The French people were convulsed by violence on 14 July 1789 and during the years following.  Perhaps the worst came in 1792 in what are called the September massacres.  Panic seized the people and they held mock trials to massacre hordes of people in the jails.  There was a display of mad violence and slaughter that would have amazed and terrified a Zulu or Hottentot.

In a book called Events in France 1789 to 1794, I said:

The fear of enemies, within and without, preyed on Hébert and Marat and others.  The sense that the patrie really was en dangère – which puts at risk the heads of those found on the wrong side – led to the ghastly eruptions known as the September Massacres.    ‘Let the blood of the traitors flow.  That is the only way to save the country’, croaked Marat.  People in prisons were seen to be enemies of the people, no matter what their crime had been.  The fear was that they would be liberated by any army that reached Paris.  At various prisons men broke in to slaughter the inmates.  From about a thousand to fifteen hundred people, mainly ordinary criminals, were killed. 

It was common to set up a cruel mockery of a hearing where the suspect could be examined while listening to his or her predecessor being slaughtered behind the door.  One survivor of the Abbaye recalled that they used to watch the butchery so as to try to learn how to die with the least pain when their turn came.  ‘Man after man is cut down; the sabres need sharpening; the killers refresh themselves from wine-jugs.  Onward and onward is the butchery; the loud yells wearying into base growls.  A sombre-faced, shifting multitude looks on; in dull approval; in dull approval or dull disapproval; in dull recognition that it is a Necessity.’

Danton, the Minister for Justice, does nothing to stop what might be called the first terror. What can we now say or do except to reflect: ‘Of such stuff are we all made; on such powder-mines of bottomless guilt and criminality – if God restrain not as is well said – does the purest of us walk’?

The September massacres of 1792 are not just a case of inmates of gaols being no worse than their gaolers, or what might happen when power is given to those who are least to be trusted with power. Nor is it just a case of venomous force of envy and the cruelty of the revenge of the dispossessed. Nor is it just a case of the danger of rule by the people – it is a case of the danger of rule by people.  The mainstay of the rule of law is that we are ruled by laws, not men and women. The September Massacres are the jurists’ final nightmare – lynch mobs licensed by a failed state.

I shall come back to the horror of the French nightmare, but here is a comment on the massacres by the great Dutch historian Professor Pieter Geyl, in a paper written in 1954 about the famous French historian, Jules Michelet.  (It is in Debates with Historians that I have referred to before – a book of great beauty and learning.)

The worst, however, was that the event had demonstrated the impotence of the Convention.  To me the way in which that assembly allowed itself to be tyrannized over by the Paris Commune (in which the lowest elements now had the upper hand, as Michelet admits) seems an undeniable proof of moral cowardice, dishonouring the revolution.

In my book referred to above, I said:

The events that occurred in France between 1789 and 1794 are commonly put under a heading or label of ‘the French Revolution’.  There was of course no such thing.  A lot happened in France during those years – and there is no agreement on the relevant span of years.  Some people stop applying the label in 1794; some when Napoleon became Emperor in 1804; some when Europe was finally rid of him in 1815.  There is no doubt that one form of government in France had been removed by violence – by definition, a revolution had occurred.  But if the process of revolution continues until a new form of government is installed that is as stable as the last, then you will get a whole range of answers.

That conclusion seems to me to be inevitable.  And you can say the same about the references to ‘the people’.  Whole libraries have been filled with arguments about what kind of person, or class of people, did what to whom in what is called the French Revolution.  It follows that a reference to what ‘the people’ did in ‘the Revolution’ will be at best sloppy.  To English philosophers in 1954, any such statement would be nonsensical.

But Michelet gloried in both.  While things were going well.  But when it comes to the September massacres, it is not ‘the people,’ but ‘three or four hundred drunks.’  Or those ratbags in England and Pitt’s gold.  ‘The French people and the Revolution were guiltless.’ 

That is a fair summation by Geyl, but you will see from his reference to ‘dishonouring the revolution’ that he is caught in the same snare.  How do you dishonour a process?  And while some celebrated the revolt, others, such as Marie Antoinette, did not.  Whose side would you be on?  And if history is written by the winners, who won?  Looked at, say, from the scene of the bloodbath at Waterloo in 1815 – or the succession of bloodbaths that disfigured France throughout the nineteenth century, and which led to disasters like Sedan and Dreyfus – and Pétain?

Michelet gloried in ‘the people’, but for Geyl, Michelet shows in his ‘sentimentality about the bloody maniacs of 1793/4, moved by the new revelation of eternal truths, but also by hatred and fear, something positively repulsive’.  Geyl then goes on to refer to ‘national self-conceit’ and the Jacobins ‘and the crushing self-confidence with which, no doubt against the large majority of the French people, they upheld the General Will.’ 

Then: ‘Can the use of that term the people in the interests of a minority dictatorship more patently betray itself for the juggling trick it is?’  He later refers to ‘necessity the tyrant’s plea’ and the statement of Michelet that France undertook for the rest of the world the war ‘which between 1792 and 1815 cost her ten millions of her children’.  Geyl coolly remarks that in saying that, Michelet ‘credits the account of France with the wars of Napoleon, in whom he saw a despot, but who is nevertheless supposed to have fought for the liberties of mankind.  Indeed, he cannot at any time mention Waterloo without the bitterest resentment.’

Here was the historian who, Geyl says, referred to the Church as ‘the wily seducer of the stupid crowd’.

I feel impelled to ask whether in order to enjoy ‘moral freedom’, one should not be on one’s guard against making a fetish of unity; ought not conceited chauvinism to be regarded as a snare; and taking a more general view, should not one disdain to spare one’s illusions the touch of rational criticism?

This is wonderful analysis and writing.  And it matters on at least three grounds.

First, we may look like Hottentots dancing around the rim of a live volcano that may at any time claim us.  Carlyle – I will not say how often I have read his account – saw all this.

One other thing, or rather two other things, we will still mention, and no more:  the blond perukes; the Tannery at Meudon.  Great talkers of these Perruques Blondes: O reader, they are made from the Heads of Guillotined Women; the locks of a Duchess, in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a cordwainer, her blonde German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald.  Or they may be work affectionately, as relics, rendering one suspect?  Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather cannibal sort.  ….  Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; … ‘There was a tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotine as seem worthy flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made; for bleaches and other uses.  The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality of shamoy; that of the women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture …’  Alas, then, is man’s civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature in him can still burst, infernal as ever?  Nature still makes him: and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.

All that was beyond Michelet – and is now ignored by most of France.  Only the numbers would have surprised Carlyle, or Geyl, a sometime prisoner of the Nazis, about Auschwitz.

Secondly, the west is experiencing a pestilence of politicians claiming to speak for ‘the people’   The politest term for them is charlatan or mountebank, and one thing we do learn from history is that in the violence of a revolution, scum rises to the surface.

Thirdly, the moral outrage expressed by Geyl, especially at ‘moral cowardice’, is a reminder that we should call things for what they are – not least at the moral cowardice shown by those one-time pillars of the Washington community in failing to do their duty in curtailing a common criminal and sometime dictator who preposterously claims to stand for ‘the people’.

Why do they fail?  They are scared, and they are ‘tyrannised over’ by a false leader and his henchman.  Even Michelet asked if the Convention was ‘an assembly of cowards’. 

If Michelet could ask that of the French, the good people of the United States can ask it of themselves.

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.