Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [63]
The prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, was delighted with these legal reforms, cheerfully reporting that heads were falling “like tiles.”60 (Soon, one of those heads would be his own.) Within the first two months after 22 Prairial, 1,500 people were guillotined. Having already run through the clergy and nobility, by now, most of the executed were peasants.61
Robespierre’s own execution was prompted by a rumor planted by Joseph Fouché. Fouché knew Robespierre was about to condemn him as an enemy to the revolution, so he told all the other members of the Convention that they were on Robespierre’s list. When Robespierre began to give his speech, denouncing traitors and calling for the arrest of “all conspirators,” the entire Convention rose up to demand Robespierre’s execution before he could mention any names. And that is how the worm Fouché survived to serve Napoleon.62
Robespierre had counted on the mob to save him. His allies at the Jacobin Club were so devoted to him, they vowed to drink hemlock should he be condemned to die.63 But when the time for action came and Robespierre needed the mob to rally and prevent his arrest, it rained. The rabble ran indoors and drank spirits instead of hemlock, inspiring Tallyrand’s remark “Rain is counterrevolutionary.”64
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the rest of the leaders of the Reign of Terror were cornered and captured at City Hall. By virtue of the speedy procedures of 22 Prairial, they were sent to the guillotine the next day, July 28, 1794. At Robespierre’s execution, the mob was cursing him as if he were an Austrian queen. That was the end of the Reign of Terror, the Jacobin Club, and the French “Republic.”
But it wasn’t the end of the French Revolution, whose influence would spread around the globe, inspiring catastrophes from Russia and Germany to China and Venezuela. Though it was the inverse of the American Revolution, the ideas of the French Revolution would even take hold in some quarters of America.
EIGHT
THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION:
HOW TO THROW A
REVOLUTION WITHOUT
LOSING YOUR HEAD
Our history is the exact opposite of the French Revolution and their wretched masses guillotining the aristocracy and clergy. It has become fashionable to equate the two revolutions, but they share absolutely nothing beyond the word “revolution.” The American Revolution was a movement based on ideas, painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become the freest, most prosperous nation in world history.
The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter, and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to today’s dirty waifs smashing Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America.
And yet the New York Times has written, “In this millennium, documents like the Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and the American Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791 advanced the universality of human rights.”1 This is on the order of saying, “In this millennium, things like mosquitoes, moths, and DDT advanced the universality of bugs.” Why not throw in the Soviet constitution or Mao’s Little Red Book?
One small difference is that the Americans and the English did win freedom and greater individual rights with their documents. France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen led to bestial savagery, followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship, followed by another monarchy, and then finally something resembling an actual republic eighty years later.
In another editorial, the Times claimed