Looking now at the background of the French Revolution—historically the mother of most of the ideological evils besetting not only Western civilization but also the rest of the world—we have to make an inventory of the roots of this iniquity. We find misinterpretation and distortion of events in America, but there were also other factors leading to the French Revolution and we will consider them later.
In dealing with the first phase of the Great Euramerican Misunderstanding we have to admit that there probably were more Frenchmen misinterpreting what they saw and experienced in America than Americans (and Englishmen!) propagating ideas in France, all bound to produce unhappy results. We have mentioned the English in this connection because ideologically their impact on the Continent was very similar to that of the United States. England is not physically part of Europe (though it naturally belongs to Western civilization) and there is a relatively large minority of Britishers (Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh among them) who refer to the Continent as “Europe,” as if their island did not really belong to this western peninsula of Eurasia. This does not mean that eminent Britishers and Americans have not enjoyed life on the Continent time and again. As a matter of fact, the Continent is dotted with graves of outstanding British non-conformists who preferred to escape the control of British society. They range from Keats, Shelley, and Kemble to Oscar Wilde and D. H. Lawrence.(Byron’s body was brought back to Britain.) The reactions of Americans to Europe naturally showed great variety and more often than not they had political implications. Philip Rahv’s Discovery of Europe1 provides a broad spectrum of positive judgments, of delight and enthusiasm, though much more for the Continent than for Britain. Certainly the notion expressed by Adet, a French agent for the Directoire in the United States, that all Americans are “born enemies of all the people of Europe”2 was and still is untrue. Yet there are some voices of dissent in Rahv’s book: John Adams, who was too unbending, and Jefferson and Mark Twain, who were too provincial and too agnostic (each in his own way, though).
Hamilton was convinced that Jefferson, while American Minister in Paris, had played a rather negative part. Hamilton said that “in France he [Jefferson] saw government only on the side of its abuses. He drank freely of the French philosophy, in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the moment of fermentation, which he had a share in exciting, and in the passions and feelings of which he shared both from temperament and situation.”3
Jefferson’s eventual successor, Gouverneur Morris, was certainly of another breed. He spent several years in Paris and Western Europe before being appointed United States Minister to France. He wrote in his diary, “At dinner I sit next to M. de Lafayette who tells me I injure the cause, for that my sentiments are continually quoted against the good party. I seize this opportunity to tell him that I am opposed to the democracy from regard to liberty.”4 Yet Morris was a voice crying in the wilderness. As an American aristocrat he moved in the highest French circles and was nauseated by the leftist sentiments he encountered everywhere, not only among the nobility but also among the clergy. The Bishop of Arras who thought it would make Morris happy to hear the American Constitution praised as the best in the world, found that he pleased him not at all, although he had helped to draft this document. As a matter of fact, Morris was always haunted by the specter of dictatorship in America.5 His eulogies of aristocracy did not please the republican countesses and princesses.6 Probably Lafayette irritated him more than anybody else. Talking to him, he “pointed out for the hundredth time, that each country needed to have its own form of government, that an American Constitution could not do for France and that, above all, France needed stability. He gave the reasons for his advice clearly and forcibly, but poor Lafayette flinched from it, and could not be persuaded to make any effectual step.”7 This was the same Gouverneur Morris who at a banquet he gave in New England in 1815 exclaimed, “The long agony is over. The Bourbons are restored. France reposes in the arms of the legitimate prince. We may now express our attachments to her consistently with the respect we owe to ourselves. . . . Thank God, we can, at length, avow the sentiments of gratitude to that august family under whose sway the fleets and armies of France and Spain were arrayed in defence of American liberty. . . . The Bourbons are restored. Rejoice France! Spain! You are governed by your legitimate kings! Europe! Rejoice!”8 One can imagine the outcry of the early American left when the full text of this address became known.
Yet that there exists a “technical” filiation between 1776 and 1789 can hardly be denied, and it is precisely this “factual” connection which effectively masks the misunderstanding. First of all one has to bear in mind that 1789 did not lead necessarily and inevitably to 1792 and to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe and later in all other quarters of the globe. Georges Bernanos always emphasized the difference between the initial stage of the French Revolution which had the almost unanimous support of the French nobility9 (and a very large sector of the clergy) and the terror regime of the lower middle class which was later followed by a proletarian-agrarian movement under Gracchus Babeuf. In other words, the aristocratic character of the American Revolution and of the initial stage of the French Revolution were very similar. But in the latter we see, from the beginning on, the active collaboration and interference of bloodthirsty mobs which gained in strength and dynamism until the fall of the Robespierre regime.10 The nobility, as de Tocqueville pointed out, nursed their old grievances against all forms of royal absolutism and it was the nobility which really forced the issue by insisting that the King convoke the Estates General. The noblesse de la robe spearheaded that movement. The historian A. Mathiez has coined the phrase révoke nobiliaire11 and this development merely shows how dangerous it can be to tamper radically with a political structure in a period of transition when prosperity is increasing considerably, when an era of reforms has been inaugurated already.
Yet besides the old aristocratic tendency to oppose the monarch in the best whiggish fashion,12 there were, naturally, other interior factors at work. One was the ancient hatred of the Jansenists for the Crown, which now again made itself felt in various ways.13 Bishop Henri Grégoire belonged to that faction: He headed the Constitutionalist priests (who were in a real schism with Rome) and received, before his death in 1831, the absolution of a Jansenist priest. He had played an eminent part during the Revolution, had voted against the monarchy (“kings are in the political order what monsters are in the natural”) and was one of the first in the National Convention to demand a trial of the King. The other religious opposition came from the Huguenots who were equally unforgiving. Edmund Burke who, as an Anglican, belonged to a faith not much unlike theirs, had to acknowledge, “I am sorry to say that they behaved shockingly since the very beginning of the rebellion, and have been uniformly concerned in its worst and most atrocious acts. Their clergy are just the same atheists with those Constitutional Catholics, but still more wicked and daring. Three of their number have met from their republican associates the rewards of their crimes. ”14 This attitude of the rebels could be understood in view of the intolerance of the French Kings in the past. Yet Brienne, Bishop of Toulouse, had already proposed the emancipation of the Calvinists in 1787, and by 1788 their emancipation was a fact. André Siegfried, himself a Protestant, had to confess that the French Protestant even today “has naturally, almost necessarily to be a partisan of the French Revolution, which means in other words that he is congenitally an enemy of the Ancien Régime and of anything that might be styled ‘reaction.’ ”15
The President of the Constitutional Assembly, Jean Paul Rabaut St. Etienne, was the son of a distinguished Reformed minister and, belonging to the more moderate Girondins, met with a tragic fate. In the popular mind, however, the Huguenots became so identified with support of the French Revolution (and not without cause, as we have seen) that after the Restoration anti-Huguenot riots took place, notably the so-called massacres de Nîmes (a reaction against the bagarres de Nîmes).16
Among the foreign “influences” (mostly “misinterpretations” of foreign countries and their institutions) we should again mention the “images” of Switzerland and of England. Voltaire was truly bewitched by England and we have to see him as the man who spearheaded Anglomania in France.17 Metternich was always haunted by the idea that copying England had been the undoing of France, if not of the entire Continent, was also certain that England would eventually be ruined by imitating French patterns, by submitting to the école francaise.18 In a secret memorandum to Alexander I, written circa December 1820, Metternich said, “It is difficult to overlook the influence which England for a long time has exercised on France. England, however, is in such a unique situation that we can maintain without exaggeration that one of the forms congenial to that State, none of its habits or institutions can be adopted by any of the states of the Continent, and when these are actually taken for models, the result is nothing but troubles and dangers without any accompanying advantages.”19 Alfred Müller-Armack also sees this very decisive English influence on the ideology of the French Revolution.20 Charles Seignobos insists that a sketchy forerunner of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme had been shown to the rebelling citizens of Bordeaux by the English Colonel Sexby. This outline was the preamble of a constitutional draft proposed by the British Army to the Parliament in 1648.21
The English and Swiss examples, needless to say, were effective thanks to the emphasis on personal liberty in these two nations and to the economic wellbeing of their respective upper classes. (The general prosperity of Switzerland is the product of a much later period. Emigration and military service in foreign countries characterizes the Swiss economy until the early part of the nineteenth century.22 The “Patricians,” however, always lived in great comfort.) The American example, because of its great distance from the English and Swiss examples was less concrete but had a highly romantic halo. At first there were the French volunteers who had arrived prior to the break between Paris and London. Then there were the regular army men who had fought shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. Finally, there was a Roussellian aura about America: virgin forests, noble savages, free men, simple lives, log cabins, manors, and town halls in Grecian style. The Americans in Paris—Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane—excited the French imagination beyond belief. In fathering the French Revolution naively and unknowingly, these Americans were perhaps less instrumental, however, than the Frenchmen, volunteers and regular officers, who had fought in the New World and had come home imbued with notions they had picked up at random and had not well digested.
