American Revolution

Moral Cowardice

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.

Paris and Terror VI – Terror in History

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Terror, as we saw, has a long history in the Holy Land – I refer back to the first post in this series.

Terror has featured in the history of Israel since before that nation was born. Terror was an essential part of the process of the birth of Israel. Evelyn Waugh spoke of the British successors to Allenby ‘decamping before a little band of gunmen.’ This led Paul Johnson to refer in his History of the Jews to ‘yet another contribution to the shape of the modern world: the scientific use of terror to break the will of liberal rulers. It was to become a commonplace over the next forty years’ – the book was published in 1987 ‘but in 1945 it was new. It might be called a by-product of the Holocaust, for no lesser phenomenon could have driven even desperate Jews to use it. Its most accomplished practitioner was Menachem Begin.’

Begin came from a Polish town where only ten out of 30,000 were not murdered. Names like the Irgun and Stern Gang were associated with religious fanatics who became serial murderers. ‘It was my faith against his faith.’ The celebrated bombing of the King David Hotel killed twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, and seventeen Jews. Was that rate of slippage acceptable? A sixteen year old school-girl gave a warning as part of the plan. Begin mourned the Jewish casualties alone. Begin later saw that two British sergeants were hanged and that their bodies were mined.

The massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948 was greeted by Begin as ‘this splendid act of conquest…..As at Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou hast chosen us for conquest.’ That is a piece of the book of Joshua and some see it as ‘relevant to the moral credentials of the Jewish state’. More than half a million Arab inhabitants fled Israel. Begin later became Prime Minister, but the Arabs, inside Israel or not, do not see any difference in the policy or practice of various governments, which they see as a policy of merciless expansion at their expense. Religious leaders on each side assure their followers that God is with them. The little area of Jerusalem might be the most accursed on earth.

It was the same with the war of independence that led to the creation of the republic which is the prime protector of Israel – and as the Arabs see it, the prime cause of the prolongation of their agony. The rebels in America who rebelled against their king were liable to be hanged for treason. Appalling atrocities were committed on both sides – as happened when an invading trained army meets guerillas defending their own soil. To see what their troops would meet in Vietnam or Afghanistan, American generals needed only to look at what happened to the British Army around Valley Forge and elsewhere. We are now familiar with the transition from terrorist to freedom fighter to liberator to national hero and founder of the nation – but you have to win. And in the meantime, as one American rebel said, you stick together, or hang separately

The second President of the US, John Adams, was severe early on about what to do with the oppressors: ‘This [the Tea Party] is but an attack on property. Another similar exertion of popular power may produce the destruction of lives. Many persons wish that as many dead carcasses were floating in the harbour as there are chests of tea. A much less number of lives however would remove the causes of all our calamities.’

When the war started, the American colonists felt that they were fighting on the moral high ground, a position that they have never surrendered. Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists. There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’ Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides’ (like Vietnam). But for the intervention of the French, this civil war – guerilla war may have gone on for years and degenerated into what would happen in Latin America with ‘Caesarism, military rule, army mutinies and revolts, and every kind of cruelty’ (like the Roman Empire).

The mention by Churchill of the atrocities in Ireland is interesting because until recently Britain was haunted by the spectre of Ireland and terrorism. Those crimes in turn ultimately derived from outrages committed by the English in Ireland over more than six hundred years. The ethnic cleansing effected by Cromwell at Drogheda and elsewhere was done in the name of God and against a native people that the English saw as racially inferior. Racism in religion is a potent driver of terrorism.

As for France, the use of the word terrorist still takes colour from the Terror that was invoked in self-defence by the young republic. Before the government instituted its own regime with the guillotine and the Law of Suspects, the people – the masses for some – had taken matters into their own hands by massacring suspected enemies like priests in the infamous prison massacres in 1792 remembered as the September Massacres. ‘Let the blood of the traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country’, croaked Marat. 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 and 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.’

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.

