GreatInsights #11: The French Revolution: Life in a time of purges

This article contains the script of Episode 11 of the GreatInsights Minicast, which you can listen to here:

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Welcome to GreatInsights. I'm StJohn Piano, CTO @ Solidi Exchange and a Blockchain Researcher @ Tela Network.

The topic of today's episode is "The French Revolution: Life in a time of purges"

Many people today think that we live in pre-revolutionary times.

I am one of them.

It feels very much as if some great change in the structure of things is at hand, as if we were living in the 1930s.

There is something in the water, the air, the news, the anxieties, the chatter, and in what is not said.

In 1950, the world of 1900 had - in a certain sense - evaporated. There were leftovers, there were buildings, memories, records, but the structure of the world was utterly different. Meaning, values, organization, companies, jobs, and social structures and patterns of interactions had completely changed.

I think the same will be true of the world of 2050. The year 2000, its hopes, dreams, cares, worries, concerns, structures of meaning, economic ideas - these will all seem irrelevant.

With this in mind, I recently re-read an excellent book by Hilary Mantel, called A Place Of Greater Safety. It follows three of the main figures of the French Revolution, all of whom are eventually devoured by the chaos that they helped to unleash.

This episode is sponsored by: Solidi Exchange
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The three major characters in the book are:

• Georges-Jacques Danton, a lawyer who becomes a demagogue and militia leader. Later, he joins the new government as the Minister of Justice.
• Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer who becomes a statesman. Later, he becomes the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety, which sets up the Reign of Terror.
• Camille Desmoulins, a radical journalist whose public call to arms sparks the Storming of the Bastille. He is a close friend of both Danton and Robespierre. His writings are highly influential during the entire revolutionary period until his execution.

Many aspects of the story are highly relevant to our position today.

The French Revolution is important because it is the beginning of the modern era in which we live. In it, we see in miniature all the emerging aspects of modern society and the types of conflicts within it. The end of the old regime, the collapse of traditions, radical atheism, worship of the nation, worship of the state, rule by bureaucracy and committee, totalitarianism, the use of propaganda, the ebb and flow of mass politics, the desperation, the chaos, the famines, the killings, and the ideological purges. It's all there, coming into being for the first time. And so: It's easier to see, and to understand, these things.

During the Reign of Terror, at least 300,000 suspects were arrested; 17,000 were officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died in prison or without trial.

There are many parts of the book that I find very insightful and thought-provoking about the human condition, about living in a period of revolution, and about people and how different they can be.

It is a work of fiction, but based as much as possible on available historical sources.

Hilary Mantel is best known for her book Wolf Hall, published in 2009, that follows the life and career of Thomas Cromwell, eventual chief minister for King Henry the 8th of England.

However, I think that this book is actually much better. It is much broader in scope, it has more characters, many of whom are better developed and more well-rounded than in Wolf Hall. There is a lot of historical context, and there are many shifts of viewpoint and of style.

It is more complex and demands more from the reader.

It is the work of her youth. It is the first book she wrote. She was born in 1952, and she began writing A Place Of Greater Safety in 1974, when she was twenty-two. It took her four years to write.

This episode is sponsored by: AI Boost
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Here a few excerpts from the book that I found striking. The page numbers are from the Kindle edition.

— p190

The exact form of the phrases does not matter now. Something is happening underneath his feet; the earth is breaking up. What does the crowd want? To roar. Its wider objectives? No coherent answer. Ask it: it roars. Who are these people? No names. The crowd just wants to grow, to embrace, to weld together, to gather in, to melt, to bay from one throat. If he were not standing here he would be dying anyway, dying between the pages of his letters. If he survives this - death as a reprieve - he will have to write it down, the life that feeds the writing that feeds the life to come, and already he fears he cannot describe the heat, the green leaves of the chestnut trees, the choking dust and the smell of blood and the blithe savagery of his auditors; it will be a voyage into hyperbole, an odyssey of bad taste. Cries and moans and bloody promises circle his head, a scarlet cloud, a new thin pure element in which he floats.

