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NOTES ON ISSUE 12: GLOSSARY
PART 2 OF 3
Models of it [La Guillotine] were
worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed
down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.
This image – of the guillotine supplanting the cross – symbolizes the
secularization of France (previously a Catholic country) under the
Republic. This secularization – the acknowledgment of “no Religion but
Liberty” – sped the adoption of the Calendar of the “New Era” (the
abandonment of the calendar based on a Christian timeline), the
conversion of Notre Dame (the great Catholic cathedral of Paris) into a
“Temple of Reason,” the melting of church-bells into cannon, the
appropriation of mass-books to cartridge-papers, and so forth (Carlyle
693-4).
…it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten
red.
The ground “most polluted” by the guillotine was that of the Place de
la Révolution in Paris. Called, before the Revolution, the Place
de Louis XV, and now called the Place de la Concorde, it is situated
between the Champs-Élysées and the Jardin des Tuileries
(called the Jardin National during the Revolution). However, though
this was the chief location of the Parisian guillotine, the site of
execution was moved, at the height of the Terror, from place to place.
Carlyle gives this account of the shift:
Meanwhile will not the people of
the Place de la Révolution, the inhabitants along the Rue
Saint-Honoré as these continual Tumbrils pass, begin to look
gloomy? Republicans too have bowels. The Guillotine is shifted, then
again shifted; finally set up at the remote extremity of the
South-east; Suburbs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, it is to be hoped,
if they have bowels, have very tough ones. (731)
The guillotine did not remain in the eastern districts,
however, but was back in the Place de la Révolution
by the end of the Terror: Robespierre was beheaded there (Carlyle
743). Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs (1878)
gives a descriptive and historical account of the plaza in which
the guillotine chiefly stood:
The
Place de la Concorde …, the most beautiful and extensive place in
Paris, and one of the finest in the world, covers an area 390 y[ards]
in length, by 235 y[ards] in width, bounded on the S[outh] by the
Seine, on the W[est] by the Champs Elysées, on the N[orth] by
the Rue de Rivoli, and on the E[ast] by the garden of the Tuileries….
The Place was completed in its present form [of 1878] in 1854…. In the
middle of the [18th century] the site … was waste ground. After the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (18th Oct., 1748), which terminated the
Austrian War of Succession, Louis XV “graciously permitted” the mayor
and municipal authorities to erect a statue to him here. The work was
at once begun by the architect Gabriel,
and at length in 1763 an
equestrian statue in bronze by Bouchardon, with a pedestal
adorned by Pigalle with
figures emblematical of Strength, Wisdom,
Justice, and Peace, was erected here. The Place then received the name
of Place Louis XV….
The Place was at that period surrounded by deep ditches, but these were
filled up, and a balustrade substituted for them in 1852. On 30th May,
1770, during an exhibition of fireworks in honour of the marriage of
the Dauphin (afterwards Louis XVI) with the Archduchess Marie
Antoinette, such a panic was occasioned by the accidental discharge of
some rockets, that no fewer than 1200 persons were crushed to death,
or killed by being thrown into the ditches, and 2000 more severely
injured.
On 11th August, 1792, the day after the capture of the Tuileries, the
statue of the king was removed by order of the Legislative Assembly,
melted down, and converted into pieces of two sous. A terracotta figure
of the “Goddess of Liberty” was then placed on the pedestal, … while
the Place was named Place de la Révolution.
On 21st Jan., 1793, the guillotine began its bloody work here with the
execution of Louis XVI. On 17th July Charlotte Corday was beheaded; [in
late] October Brissot, chief of the Gironde, with twenty-one of his
adherents; on 16th Oct[ober] the ill-fated queen Marie Antoinette; on
14th Nov[ember] Phillipe Egalité, Duke of Orléans, father
of King Louis Philippe; [in] May, 1794, Madame Elisabeth, sister of
Louis XVI. [In] March, through the influence of Danton and
Robespierre, Hébert, the most determined opponent of all social
rule, together with his partizans, also terminated his career on the
scaffold here. The next victims were the adherents of Marat and the
Orleanists; then [in] April Danton himself and his party, among whom
was Camille Desmoulins; and [then] the atheists Chaumette and
Anacharsis Cloots, and the wives of Camille Desmoulins, Hébert,
and others. On 28th July 1794, Robespierre and his associates, his
brother, Dumas, St. Just, and other members of the “comité
de
salut public” met a retributive end here; next day the same fate
overtook 70 members of the Commune, whom Robespierre had
employed as his tools, and on 30th July twelve other members of the
same body….
Between 21st Jan., 1793, and 3rd May, 1795, upwards of 2800 persons
perished here by the guillotine. A proposal afterwards made to erect a
large fountain on the spot where the scaffold of Louis XVI had stood
was strenuously opposed by Chateaubriand, who aptly observed that all
the water in the world would not suffice to remove the blood-stains
which sullied the Place. (153-5)
It is chiefly this ground, which
“all the water in the world” could not wash of its
blood-stains, that Dickens describes as a “rotten red.”
