Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [51]
The mob was riled up; there was no time for calm reflection or consideration of the evidence.
And so, on October 5, 1789, angry fishmongers and other market women stormed the Versailles Palace intent on offing the queen. Called “8,000 Judiths,” the rabble included some men dressed like women.13 They were armed with pikes, axes, and a few cannon, hollering that they would “cut the Queen’s pretty throat” and “tear her skin to bits for ribbons.”14
Rallying outside the palace all day, by evening the rabble was half-naked, having taken their clothes off on account of the rain, much like the audience at a Rage Against the Machine concert. Early in the morning, around 2 a.m., a gaggle of women broke into the palace, decapitating two guards on the way. They made a wild dash toward Antoinette’s bedroom, shouting, “Where is the whore? Death to the Austrian! We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out! I’ll fry her liver and that won’t be the end of it! I’ll have her thighs! I’ll have her entrails!”15
The dulcet shrieks of the fishmongers call to mind George Washington exhorting his men, “Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of Liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men.” This was not the American Revolution.
The queen fled her bedroom one step ahead of the howling mob. The crazed women proceeded to smash all the mirrors in the queen’s boudoir and slash her bed to bits. After a standoff between the palace and the mob, the king capitulated, and the royal family was marched to the Tuileries Palace in Paris by triumphant hoi polloi. Leading the procession were the heads of the decapitated guards bouncing along on pikes. The king and his family were effectively put under house arrest at the Tuileries, with a guard stationed in Marie Antoinette’s room at all times, even when she dressed and slept. The family would never see Versailles again.
The king signed a new constitution, relinquishing most of his power, and the French people lived in liberty and happiness from that moment ever after. No, wait—it didn’t happen that way.
The political clubs, once gentlemen’s debating societies, suddenly assumed actual political importance during the revolution. The Jacobin Club went from being a prestigious institution of distinguished individuals with little power to a motley collection of left-wing radicals that launched the monstrous revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. Soon, respectable members quit the Jacobin club, leaving only the reprobates behind—much as happened to the American Bar Association in the 1980s.
On the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, some of the political clubs built model Bastilles, so that they could again be sacked by the people.16 If there had been a Franklin Mint back then, the “Storming of the Bastille” chess sets would have been a bestseller.
The rabble, often led by the Jacobins, proceeded to smash every trace of the past—religion, law, the social order, eventually even the weights and measuring system and, most absurdly, the calendar.
On November 2, 1789, just a month after the storming of the Tuileries, the Assembly declared everything owned by the Catholic Church to be property of the state. Three months later, the Assembly severed the French Catholic Church’s relations with the pope, dismissed about fifty bishops, dissolved all clerical vows, reorganized the church under the civil constitution, with priests to be elected by popular vote, and required all the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. Convents and monasteries were seized and turned into prisons to house any recalcitrant royals and priests.17