...

A few days ago, on this spot, he said, ‘The beast is in the snare: finish it off.’ He meant the animal of the old regime, the dispensation he had lived under all his life. But now he sees another beast: the mob. A mob has no soul, it has no conscience, just paws and claws and teeth.

— p332

‘I object to the use of the courts as instruments of the intrusive moralizing state.’

‘Really?’ The judge leaned forward; he liked to argue generalities. ‘As you seem to have wiped the church out of the picture, who is going to make men what they ought to be, if the laws do not do it?’

‘Who is to say what men ought to be?’

‘If the people elect their lawmakers - which, nowadays, they do - don’t they depute that task to them?’

‘But if the people and their deputies were formed by a corrupt society, how are they to make good decisions? How are they to form a moral society when they have no experience of one?’

‘We really are going to get home late,’ the judge said. ‘We shall be here for six months if we are to do justice to the question. You mean, how are we to become good when we’re bad?’

‘We used to do it through the agency of divine grace. But the new constitution doesn’t provide for that.’

— p403

‘But what are you doing?’

He resigned himself. ‘There is a large body of patriots at City Hall. They are shortly going to take over from the existing Commune and call themselves the Insurrectionary Commune. Then the patriots will have de facto control of the city.’

Gabrielle: ‘What does de facto mean?’

‘It means they’ll do it now and make it legal later,’ Lucile said.

— p451

The elections for the National Convention were conducted by the usual two-tier system, and, as the nine hundred second-stage Electors walked to their meeting in the hall of the Jacobins, they passed heaps of fresh corpses piled in the street.

— p544

Marat reached up, pulled once at the red kerchief wrapped around his neck; this was the signal that the joke was over. He stretched out his arm again, fearfully leisured. When he spoke he sounded calm, dispassionate. His proposal was simply this: that the Convention abolish the deputies’ immunity from prosecution, so that they could put each other on trial. The Right and the Left glared at each other, each deputy imagining for his personal enemies a procession to Dr Guillotin’s beheading machine. Two deputies of the Mountain, sitting a few feet apart, turned and looked at each other; their eyes met, then darted away in shock. No one looked Philippe in the face. Marat’s motion was carried, supported from all sides.

— p629

‘Brissot’s trial went on for days. They were allowed to speak. They called witnesses. It was all reported in the newspapers. It was only pressure from Hébert that stopped it, or we could have been arguing still.’

‘Just so,’ de Sade said.

‘But in future defendants won’t have those rights. It is regarded as not expeditious, not republican. I am afraid of the consequences of cutting the trials short. I think that people are being killed who need not be. But the killings go on.’

— p660

DECREE of the National Convention:

The Executive Council, the ministers, generals and all constituted bodies, are placed under the supervision of the Committee of Public Safety.

CAMILLE: I don’t see why I should expect any plaudits for the third issue. Anyone could have done it. It’s a kind of translation. I was reading Tacitus, on the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. I said to de Sade that it was the same, and I checked it, and it was. Our lives now are what the annalist describes: whole families wiped out by the executioner, men committing suicide to save themselves from being dragged through the streets like common criminals; men denouncing their friends to save their own skins; the corruption of all human feeling, the degradation of pity to a crime. I remember when I first read it, years and years ago; and Robespierre will remember when he first read it, too. There didn’t seem much to add – it was enough to bring the text to the public’s attention. Take out the names of these Romans, and substitute instead – in your own mind – the names of Frenchmen and women, the names of people you know, people who live on your street, people whose fate you have seen and whose fate you may soon share.

That's the end of this episode.

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Video Description

"... they’ll do it now and make it legal later..."

This is Episode 11 of the GreatInsights Minicast, hosted by StJohn Piano.

📩 If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions - you can contact StJohn Piano here:

On Tela:
tela.app/id/stjohn_piano/7c51a6

On LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/stjohnpiano

Read this content as an article:

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