Click on
map for larger view
The Place de la Révolution
is visible on this portion of the Plan de la Ville de Paris,
Période Révolutionnaire, 1790-1794, at the
far left, above the Seine.
Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living
and one dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in
as many minutes.
The “Twenty-two friends of high public mark” are
the members of the moderate Girondin party, defeated by the
Jacobin faction (of Danton, Robespierre, etc.) and guillotined
on October 31, 1793. Carlyle relates the circumstances, including
how Valazé, though already dead (having committed suicide),
was beheaded with his fellows, in a chapter called “The
Twenty-Two”:
The next are of a different
colour: our poor Arrested Girondin Deputies. What of them
could still be laid hold of; our Vergniaud, Brissot, Fauchet,
Valazé, Gensonné; the once flower of French
Patriotism, Twenty-two by the tale…. [T]he Sentence
on one and all of them is, Death with confiscation of goods….
[O]n the morrow morning all Paris is out; such a crowd as
no man had seen. The Death-carts, Valazé’s cold
corpse stretched among the yet living Twenty-one, roll along.
Bareheaded, hands bound; in their shirt-sleeves, coat flung
loosely round the neck; so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured,
beshouted. To the shouts of Vive la République,
some of them keep answering with counter-shouts of Vive
la République. Others, as Brissot, sit sunk in
silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike up,
with appropriate variations, the Hymn of the Marseillese [a
patriotic song]. Such an act of music; conceive it well! The
yet Living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak!
Samson’s axe is rapid; one head per minute, or little
less. The chorus is wearing weak; the chorus is worn out; – farewell for evermore, ye Girondins.
Te-Deum Fauchet has become silent; Valazé’s dead
head is lopped: the sickle of the Guillotine has reaped the
Girondins all away. (671-3)
So much more wicked and
distracted had the Revolution grown in that December month, that the
rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of the violently
drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in lines and squares under
the southern wintry sun.
Though Dickens’ reference to the “rivers of the South encumbered with
bodies” is often glossed as a reference to the Republican (Jacobin)
suppression of Lyons, a Girondin-supporting region of southern France
(Sanders 145, Maxwell 472), Lyons was suppressed in October of 1793 –
not
December. There were bodies in the southern rivers as the
Republic put down Lyons – Carlyle writes that “Revolutionary Tribunal
[t]here, and Military Commission, guillotining, fusillading, do what
they can: the kennels of the Place de Terreaux run red; mangled corpses
roll down the Rhone” (686-8). However, Dickens seems to be referring to
another set of bodies – those drowned in the first “Noyades”
of December 1793 at Nantes:
One
begins to be sick of “death vomited in great floods.” Nevertheless,
hearest thou not, O Reader (for the sound reaches through centuries),
in the dead December and January nights, over Nantes Town, – confused
noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of rage and lamentation; mingling
with the everlasting moan of the Loire waters there? Nantes Town is
sunk in sleep; but Représentant Carrier is not
sleeping, the wool-capped Company of Marat is not sleeping. Why unmoors
that flatbottomed craft, that gabarre; about eleven at night;
with Ninety Priests under hatches? They are going to Belle Isle? In the
middle of the Loire stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled;
she sinks with all her cargo. “Sentence of Deportation,” writes
Carrier, “was executed vertically.”
The Ninety Priests, with their gabarre-coffin, lie deep! It is the
first of the Noyades, what we may call Drownages, of Carrier; which have
become famous for ever.
Guillotining there was at Nantes, till the Headsman sank worn out: then
fusillading “in the Plain of Saint-Mauve”; little children fusilladed,
and women with children at the breast; children and women, by the
hundred and twenty; and by the five hundred, so hot is La
Vendée: till the very Jacobins grew sick, and all but the
Company of Marat cried, Hold! Wherefore now we have got Noyading; and
on the 24th night of Frostarious year 2, which is 14th of
December, 1793, we have a second Noyade; consisting of “a Hundred and
Thirty-eight persons.”
Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them? Fling them out; fling
them out, with their hands tied…. [w]omen and men are tied together,
feet and feet, hands and hands; and flung in: this they call Mariage
Républicain, Republican Marriage. (Carlyle 691-2)
These “Noyades”
seem to be the December
drownings to which Dickens refers, though he may well be conflating the
atrocities of Nantes with those of Lyons. Nantes, it will be remarked,
is not properly in the South of France, and thus does not fall under
a “southern wintry sun”; however, like Lyons, Nantes is on a river (the
Loire), it was
(again, like Lyon) in revolt against the Republic, and it is, if not in
the South of France, at any rate
south of Paris. Furthermore, Dickens’ geographical conflation follows
Carlyle’s own grouping of events. The opening paragraph of the chapter
in which Carlyle discusses the suppression of Lyons and Nantes runs as
follows:
The
suspect may well tremble, but how much more the open rebels; the
Girondin Cities of the South! Revolutionary Army is gone forth, under
Ronsin the Playwright; six thousand strong, … and has portable
guillotines. Representative Carrier has got to Nantes, by the edge of
blazing La Vendée, which Rossignol has literally set on fire:
Carrier will try what captives you make; what accomplices they have,
Royalists or Girondin: his guillotine goes always, va toujours; and his wool-capped
“Company of Marat.” (685)
Carlyle, like Dickens after him, groups
Nantes with the “Girondin Cities of the South.”
