A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla Page B

constitutional monarchy on the English model admired by philosophes like Voltaire and Montesquieu. At every critical moment, however, the revolution seemed to grow more violent and more radical. The freshly severed head of the commandant of the Bastille, bobbing on a pike high above the crowd that carried it triumphantly through the streets of Paris, inaugurated a gory ritual of blood lust—butchery only sanitized by the ruthless efficiency of an ingenious mechanical device invented by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. 19
    Two days after the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI donned a simple morning coat and left Versailles for Paris in a plain coach drawn by eight black horses. The marquis de Lafayette and the National Guard, awash with red, white, and blue cockades, greeted the king at the edge of the city and escorted him to the Hotel de Ville, where Louis XVI spoke a few inaudible words of conciliation, accepted a tricolor cockade from the mayor, and pinned it to his hat. Throngs shouted
“Vive le roi”
and
“Vive la nation”
at the auspicious ceremony, and many who were present honestlyhoped for constitutional reform and the rights of man and citizens. The revolution, however, marched to the cadence of a more violent crowd, hearkening to legislators who believed they must “destroy everything; yes, destroy everything; then everything is to be recreated.” The revolution spoke of constitutional reform, the rights of man and citizen, and ideals of equality and fraternity, but it followed the crowds who carried bloody heads on pikes, cheered each time the blade of the guillotine fell, and sang “Ca Ira”:
    Lafayette says, “Let he who will, follow me!”
And patriotism will respond,
Without fear of fire or flame.
The French will always conquer,
We will win, we will win, we will win….
Let’s string up the aristocrats on the lampposts!
We will win, we will win, we will win….
And we will no longer have nobles or priests,
We will win, we will win, we will win.
Equality will reign throughout the world….
We will win, we will win, we will win.
    As the marquis de Ferrieres feared it would, the French Revolution offered “a banner of blood … to all parts of Europe.” 20
    Few events in modern history unleashed as many strong passions as the French Revolution. “Considering that we are divided from [France] but by a slender dyke of about twenty-four miles,” the British statesman Edmund Burke (an admirer of the American Revolution a decade earlier) gave thanks in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(November 1790) that his countrymen were “not the converts of Rousseau” and “not the disciples of Voltaire,” and especially that “atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.” Safe on the far side of the Atlantic, Americans from Maine to Georgia were initially united in joy at the creation of a sister republic—happy for the citizens of France who had sent them Lafayette, the king’s legions, and a fleet to help win American independence. 21
    Then came shocking news of the execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, and the mad efficiency of Dr. Guillotin’s invention in the hands of Maximilien de Robespierre and the Jacobin party. Forty thousand people were executed during their Reign of Terror, when Robespierreheaded the bloodthirsty Committee of Public Safety from April 1793 through July 1794. Whether the crime was treason, petty theft, or insufficient enthusiasm for Jacobin opinions, practice made perfect. In October 1793 Paris executioners beheaded twenty-two Girondin leaders (former allies of the Jacobin party) in thirty-six minutes. Two months later, executioners in Lyon lopped off thirty-two heads in twenty-five minutes. A week after that residents of rue Lafont complained that blood from the scaffold at Place des Terreaux, where the executioners dispatched twelve heads in five minutes, was flooding the drainage ditches near their homes. 22
    After 1793 the French Revolution