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After having his hands bound and his hair cut above the nape of his neck, King Louis XVI ascended the platform, motioned for the drummers to pause, and began to address the crowd. He said, “I die innocent of all the crimes imputed to me. I pardon the authors of my death, and pray God that the blood you are about to shed will never fall upon France—”55

But like an audience of college liberals, the audience began shouting and the drummers resumed their banging, so the king could no longer be heard. They could hear the king any old time, whereas who knew when they might get to yell and hit drums again?

Once the guillotine blade fully severed the king’s thick neck, an attendant yanked the head from a basket and waved it before the crowd while making obscene gestures. The people whooped and cheered, threw their hats in the air, and lined up to dip their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood. His carcass was dumped in a pit and the body dissolved with lime.

Within the next year, the king’s backstabbing cousin, Mr. Equality, Phillipe Egalité, would himself be guillotined, with the less illustrious final remark: “Merde!”56 Madame Roland was also executed, after bowing to the statue of Liberty next to the guillotine, saying, “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”57 Thomas Paine would narrowly escape the guillotine and be imprisoned instead. On the one-year anniversary of the king’s execution, the revolutionaries presided over fetes of celebration, including one in Grasse that featured the guillotining of a Louis XVI mannequin.58

They had executed a king, but the French had not yet begun the Reign of Terror. The fact that, after all this, the Terror was still to come begins to explain why all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have drawn inspiration from Rousseau and the French Revolution.

SEVEN

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

PART DEUX:

COME FOR THE

BEHEADINGS, STAY FOR

THE RAPES!

By June of 1793, the radical Jacobins had seized total control of the Convention and begun instituting left-wing government policies, such as price controls and a general draft. Yet another constitution was adopted by the Convention and then immediately suspended by the Convention. Instead, a revolutionary government was decreed “until the peace.” Robespierre dominated the tyrannical—and ironically named—Committee of Public Safety. (Similarly, in 2003, Libya was made chairman of the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights.) Thus began the “Reign of Terror,” purging all “enemies of the revolution.”

The enforcers, Robespierre and his allies, demanded death to traitors, spies, moderates, and anyone who disagreed with Robespierre. Saint-Just, Robespierre’s ally on the Committee of Public Safety, called for “unlimited war,” saying the Republic “owes the good citizens its protection. To the bad ones it owes only death.”1

There were up to fifty executions a day, by a guillotine set up next to the statue of Liberty in the “Place de la Revolution,” formerly “Place Louis XV.” More than three thousand aristocrats were sent to the guillotine, with huge crowds on hand to cheer the carnage. The victims often had to be dragged up the stairs of the scaffold. Programs called “menus” were distributed, listing the names of the condemned, the better to heckle them. Street jugglers entertained the crowds by staging mock executions with puppets.2

With the Jacobins in control, the “de-Christianization” campaign kicked into high gear in 1793. Inspired by Rousseau’s idea of the religion civile, the revolution sought to completely destroy Christianity and replace it with a religion of the state. To honor “reason” and fulfill the promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that “no one may be questioned about his opinions, including his religious views,” Catholic priests were forced to stand before revolutionary clubs and take oaths to France’s new humanocentric religion, the Cult of Reason (which is French for “People for the American Way”).

Only a bare