The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a
basket. “I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine.”
A “billet,” in this sense, is “[a] thick piece of wood cut to a
suitable length for fuel” (OED); and the woodman calls himself
the “Samson of the firewood guillotine” because he – like the public
executioner – cuts or shaves. In French, of course, a “billet” is also
a ticket, note or letter. The alternate meanings of the word may
suggest
that this Samson does double duty – first as a woodman, and second as
an informer.
On a lightly-snowing afternoon she arrived at the
usual corner. It was a day of some wild rejoicing, and a festival.
This winter day of “wild rejoicing” is probably based upon the
festivities of November 10, 1793 (or, more generally, November and
December 1793), when – following the widespread renunciation by priests
and curates of the Catholic religion (in favor of the “Fraternal
embrace” and “no Religion but Liberty” [Carlyle 694]) – a procession of
citizens, having despoiled the churches, jubilantly visited the
National Convention. Carlyle describes this parade, and the events
leading up to it, as follows:
From
afar and near, all through November into December, till the work is
accomplished, come Letters of renegation, come Curates who “are
learning to be Carpenters,” Curates with their new-wedded Nuns: has not
the day of Reason dawned, very swiftly, and become noon?… This ... is
what the streets of Paris saw:
“Most of these people were still drunk, with the brandy they had
swallowed out of chalices; – eating mackerel on the patenas! Mounted on
Asses, which were housed with Priests’ cloaks, they reined them with
Priests’ stoles; they held clutched with the same hand communion-cup
and sacred wafer. They stopped at the doors of Dram-shops; held out
ciboriums: and the landlord, stoop in hand, had to fill them thrice.
Next came Mules high-laden with crosses, chandeliers, censers,
holy-water vessels, hyssops; – recalling to mind the Priests of Cybele,
whose panniers, filled with the instruments of their worship, served at
once as storehouse, sacristy, and temple. In such equipage did
these profaners advance towards the Convention. They enter there, in an
immense train, ranged in two rows; all masked like mummers in fantastic
sacerdotal vestments; bearing on hand-barrows their heaped plunder, –
ciboriums, suns, candelabras, plates of gold and sliver.” [Carlyle’s
source here is Mercier on the “Séance of 10 Novembre.”]
The Address we do not give; for indeed it was in strophes, sung vivâ voce, with all the
parts; – Danton glooming considerably, in his place; and demanding that
there be prose and decency in future. Nevertheless the captors of such spolia opima crave, not untouched
with liquor, permission to dance the Carmagnole also on the spot:
whereto an exhilarated Convention cannot but accede. Nay “several
Members,” continues the exaggerative Mercier, who was not there to
witness…, “several Members, quitting their curule chairs, took the hand
of girls flaunting in Priests’ vestures, and danced the Carmagnole
along with them.” Such Old-Hallowtide have they, in this year, once
named of Grace 1793. (694-6)
Though probably based on the
sacrilegious festivities of November 10, the day of “wild rejoicing” to
which Dickens refers could be any day in November or December 1793 –
the interval in which Catholicism was widely denounced (even by its
most reverend members) in favor of “Liberty” and “Reason.” The
disapprobation implied in Carlyle’s reference to the year “once
named of Grace 1793” (emphasis added) is reflected in Dickens’
representation of the
festivities as sinister and disturbing. Under the New Calendar of the
New Era of the French Republic, the Christian holidays were of course
thrown out, replaced by occasional secularized holidays. Indeed, having
divided the
year into twelve months of thirty days each, the New Calendar had five
days left over. These five days became a festival period, to be added
to the end of “Fructidor” (August in the “old” calendar). Carlyle
explains this part of the
calendar as follows:
Four equal
Seasons, Twelve equal Months of Thirty days each; this makes
three hundred and sixty days; and five odd days remain to
be disposed of. The five odd days we will make Festivals,
and name the five Sansculottides, or Days without
Breeches [the revolutionaries were called “sansculottes”
because they did not wear knee-breeches like the aristocracy].
Festival of Genius; Festival of Labour; of Actions; of Rewards;
of Opinion; these are the five Sansculottides. Whereby the
great Circle, or Year, is made complete: solely every fourth
year, whilom called Leap-year, we introduce a sixth Sansculottide:
and name it Festival of the Revolution. (660)
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