed lawyers destroyed their enemies and innocent nobodies just to express an idea. Today we have a faux-christian secret society of Joint Chiefs of Staff astronomically more dangerous than the Jacobins of powder puff Paris, circa 1790. They hold the cryptic codes to usher in doomsday. And all we must do to keep our heads is shut up and carry on. For God’s sake don’t stir the pot if the spoon splits atoms!
Thank goodness the Chinese people are less free, and England and new France U.S. puppet regimes. I’d watch out for Israel, though. Religious fanaticism and weapons of mass destruction are a marriage of inconvenience to all life on earth.
Paris Carnival Acrobat and Imp, 1789 Acrylic on paper, 16 x 20"
“Down Where the Drunkards Roll” performed by Rose and the Amateurs (our garage band). Video from art residency in Southwestern France.