#montesqueue

Robespierre the Knave

…[T]he storming of the Bastille has become – in the annals of historiography as in the popular imagination – the one event that signifies the beginning of the French Revolution. In 1989, as in every year since 1789, the date commemorated above all others in France was not 26 August, when the Declaration was proclaimed, but rather 14 July, Bastille Day. That date preempts all others. What Charles Peguy wrote nearly sixty years ago about the storming of the Bastille still exemplifies the prevailing view of its primordial importance. “The taking of the Bastille, says History, was the first celebration, the first commemoration, and already so to speak the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille; or at least the zero anniversary…It was not the Festival of Federation that was the first commemoration, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. It was the storming of the Bastille that was the first Festival of Federation, a Federation avant de letter.”

Colored engraving of Georges Danton

The loss to the Revolution was irreparable. Marat possessed the coolest head and the most powerful intellect of the chiefs of France of the First Republic. Independent in judgment and free from too much devotion to theory, he had opposed the imperialism of the winter; and in the crisis of May 31st (as often before), he had proclaimed the need of a leader for the Republic - this at a time when the very suggestion of a dictator was anathema to republican ears…We have seen that in March, he alone had opposed the death penalty for all in arms against the Republic, and had pleaded for mercy for the misled followers of the royalist conspirators. The memoirs of Barras tell us that twice the Friend of the People saved unfortunate aristocrats from death at the hands of Parisian mobs; and in spite of the fact that the Girondins had tried to have him condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, he scorned to retaliate in kind when they were fallen after the 2nd of June. He alone of the republican chiefs had the will, the power, and the energy to direct the revolutionary government into the path of wise clemency. Had he lived (disease would probably soon have accomplished Charlotte’s purpose), he would have opposed with all his power the abuse of the Tribunal in the spring of 1794. By his death, revolutionary France lost her ablest intelligence.  

Danton remained the same, right up to the guillotine, passing without transition from a state of violent anger to one of utter serenity. When we reached our destination, he saw the scaffold; his face paled and I noticed that his eyes were wet. My close scrutiny must have displeased him because he jabbed me with his elbow. His voice sounded angry, “Have you no wife, no children?” I answered yes, I had a wife and children, whereupon he said, “I too, and thinking of them I become a man again.” He lowered his head and I heard him murmured, “My beloved wife, I shall not see you again; my child, I shall never see you…”

Jeanne d'Arc dans la cellule de prison. 19th century.