It took me many years in the United States to understand what makes that country “tick,” what is the inner meaning of certain words, what is the mind and thought of both the average and the extraordinary American. The confusion among the French (and other volunteers) must have been considerable in many ways.
The evidence of this misunderstanding, to which so many Frenchmen succumbed and which helped to bring about the French Revolution, receives documentation in a number of works. Among these I would like to mention merely the writings of Lafayette,23 of Count Louis Philippe de Ségur,24 of Madame de Staël,25 of Madame Campan,26 of Lamartine,27 of Taine,28 Chateaubriand,29 and many others. Later Lord Acton,30 Alexis de Tocqueville,31 Philippe Sagnac,32 Georg Jellinek,33 and Felix Somary34 have emphasized the American roots of the French Revolution but also insisted that the ideas prevailing in America at the time of the War of Independence had been grossly misinterpreted by the French: They assumed a new meaning and, when transplanted in French soil, degenerated rapidly.
Hamilton was certain that Jefferson had not been innocent concerning the evolution in France after 1789 (p. 73) and John Adams was tortured by the thought that the United States and he himself had to take a large share of the blame for the horrors that followed the storming of the Bastille. The former President of the United States wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush in a letter dated August 28, 1811: “Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the American Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation to the human race and the whole globe ever since? I meant well, however. My conscience was clear as a crystal glass, without scruple or doubt. I was borne by an irresistible sense of duty. God prospered our labors, and, awful, dreadful, and deplorable as the consequences have been, I cannot but hope that the ultimate good of the world, of the human race, and of our beloved country, is intended and will be accomplished by it.”35
Yet the ultimate good had not been achieved so far, and Adams himself knew that the crowned dictator who followed the French Revolution had been its offspring. “Napoleon and all his generals were but creatures of democracy,” he wrote to John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia.36 But other men were infinitely more responsible than John Adams in pushing the ideas of the French Revolution, men like the Anglo-American Thomas Paine who much later became the hero of the Nazi playwright Johst.37 Other Nazis, for instance a certain Dr. Friedrich Schönemann, praised Jefferson and damned Hamilton, seeing in the former a precursor of the historic evolution leading to the victory of the Common Man—and of German National Socialism.38 Earlier European authors dealing with the United States have extolled George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and criticized Jefferson as well as, later, the American Democratic Party in which they saw a helpmate to the “party of revolution”39 in Europe. Then as now, to be sure, only a few recognized the United States for what it really was and, temperamentally, still is: an aristocratic state.40
Charles-Armand Tuffin, Marquis de la Rouërie, was a Frenchman who participated in the War of Independence and who clearly perceived the difference between that noble struggle and the French Revolution, a man who should be much better known to Americans than the immensely vain and morbidly ambitious Lafayette,41 a man who should inspire young Americans, young Frenchmen, and lovers of liberty everywhere, as well as defenders of all human values. He came to America before Lafayette, left after Lafayette, and fought bravely for freedom and against democracy. No monument, no street name, no stamp, no memorial whatsoever to commemorate his name or his deeds can be found in the United States. His life is briefly described in an Appendix (see pp. 435-443).
This aristocrat differed radically from other noblemen who, each in his own way, contributed to the French Revolution. We have already mentioned Lafayette, still so popular in America, and we also referred to Maximilien de Robespierre.42 But above all we should discuss the “grandfather of modern democracy,” the Comte de Sade, sometimes called “the Divine Marquis.” He is better known for his sexual aberrations than for his philosophy—sadism is named after him—but his real importance lies in the domain of politics, in his one historic intervention and, later, in the spreading of his political ideas.
Research on de Sade started slowly only half a century ago: The first serious efforts were made by Dr. Eugen Dühren (a pseudonym for Iwan Bloch) who, however, was interested in Sade only from the point of view of sexual pathology. After World War I there was Maurice Heine, originally a member of the French Socialist party which, like the Russian one, underwent a profound schism and split into the old-fashioned Socialists and the Communists. Heine joined the radical group and soon became editor of L’Humanité, the Communist daily. He made a mistake that is not rare in the Latin countries: He confused communism with anarchical libertinism. Upon orders from Moscow he was fired by his paper in 1922 and the year after was thrown out of the Parts, the P.C.F. He then concentrated largely on de Sade and sadism43 and came to admire de Sade as a totally free, unfettered, and diabolical spirit.
The events of World War II have increased public interest in de Sade, who emerges from a number of essays as a “fellow like you and me.” Refer to the book by M. Pierre Klossowski, called significantly Sade, notre prochain. A private edition of de Sade’s collected works has been published as well as a serious but, in my opinion, still not definitive biography by Gilbert Lely.44 By and large the crimes of the Divine Marquis had been exaggerated: His deeds were neither so numerous nor so ferocious as reputed, since he spent most of his time in jails and hospitals for the criminally insane. However, he was not mentally ill. As a fanatical and confirmed atheist he more or less acted in accordance with his views, and apart from the aid of skilled theologians and philosophers, he might have needed the attention of a competent psychiatrist. Still he was neither schizophrenic, nor a paranoiac, and he was fully responsible for his actions.
What has not been done so far is a systematization of his political and philosophical thought which is to be found in a few pamphlets and minor essays while the larger part is dispersed among his pornographic works. One would have to wade through an ocean of smut (shocking, perhaps, in the beginning, but merely tiring in the long run) in order to get a coherent whole. As far as one can see without having undertaken this Herculean task, we have here a real system of thought waiting to be expounded. There was method and logic to this man. His books were widely read but, naturally, rarely quoted because even for the end of the eighteenth century they were far from respectable. And precisely because these were volumes one did not like to boast of knowing, it will always be very difficult to prove unequivocally how influential they were at the time of their publication—and after. One would have to look for their oblique reflection in the sayings, writings, and actions of others.
It is probable that de Sade’s ideology-philosophy was the outflow of his inclinations and aberrations—and not the other way round. It is quite possible that we all have sadistic drives but that in normal, in average persons they exist only within certain limits. It can be argued that de Sade in this respect was not an exception but that, being able to justify his yielding to these instincts, he finally became their slave. They certainly dominate his imagination, his daydreams, his writings, his whole intellect.
