First Revolt, Then Wipe the Slate Clean
Revolutions are about eliminating the past regardless of the costs
*NOTE (The French Revolution was a watershed moment in the history of the West. The subject, however, is far too massive and complex to be crammed into such a limited space as this post could allow. The desire of revolutionaries to get rid of their history strikes me as relevant to our current times.)
The French Revolution of 1789 was political unrest at its undignified worst. You could lose your head by speaking the wrong opinion. In the attending Reign of Terror many did, including some of the leading rabble rousers themselves. In fact, Maximilien Robespierre, the chief proponent of sending people to the guillotine was separated from his head by his own followers (more on this later).
France in 1789 was running out of bread. You don’t deprive a Frenchman of his bread unless you want mayhem. The French revere bread so much that they even refuse to put butter on it so it’s a very big deal if you can’t get your loaf or two every day. Revolutionary plotters understood this and actually planned ways to worsen the supply of bread and thereby gin up more misery, hatred and revolutionary rage among the masses.
*(See how a similar plan is being implemented in America today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy)
Part of the problem was the rigid French class system. Five percent of the population was clergy, another five percent was the nobility and 90 percent were the commoners whose resentment against both “estates” of the upper crust had begun to seethe.
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When informed that the masses were hungry and without bread, French Queen Marie Antoinette purportedly responded with the now famous “let them eat cake”! Whether true of not, word got out in a hurry and fed envious revolutionary fires with added fuel.
Another big problem was that poor old King Louis XVI understood little about money or debt and France was running out of the first and accumulating more of the second. The country was going broke, accelerated in part by the king’s authorizing financial aid to the Americans in their war for independence. Meanwhile, the rich nobles and the priesthood were exempt from paying taxes, a burden which forced commoners and the poor to pay 100 percent of them. It was a very raw deal.
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As if all that weren’t enough, overpopulation and a series of bad harvests in back-to-back years made food shortages progressively worse. People were doing without and they were getting really mad and running out of patience with everything, especially their government. Fearing the loss of his power King Louis secretly escaped Versailles with his family. They were discovered and brought back to Paris. From there, things only deteriorated.
On August 10, 1792, a group of insurgents led by the extremists Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king. Five months later, on January 21, 1793, they took him to the guillotine and executed him. Nine months after that they did the same to his wife, Marie Antoinette.
Meanwhile, Robespierre, who headed the Committee of Public Safety became too zealous for the Committee’s liking and they had him also dispatched by guillotine, July 27, 1794. If you were elected to a public office in France at the time, especially in Paris, you were likely motivated to keep a low profile or risk having no profile at all.
Reordering time itself: The Republican Calendar
The revolutionary hotheads and intellectuals in France at the time were not satisfied in merely executing the king and queen and abolishing the “Ancient Regime”. They wanted to get rid of Easter and Christmas and Christianity and the family and the social classes and the ways of measuring and telling time and totally re-do everything; to wipe the slate clean and start all over from scratch. A big part of this nonsense was the Republican Calendar, a monstrosity of convoluted revenge-naming of all the days, months and years, including the metrifcation of time and changing of all the clock faces.
In that concocted calendar every day of the year is numbered and named after something familiar, such as “pigeon” or “basil” or “oak”. The day they dragged old Robespierre to the guillotine was named “rapeseed”. It’s hard to imagine trying to get through life with such mental baggage.
Examples:
22 September to 21 October ——- “grape harvest” ——- Vendemiaire
22 October to 20 November ——- “fog” ——- Brumaire
21 November to 20 December —— “frost” —— Frimaire
An interesting example of this is the changing the name of “July” to “Thermidor” (“heat”) which included the period from July 19 to the 17th of August. Robespierre was executed on 7 Thermidor (July 27). His death became known as a “Thermidoran Reaction” which meant any radical leader who gets too radical for his own good and gets knocked off by his followers.
The strange origin of Lobster Thermidor …
This culinary creation was invented in 1894, by legendary chef Auguste Escoffier at a Parisian restaurant named Marie’s, in honor of the opening of the stage play “Thermidor” at a nearby theater. The play so offended an audience of Republican followers of Robespierre that they staged a near riot which had to be broken up by police.
In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte pulled off a coup d ‘etat and did away with most of this nutty remodeling of reality except for the metric system which remains a bone of contention among traditionalists.
Today in the United States we are witnessing a limited resurgence of the revolutionary fervor which racked France in the 1700’s. Like the French Jacobins of 1790, “revolutionary” factions in the US are tearing down American statues, especially any that relate to the Confederacy or, for that matter, any that displease them. Like the Jacobins, they would wipe the slate clean, rid the world of America once and for all and become just as poor and miserable as they ever could have wanted.
This hatred of the past appears repeatedly in totalitarian political movements. It happened notoriously in the USSR, when communist bureaucrats simply “erased” people or any part of history that Stalin didn’t like. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. The communist government of Pol Pot there was so paranoid that people who simply wore glasses were executed because wearing glasses was a sign that they might be “educated”. It is estimated that this genocide killed about 2 million people in a country of 8 million in a span of two years.
The French were able to have their revolution and keep the beneficial aspects of their culture intact despite the efforts of mad revolutionists to do away with it all. The terrible existence of feudalism and the exorbitant privileges of the upper “estates” was eliminated and wiser heads prevailed in restoring tradition. They were lucky.