Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  The Assembly had intended to conduct a reasoned, enlightened debate on the American model, but it had reckoned without the people. After a bad harvest, food supplies were dangerously low, the price of bread rocketed in the towns, and there was widespread unemployment. In April five thousand artisans had rioted in Paris, and revolutionary committees and citizen militias had formed across the country to contain the unrest. During the Assembly’s discussions, delegates were booed and heckled from the public galleries, and the distraught crowds took to the street, attacking any representative of the Old Regime who crossed their path. In a crucial development, some of the troops dispatched to quell these riots joined the rebels instead. On June 14 the mob stormed the Bastille in eastern Paris, released the prisoners, and hacked the jail’s governor to pieces. Other senior officials met the same fate. In the countryside, the famished peasantry were gripped by the “Great Fear,” convinced that the grain shortages had been engineered by the regime to starve them into submission. This suspicion was compounded by the arrival of impoverished laborers seeking work, who were thought to be the nobility’s advance troops.61 Villagers raided the châteaux, attacked Jewish moneylenders, and refused to pay their tithes and taxes.

  As the country spun out of control, the Assembly became more radical. It produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that vested sovereignty in the people rather than in the monarch and proclaimed that all men had natural rights of liberty of conscience, property, and free speech and must enjoy equality before the law, personal security, and equal opportunity. Then the Assembly set about dismantling the Catholic Church in France. As we have seen, the “myth of religious violence” was founded on the belief that the separation of church and state would liberate society from the inherent belligerence of “religion.” But almost every secularizing reform in Europe and in other parts of the world would begin with an aggressive assault on religious institutions, which would inspire resentment, anomie, distress, and in some cases, a violent riposte. On November 2, 1789, the Assembly voted by 568 to 346 to pay off the national debt by confiscating the wealth of the Church. The bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, pointed out that the Church did not own property in the ordinary way; its lands and estates had been given to it so that it could do good works.62 The state could now pay the clergy a salary and finance these charitable activities itself. This decision was followed on February 3, 1790, by the abolition of all religious orders except those engaged in teaching or hospital work. Many clerics protested vigorously against these measures, and they gravely disturbed many of the common people, but some priests saw them as an opportunity for reform that could return the Church to its pristine purity and even inaugurate a new “national religion.”

  The secular regime thus began with a policy of coercion, disempowerment, and dispossession. On May 29, 1790, the Assembly issued the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that relegated the Church to a state department. Fifty sees were abolished, and in Brittany many parishioners found themselves without a bishop. Four thousand parishes were eliminated, bishops’ salaries were reduced, and in the future bishops were to be elected by the people. On November 26, the clergy were given eight days to take an oath of loyalty to the nation, the law, and the king. Forty-four clerics in the Assembly refused to take the oath, and there were riots in protest against this humiliating order in Alsace, Anjou, Artois, Brittany, Flanders, Languedoc, and Normandy.63 Catholicism was so deeply entwined with almost every detail of daily life that, aghast, many of the Third Estate turned against the regime. In western France, parishioners pressured their priests to refuse the oath and would have nothing to do with the Constitutional clerics sent in to replace them.

  The aggression of the secular state soon segued into outright violence. Neighboring monarchies began to mobilize against the revolution. As so often happens, an external threat led to widespread fears of the “enemy within.” When French troops were routed by the Austrians in the summer of 1792, wild rumors circulated of a “fifth column” of counterrevolutionary priests aiding the enemy. When the Prussian army broke through the frontier and threatened Verdun, the last line of defense before Paris, recalcitrant clergy were imprisoned. In September, amid fears of royalist clerics planning simultaneous uprisings, violent mobs descended on the prisons and murdered between two to three thousand prisoners, many of them priests. Two weeks later France was declared a republic.

  The French and the Americans had adopted diametrically opposed policies toward religion: all the American states eventually disestablished their churches, but because their clergy were not implicated in a long-established aristocratic regime, there was no virulent hostility toward the traditional denominations. In France, however, the Church, which had been so deeply involved in aristocratic rule, could be dismantled only by an outright assault.64 By now it was clear that a nonreligious regime had just as much potential for violence as a religiously constituted one. After the September Massacres, there were more atrocities. On March 12, 1793, an uprising began in the Vendée in western France in protest against conscription to the army, unfair taxation, and above all, the anti-Catholic policies of the revolution.65 The rebels were especially incensed by the arrival in the Vendée of Constitutional clergy, who had no roots in the region, to replace priests who were known and loved. They formed the Catholic and Royal Army, carried banners of the Virgin, and sang hymns as they marched. This was not an aristocratic uprising but an army of the people, who were determined to retain their Catholicism: over 60 percent were farmers, and the others, artisans and shopkeepers. Three armies dispatched from Paris to quell the uprising were diverted to deal with the Federalist Revolt, in which moderate provincial bourgeois and republicans joined forces with royalists in Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse, and Toulon to protest measures taken in Paris.