Donatien Alphonse Francois Comte de Sade was born on June 2, 1740 in Paris as scion of an ancient southern French, Provençal family. He served in the army and in 1763 married Mademoiselle de Montreuil whose wealthy family belonged to the noblesse de la robe. A few months after the wedding he engaged in sadistic torture of a prostitute and was jailed for fifteen days as a consequence. A similar though graver case occurred in 1768 when he cruelly flogged a girl and was again committed to prison. Released, he engaged in an orgy in a brothel in Marseille which resulted in a more severe sentence in 1772. Imprisoned in Miolans, he succeeded in escaping but was again arrested in Paris in 1777 and brought back to the south of France where, thanks to another escape, he enjoyed thirty-nine days of liberty. Arrested once more, he spent five and a half years in Vincennes followed by another five and a half years in the Bastille and after that a year in the hospital for the criminally insane in Charenton. This long imprisonment was not due to a jail sentence but to a lettre de cachet from the King, issued upon the request of de Sade’s mother-in-law, the Présidente de Montreuil.
When the government had decided to liquidate the prison tract of the fortress of Vincennes, de Sade was transferred to the Bastille, which also was “doomed” during the reform year 1788. The government wanted to raze this state prison and to sell the ground for a real estate development. History only precipitated events. During his imprisonment de Sade wrote assiduously, expressing his libertine, atheistic, materialistic, and leftist views. Knowing about the unrest in Paris, he began to harangue the people from his window, saying that the prisoners were tortured and assassinated in the dark dungeons of the Bastille. He used a funnel to give greater strength to his voice. We have a letter from M. de Launay, Governor of the prison, to M. de Villedeuil, Minister of State, dated July 2, 1789, in which the former insists that under the circumstances his prisoner ought to be transferred to the hospital for the criminally insane45 in Charenton. Actually, after the prisoner had repeated his performance on July 3, his transfer was carried out in the morning of July 4. The documentation concerning de Sade’s noisy appeals is fairly complete46 and when, much later, he was arrested at the height of the Terror, he boasted of his contribution to the fall of the Bastille. He spoke of the “ardor with which I called the people on the third of July to destroy the Bastille where the despots had me imprisoned: thus I possess the most glittering civic record of which a republican can pride himself.”47
Was de Sade then really the main culprit in this sordid affair? He well might have been because the forthcoming destruction of the Bastille was well known and political prisoners were rarely, if ever, locked up behind its walls.
The Governor of the Bastille, M. de Launay, an enlightened liberal, had a tiny garrison of Swiss and some invalid veterans at his disposal when the mob finally gathered around the building on July 14: He offered only token resistance. The delegates of the Town Hall and two appointees of the mob were received and were invited to join the governor at his meals. In the meantime the drawbridge of the outer court was let down and guns were directed at the inner court. The soldiers, sensing that they had no commander willing to take the responsibility, surrendered. The governor was killed after having been atrociously tortured. He implored the monsters to finish him off and when, at last, he had been given the coup de grace, a young cook “who knew how to handle meat” cut off his head with a small kitchen knife. The head was carried around in triumph until the late evening hours. Three of the officers were also murdered fiendishly and two of the invalids who once had heroically fought for France were hanged by the howling mob, which also cut off the hands of a Swiss guard. The surprise came when the “victors” found only seven prisoners. Four were forgers who quickly decamped, two were insane (they had been there only for observation), and one was a dissolute young man of noble descent who considered himself the real hero of the day: he harangued the people with revolutionary phrases. All in all, a nauseating and disgraceful performance, certainly not fit to serve as the basis for a national holiday—and inspired in every way by the “Divine Marquis.”
Donatien de Sade stayed at Charenton only until April 2, 1790, when he was released, thanks to a decree of the National Assembly, which declared all lettres de cachet of the King null and void. It was Good Friday. His wife sued for separation from the monstrous man and got it. De Sade felt “betrayed.” Yet he soon engaged in local politics and became a leader of the Place Vendôme section of Paris. After the September massacres in 1792 he was even appointed its secretary. It is evident that he was somewhat torn between a certain snobbery—after all, the de Sades belonged to the highest nobility—and his materialistic and atheistic convictions which drew him toward the left. The mere fact that he was of noble origin proved to be no obstacle either in his case or in others to a “career” in Republican circles. Yet at the height of the Terror, in spite of the fact that his section had been directed by Robespierre, de Sade was in danger of being guillotined. The 9th Thermidor, the day of Robespierre’s fall, saved his life.
However, de Sade’s writings are of even greater interest. In 1791 he published his first great pornographic novel Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. Here philosophical remarks and debates are wedged in between scenes of sexual debauchery. His Addresse d’un citoyen de Paris au roi des Francais, issued in the same year, is purely political and shows not the extreme leftist materialist views which we encounter in later writings, as for instance in Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman Philosophique, a “novel” in four volumes that was printed three times between 1793 and 1795. With its total of more than 1,700 pages, it had an enormous impact on the French Revolution which was, in so many ways, a sanguinary sex orgy.
Even worse, from a purely moral-esthetic as well as from an ideological point of view, were La philosophic dans le boudoir (1795) and La Nouvelle Justine, suivi de l’histoire de Juliette ou les prospérités du vice (1797). De Sade, especially during his jail terms and his sojourn in Charenton, must have had a prodigious capacity for work and a truly limitless imagination, because the abovementioned works by no means exhaust the list of his opera omnia. Some of his manuscripts were destroyed by his son or by the police. Others were published posthumously—for instance the very important Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond which contains the quintessence of de Sade’s atheistic, materialistic outlook, while the more scandalous Les 120 Jours de Sodome ou l’Ecole du libertinage is onesidedly pornographic.
Lost is the manuscript of Projet de création de lieux de prostitution, organisés, entretenus et dirigés par l’Etat which contains an interesting plan for totalitarian sex control. Altogether thirty-one published books and pamphlets are listed in Lely’s biography of de Sade,48 twenty-three unpublished ones and thirty-five lost manuscripts. Among all these are only seven smaller (published) political pamphlets (between four and eight pages), seven of which were issued by the Section des Piques (Vendôme) during the time “Citizen Sade” was politically active. Among the unpublished manuscripts there is a large number of plays. One of these, Le Comte Oxtiern ou les Effets du Libertinage, was performed for the public in the Théatre Molière (October 1791).
De Sade’s outlook was materialistic-atheistic-totalitarian, with a curiously contradictory anarchical bent. He believed that human beings were not superior to animals: The whole “animal kingdom” as well as the plants (he drew the line at minerals) admitted no hierarchic superiorities and inferiorities,49 all were “equal.” His determinism was complete. “Pedantic louts, hangmen, scribblers, legislators, tonsured scum, what are you going to do once we prevail? What will happen to your laws, your morality, your religion, your powers, your paradise, your gods, your hell, when it will be proved that such and such a flow of humor, a certain type of fibres, a specific degree of acidity in the blood or in the animal spirits will make a man the object of your punishment or your rewards?”50 According to him the idea that murder, destruction, annihilation could be “bad” completely contradicts the workings of nature: As a matter of fact, there can be no creation without preliminary destruction,51 an idea which we also find expressed in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s writings (p. 180).
