Slaughter and Terrorism

In view of the treatment meted out to the poorest elements of the masses by the ruling classes, it is not, to be wondered at that the revolutionary elements, so soon as they could operate freely, often gave to the struggle a wild and cruel character, thus turning the great revolution into one of a particularly sanguinary character. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to class all revolutionary massacres under one head. One must moreover distinguish between excesses, to which a brutalised people, in the passion aroused by struggle and despair, or out of thoughtless fear, allowed itself to give way: and those excesses, which are the result of a pre-considered system of training, and which are introduced into the State system, in the form of carefully-planned legislation, by those in power, in order to grind down elements, which seemed to those rulers to be dangerous.

Atrocities which sprang spontaneously from the people we find already at the beginning of the revolution; but the commencement of the Reign of Terror dates from the summer of the year 1793, at the time when the Girondins were arrested and executed. The people showed their brutality as early as the day of the storming of the Bastille, when the garrison capitulated. Same were killed; others had their heads hacked off, which were triumphantly carried round on pikes. This parading of heads on pikes happened often enough during the course of the revolution. The thirst for blood and cruelty increased when it came. to a war of the Revolution with the monarchs of Europe. When the Prussian army was marching on Paris and the Prussian Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Brunswick, in his manifesto, threatened Paris with total destruction, rumours as to a conspiracy of the aristocrats throughout the land in support of the external enemy were rampant. Then did the Parisians rise in uncontrolled and fearful rage, in order to annihilate the political prisoners in the prisons. That took place on September 2nd, 1792. This massacre, which cost 3,000 men their lives, represented the height of the horrors of the great revolution. A very intoxication for blood seized these crowds of executioners. They were not content with killing. They literally bathed with delirious delight in blood.

The Princess de Lamballe, whose whole crime consisted merely in being a friend of the Queen, was not only killed; but her body was cut open and her heart torn out. Her head was put on a pike, and brought to the imprisoned Queen before the window. At the sight of this horror the Queen swooned away.

Even acts of mercy took on a cruel form. An example may be found in the experience that happened to Mme. de Sombreuill, who at the time of the September massacres was in prison with her father. A certain M. de Saint Mart, who was near her father, had his skull split open. Her father was to suffer the same fate; whereupon she in desperation covered him with her own body, and fought for a long time, until she succeeded, after having received three wounds, in moving these men.

One of them took a glass, poured therein blood that was flowing from the head of the murdered M. de Saint Mart, mixed it with wine and powder, and said that if she would drink that to the health of the nation she could save her father. She did this without a shudder, and was forthwith carried out by these selfsame men.

(This report is presented in the collection of Letters from the French Revolution, by Gustav Landauer, 2nd volume, p.176, which was finished in the summer before the latest German Revolution. The Preface, dated June, 1918, closes with the following remark: “An intimate knowledge of the spirit and the tragedy of the Revolution should be of help to us in the serious times that now confront us.” The unfortunate man little suspected how soon, in these “serious times,” the tragedy of the Revolution would be fulfilled on his own person.)

There is no doubt that the cruelty of the enraged and desperate masses in the Revolution was terrible. But one should not blame the Revolution alone for that, even if one is justified in ever blaming mental occurrences of this kind. They were the result of the treatment that had been meted out to the people by high authority for many a long day. Just one example.

In the year 1757 a man, Damiens by name, attempted the life of Louis XV. He attacked him with a kind of penknife, which proved to be quite harmless. But the revenge for this deed was terrible. Damiens’ right hand was hacked off, and burnt before his own eyes. Wounds were made in his arms, legs and chest, and boiling oil and molten lead were poured into these wounds. Then they bound each of his limbs to horses, and drove the animals each in different directions, so that his whole body was literally torn to pieces. This infamous torture was executed in full publicity, in order to make an effect on the crowd. The effect, alas, we know.

Such barbarities were perpetrated till right into the time of the Revolution. It was really the Revolution that finally brought them to an end. But still, on August 13th, 1789, Gaultier de Biauzat made the following report from Versailles:

Last Tuesday, about midday, the people of Versailles succeeded in preventing the execution of a criminal, who had been condemned, on account of patricide, to be bound alive to a wheel and burnt. (Landauer’s Letters, volume 1, p.315.)

“These atrocities committed by those in higher authority preceded those perpetrated by the masses. The slaughter, which the masses engaged in, found no approbation from the acknowledged leaders of the Revolution. Indeed, they inveighed bitterly against such deeds. Such was the case with the September massacres, which have been quite falsely attributed to those leaders. If one could attach any blame to them, it would be, at the very most, that they were unable to restrain the rage of the mob. This rage was so terrible, so fearful and intimidating, that nobody dared to risk falling a victim to it, not even the Girondins. The Commissioners of the Commune endeavoured, with danger to their own lives, to rescue the ladies in immediate attendance on the Queen; and they succeeded in every ease with one exception, that of the Princess de Lamballe, whom we mentioned above.” (Kropotkin’s French Revolution, (volume 2, p.5.) Among those who were most incensed over the September massacres was Robespierre. He cried bitterly, “Blood, ever and always blood. These miserable people will end in drowning the Revolution in blood.” (Louis Blanc, French Revolution, volume 2, p.207.)

