Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [62]
Hébert, the revolutionary who had accused her of incest, said, “The whore, for the rest, was bold and impudent to the very end.”48 It’s impossible to win with a mob. The queen was accused of frivolity, stupidity, licentiousness—every possible base quality. For exhibiting serenity in the face of a ravenous mob, she was deemed “impudent.”
Hébert would later be executed himself, as was Antoinette’s prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier de Tinville. Both showed far less dignity in their final moments than Antoinette. Hébert fainted repeatedly on the way to the guillotine, and Fouquier-Tinville cried out, “I’m the axe, you don’t kill the axe!”49
The killings went on, mercilessly, day after day, without reason. Saint-Just demanded that people be guillotined not just for being traitors but for being “indifferent as well.”50 (This roving indictment was unknowingly adopted by key Obama advisers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the SDS’s anti-war pamphlet titled The Opposite of Moral Is Indifferent.)51
Politicians, unsuccessful generals, writers, nuns, the old, the young, the poor, and the well-to-do alike were sent to the national razor. Great scientists and mathematicians were sent to the guillotine, too, on the grounds that the republic “does not need scientists.”52
Before the end of the year, the mayor of Paris was guillotined; 90 priests were drowned; and, in Dunkirk, 150 citizens guillotined. Entire families were guillotined. Girls overheard remarking that the killing was going overboard were sent to the guillotine.53 When one of the accused explained to the Revolutionary Tribunal that they had confused him with his brother, he was ordered executed because “we’ve got him—we haven’t got his brother.” A woman proved to the court that she had been arrested in a case of mistaken identity, but was executed because “since she’s already here we might as well execute her too.”54 In the first few months of 1794, more than 5,000 citizens of Lyon were executed.55
The revolutionaries began executing one another to avoid execution themselves. Consider the cases of Jacques Pierre Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, and Robespierre.
Brissot was a leading philosopher of the revolution—he had even been imprisoned by the king for his revolutionary writings. Although renowned for his incendiary speeches to the Jacobin Club, he belonged to the more moderate faction in the Convention, the Girondists—the Blue Dog Democrats of the day. He had opposed, for example, executing the king, voting to keep him under house arrest instead. For that counterrevolutionary vote, the Montagnards—the Nancy Pelosi Democrats—issued a warrant for his arrest on June 2, 1793. Brissot was promptly guillotined, at the age of thirty-nine.56
Brissot’s principal accuser had been Desmoulins, a fellow writer and habitué of the Jacobin Club. Although Brissot had repeatedly leapt to the defense of Desmoulins and his crazed and often libelous writings, in 1793, Desmoulins turned his acid pen on his former mentor and friend. In a pamphlet titled Jacques Pierre Brissot Unmasked, Desmoulins accused Brissot of being a spy and enemy of the revolution, resulting in Brissot’s beheading.57
Desmoulins’s next tract, Fragment of the Secret History of the Revolution, had helped incite the Reign of Terror, but when he proposed a clemency committee for some of the accused, his high school classmate, Robespierre, denounced Desmoulins. Robespierre referred to Desmoulins and his associates as “les indulgents” and demanded that Desmoulins’s newspaper be burned. Desmoulins was sentenced to death on April 5, 1794, and executed the very same day. He was thirty-four years old. A few days later, Desmoulins’s wife was guillotined.
Robespierre was godfather to the Desmoulinses’ son. Both Robespierre and Brissot had been witnesses at their wedding.58
To speed things along, on June 10, 1794, the Committee on Public Safety issued its infamous “22 Prairial” decree, which dispensed with even the pretense of a trial before execution. No longer would the accused be entitled to lawyers