The nihilism of de Sade went so far that he contemplated with a certain satisfaction the possibility that mankind could annihilate itself. “This total self-destruction would merely return to nature the opportunity of creation which we have taken from her by propagating ourselves.”52
Needless to say, children should belong to the state, a demand that will always be raised by leftists who have an innate hatred for the family as an “individualistic” group that tries to separate itself as an independent cell within the state and society.53 Yet de Sade’s hatred of the family also took other forms. He insisted that any society based on fraternity should make incest mandatory between brothers and sisters. (Interestingly enough, this theme recurs in the writings of Thomas Mann, a leftist of great literary talent.)54 Promiscuity will naturally end the concept of fatherhood which rests on man’s ability to identify children as his own by an act of faith and conviction, but that does not matter. Motherhood will survive and man has a fatherland, a patria, and this is sufficient.55 Just as creation-propagation loses its value, so also murder loses its horror.56
The French Revolution truly lived up to de Sade’s visions, and there can be little doubt that, in a certain way, the “Divine Marquis” is the patron saint of all leftist movements. In making this statement, however, one must bear in mind that only leftists produce movements, whereas, at best, the right can “organize” in a relatively hierarchic fashion. It has been well said by Spengler that the concept of the “party” in itself is leftish.57 Yet if movements and parties have no affinities for a genuinely rightist outlook, we must come to the conclusion that the principles of the right within the parliamentary-democratic framework can only prevail after a catastrophic default or collapse of leftism. The right cannot normally win by its own virtue, its truth, its values because it will never fascinate the masses. It will attract extraordinary and superior people but hardly ever the average man.
It is obvious that de Sade was by no means solely responsible for the French Revolution—nor were the confused veterans of the American war. Nor even Voltaire, who was instrumental in undermining, eroding, and corroding the principles of religion and order on which the ancien régime rested. His part was very similar to that of the German Leftist pseudoliberal intellectuals and artists who can be called collectively the spiritual Kerenskys of the decaying Weimar Republic.58 Voltaire was certainly not an ardent republican, nor was he a democrat. His ideal was a constitutional monarchy headed by a roi sage, Plato’s philosopher-king.59 So was Diderot’s. Voltaire wrote of the republic that it represented a social order leading to tyranny.60 “Independent of my love for freedom,” he wrote, “I still would prefer to live under a lion’s paw than under the teeth of a thousand rats who are my fellow citizens.”61 In a letter to d’Alembert he said that the canaille was not made for reason. In another letter he insisted that “we never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servants, that is up to the apostles.”62 A democracy, he said in the Dictionnaire de Philosophie, “would only be feasible in a very small country which also must have a most fortunate geographical location. And in spite of its smallness it will commit many mistakes because it will consist of human beings, which means that discord will rule in it as in a monastery.”63 Yet he forgot his geographic reservations when he sang his usual praises of the British Constitution. Once when he embarked again on his panegyric, the Prince de Ligne interrupted him, saying, “Add to it the protection of Britain by the Ocean without which she would not last a year.”64
Rousseau too was convinced that the democratic republic fitted only small states while large ones ought to have monarchical governments.65 However, it is not this particular theory that gave Rousseau his importance as a political theorist but rather his notions of the social contract which opened an era of totalitarianism in whose midst we are still living. As one can easily imagine, the French Revolution was deeply indebted to Rousseau, who died in 1778. His memory was honored at every possible (or impossible) opportunity. At the Feast of Reason in Notre Dame the busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Franklin were objects of veneration.66 In 1794 Rousseau’s remains were solemnly buried in the Pantheon but removed again in 1814.
A vain person, a shabby immoralist burdened with an unbalanced mind (especially during the last years of his life when his neuroses left him on the verge of insanity), Rousseau helped to father the French Revolution and subsequent developments. He also had an impact on the American scene—from a folkloric as well as from an intellectual point of view. We can see this reflected in George D. Herron’s enthusiasm for Rousseau and Calvin.67 Jacques Maritain is convinced that Rousseau influenced the rise of democracy and democratism in the United States, although he admits that this was less the case than in France.68 Walter Lippmann, on the other hand, states unequivocally that “Jacobinism became the creed of American democracy”69 and that Rousseau’s ideas (as well as those of two other Swiss, Fröbel and Pestalozzi)70 made themselves felt in American education. Alfred Müller-Armack, on the contrary, insists that neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau, but seventeenth-century England71 originally provided the French Revolution with its ideological foundations. We should not forget, however, that Rousseau hailed from Geneva, that his original faith was Calvinism, and that there are various analogies as well as dialectic contradictions between his thought and Calvin’s. A certain emotional trait pervades the thinking of both, a fact well brought out by a Dutch author.72 To Rousseau’s sentiment Intérieur, his avowal that he “never thought out anything,” that he had felt everything, stands Calvin’s remark about the “inner gifts of the spirit, the autópiston, which one should never subject to demonstration or reason,”73 certainly a language very different from that of the scholastics.
Yet one should distinguish clearly between analogy and dialectic contradictions, and the antinomian reaction of Rousseau to Calvin and Calvinism is undoubtedly stronger than his readiness to copy from the Reformers.74 Temperamentally, too, these two men were poles apart: Maitre Jean, the man from Noyon was, after all, a cold spirit and a methodical thinker; Jean-Jacques, the native Genevan, was a confused emotionalist.
Still, both Genevans75 stood for absolutes and Jellinek is quite right when he also sees Hobbes as a forerunner of Rousseau. “It was obviously the concept of the sovereign king in his own glory, which engendered the demand for a free, sovereign people. The omnipotent king became the ancestor of the omnipotent people and Thomas Hobbes found a master in a pupil surpassing him—in J. J. Rousseau.”76 However, Jellinek also recognized the emotionalist in Rousseau, the man who has to experience everything before formulating a theory.77 And there is possibly in Rousseau even a deist with pantheistic inclinations, a sort of mystic—the term taken in a general sense—more so than in the theocentric Calvin.78
We have to admit, however, that both Calvin and Rousseau were not only “absolutistic” in their thinking but also totalitarian, which is by no means the same. Benjamin Constant, a genuine liberal, rightly called Rousseau’s theory of the social contract “the most terrible aid to all types of despotism.”79 In a way Rousseau’s notion of the people reminds one of the totality of the Greek city-state, but it is also the precursor of modern nationalism. Irving Babbitt knew very well that nationalism and internationalism (as opposed to genuine patriotism or a feeling of universality) are different in degree, not in essence, and rightly accused Rousseau of having given a new impetus to both collectivist drives. At the same time he admitted that Rousseau “in his final phase is an emotional nationalist, and that is because he saw that the patriotic virtue is a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity.”80 If this emotional nationalism is exploited by an able imperialistic leader who, spurning all ethical discipline, not only is dominated by the lust for knowledge and for feeling, but even more so by the lust for power, we have to expect the “most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac. The final use of science that has thus become a tool of the lust for power is, in Burke’s phrase, to ‘improve the mystery of murder.’ ”81 Indeed these were prophetic words published in 1919 by Babbitt, one of the most brilliant minds among American conservative thinkers.
It would be wrong to think in this connection only of the obvious mass assassins, of Hitler and Stalin. One has to add the butchers of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. “The leadership of the Occident is no longer here,” Babbitt wrote scathingly. “The leaders have succumbed in greater or lesser degree to naturalism, (the Church, so far as it has become humanitarian, has itself succumbed to naturalism) and so have been tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very reason that it is less obvious.”82 (Italics mine.)
To what extent Rousseau not only laid the foundations of the French Revolution but also of the modern totalitarian state can be gleaned even better from Werner Kägi’s fascinating essay, “The Constitutional State and Democracy.”
