One of my sons was eagerly looking forward to the Olympics and asked if we could watch the opening ceremony together. We cut the Sky cord about 10 years ago, but they do have a reasonable package for the Olympics which I was thinking about getting anyway. So my son’s request was the tipping point for that and on Saturday we got up at 5:30 AM to watch the great event.
I don’t think we watched the Tokyo opening ceremony so this was his first one. I warned him at the outset not to expect any kind of succinct and exciting spectacle. This was going to be something like five hours long and, if he wanted, we could watch a movie instead. The English Patient or Lawrence of Arabia might have been a lesser slog.
Obviously maintaining focus for the duration was always going to be a hard ask. By the time countries starting with the letter “E” were making their way down the Seine people were drifting in and out of the lounge. We didn’t watch the ceremony so much as catch glimpses of the event as we went about our morning.
Some segments we missed altogether. This included the burlesque rendition of the Last Supper which has annoyed lots of people. If the whole thing was as jam packed with Drag Queens as people claim all I can see is we must have been brushing our teeth when that happened.
We did see the singing head of Marie Antoinette (detached from her body). I have to confess being a bit shocked by that in the moment. Just because it took me by surprise given my expectations for something much more sanitised.
That just goes to show how much French Revolution is still vividly mythologised within the national imagination of that country. If the small sample of French people I know is anything to go by, they proud of their revolution, viewing it as a seminal event that laid important foundations for human rights. It’s their founding legend.
There is no reason for the rest of us to buy into this, of course. The French Revolution was a disaster that was in many ways a precursor to some of the most terrible events in modern history. It set a precedent for political purges and mass executions that would be mirrored in future revolutions and totalitarian regimes. The Reign of Terror saw thousands sent to the guillotine in a wave of paranoia and violence.
The chaos and upheaval that followed destabilised France. This lead eventually to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and further conflicts across Europe. An entire generation was lost to constant warfare and economic turmoil.
In this great tragedy, Marie Antoinette was far from the villain. The manner of her vilification and unhappy fate ought to make you deeply uncomfortable. Despite being portayed as an out-of-touch and extravagant queen, she was the victim of misogyny and xenophobia.
Marie Antoinette was an Austrian princess. Her marriage to Louis XVI was - as all royal marriages were - intended to solidify alliances. This was not something she had much say in but her foreign birth made her a target for discontent among French radicals. The press of the time - the newly heralded “fourth estate” - exploited this by painting her as an enemy of the people. She was often depicted in cartoons and pamphlets as a spendthrift and seductress, often in very lurid terms.
“Let them eat cake” is one such example. There is no historical evidence that Marie Antoinette ever uttered these words. Her actual words and actions often reflected concern for the poor, but these were overshadowed by the powerful and malicious propaganda against her.
Her trial was a travesty of justice without any genuine legal basis. The charges against her included high treason and a baseless and horrifying accusation of incest with her own son. The outcome was predetermined; of course, and she was sentenced to death in a spectacle that underscored the bloodlust the Revolution had quickly descended into.
This is one famous example of what was unleashed in France, but hardly the only or most horrifying one.
At Nantes, where thousands of people, including priests, women and children, were loaded onto barges and deliberately sunk in the Loire River. These mass executions were intended to suppress counter-revolutionary sentiment and eliminate perceived enemies of the new regime. Thousands of people were put to death over the course of a few months in what was called “the national bathtub”.
When the government tried to impose conscription in the Vendée, a region in western France, while also attacking the church, the people rose in opposition to the revolutionaries. The response from Paris was swift and brutal. General Louis Marie Turreau’s raised 12 army columns to the region with the express purpose of “to burn everything, to leave nothing but what is essential to establish the necessary quarters for exterminating the rebels.”
Entire villages were razed, and the population faced mass slaughter. The violence was shocking and indiscriminate, targeting not just combatants but civilians as well. Eyewitness accounts and historical records detail the horrific scenes of massacres and pillaging. Communities were systematically destroyed, livestock slaughtered, and crops burned. The aim was to leave nothing that could sustain the Vendean population, ensuring that rebellion would not rise again from the ashes.
Reports from the time speak of rivers running red with blood and fields littered with the dead.
There is an ongoing controversy about whether the “pacification” of the region can be called a genocide or not. What cannot be denied is that the actions taken by Turreau and his forces resulted in widespread devastation and immense loss of life and that the objective was not merely to defeat the insurgents but to annihilate any opposition to the revolution.