France would be convulsed by uprising and terror time and again in the nineteenth century. In 1848, a revolution ended in a bloodbath that disgraces Western civilisation. That very great writer Gustave Flaubert left us an amazing picture of hell on earth that must test our endurance. ‘Nine hundred men were there, crowded together in filth, pell-mell, black with powder and clotted blood, shivering in fever and shouting in frenzy. Those who died were left to lie with the others. Now and then, at the sudden noise of a gun, they thought they were all on the point of being shot, and then flung themselves against the walls, afterwards falling back into their former places. They were so stupefied with suffering that they seemed to be living in a nightmare….Because of a fear of epidemics a commission of inquiry had been appointed. On the first steps, its president flung himself back, appalled by the odour of excrement and corpses. When the prisoners approached a ventilator, the National Guards on sentry duty stuck their bayonets, haphazard, into the crowd to prevent them loosening the bars. The National Guards were in general pitiless. Those who had not been in the fighting wanted to distinguish themselves now, but all was really the reaction of fear. They were avenging themselves for the journals, the clubs, the doctrines, for everything that had provoked them beyond measure for the last three months; and despite their victory, equality (as if for the punishment of its defenders and mockery of its enemies) was triumphantly revealed – an equality of brute beasts on the same level of blood-stained depravity; for the fanaticism of vested interests was on a level with the madness of the needy, the aristocracy exhibited the fury of the basest mob, and the cotton night-cap was no less hideous than the bonnet rouge. The public mind became disordered as after a great natural catastrophe, and men of intelligence were idiots for the rest of their lives.’

After the Paris commune of 1870 – the event that leads to the word Communism – about 20,000 communards were slaughtered. Emile Zola said: ‘The slaughter was atrocious. Our soldiers…meted out implacable justice in the streets. Any man caught with a weapon in his hand was shot. So corpses lay scattered everywhere, thrown into corners, decomposing with astonishing rapidity, which was doubtless due to the drunken state of these men when they were hit. For six days Paris has been nothing but a huge cemetery.’

So, violence, uprisings, and terror are part of the fabric of history of the West, and not just the Third World or failed states. The most august components of what we know as the West have had their share of terrorists. And that is without going to the Christian church – to, say, the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or the brutal murder and repression of natives in every land that western nations brought within their empires.

It will be adequate to refer to some well-known passage of Edward Gibbon on the crusades.

The cold philosophy of modern times is incapable of feeling the impression that was made on a sinful and fanatic world. At the voice of their pastor, the robber, the incendiary, the homicide, arose by thousands to redeem their souls by repeating on the infidels the same deeds which they had exercised against their Christian brethren; and the terms of atonement were eagerly embraced by offenders of every rank and denomination. None were pure; none were exempt from the guilt and penalty of sin; and those who were the least amenable to the justice of God were the best entitled to the temporal and eternal recompense of their pious courage. If they fell, the spirit of the Latin clergy did not hesitate to adorn their tomb with the crown of martyrdom; and should they survive, they could expect without impatience the delay and increase of their heavenly reward.

Gibbon then goes on to describe the beginning of the first Crusade.

Some counts and gentlemen, at the head of three thousand horse, attended the motions of the multitude to partake in the spoil, but their genuine leaders (may we credit such folly?) were a goose and a goat, who were carried in the front, and to whom these worthy Christians ascribed an infusion of the divine spirit. Of these, and of other bands of enthusiasts, the first and most easy warfare was against the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were numerous and rich, and they enjoyed under the protection of the Emperor and the Bishops the free exercise of their religion. At Verdun, Trèves, Metz, Spires, Worms many thousands of that unhappy people were pillaged and massacred, nor had they felt a more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian …. The more obstinate Jews exposed their fanaticism to the fanaticism of the Christians, barricadoed their houses, and precipitating themselves, their families and their wealth into the rivers of the flames, disappointed the malice, or at least the avarice, of their implacable foes.

Gibbon next savages the institution of knighthood and then goes on to describe the taking of the Holy City, Jerusalem.

A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries [Tancred’s] to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify their implacable rage: they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease. After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare. …. The Holy Sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow. Bare-headed and bare foot, with contrite hearts and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world; and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption. This union of the fiercest and most tender passions has been variously considered by two philosophers: by the one, as easy and natural; by the other, as absurd and critical.

Yes, the murderers of Muslems were offered the crown of martyrdom and an increase in heavenly reward, but does any of this tale of cruelty and misery have any meaning for terrorism being inflicted in the name of Islam now?