“Rousseau,” he says, “might be a representative of the idea of local rights, but within the state he had denied all manifestations of pluralism as a menace to democracy. This monistic—unitary-centralistic—thinking has determined the very character of the French Revolution’s ideology. The république une et indivisible became the great postulate of constitutional evolution and ‘simplification’ was equated with ‘progress.’ Thus the unitary centralistic state became the prevailing form of state structure,”83 and we are finally faced with a “democratic Leviathan.”84 No wonder, since the “massively absolutistic democratism of the twentieth century is not dominated by the notion of representation, but by identity, because the representatives do not have a well grounded position of constitutional power, but have merely the unstable status of ‘agents’ as defined by Rousseau,”85 whose seminal ideas matured only in our age.86
Rousseau had chosen between uniformity, equality, and freedom—although he cagily used the latter term. “Whoever refuses to pay obedience to the general will,” he wrote, “shall be liable to be compelled to it by the force of the whole body. And this is in effect nothing more than that he may be compelled to be free.”87 This formulation, on the other hand, is not surprising if we remember that Rousseau, entirely in keeping with much of democratic thought, insisted on an a priori consent of every citizen to all laws, including those against which he voted and to which he objected.88 Naturally “the most generally expressed will, the will of the majority [la volonté la plus générale] is most just because the voice of the people is the voice of God.”89 (Nor is this emphasis on majority rule alien to Jefferson.)90
Starting with the individualism of eighteenth-century romanticism, with antiroyalism and the concept of the noble savage (“people born free are now in chains”),91 Rousseau’s programmatic switch from the rule by one to the rule by all paved the way to totalitarianism. The glorified individual in his ideology reappears as a cipher. The foundations of socialism were laid thereby. Naturally the old individualistic man who had grown up in the ancien régime was hardly ideal material for this new society of obedient nonentities ready to be submerged in the mass: Man had to be created anew. “He who dares to legislate to a people,” Rousseau wrote, “has to be capable, so to say, of changing human nature . . . he must transform human nature in order to strengthen it.”92
In a statement like this we can sense that absolute contempt for personality, for the character of individuals as well as of entire nations, that mixture of ignorance and arrogance which is typical of the entire modern left bent upon putting mankind into a strait jacket. A Girondist like Condorcet manifested the same outlook when he wrote, “One law is good for all the nations just as a theorem in geometry is good for all minds.”93 Of course there is in Rousseau not only the sloppy, contradictory thinker, but also the sentimentalist with exhibitionist tendencies and, above all, the visionary, the prophet.94
Ideas have consequences. Jean-Jacques died eleven years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, but the great revolutionary leaders thought and acted in his spirit. His totalitarian attitude is well exemplified by the speech of Saint-Just on October 10, 1793. “You have to punish not only the traitors” he shouted, “but even those who are indifferent: You have to punish whoever behaves in the Republic in a passive spirit and does nothing for her, because ever since the French people has manifested their will, everything outside of the sovereign is an enemy.”95 This is the same man who declared on February 26, 1794: “You wanted a republic . . . what constitutes a republic is the total destruction of everything which places itself in its way.”96 And Maximilien de Robespierre, with a contradictory Roussellian concept of “collective liberty,” stated on February 7, 1794, “The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”97 The same phraseology reappears under the Nazis, who were ideologically nurtured by Fichte, the great defender of the French Revolution.
The French Revolution is still with us in every way. Not only are its ideas everpresent, but there is much in its historic evolution that can teach us—in North America no less than in Europe. Its initial period began with the undermining of traditional values and ideas, coupled with the demand for moderate reforms. With Voltaire a whole series of scoffers, facile critics, and agnostics in the literal sense of the term made their appearance. They subverted religion, convictions, traditions, and the loyalties on which state and society rested. The process of decomposition and putrefaction always starts at the top—in the royal palace, the presidential mansion, among the intellectuals, the aristocracy, the wealthy, the clergy—and then gradually enmeshes the lower social layers. In this process it is interesting to notice how the high and mighty develop a sense of guilt and with it a readiness to abdicate, to yield to expropriation, to submit to the loss of privileges, in other words, to commit suicide politically and economically. For this masochist act, however, they are well prepared by the ideological propaganda coming from their own ranks. In the case of the French Revolution we had in Louis XVI not a representative of either “reaction” or “conservatism” but an avid reader of the Encyclopédic and (not so improbably) perhaps a Freemason. The members of the nobility who took active part in the intellectual or political undermining of the ancien régime and then participated in the Revolution are very numerous; without their support the French Revolution is well-nigh unimaginable. Among its forerunners we encounter Holbach, Grimm, and Madame d’Epernay, and later Mirabeau, Noailles, Malesherbes, Victor Claude de Broglie,98 Clootz, Condorcet, Robespierre, Custine, St. Just, Clermont-Tonnerre, de Séchelles, Boissy d’Anglas, Barras, Collot d’Herbois, Corday d’Armont, Rouget de Lisle, Sade, Lafayette, Lanjuinais, the brothers Lameth, Barère de Vieuzac, and the Due d’Orléans. In compiling such an inventory one is inevitably reminded of the fact that, statistically speaking, the natural death of states and nations as well as of classes and estates, is not murder but suicide. However, this act of suicide is usually preceded by a period of delusions and follies. Quem deus vult perdidi prius dementat.
The first president of the Jacobin Society in 1790 was the Due d’Auguillon, and even the man who, in moderation, spread the Revolution over the map of Europe, Napoleon, came from a noble family. The pioneers of the Revolution also belonged frequently to the clergy. The “philosophizing abbés” could be found everywhere, men such as Sieyès, Raynal, (Bishop) Grégoire, Mably, de St. Pierre and Barthélmy. Voltaire owed his deism to the Abbé de Châteauneuf and not without reason did Rousseau put the summary of his sentimental -deistic philosophy into the mouth of his Vicaire Savoyard. Enlightenment and the Revolution had little to fear from the more intellectual clergy. Voltaire and Diderot both had been educated by the Jesuits (who are by no means the mind molders a certain type of propaganda makes them out to be). And since the totalitarian movements of the last hundred years are in parts or even predominantly Christian heresies if not caricatures of the monastery, it is not so surprising that men and women with a distinctly Christian background fall for them. Neither the clerical state nor seminary training are by any means prophylactics against such deviations. Who could imagine the French Revolution without the participation of clerics and exclerics, Russian Bolshevism without Stalin and Mikoyan, both former seminarians? Nor could one conceive of the earlier leftist currents without Arnaldo di Brescia, Joachim de Floris, John Ball, John Wyclif, or Campanella. Corruptio optimi pessima. We will revert to this theme some time later.
The second lesson to be learned from the French Revolution concerns the danger inherent in reforms that are not carried out by a very firm hand.99 The majority of human beings do not respond to generosity with gratitude and frequently the loosening of reins becomes a signal for general unrest and mutiny.100 The Reformation gave to extremist illiterate groups a feeling that there were no fixed laws, no eternal rules, no set standards, no permanent authority—all this in spite of the fact that the Reformation was by no means a liberal revolution but a rigoristic movement, a spiritual revolt against the rationalism of Rome, in other words, the very reverse of the Enlightenment (which, in turn, was the grandchild of the Renaissance).