  Once the Federalists were put down with horrible reprisals, four revolutionary armies arrived in the Vendée early in 1794 with instructions from the Committee of Public Safety that recalled the rhetoric of the Catharist Crusade: “Spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region—it matters not, we must sacrifice all.”66 “All brigands found with weapons or suspected of having carried them will be speared by the bayonet,” General Turreau instructed his soldiers. “We will act equally with women, girls and children.… Even people only suspected will not be spared.”67 “The Vendée no longer exists,” François-Joseph Westermann reported to his superiors at the end of the campaign. “Following the orders I have received, I have crushed children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred women.… The roads are littered with corpses.”68 The revolution that had promised liberty and fraternity may have slaughtered a quarter of a million people in one of the worst atrocities of the early modern period.

  Human beings have always sought intensity and moments of ecstasy that give their lives meaning and purpose. If a symbol, icon, myth, ritual, or doctrine no longer yields a sense of transcendent value, they tend to replace it with something else. Historians of religion tell us that absolutely anything can become a symbol of the divine, and that such epiphanies occur “in every area of psychological, economic, spiritual and social life.”69 This was soon evident in France. No sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion than they invented another, making the nation an embodiment of the sacred. It was the audacious genius of the revolutionary leadership to recognize that the potent emotions traditionally connected with the Church could be just as powerfully felt if directed toward a new symbol. On August 10, 1793, while the nation was tearing itself apart in war and bloodshed, a festival choreographed by the artist Jacques-Louis David celebrated the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic in Paris. It began at sunrise on the site of the Bastille, where an imposing statue of Nature decanted water from her breasts into a cup held by the president of the National Convention; he then passed it to eighty-six elderly men representing the French départements in a holy commu
nion. In the Place de la Révolution the president torched a great bonfire of heraldic symbols, scepters, and thrones before a statue of Liberty, and at the Invalides the public gazed at a giant effigy of the French people as Hercules. These festivals became so frequent that people wrote of “festomania.”70 As the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet explained, the state festivals celebrated the arrival of “a strange vita nuova, one eminently spiritual.”71

  The Catholic Mass had been a central feature of the early festivals, but by 1793 the priests had been eliminated from these national rites. This was the year that Jacques Hébert enthroned the Goddess of Reason on the high altar of Notre Dame Cathedral, transforming it into a temple of philosophy. Revolutionary politics was itself becoming an object of worship. Leaders made great use of such terms as credo, zealot, sacrament, and sermon when describing political events.72 Honoré Mirabeau wrote that “the Declaration of the Rights of Man has become a political Gospel and the French Constitution a religion for which the people is prepared to die.” The poet Marie-Joseph Chénier told the National Convention: “You will know how to found on the ruins of dethroned superstition, the single universal religion of which our lawmakers are the preachers, the magistrates the pontiffs, and in which the human family burns its incense only at the altar of the Patrie, common mother and divinity.”73 Because the revolution “seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than for the reform of France,” Tocqueville would observe, “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs.”74 It is interesting that he equated this defiantly secular religiosity with the fanatical violence that Europeans had long attributed to Islam.

  The “civil religion” described first by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was based on belief in God and the afterlife, the social contract, and the prohibition of intolerance. Its festivals, Rousseau wrote, would create a sacred bond between participants: “Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.”75 But Rousseau’s loving tolerance did not extend to anyone who refused to obey the precepts of civil religion, and a similar rigor entered the revolution.76 A month after the festival celebrating the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic, the reign of terror began, when Maximilien de Robespierre appointed a tribunal to seek out traitors and pursued dissidents with all the zeal of a militant pope. Not only were the king and queen, members of the royal family, and the aristocracy executed, but one group of apparently loyal patriots after another went to the guillotine. The distinguished chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who had worked all his professional life to improve conditions in French prisons and hospitals, and Gilbert Romme, who had designed the revolutionary calendar, were both beheaded. When the purge ended in July 1794, some seventeen thousand men, women, and children had been guillotined, and twice as many more had either died in the disease-ridden prisons or were slaughtered by local vigilantes.77

  Meanwhile, the revolutionary leaders were waging a holy war against the nonrevolutionary regimes of Europe.78 After the Peace of Westphalia, the continent had known nearly two hundred years of relative peace. A balance of power kept the sovereign states in harmony. Brutality on the battlefield was no longer acceptable; moderation and restraint were the new watchwords.79 Armies were now adequately provisioned so soldiers no longer had to terrorize the peasant population by foraging for themselves.80 There was greater emphasis on drill, discipline, and correct methods of procedure, and between 1700 and 1850 there were no significant developments in military technology.81 But this peace was shattered when first the revolutionary armies and then Napoleon threw these restraints to the wind.

