I’m listening to a podcast, “The Rest is History,” walking through one of the periods of history that repel me most strongly: the Reign of Terror.
Listening to the downfall of so many of those involved, I find I have no sympathy for the concept of royalty but quite a bit of empathy for the royals themselves. The revolutionaries’ stated opposition to inherited authority is considerably closer to my own political ends. That doesn’t make what they did to those people any easier to stomach.
I mean, when I look at the revolutionaries’ stated ideals, I find myself agreeing. Even Robespierre’s published views resonate with me - and he stands in my memory as an abhorrent Other, similar to Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin, a member of Amalek in my eyes. Inherited authority? I think not! I don’t even respect earned authority that much - every statement I hear from another has to pass judgment for me to accept it. You are worth what you say; what you say is not worthy because you said it.
So I read their early work, sans action, and think “Yes!” In this, I am very much a committed leftist, in the classical sense: I recognize few social strata. There are low-borns, and high-borns, I guess, but … maybe “born” is the wrong term.
There are people of low status because of who they are, and their financial or social class factors into this … relatively little. Money does make some good behavior easier. A billionaire doesn’t have to wonder whether buying coffee means missing a meal. Someone barely surviving does, and I’m not going to judge choices made under that pressure as though the alternative were comfortable: pikuach nefesh, preserving the soul, applies. But the obligation to tikkun olam, to help repair the world, doesn’t disappear. At all. What each of us can do differs; our bank balance doesn’t tell me whether we’re doing it. That’s what defines one’s social stratum in my eyes.
I don’t care what family you’re from - if you’re a moral person, if you seek to make the community around you better, to heal the world as best you can, you’re of higher class than the millionaire who hoards where there is no need, who leaves the world in the state he found it, or maybe even makes it worse.
But where was that class in the treatment of the royals? I despise the idea of royalty. The royals themselves were still people. The Revolution’s pursuit of vengeance on them was beyond the pale, and I would never have been able to be part of it. They’d have guillotined me as a sympathizer, simply because I find the idea of keeping a child in prolonged isolation in appalling conditions in the Temple unconscionable and punishable. That’s what happened to Louis-Charles, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: separated from his mother, manipulated into accusing her, then subjected to severe isolation and neglect. His care improved after July 1794, but he never left the prison: he died of tuberculosis in June 1795, at 10. Better treatment at the end doesn’t erase that utter disenfranchisement as a human.
Terror? No. Terrorizing a child? Even his mother was degraded and ruined by a corrupted press before she was executed for treason. Let’s be real: she had sought foreign military intervention to preserve the monarchy. But what she had actually done and what the prosecution could substantiate were different things. At her trial, witnesses supplied little substantial evidence, and Hébert brought in a grotesque accusation of incest with Louis-Charles, based on claims coerced from a boy who was eight years old. Incest wasn’t the formal basis of her conviction: the jury’s questions concerned foreign collaboration and internal conspiracy. But it was part of the degradation inflicted on her in a proceeding where, as even the French Ministry of Justice’s account describes, her lawyers protested the absence of proof and her fate was already fixed. They were going to kill her, and they dragged her child into the business of justifying it.
The revolutionaries had done the unacceptable: they abolished the monarchy (again, a good thing, IMO) but treated the royals as though their humanity could be abolished with it, and I find that … abhorrent. To an extreme. In Hébert’s accusation, I see the removal of the royals being treated as so important that even a lie extracted from a child could be pressed into service. Apparently that, too, could serve the will of the people.
And even that - the “serving of the aims of the will of the people” - rings hollow to me. In his speech of February 5, 1794, Robespierre described virtue as natural to the people, then justified terror as an expression of that virtue. He went further: royalists were enemies, outside the body of republican citizens entitled to society’s protection. So who gets to count as the people? As I see it, he and his ilk had given themselves the authority to draw that line, and then to terrorize those on the wrong side of it - rather ironic, considering that they opposed what they considered (quite rightly) to be tyrants.
What bothers me most is that I agree with so much of what these men claimed to want. I can read their principles and say “Yes.” Then I reach the child in the Temple, the manufactured accusations, the purges of their own fellow revolutionaries. Danton and Camille Desmoulins went to the guillotine in April 1794, caught in factional struggles and a prosecution that tangled political opposition with accusations of conspiracy and corruption. Having fought for the Revolution didn’t save you. To me, that’s the horror of making political purity a test of whether someone still belongs: yesterday’s fellow revolutionary can become today’s enemy to be destroyed. What principle am I supposed to invoke to excuse that?
If your commitment to human dignity depends on whose child is suffering, what exactly are you committed to? If a lie becomes acceptable because it destroys the right person, how much is your love of truth worth? And if even the people who fought beside you become disposable the moment they disagree with you, what freedom are you actually defending? I want those questions asked of the people whose politics I share. I want them asked of me.
Robespierre ended up under the guillotine himself, injured and humiliated. There’s a lesson in that, certainly. But he didn’t become a monster when the Revolution finally turned on him. He became one while he could still explain why everything he was doing was good.
And that’s where my own initial “Yes” becomes uncomfortable. The Revolution was a struggle to seize power, however much it promised to place that power in the hands of the people. Who would exercise it in their name? Who would decide which people counted? If the promised good already gave its custodians permission to destroy anyone they judged an obstacle, how good was it to begin with?
I wholly agree that birth gives no one the right to rule. Heck, birth gives no one the right to command - authority is earned in every moment, not granted as a state of being. And I’m no more willing to grant that right to someone who thinks his virtue entitles him to decide whose humanity still counts.