Still, the fact that radical changes took place completely upset the inner balance of the masses. Anarchical peasant risings occurred and mad, weird sects made their ubiquitous appearance. Luther strongly invoked the secular arm, and since secular authority had not been shaken by this purely religious evolution, order was preserved and restored. In the French Revolution, however, secular authority was undermined and attacked after religious loyalties had been gravely weakened. Only outside military intervention could help the Old Order, but the energies let loose by the revolutionary volcano were too strong. For twenty years Continental Europe was at the mercy of the French Revolution and its Bonapartist aftermath, with the United States a virtual ally of Napoleon in the War of 1812.
The Kerenskys usually appear on the scene in a time of reform. They take over and pretend to be the originators of all improvements. In fact they not only continue the reforming-liberalizing policy of their “reactionary” forerunners, but soon they lose hold and are defeated by a combination of wild demagogues and frantic mobs. The Lafayettes, Lameths, Mirabeaus, in precisely this fashion, failed to stem the mounting tide of radicalism. As in a Greek tragedy, events had to run their course. The anarchical tyranny of the many had to evolve into the despotism of a single man. Civilian chaos became military order. Skytalismos, the rule of the club, yielded to the rule of the sword. Tyranny “settled down” to becoming a monarchy, as foreseen by Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius. However, the “royalization” of tyranny, unfortunately, is no longer possible. Totalitarian tyrannies no longer evolve because Big Brother cannot become a father. Thus we get endless intrigues, palace revolts, and assassinations. Only total military defeat breaks the evil chain.
We saw that during the years 1789-1815 France was a classic example of political revolution-evolution, but the classic does not always prevail just as diseases do not always follow the pattern laid down in medical textbooks. In history we can never talk prophetically about certainties, only about likelihoods, about lesser or greater possibilities. Nothing is inevitable, yet only a fool would disregard the lessons of history which individuals sometimes learn, but nations (as Hegel remarked) never. There is personal memory and there is personal learning: Collective memory is very problematic and the masses never study. The real historian, however, beyond his task of finding facts, is neither a determinist nor a pure pragmatist. Still, Friedrich Schlegel was right when he called the historian a backward-looking prophet.101
The horrors of the French Revolution were the direct and logical outcome of the philosophy or philosophies underlying it. The atrocities surprised only the British and American observers (as did the nightmarish deeds of Communists and Nazis a century and a half later) because, owing to the relativistic post-Protestant mind of the English-speaking world, extremism and absolutism in thought and deed became “unimaginable.” By the end of the eighteenth century the American and British intellectuals were beginning to veer from deism to agnosticism. The recession of Catholic (and Eastern) religiousness on the Continent, however, did not give way to agnosticism but, rather, to atheism and antitheism. Absolutism in thinking was not replaced with polite doubt, but with other radical and extreme attitudes, with secular faiths of a sentimental or pseudorational character. Anatole France, who was certainly not a convinced Christian nor a hidebound secular dogmatist, once remarked that “only extremes are bearable.”102
This was the same Anatole France who in his novel, Les Dieux ont soif, described the blood orgies of the French Revolution, a revolution that pleased and inspired the budding American left more than 170 years ago. Although the delirious horrors committed by the National Socialists and the international Communists in our century were even worse, the French Revolution, marking the rebirth of democracy after its foundering in antiquity, laid down a pattern of inhumanity which set a lasting example. It can be argued, on the other hand, that the French Revolution, much more even than its Russian counterpart and quite differently from its Nazi imitators, engaged in “unauthorized” tortures and massacres, that it had a truly popular élan, whereas National Socialism, for instance, perpetrated its crimes in a purely bureaucratic and almost always clandestine way. The tortures to which the officers of the Bastille were submitted were carried out by the “dear people” in full daylight. The fiendish dissection of the Princesse de Lamballe and the delirious work of sadists and sex maniacs can be ascribed to “ignoble savages,” to our deified friend, the Common Man. The reader may forgive—or thank—me for not serving him details.103 Still, I would think that the ghoulish procession in which the private parts of this unfortunate woman were carried on a pike through the streets was a fitting symbolic overture to the democratic tragedy which, until our day, became the nightmare of Europe.
Metternich’s reactions to the French Revolution led him to the remark, “When I saw what people did in the name of fraternity, I resolved if I had a brother to call him cousin.”104 And, indeed, the history of the Revolution is a nauseating mixture of idealistic verbiage, of treachery and intrigue, of sentimental incantations and senseless butcheries, of envy and outbursts of sadism. The colonnes infernales of the revolutionary army under General Turreau105 massacred the population of entire villages in the Vendée and eastern Brittany. As during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany and Austria, women and girls of all ages were raped, from three- and four-year-olds to tottering matrons. The republican regional governor, Président Cholet, wrote to Turreau that his soldiers committed horrors of which not even cannibals would be capable.106 Some of the worst cruelties were committed after Le Mans fell into the hands of the Republicans, who murdered all the wounded counterrevolutionaries in the military hospitals. Almost everyone who had not fled was butchered. The women and girls were undressed, raped, slain, and finally placed together with naked male corpses in obscene positions—scenes which General Turreau perhaps failed to notice in his official promenades (as he called them). These slaughters were also designed to reduce the grande armée de bouches inutiles.107 The Noyades in the Loire were nauseating beyond description and had a homosexual character.108
These nightmarish horrors were repeated in Arras, where the guillotine was placed in front of the theater from whose balcony the revolutionary leader Lebon and his dear wife could watch the spectacle. After a very arduous day with a big crop, the executioners amused themselves by imitating the batteries nationales of Le Mans, they denuded the decapitated corpses of both sexes, mixing the macabre with the lascivious. Another time the hangman fastened a ci-devant marquis on the board and then proceeded for ten minutes to read aloud the last issue of the local newspaper. Finally he exhorted the wretched marquis to inform his friends and relatives in the beyond about the victories of the French armies.109 During the September Massacres, which took place in the Paris jails (1792) the butcher-volunteers were paid six francs each and received as much wine as they could drink. But not only the aristos were made to suffer, even the children in the reformatories and temporarily arrested prostitutes in the Bicêtre and La Salpêtrière jails were not spared. There indescribable scenes of bestiality took place. Big butcheries among prostitutes were also organized by the left during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona and by SS units in Eastern Poland—not perhaps out of moral indignation but for “hygienic” reasons. For the genuine materialist there is no fundamental, but only a gradual, an “evolutionary” difference, between man and a pest, a noxious insect.
The revolutionary fervor spared nobody. When Lavoisier, the great mathematician, physicist, and chemist, was accused of counterrevolutionary activities and the tribunal condemned him to death, his lawyer cried out that he was a great scientist. But to a convinced democrat one man is as good as any other, and Coffinhal, the president of the Law Court, replied quite truthfully, “La République n’ a pas besoin de savants.’’110 In spite of the cult of reason, true intellectuality soon became suspect. The envy for titles and honors rapidly evolved into envy for knowledge and it was naturally only a question of time for the strongest form of this vice to appear, envy for material possessions, which played such a potent part in the radical democratic movements in seventeenth-century England.
The Enragés, the left wing of the Montagne, with men such as Roux, Varlet, and Leclére, increased their protest against the inequality of wealth. The equality of civil rights, they insisted, was senseless without financial equality. Hébert spoke in the same way and Saint-Just declared war on the rich. It was Joseph Lebon, the butcher of Arras, who started the methodic warfare against the “rich” in the North: 392 were guillotined in Arras, 149 in Cambrai. In a famous speech before the National Convention Jacques Roux had demanded equal incomes for everybody. Identitarianism wanted to go all the way, and it was only the fall of Robespierre and later the defeat of Gracchus Babeuf, the first modern Communist leader (in 1797) which prevented a further development in this direction. In the course of the French Revolution, however, the inner connection between democratism and socialism again had become clearly visible.
