The Story of the Jews, Volume 2 by Simon Schama

The Story of the Jews, Volume 2 by Simon Schama

Author:Simon Schama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-09-14T16:00:00+00:00


III. The Democracy of Death

The revolution gave and the revolution took away. Total immersion in the new world of citizens and unprotected exposure to its politics carried risks as well as opportunities. It was not a good sign when, in the midst of disestablishing the old Catholic Church in 1791, the revolutionary council in Bordeaux decided to close all churchyards. Henceforth there would be no separate burial places for Protestants, Catholics or Jews. All would share a common resting place. There would be a democracy of death. So the cemetery which Jacob Rodrigues Péreire had succeeded in acquiring for the Jews of his community just outside the city was shut down.

Nor did it help that the most prominent champions of the Jewish cause themselves came to grief as the revolution, under pressure from the threat and then the reality of foreign invasion, became swiftly more radical. Mirabeau, Duport and Clermont-Tonnerre were all compromised by their support for the monarchy, especially after Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had tried to flee France and put themselves under the protection of the queen’s brother, the Austrian emperor Leopold. Suspected of having a hand in the attempted flight or other plots to restore royal powers, many of their circle were arrested or themselves took flight. The fact that most of them had been aristocrats now cast an extra shadow of suspicion over their political transparency and integrity. Duport found himself in prison and would have faced the guillotine but for personal connections among the Jacobins which got him out long enough for an escape over the Swiss border. Mirabeau died before facing the consequences of his double-dealing with the court. On 10 August 1792 a violent insurrection in Paris, reinforced by armed National Guards from the provinces, singing the new anthem of inspirational fury, the ‘Marseillaise’ (actually composed in Cerf Berr’s Strasbourg), invaded the Tuileries where the ‘constitutional monarch’ was housed, killed his Swiss Guards and declared the monarchy at an end. Anyone associated with the politics of the monarchy was now fair game. The orator of emancipation, the ci-devant comte, now citizen, Clermont-Tonnerre, was one of them. Recognised, he was pursued by a howling crowd all the way to his house. The doors were smashed in. Up the grand staircase they clambered and into the first-floor library where they took him amid his books, pulled open one of the elegant windows and heaved Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre out, where he died after smashing his head on the cobblestones below.

French Jews, except those who lived in or who had removed themselves to Paris, were borderland people which meant, as war broke out on the eastern and (from January 1793) the Spanish frontiers, they could be both useful to the embattled patrie and suspected by it. Horses, animal fodder like hay and oats, and the shipment of grain were the stock-in-trade of many Jews in Alsace and Lorraine, so it was often to the Jews that the armies turned for these vital supplies. Sons of Cerf Berr



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