Even Marat himself recoiled horror-stricken before those massacres. “It is characteristic of Marat himself, a fact which according to my knowledge has not yet been mentioned by any historian, that he openly disavowed the September massacres, or at least bitterly regretted them – the self-same Marat, who recommended them in his issue of August 19th, and the benefit of which massacres he, on September 2nd, wished to extend to the whole of France.” (Jean Jaurès, La Convention, volume 1, p.75.)

Needless to say, in the case of Marat it was more political consideration than regard for humanity that made him disavow the September massacres. Robespierre, on the other hand, belonged to the intellectuals, who were fundamentally opposed to any shedding of blood. This he proved in the Constituent Assembly, in the discussion on May 17th, 1791, over the new penal law. At the discussion of the new penal law, when the death penalty came under consideration, Robespierre was among those who most vehemently opposed this penalty, on the ground that it did not prevent crime, but merely made the populace more brutal and more inclined to deeds of violence. His efforts were frustrated. The death penalty remained. Only the most horrible forms of its execution were to be prohibited. Decapitation only was retained. This decision formed one of the very rare occasions that caused Marat to express his approval of the National Assembly, in opposition to Robespierre. Two years later Robespierre found himself on Marat’s side, and was obliged to renounce his opposition to the death penalty. From henceforward this penalty was his chief political weapon, even against his own political friends.

We have already urged that the well-planned and orderly execution of terrorist methods should not be classed with the excesses of an excited mob. For these excesses had their origin among the uncultivated and coarse elements of the populace, whereas the Regime of Terror, was maintained by highly cultivated men who were filled with the most humane feelings. This Regime of Terror was the result of the conditions then existent, and was different in origin from the spontaneous atrocities. These latter were a result of the merciless legislation of the old regime against the poverty-stricken masses; whereas the Regime of Terror was forced on the Jacobins because they, in the most appalling circumstances and in the midst of a war, which had come about through the misery of the decaying masses, and only became paramount when the Jacobins came into power, found themselves face to face with a task that was insoluble. The task they had to solve was to preserve bourgeois society and private property, and at the same time to do away with the misery of the people. The result of this was that they found themselves in a most desperate position, out of which they could extricate themselves only by the employment of the very means of which they themselves disapproved, and of whose uselessness they were perfectly well aware. It was the very misery of the masses that caused the old regime to proceed to its bloody legislation, and to have recourse to terrorism. Indeed, the general misery itself gave rise to this bloody legislation, to the terrorism of the new regime. The only difference was, that the ancient State endeavoured to gain the mastery over the wretched populace, by beheading and ill-treating the poor; whereas the new State sought to diminish the misery of the masses, by beheading – without ill-treating – the rich and their servants. Yet the one failed of its object just as did the other. But even in this respect there was a difference. The existence of the old regime did not depend upon whether the Regime of Terror destroyed the proletariat or not. The failure of terrorism was certainly a disagreeable fact, but it represented no serious danger for the old State, because the class that it wished to keep under, namely, the mob proletariat, was quite incapable, by its own strength, of ever gaining the upper hand, and was, from an economic point of view, a completely negligible factor. The new regime, on the other hand, was bankrupt, and went to pieces as soon as its terrorism failed. For the class that it tried to keep under, namely, the bourgeoisie, was the very one which, under the circumstances, was best calculated to gain the supremacy; and at that, time it was, economically considered, indispensable. The repression of this bourgeois class hindered social development and production, and in consequence gave rise to still greater misery, even among the very people who should have derived advantage from the Reign of Terror. And a still greater difference distinguishes the old from the new “Reign of Terror.” In the case of the former, it corresponded entirely with the ethics of the circles that directed it. They were not necessarily unfaithful to themselves, by putting terrorism into practice. It appeared to them to be a perfectly obvious and justifiable means. The new Reign of Terror, however, was set up in absolute opposition to the ethics of the class that put it into execution. From the very beginning, therefore, the terrorists suffered from a bad conscience, which they endeavoured to salve by all sorts of sophistry, but which nevertheless undermined their moral strength, lessened their authority, and increased the friction and the insecurity then existing, and even rendered corrupt many of their members. Even if there be no absolute “morality” – existing in the world beyond, and even supposing that the morality of a particular time, of a particular country, or of a particular class, is something relative, ethics do remain the strongest social bond, and the stoutest support in all problems and conflicts of life. Nothing can be worse than unfaithfulness to oneself, or to act against those ethical principles that one has acknowledged as forming the categorical imperative. It was the result of all this which contributed largely to the complete destruction of the Reign of Terror, as soon as it met with energetic opposition. How quickly the surviving terrorists became converted to quite other views! The legitimate Monarchists were for Napoleon a far greater danger than the old Republicans. This was proof of how seriously the “morality” of these latter had suffered in the Reign of Terror.