TO QUELL THE TERROR by William Bush

Author:William Bush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ICS Publications

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REGARDLESS OF WHEN Madame Lidoine’s carol was first sung, it sprang from the same source as their act of consecration. It was Mother Teresa of St. Augustine’s spiritual reaction as a consecrated Christian woman to the chaos into which France had been plunged since the night of August 10, 1792, when the king and royal family had fled to the National Assembly, seeking protection from the mob storming the Tuileries Palace. The National Assembly, instead of receiving them as the endangered First Family of France’s much-touted constitutional monarchy, locked them up in the Temple.

Three weeks later the September massacres announced the unchaining of those dark, malevolent forces at work in France since the beginning of the Revolution. The definitive expulsion of all religious from convents and monasteries immediately followed.

These dark forces launched by the September massacres were even more blatantly evident by the end of 1792. By the spring of 1793, they had proven powerful enough to reshape official French justice with a heretofore unknown creation: the Revolutionary Tribunal. This Tribunal, under the cloak of legality provided by its creation, gave the revolutionary government complete freedom to perpetrate a reign of terror through indiscriminate mass executions.

The Revolutionary Tribunal was in fact the brainchild of Georges Jacques Danton, the thirty-four-year-old Minister of Justice. Though he had sanctioned the September massacres, he was sensitive to the political damage done to revolutionary France by foreign criticism of such freelance slaughter. An official, legal structure must therefore be created to allow for continuing the terrorism of mass executions, thus ensuring the Revolution’s success through ever-greater audacity. What Danton did not foresee, however, was that he himself would be ensnared by his own audacious creation. A scarce year later, on April 5, 1794, he became the Revolutionary Tribunal’s most notable nonroyal victim.

The terrorism Danton favored proved as insensitive to the dead as to the living. It was as if everything human, dead or alive, had to feel the impact of the new order’s fanatical championing of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Long before 1793, with its desecration of the tombs in the royal basilica at Saint-Denis, and even prior to the storming of the Bastille, profanation of the dead had become a mark of the revolutionary spirit abroad. The macabre orgy of profanation and pillage at Saint-Denis in October of 1793 did not spare even the chaste remains of Madame Louise of France. Expressly sought out in the cemetery of Saint-Denis’s Carmel at the end of that ghoulish operation, they were disinterred and pitched into the common pit with the rest of France’s “most Christian” royal house, to be covered with quicklime. Christianity’s power to transcend birth and royal station was meaningless to the inflamed patriots.

Profanation of the dead in revolutionary France went beyond the mere parading of human heads. As we have seen, it included the mutilation of bodies and, on occasion, even cannibalism. The bloodbath of the September massacres thus only provided a disordered foretaste of the legalized mass shedding of blood ordered by the Revolutionary Tribunal.

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