Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [52]
Having a general idea where this godless fanaticism was headed, the royal family attempted to flee Paris on June 20, 1791. They got lost and stopped to ask directions from a young boy, whom the king tipped with a gold louis d’or. The boy recognized the king from his visage on the coin and quickly ratted-out the fleeing royals to revolutionary authorities.19 The royal family was marched back to the Tuileries under a rain of stones, with effigies of the king dangling from trees along their path.20
A few months after the royal family’s flight, the leftist Jacobins and the comparatively moderate Girondists forced the king to sign yet another new constitution. Louis XVI was reduced to a mere figurehead—and a prisoner.
The mob had no fear of punishment, certainly not from Louis XVI, the David Dinkins of kings. So they exploded in animalistic fury. The bourgeoisie had riled up the masses to storm the Bastille and Versailles. Now they would pay the price. As historian Erik Durschmied says, the king “had been the only constitutional instrument that could stand up to the extremists,” but now the moderates had “opened the door to raging madmen willing to use mob brutality.”21
On August 10, 1792, Parisians were out of sorts over more military setbacks in France’s war with Austria and Germany—not to mention the absence of an “exit strategy”—so an armed mob stormed the Tuileries, forcing the royal family to flee to the National Assembly for safety. From there, the weak king, frightened by the sound of cannon fire, ordered the Swiss guards who were defending him to surrender. (This strategy, known as “unilateral surrender,” would later become the cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s national security policies.)
Refusing to believe such an insane command, the guard’s commander went to see the king for himself, telling him, “The rabble is on the run! We must vigorously pursue them!”
Minutes ticked by with Louis XVI unable to make a decision. This was the king, after all, who had written in his diary the day of the storming of the Bastille, “July 14th: nothing.” Finally, he repeated his surrender order. The incredulous commander demanded that it be put in writing. The king wrote, “We order Our Swiss to put down their arms immediately and withdraw to their barracks. —Louis.”22
Ordered by the king to surrender, more than 600 Swiss guards were savagely murdered. The mobs ripped them to shreds and mutilated their corpses. “Women, lost to all sense of shame,” said one surviving witness, “were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph.”23 Children played kickball with the guards’ heads. Every living thing in the Tuileries was butchered or thrown from the windows by the hooligans. Women were raped before being hacked to death.
The Jacobin Club, the MSNBC of the French Revolution, demanded that the piles of rotting, defiled corpses surrounding the Tuileries be left to putrefy in the street for days afterward as a warning to the people of the power of the extreme left. (This was easily arranged, as it coincided with a national strike by Paris’s garbage collectors.) The next day, foreign ambassadors fled France.24
This bestial attack, it was later decreed, would be celebrated every year as “the festival of the unity and indivisibility of the republic.”25 It would be as if families across America delighted in the annual TV special “A Manson Family Christmas.”
Back at the National Assembly, the king was arrested and the last flickers of the monarchy extinguished. King Louis XVI would henceforth be known as “Citizen Louis Capet.” This time, the royal family was locked up in the filthy Temple prison. Mobs gathered outside, night and day, refining their nuanced political philosophy by chanting, “Death to the king!”
Executive authority was vested in the new National Convention, elected by all the people, including foreigners such as Thomas Paine