It would be wrong to believe, as “sensible” but badly informed people like to do, that the French Revolution (as any other one) represented the “swinging of the pendulum in the other direction” or the “just reaction to earlier abuse.” In American high schools and colleges such interpretations of history are quite popular and are often given with the best intentions, to provide the students with a story that “makes sense” and at the same time suggests that reason and justice, though not always effective, are forces to be reckoned with in the gradual evolution of mankind. The alternative seems merely an endless enumeration of names, places, and dates, all amounting to the inventory of a madhouse or a vale of tears, the Beyond remaining the only consolation. The average teacher is afraid to tell young people who want to “establish” themselves cosily on this globe that Luther was only too right in calling the world des Teufels Wirtshaus, the “Devil’s Inn.” The deeper meaning of history is theological and he who flees theology can only try to solve the riddles of history by offering banalities of a moralizing nature, such as an optimistic Old Liberalism and Marxism (related to each other in certain ways) have tried to provide. This world, however, is a vale of tears and man, from a purely terrestrial viewpoint, a tragic creature. The trouble is that America and Europe, after a long process of de-Christianization, are no longer capable of assimilating a philosophy of the tragic or a theology of the Cross.111 Besides the facile spiritual-moral explanation of history we have the rationalizations, the abovementioned pendulum theory, the conviction that “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” This theory forgets, however that there can be an enormous fire with little smoke and a tiny fire, maybe only a glow, enveloping a whole area in dark fumes. We shall encounter these phenomena again and again in our study. There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.
If we look at the French Revolution from a social viewpoint we will make the discovery that it took place in a period of general wellbeing and increasing prosperity. External trade had quadrupled since the death of Louis XIV: The value of exchanged goods exceeded a billion francs in 1788, a sum that was reached again only in 1848.112 Not the poorest but the richest regions of France were the most revolutionary, those where the mirage of limitless wealth had driven cupidity to new heights.113 The same phenomenon could be observed in Spain during the Civil War (1936-1939) or in Italy after the last war, when communism was (and is) strongest in areas where equitable social conditions exist and where there are no latifundia: the huerta of Valencia and the Emilia with its rich soil. Another example is the strong Communist or agrarian-Socialist movement in pre-Communist Bulgaria, a country without an upper crust and with only a small middle class, a nation where the factor of envy should hardly have come into play.
In France the relationship between the old nobility and the peasantry ranged from fair to good. (The largely fake nobility of the newly rich,114 however, did not have the demophile-patriarchal qualities of the ancient noblesse de l’épée.) Serfdom survived only in a few remote corners of the extreme East and in the Bourbonnais. Louis XVI himself had eliminated the last vestiges of serfdom on his own domain. About half of the land in France was owned by the peasantry and peasants, as a rule, even though they were proprietors, also rented land from those who had large estates. In addition there were numerous home industries. Yet there were endless minor frictions and troubles about rents, over borders and title deeds: This will not surprise those who know something about French rural mentality.115 There was, of course, no slavery.
Edmund Burke, who had traveled in France fairly widely before the Revolution, gives a good picture of the character of the classes and their mutual relationships.116 He noted that the nobility showed “something more nearly approaching familiarity than is generally practiced with us,”117 toward the lower classes. And he added that the aristocracy had no “manner of power in the cities” and very little in the country. Still, he berated them for their foolish Anglomania which (politically at least) contributed to their downfall. They were morally lax and hesitant to take in the new moneyed class. “All this violent outcry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of art,” he wrote. As to the Catholic hierarchy of France, Burke remarked that they were “liberal and open, with the hearts of gentlemen and men of humour, neither insolent nor servile. They seemed to me a rather superior class.”
It is, however, legitimate to ask whether the French Revolution would have taken place without an ideological preparation in which as we said before, large sectors of the nobility and a not insignificant number of the clergy had an appreciable share. Even when the mask was off and the face of the beast clearly recognizable, some silly priests and stupid friars of the “constitutional” type, as well as formally unfrocked clerics enthusiastically supported the Revolution. It was, in fact, Claude Royer, a pastor from Chalon-sur-Saone and member of the Paris Jacobin Club in the Rue Saint-Honoré, who made the first great appeal for a regime of sheer terror. “Let us stop talking,” he shouted, “yet let our silence be terrible. It should be the signal for combat, putting fear into the hearts of the conspirators and acting as a call to men hesitating to support liberty. . . . Yes, my friends, let us be terrible but save liberty!” Royer repeated this speech before the Convention and demanded that the Levée en Masse and the jailing of all suspects should be decreed. Danton and Robespierre seconded this proposition. Mass arrests were voted immediately and Royer had a pamphlet printed carrying the headline, “Let us make terror the order of the day!”118 One of the shrillest propagandists for the execution of the royal couple was the ex-Capuchin monk Chabot who supported Moras in his bloodcurdling attacks.119 The perversion of basic Christian sentiments comes easily to silly priests who have neglected their spiritual life, and secularizing theology, become real mobmasters, as it now so frequently happens in Latin America.120
Royalist authors later intimated that the “Jacobin Fathers” of the Rue Saint-Honoré (who were Dominicans) were imbued with an antiroyalist spirit from the time of the Ligue, but this is an exaggeration. Still, they actively invited the Jacobins to install themselves in their monastery and they undoubtedly had leftist leanings—unlike the monks of the same order domiciled in the Rue Saint-Jacques.121
The tragedy of the intellectual leftist nobleman is best personified by Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a liberal of somewhat sectarian cast and a pillar of the Enlightenment. In 1750, at the age of 29, he became President of the Cour des Aides of the Paris parlement while his father was made Chancellor (but left all the work to his son). He used his position to promote the Enlightenment and, trying desperately to appear “tolerant,” “progressive,” “broadminded,” he not only gave every imaginable aid to those who undermined the old order but even persecuted opponents of the Enlightenment. This was easy for him because his office entailed the censorship of all printed matter published in France. As one can see, the Holy Illiberal Inquisition in the literary field already worked effectively even in those days. In all these “establishments” of the left, then as now, the pink intellectual, fearing to be out of tune with the times, is not only the most contemptible, but also the most ridiculous creature.
Baron Grimm said without exaggeration that “without the assistance of Malesherbes the Encyclopédic would probably never have been published.”122 Pierre Gaxotte calls him ‘le type achevé du libéral qui a toujours peur de passer pour en réactionnaire.” Elie Fréron, the enemy of Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Marmontel, published a relatively conservative journal, L’Année Littéraire, which was again and again confiscated and in 1758 he was almost jailed for having discussed in his paper a book opposed to the Encyclopédie. Although he was constantly attacked by the men of the Enlightenment, he was actively prevented by Malesherbes from defending himself. In 1752 Malesherbes forbade the publication of a work by Father Julien Louis Geoffroy because it was critical of Diderot. Father Thomolas from Lyons, who had dared to reply to the article Collège123 in the Encyclopédie, was warned not to be impudent. Father Charles Palissot de Montenoy, an Oratorian, was persecuted by Malesherbes and so was the gifted Nicholas Laurent Gilbert who died young. “The philosophers shouted that they were being tyrannized,” Gaxotte remarks, “yet they were the ones who exercised a tyrannical rule over the literary world.”