  The French state had certainly not become more irenic after eliminating the Church from government. On August 16, 1793, the National Convention issued the levée en masse: for the first time in history, an entire society was mobilized for war.

  All Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service into the armies. Young men will go forth into battle; married men will forge weapons and transport munitions; women will make tents and clothing and serve in the hospitals; children will make lint from old linen; and old men will be brought into the public squares to arouse the courage of the soldiers, while preaching the unity of the Republic and hatred against Kings.82

  Some 300,000 volunteers, aged between eighteen and twenty-five, brought the French army up to a record-breaking million strong. Hitherto peasants and artisans had been tricked or press-ganged into the military, but in this “Free Army” soldiers were well paid and for the first year officers were elected from the ranks on merit. In 1789 over 90 percent of French officers had been aristocrats; by 1794 a mere 3 percent were of noble birth. Even though over a million young men died in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, more were willing to volunteer. These soldiers fought not with professional decorum but with the raw violence they had learned in the revolution’s street battles, and they probably relished the ecstasy of warfare.83 Because they had to feed themselves, they committed the same kind of atrocities as the mercenaries in the Thirty Years’ War.84 For nearly twenty years, the French armies seemed unstoppable, overrunning Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany and effortlessly brushing aside the Austrian and Prussian armies that tried to halt this triumphant progress.

  Revolutionary France did not bring liberty to the peoples of Europe, however; instead, Napoleon, the revolution’s heir, created a traditional tributary empire that threatened the imperial ambitions of Britain. In 1798, to establish a base in Suez that would cut off the British sea routes to India, Napoleon invaded Egypt and at the Battle of the Pyramids inflicted a devastating defeat on the Mamluk army: only ten French soldiers were killed, but the Mamluks lost more than two thousand men.85 With consummate cynicism, Napoleon then presented himself as the liberator of the Egyptian people. Carefully briefed by the French Institut d’Égypte, he addressed the sheikhs of the Azhar madrassa in Arabic, expressing his deep respect for the Prophet and promising to free Egypt from the oppression of the Ottomans and their Mamluk agents. Accompanying the French army was a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The ulema were not impressed: “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery,” they said, “to entice us.”86 They were right. Napoleon’s invasion, exploiting Enlightenment scholarship and science to subjugate the region, marked the beginning of Western domination of the Middle East.

  To many it seemed that the French Revolution had failed. The systemic violence of Napoleon’s empire betrayed revolutionary principles, and Napoleon also reinstated the Catholic Church. For decades the hopes of 1789 were dashed by one disillusioning event after another. The glory days of the fall of the Bastille were followed by the September Massacres, the Reign of Terror, the Vendée genocide, and a military dictatorship. After Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814, Louis XVIII (the brother of Louis XVI) was returned to the throne. But the republican dream refused to die. The republic was revived for two brief periods, during the Hundred Days before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and for a brief period between 1848 and 1852. In 1870 it was restored yet again, this time lasting until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example.

 
The French Revolution may have changed the politics of Europe, but it did not affect the agrarian economy. Modernity came of age in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which began in the later eighteenth century, though its social effects would not be truly felt until the early nineteenth.87 It started with the invention of the steam engine, which provided more energy than the country’s entire workforce put together, so the economy grew at an unprecedented rate. It was not long before Germany, France, Japan, and the United States followed Britain’s lead, and all these industrialized countries were forever transformed. To man the new machines, the population had to be mobilized for industry instead of agriculture; economic self-sufficiency now became a thing of the past. The government also began to control the lives of ordinary folk in ways that had been impossible in agrarian society.88 In Hard Times (1864) Charles Dickens portrayed the industrial city as an inferno: workers—referred to contemptuously as “the Hands”—live in abject poverty and have only instrumental value. The oppression of the agrarian state had been replaced by the structural violence of industrialization. More benign state ideologies would develop, and more people than ever before would enjoy comforts previously available only to the nobility, but despite the best efforts of some politicians, a seemingly unbridgeable gap would always separate rich and poor.