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NOTES ON ISSUE 11: GLOSSARY
PART 2 OF 3
“In the name of that sharp female
newly born and called La Guillotine, why did you come to France?”
The guillotine, named after its inventor (Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin),
is the famous instrument of execution used by the French Republic; it
was especially active during the Reign of Terror. Carlyle describes the
advent of the “newly born” guillotine (though proposed much earlier, it
was
not put into use until 1792) as follows:
For, lo, the great Guillotine, wondrous to behold, now
stands there; the Doctor’s Idea has become Oak and Iron; the
huge cyclopean axe “falls in its grooves like the ram of the
Pile-engine,” swiftly snuffing out the light of men! (513)
From this point onward in The
French Revolution, the guillotine appears more and more
frequently, the Doctor’s “Idea” quickly becoming emblematic:
The
Guillotine, we find, gets always a quicker motion, as other things are
quickening. The Guillotine, by its speed of going, will give index of
the general velocity of the Republic. The clanking of its huge axe,
rising and falling there, in horrid systole-diastole, is portion of the
whole enormous Life-movement and pulsation of the Sansculottic System!
(667-8)
It is for this that Doctor Guillotin,
“respectable practitioner,” is introduced, early in The French
Revolution, as a man
…doomed
by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept
obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of oblivion! Guillotin
can … in all cases of medical police and hygiène be a present aid:
but, greater far, he can produce his “Report on the Penal Code”; and
reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which shall
become famous and world-famous. This is the product of Guillotin’s
endeavours, gained not without meditation and reading; which product
popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine derivative name, as
if it were his daughter: La Guillotine! “With my machine,
Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter la tête)
in a twinkling, and you have no pain”; – whereat they all laugh.
Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall
hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying,
shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost,
on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Caesar’s.
(121)
The few words that he caught
from this man’s lips, first made it known to Charles Darnay that the
king was in prison, and that the foreign ambassadors had one and all
left Paris.
King Louis XVI was imprisoned in the Temple beginning on August 13,
1792, and foreign ambassadors in France did, upon this instigation,
leave Paris. As Carlyle describes it in The French Revolution,
“French Royalty vanishes within the gates of the Temple: these old
peaked Towers … do cover it up…. Foreign Ambassadors, English Lord
Gower have all demanded passports; are driving indignantly toward their
respective homes” (502). However, if the imprisonment of the King were
enough to set ambassadors packing – an act expressive of European
disapprobation for France – the execution of Louis XVI early in the
following year had even more pronounced effects: England, disgusted,
expelled the French embassy in Britain:
At
home [in France] this Killing of a King has divided all friends; and
abroad it has united all enemies. Fraternity of People, Revolutionary
Propagandism; Atheism, Regicide; total destruction of social order in
this world! All Kings, and lovers of Kings, and haters of Anarchy, rank
in coalition; as in a war for life. England signifies to Citizen
Chauvelin, the Ambassador or rather Ambassador’s-Cloak, that he must
quit the country in eight days. Ambassador’s-Cloak and Ambassador,
Chauvelin and Talleyrand, depart accordingly. Talleyrand … thinks it
safest to make for America.... England has cast out the Embassy:
England declares war…. (600)
The horrible massacre, days and
nights long, which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a
great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest…
The “horrible massacre” to which Dickens alludes
here is the “September massacre” or “September
massacres” of September 2-6, 1792, in which Parisian mobs
stormed the Prisons of the Abbaye, La Force, Châtalet,
and the Conciergerie, slaughtering over 1,000 prisoners (most
of whom had been arrested as royalist sympathizers, aristocrats,
emigrants, etc.) (Carlyle 529, 537). The massacres were partly
the result of a public panic over the Prussian invasion of France,
and some modern historians contend that they were directed mainly
against criminal prisoners suspected of being part of a counter-revolution
(possibly in collusion with the foreign invaders) (Maxwell 469).
Carlyle, however, tends to emphasize the relation of this panic
over Prussian invasion to the old conflict between revolutionary
commoners and the toppled aristocracy:
At
Paris, by lying Rumour which proved prophetic and veridical, the fall
of Verdun [to Prussian forces] was known some hours before it
happened. It is Sunday the second of September; handiwork hinders not
the speculations of the mind. Verdun gone (though some still deny it);
the Prussians in full march, with gallows-ropes, with fire and faggot!
Thirty-thousand Aristocrats within our own walls; and but the merest
quarter-tithe of them yet put in Prison! Nay there goes a word that
even these will revolt. (524)
Dickens does not describe the causes of
the September massacres, and this decontextualization has the effect
of representing the massacres as the result of an irrational, vengeful
kind of revolutionary malice. However, though Dickens gives an
oversimplified version of the historical events in question, his
September massacres are fictionally consistent with his representation
of the French Revolution at large, and foreshadow the brutality of the
coming Reign of Terror.
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