Malesherbes, we can be sure, finally saw the light, but then it was too late. He returned from Switzerland, where he had been given asylum, in order to defend the King before his judges, and it was his bitter task to tell the monarch that he had been sentenced to death. He then retired to the country but was arrested in December 1793 together with his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchildren. They were all condemned to death and, with the great delicacy that always distinguishes convinced leftists, the executioner had all the family beheaded in the presence of the old man (the grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville) before his turn came (April 23, 1794). Certainly he expiated all his sins. The road leading to the hell of leftist radicalism is not only broad, it is also fast and steep. Under such circumstances the brakes rarely work.
The significance of the French Revolution lies not only in the revival of democracy, and it represented not only the adoption of political patterns prevailing in antiquity and among primitives, but it also gave a new impetus to state worship and to ethnic nationalism. The all-powerful polis-state again made its appearance. In other words, the identitarian drives culminated not only in a frantic demand for equality (which went so far that only Robespierre’s fall prevented the destruction of all steeples and towers),124 but also of ethnic sameness. In the chapter dealing with National Socialism we shall see how much the Nazis owe, directly and indirectly, to the French Revolution and also to what extent “well-meaning,” “moderate,” “enlightened,” and “progressive” leftists had contributed to the rise of the brown scourge. Here, however, we would like to draw the reader’s attention to The Jacobins, Professor Crane Brinton’s excellent book on the radical clubs during the French Revolution. The volume was published in New York in 1930, three years before Hitler came to power. It reads exactly like the work of an author who tries methodically to prove that the Nazis knowingly adopted and imitated the notions, plans, and actions of the Jacobins—who were by no means internationalists.
“When the war went wrong,” Brinton writes about the first defeats inflicted by the Prussian-Austrian alliance, “and the peoples refused to rise, Frenchmen were almost obliged to consider themselves the only virtuous people. The society of Guéret waited nobly until January 1794, and then removed the American and English flags from the tree of liberty. The tricolor flew alone.”125
Yet Professor Brinton argued rightly that, even without a foreign war, the patriote would have evolved from a lover of mankind into a nationalist because equality could not remain an abstraction: It had to find concrete expression. All other qualities were accidental, but Frenchness now became the touchstone of equality.126 All Frenchmen should have a common language and soon the Jacobin clubs began a minor crusade against all other languages—Provençal, Breton, German, Flemish, Basque. The Jacobin Club of Strasbourg even suggested that all Alsatians who refused to learn French be deported and in their stead sans-culottes imported.127 French was la langue républicaine128 and the French people the historically predestined bearer of truth, of a messianic message. Thus we get a hint of the extent to which the French Revolution is not only a forerunner but an ideological stepping-stone to the slow growth of Nazi ideas, which finally found their concrete expression only in our time.
The reader might object that, as far as fanaticism, extremism, and savagery are concerned, the National Socialists far outdid their precursors. In a purely quantitative way this is surely the case. Yet la terreur was far more programmatic with the French Revolution (to which the uncommitted, non-Marxian left always assented the world over) than the system inaugurated by Hitler. It is difficult for outsiders to believe how effectively the truth about systematic murder was kept from the Germans, who certainly knew about the concentration camps and even about the killing of the insane, but not about the extermination camps.129 Schrecklichkeit—terribleness—was used as a means for paralyzing resistance and creating fear—but it was used quite sparingly. Anybody who would have dared to tell openly and publicly the truth about Auschwitz, Tremblinka, Majdanek, and the other horror chambers would have risked his life. Those Jews who were still at liberty did not know what was in store for them. Here and there rumors leaked out, but since they were vague it is understandable that people’s minds shied away from accepting the tales of horror. We were all still too much conditioned by the centuries of Christianity.130
In the French Revolution this was quite different. In spite of the Roussellian fancies, it soon became obvious what a depraved individual the average man can be. One literally danced around the guillotines. Various military and civil commanders openly and officially boasted about their bestial deeds, which in all their nauseating horror were perpetrated above all against the “internal enemy.” Thus General Westermann in his message to the Committee of Public Welfare, after the defeat of the Chouans near Savenay, could declare:
The Vendée, republican fellow citizens, no longer exists. She is dead under our sabres, together with her women and children. I have just buried her in the swamps and forests of Savenay. Following the orders you gave me, I have trampled the children to death with our horses, I have massacred the women, and they are no longer going to give birth to any more brigands. I am not guilty of taking a single prisoner, I have exterminated them all. . . . The roads are covered with corpses. There are so many of them at several places they form pyramids. The firing squads work incessantly at Savenay since every moment brigands arrive who pretend that they will surrender as prisoners . . . but we are not taking any. One would be forced to feed them with the bread of liberty, but compassion is not a revolutionary virtue.131
The unspeakable Westermann, an Alsatian, belonged to the faction around Danton. He was later arrested and guillotined on April 5, 1794. But his spirit continues to live. An official report reaching Paris from Avranches said, “The Hospital was also filled with wounded and they too were subjected to the national vengeance. They have been finished off.” Among them was a woman who “simulated a disease.” Doctor Gainou, a friend of Robespierre, wrote him from Fougères that “the soldiers have killed all the wounded and the sick in the hospital. Several wives of brigands were there in a state of illness. They were raped and their throats cut.” Marceau-Desgraviers, a real soldier who participated in the war against the Vendée, was tormented for the rest of his life—he was killed in action in 1796—by nightmares about the horrors perpetrated by this renascent democracy. At Le Mans he had rescued a royalist girl and thereupon barely escaped the guillotine. Meanwhile the commissioner of Angers wrote triumphantly to the mayor of Paris, “Our Holy Mother Guillotine is working full time. . . .” And it was in Angers that the Republicans issued an order to have the heads of the “brigands” (the Chouans) scalped and dissected and then exposed on small pikes on the ramparts of the city. The doctors who had to do this appetizing job, however, were too slow. Since the Republicans needed quick demonstrations of democratic fervor, they guillotined whatever civilian prisoners they had, among them the 82-year old Abbess of Fontevault. She was blind but, as the chronicler tells us, “pleine de vertus et de charité.”132
One ought to read not only the reports by the minions of the victorious Revolution on this war, but also the accounts of other eyewitnesses. There are the descriptions of the Le Mans massacre, where Bourbotte and Prieux watched not only the raping of naked women and girls whose throats were subsequently slit, but the raping of corpses—real orgies of necrophilia. Beauvais, writing about the event after the retreat from Fougères, relates that “all the wounded in the hospital were massacred in the most fiendish way. Incisions were made on their footsoles and all their members without exception were cut off bit by bit. The women were treated in exactly the same way until, finally, cartridges were inserted in their private parts in order to terminate their lives and their sufferings with an explosion.”133 Tortures of this sort were also perpetrated by the admirable Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, but instead of hospitals they selected churches for their expressions of sexual democracy.
Mass murder had become the order of the day. If the Nazis succeeded in slaughtering millions, thanks to the development of technology, the French revolutionaries were prevented from doing just that only because they did not have the means. They certainly tried very hard. The chemical engineer Fourcroy invented a poison gas which, however, did not prove really effective. He had acted on the command of Robespierre, Collot d’Herbois, Barère, and Fouché. Carrier then proposed to poison the rivers and lakes with arsenic. What Renan later called the “zoological wars” had already begun.134
The spirit of the Marseillaise was already Nazi and racist: “To arms, citizens, form your battalions, let us march, march, so that impure blood will drench our furrows.” A clever inversion of the blood-soil complex, Blut und Boden, seems to be contained in these lines.