Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Bastille Day

Jerry Pournelle writes:
On July 14, 1789, the Paris mob aided by units of the National Guard stormed the Bastille Fortress which stood in what had been the Royal area of France before the Louvre and Tuilleries took over that function. The Bastille was a bit like the Tower of London, a fortress prison under direct control of the Monarchy. It was used to house unusual prisoners, all aristocrats, in rather comfortable durance. The garrison consisted of soldiers invalided out of service and some older soldiers who didn’t want to retire; it was considered an honor to be posted there, and the garrison took turns acting as valets to the aristocratic prisoners kept there by Royal order (not convicted by any court).

On July 14, 1789, the prisoner population consisted of four forgers, three madmen, and another. The forgers were aristocrats and were locked away in the Bastille rather than be sentenced by the regular courts. The madmen were kept in the Bastille in preference to the asylums: they were unmanageable at home, and needed to be locked away. The servants/warders were bribed to treat them well. The Bastille was stormed; the garrison was slaughtered to a man, some being stamped to death; their heads were displayed on pikes; and the prisoners were freed. The forgers vanished into the general population. The madmen were sent to the general madhouse. The last person freed was a young man who had challenged the best swordsman in Paris to a duel, and who had been locked up at his father’s insistence lest he be killed. This worthy joined the mob and took on the name of Citizen Egalite. He was active in revolutionary politics until Robespierre had him beheaded in The Terror.

And elsewhere we read of the triumph of Reason four years later:
[T]he first such modern genocide in the West took place in France, beginning in 1793. It was undertaken by modern, progressive apostles of Enlightenment and aimed at pious peasants in the Vendée region of France. By its end up to 300,000 civilians had been killed by the armies of the Republic.

This story is little discussed in France. Indeed, a devout historian who teaches at a French university once told me, “We are not to mention the Vendée. Anyone who brings up what was done there has no prospect of an academic career. So we keep silent.”

It is mostly in the Vendée itself that memories linger, which may explain why that part of France to this day remains more religious and more conservative than any other region. The local government opened a museum marking these atrocities on their 200th anniversary in 1993 — with a visit by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who noted during his eloquent address that the mass murders of Christians in Russia were directly inspired by those in the Vendée. The Bolsheviks, he said, modeled themselves on the French revolutionaries, and Lenin himself pointed to the Vendée massacres as the right way to deal with Christian resistance.

It was ordinary farmers of the Vendée and Brittany regions who rose up in 1793 against the middle-class radicals in Paris who controlled the country.
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“Not one is to be left alive.” “Women are reproductive furrows who must be ploughed under.” “Only wolves must be left to roam that land.” “Fire, blood, death are needed to preserve liberty.” “Their instruments of fanaticism and superstition must be smashed.” These were some of the words the Convention used in speaking of the Vendée. Their tame scientists dreamed up all kinds of new ideas – the poisoning of flour and alcohol and water supplies, the setting up of a tannery in Angers which would specialise in the treatment of human skins; the investigation of methods of burning large numbers of people in large ovens so their fat could be rendered down efficiently. One of the Republican generals, Carrier, was scornful of such research: these “modern” methods would take too long. Better to use more time-honoured methods of massacre: the mass drownings of naked men, women and children, often tied together in what he called “republican marriages,” off specially constructed boats towed out to the middle of the Loire and then sunk; the mass bayoneting of men, women and children; the smashing of babies’ heads against walls; the slaughter of prisoners using cannons; the most grisly and disgusting tortures; the burning and pillaging of villages, towns and churches.
Anyone for a rousing chorus of Le Marseillaise?

10 comments:

  1. Yesterday, I conspicuously did NOT ask anyone for a swig of beer in my mug.

    Care to guess why?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Only if it's the scene from Casablanca.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Casablanca was thematically (though not in each motive not in detailed outline and not in political loyalties) copied from Les Sept Couleurs, by Robert Brasillach.

      He was probably not giving La Marseillaise the same status as Humphrey Bogart's scenario writer did.

      Delete
  3. RE: "first modern genocide", Cromwell isn't modern? He killed as many people as the high estimate for the Vendée, and predated the French Revolution by a century and a half.

    Jacobinism is arguably just Whiggism "in a French context", to paraphrase the old description of Maoism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cromwell is indeed not a Medieval.

      Jacobinism even has some few perks as compared to Whiggism. Whigs were so obviously endorsing tyranny of the rich. Jacobins did some things that way, like forbidding guilds, but they seemed less dedicated to achieving that particular effect.

      Delete
  4. Since atheists never do these things were the socialists or some such that explains these acts?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am depressed to find this silly repetition of ignorant and mendacious US conservative talking points under the signature of someone who usually does so much better. I am going to have to post about the French Revolution myself, I guess, even though I have a million other things to do A suggestion just to correct one of the most insulting and offensive pieces of verbiage: if you think there was no genocide before 1793, I suggest you don't spoil your digestion and self-respect by studying, say, the colonial history of the Netherlands, or the history of the Waldensian Church, or the history of Ireland, or....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Genocide and Waldensians?

      Don't exaggerate. Unless you equate forced conversions with genocide of a faith community - but this is one which should not have been there in the first place.

      Delete

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