The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

By 1787, the problems had become acute, and the Marquis de Lafayette, who had taken part in the American revolution, suggested that the king should call a parliament – or Estates General. Louis XVI refused, but as the idea was taken up by newspapers and pamphleteers, finally gave way. Now he suddenly became unpopular with the aristocracy, who suspected – rightly – that he meant to force them to pay taxes. Parliament met, but the representative of the people found they were being blocked at every turn by the bishops and the aristocracy. In 1788, there was a crop failure that led to famine. Peasants began to revolt and burn the houses of the rich. The people of Paris heard rumours that the king had sent for troops to attack them. On 14 July 1789, they surrounded the Bastille -where large numbers of soldiers were supposed to be hiding – and began shooting. The governor agreed to surrender, but as he marched out with his soldiers (in fact, only a hundred and ten), he was seized and beheaded with a butcher’s knife. The prisoners in the Bastille were all freed, including a dissipated nobleman called the Marquis de Sade…

For the time being, the king and queen were safe; in fact, if Louis had behaved sensibly, he would have kept his throne. But he decided to try and escape and return at the head of an army. He and the queen were caught at Varennes, returned to Paris, and sentenced to death. By a gruesome coincidence, the king himself was responsible for the manner of his own death. Not long before his flight, the new assembly had asked the king’s physician, Dr Antoine Louis, to look into a new beheading machine that had been designed by a humanitarian called Dr Joseph Guillotin. The lower cutting edge of the blade was curved. As Louis and Dr Guillotin were studying sketches of the machine in the Tuileries Palace, the king strolled into the room, looked at the sketch, and said: ‘That wouldn’t suit every neck – what you need is something like this.’ He took a pencil and drew a blade with a cutting edge that sloped upwards. Guillotin decided to test both types of blade. The king proved to be right. The curved blade failed to sever the neck of a corpse, but the sloping blade decapitated two corpses the first time. Two years later, the king was decapitated by the same sloping blade; the queen was executed in the following year.

The man who was directly responsible for the queen’s death was Maximilien Robespierre, an extreme leftist who regarded himself as a humanitarian – he invented the slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’ By 1793, Robespierre was suggesting that the only way to save the Revolution was to execute everyone who might betray it. He ordered the trial and execution of all potential ‘traitors’. In Paris alone, 2,600 suspects, mostly nobles, were tried and executed. Victims included the chemist Lavoisier, discoverer of oxygen, and the poet Andre Chenier. Moderate leftists (Girondins) were guillotined for being moderate. When Robespierre had his close associate Danton executed, he became dictator of France. The port of Toulon had been handed over to the British fleet by ‘traitors’; a young captain named Napoleon Bonaparte was despatched with an army to retake it. He succeeded brilliantly; but the extreme reds – the Jacobins – went on to execute hundreds of its citizens as traitors. Marseilles, which had also shown itself unfriendly to the Jacobins, was also ‘purged’. Lyons executed its Jacobin leader and suffered the same fate. So did Bordeaux and Nantes. At Nantes, a sadistic madman named Jean Baptiste Carrier was placed in charge of the executions. He had five hundred children taken to meadows outside the town and shot and clubbed to death. He had many children publicly executed – some of them so small that the blade would not reach their necks and sliced their heads in two. The public executioner had a breakdown and died after executing four children, all sisters. Then Carrier invented a new and more efficient method of execution: drowning, or ‘noyades’. Barges filled with prisoners were towed into the middle of the river, then sunk while men waited on the banks with hatchets in case any escaped. One man and woman were tied together naked, face to face, and drowned.

Just as in ancient Rome, terror led to more terror. The humanitarian Robespierre was actually worried by the bloodbath, and felt his followers were going too far; yet he failed to grasp that both he and they had fallen a victim to one of the basic laws of criminality: what might be called ‘the snowball effect’. Mass murderers usually commit widely-spaced crimes, then commit them with increasing frequency until they are caught or commit suicide. The Revolution had filled France with mass murderers like Carrier. Even humanitarian judges were afraid to be lenient in case they were arrested and executed. (Amusingly enough, the Marquis de Sade, now ‘Citizen Sade’ and secretary of an assembly of revolutionaries, resigned when they proposed acts that were ‘horrible and utterly inhuman’; he was arrested later that year – 1793 – and spent much of the rest of his life in prison.) In 1794, Robespierre agreed that the Terror had to be intensified, and that anyone who disagreed with the government should be sentenced to death. In one month, 1,300 were beheaded in Paris. All this bloodshed finally sickened the citizens of Paris. On 28 July 1794, in the midst of the new Terror, Robespierre and his friends were planning more mischief in the city hall when troops burst into the room. There was a shot, and Robespierre fell forward with a shattered jaw. Some of his friends jumped from windows, and were horribly injured on the pointed railings below. Later the same day, Robespierre and nineteen of his followers were guillotined. Soon after, Carrier, the butcher of Nantes, was tried and guillotined. All over France, Jacobins were killed by mobs. The French Revolution, one of the most extraordinary outbreaks of mass murder in human history, was over.

We can see, in retrospect, that the French Revolution was caused by individuals rather than by economic conditions; by nobles who believed they had a divine right to their riches and titles, and by individuals like the king (who secretly regarded the people as scum, and who trampled the tricolour flag underfoot at a banquet of his officers). If Louis had been capable of reason, he would have accepted the new Assembly, endorsed its declaration of the Rights of Man, and quietly waited for the storm to blow over. Instead, he dreamed of returning to Paris at the head of an army and suppressing the scum. It was pure ego-assertion, the same kind of ego-assertion that had made Louis XIV humiliate Spain, that had made the Chevalier de Rohan humiliate Voltaire, that had made Voltaire direct his venom at the ancien régime, that had made Marie Antoinette demand the arrest of Cardinal Rohan – and that later made Robespierre establish himself as dictator of France.

In England there was no revolution – although the poor had as much ground for complaint – because there were no nobles like Rohan to arouse hatred. The king had been executed in 1649, and the idea of ‘divine right’ had died with him. In fact, George III had made a determined attempt to rule without parliament; but the American Revolution had undone him. In France, a labourer touched his hat as a gentleman passed; in England, he might well spit. Foreigners were amazed at the lack of deference shown by the English poor. When they felt dissatisfied, they rioted, and on two occasions – in 1795 and 1820 – they even mobbed the king. When Voltaire returned from England and published letters in favour of English liberty, he had to flee Paris; towards the end of his life he chose to live at Ferney, conveniently close to the Swiss border. But an English rabble-rouser like John Wilkes could be hated by the aristocracy and the middle classes and still rely on the support of the London mob to keep him out of prison while he continued to defy parliament. In 1791, Tom Paine, an Englishman who had helped inspire and guide the American Revolution, was able to publish his revolutionary Rights of Man, praising the French Revolution, in England, and follow it up in the next year with a second part that contained precise proposals for cutting the army and navy, remitting taxes and creating a welfare state. In 1792, he left England hurriedly, convinced he was about to be arrested. But it was Robespierre’s police who arrested Paine in the following year; only Robespierre’s own execution in 1794 saved Paine from the guillotine. And The Rights of Man continued to be the Bible of the new working-class movement in England, endlessly discussed at meetings. The poverty and misery of the industrial revolution in England were worse than anything on the continent; but while the working classes could argue about The Rights of Man there was no danger of revolution. Fortunately, there was no English Louis XVI and no English Robespierre either.