There were the prison massacres of 1792. In early September of that year, with Paris gripped by fear of counter-revolutionary conspiracies and the threat of foreign invasion, the Revolution took a more radical turn. Mobs stormed the city’s prisons, driven by the belief that the inmates would rise against the revolution if given the chance.
Over several days, more than a thousand prisoners - fully half the prison population - were brutally murdered. The violence was, again, indiscriminate, with victims including political prisoners, clergy, nobles and common criminals. Makeshift tribunals were set up, but many prisoners were simply killed in their cells or in the streets. This orgy of violence so close to home shocked even those within the revolutionary government.
But to claim that these were isolated incidents that do not reflect on the Revolution as a whole would be very wrong. None of these events were anomalies but integral parts of the revolutionary period. They were driven by the same ideological fervour and spirit that characterised the Revolution itself. Extreme violence was a tool consistently used by French revolutionary leaders and was praised by those who simultaneously espoused liberty, equality and fraternity.
All of this prefigured many of the catastrophic events that later plagued the 20th century. Never before had human society encountered this absolute politicisation of personal and moral issues, which laid the groundwork for the rise of totalitarian regimes. The revolutionary belief that the state could solve all human misfortunes fostered a dangerous precedent for unchecked governmental power on a pretext of ideological purity that gave us the horrors of Stalin and Mao.
It is here that we see the introduction of the notion of the state as the final arbiter of public morality. The power of show trials and purges to eliminate political dissidents became clear in revolutionary France. This set the stage for the Kangaroo courts of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and so many others.
The Revolution’s elimination of traditional social structures was also noted and aped by later authoritarian states. The systematic dismantling of intermediary institutions, such as the church and local councils, left individuals isolated and entirely at the mercy of the state. This atomisation of society, where individuals were stripped of their natural social bonds, set the template for later regimes to exert total control over the population.
Lastly, and most perhaps most insidiously, the French Revolution showed how zeal for doctrines of universal rights can spur violent radicalism. Extreme sanctimony gives justification of extreme measures for the greater good. Much evil was done for the sake of virtue in France, on an assumption of perfectibility of humankind through political action.
The use of terror to inspire virtue was an idea that underpinned repression and mass violence for centuries to come. From the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge, the 20th century’s most brutal regimes were all inspired directly or indirectly by the spirit of 1789.
The best defence of the Revolution is the untenable nature of what came before it. The violence and chaos were not inevitable, however, and there was never a binary choice between revolutionary terror and absolute monarchy. The trajectory of events was shaped by a series of steps that deliberately veered away from more moderate path of reform. Constitutional monarchists and moderate republicans offered visions of a new path forward for France under the rule of law.
These more tempered approaches were unacceptable to the radicals setting the agenda, however. Moderation was equated with treason and was taken as an invitation for violence in the name of ideological purity.
Which is why, following a show trial, the queen was beheaded and flung into an unmarked grave. It is why her young son died in prison, at the age of ten, under appalling conditions. It is why her daughter was held hostage in solitude for years before, finally, family abroad could negotiate for her release into their care.
And it is why these events were celebrated at the Olympics. The singing head of Marie Antoinette reminds us how violence and hate is so easily contextualised by claims of lofty ideals. Another warning, if we ever needed one, of the glamour of evil.
Great exposition of the pattern set by the reign of terror and how it informed the upheavals that followed in the 20th century. Like many NZers of my generation (b1947) my knowledge of the French revolution is relatively superficial and stops at what happened in and around Paris and the call to arms of liberty, equality and brotherhood - I can even still sing the Marseillaise we had to learn in 4th form French. I had no idea of what happened in other parts of France.
It's like a bucket of cold water to be reminded of the many forms of tyranny that result from blind adherence to a set of principles that seemed to promise much but when driven by blind ideological fervour that the state is the ultimate arbiter of public morality etc disaster is not far down the track. After all, we're seeing the beginnings of this here, with the takeover of our public service, academic and educational institutions and legal system by those whose catch-cry of diversity, equality and inclusion has weird echos of liberty, equality and fraternity. This social justice agenda is being pursued with as much fervour as any Parisian mob storming the bastille.
Perhaps it's not surprising that some of the main architects of Critical Theory were French!