Asa H. Craig, (Asa Hollister), 1847-1934
In relating the events of the French Revolution, it is not the intention to dwell largely on the condition of France politically, or to enter minutely into the causes which led to this terrible conflict, but of the general conditions, the persecutions, the dethronement of reason, the desecration of God’s Holy Word, the baptism of blood, triumphant guilt, and the wild excesses of the Commune.
The revolution was a revolt against royal despotism and privileged wealth. The lands, business, institutions, and wealth were in the hands of the nobility, while the common people were oppressed, robbed of the fruits of their labor, and treated as serfs, instead of equals. At first but the murmurings of discontent were heard, but as excitement grew the most horrible conditions came into existence — mobs rose in violence, became frenzied in their mad career, and committed the most atrocious crimes in the name of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the motto of the Revolution.
The principal causes which led to this uprising may be enumerated as follows: The abuses and extravagances of the Bourbon monarch; the unjust privileges enjoyed by the nobility; the accumulation of wealth by the clergy; the revolutionary character of French philosophy; the influence of the late American Revolution; the impetuous and revolutionary character of the French people and the wretched condition of the common masses: all conspired to turn reason into madness, consistency into inconsistency, moderation into violence, honor into dishonor, and law and order into the wild and uncontrollable fury for pillage, confiscation and murder. The “Reign of Terror” is a black page in the history of France — a page that relates a fiendish persecution, only equaled by the cruelty of the pagan, Nero. Down with royalty! Down with the nobility! Down with the clergy! was the loud cry of the infuriated mobs. Reason had changed to madness. Justice was dethroned, blood had been shed and the wild and terrible cry of vengeance was resounded from throat to throat. “To the lions with the Christians!” was the cry of the pagan populace. “To the guillotine!” was the cry of the infuriated mobs of the Commune.
At the commencement of the French Revolution, we find Louis XVI, a Bourbon monarch, king of France. We find him a weak-minded, vacillating sovereign; inclined to fairness and justice, but surrounded with a nobility that worked upon his weakness, obtained concessions and through their selfish designs instituted a condition of discontent that led to disastrous results, not only for the throne, but for the cause of Christianity. This nobility, numbering 80,000 families, was what remained of the once powerful feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages. The common people numbered 25,000,000, and were subjected to the payment of heavy taxes for the support of these classes. The nobility, however, were not taxed for the support of the government and were accorded many privileges at the expense of the lower classes. The peasants were rudely trampled upon by the infliction of intolerable wrongs. They were forbidden to fence their fields for the protection of their crops, because it might interfere with the lord’s convenience in the hunt. They were even forbidden to cultivate their fields at certain seasons of the year, for fear such cultivation might disturb the young pheasants and other game. They were made to feel that they were inferior, and must bow to the demands of their superiors.
With the existence of such conditions, is it any wonder they were highly incensed against the nobility, against wealth, and against the inequality of society?
Also, we find the same old pagan philosophy, simply smoothed over to suit existing conditions. There was in it the same old opposition to Christianity, faith, and devotion. Rousseau, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine were the great philosophers of the age. Their godless and atheistic writings were scattered broadcast, and sowed the seeds of discontent, of revolution, and of apostasy. They denounced the nobility as the great source of evil to mankind. They denounced the Church as a plague-spot upon the civil liberties of the people. They denied God from the standpoint of reason. They wrote, talked, and pleaded for revolution, for equality, for justice, for individual rights. They harangued the masses, and held up to them the freedom of America and demanded a war for liberty, equal taxation, and a government freed from tyrants, kings, and nobility. They declared that all men are created equal and titles should be abolished. They cited the privileges of the few and the sufferances of the many. They appealed to the passions and prejudices of the people. They drew pictures of American independence and American freedom. Discontent was thus produced, passions were aroused, and disrespect for authority made manifest. By preying upon the ignorance of the people they instituted a civil rebellion that knew no bounds for the infliction of vengeance, bloodshed, confiscation and persecution.
The commencement of this terrible struggle was in 1789, when the National Assembly was organized to direct the affairs of the nation. This Assembly immediately became violent in its opposition to the throne and the Catholic Church, and seized the property of the clergy, the accumulation of centuries. All religious orders were suppressed, and solemn monastic vows interdicted. It prohibited ecclesiastical dress, legalized divorces, recognized the persecution of Catholic priests, stripped churches of their emblems of worship, and, to wipe out every feature of Christianity, the Gregorian calendar was abolished, because k was the established time of the Catholic Church. A new mode of reckoning time was introduced. Each month was divided into three periods of ten days called “decades,” the tenth day being set aside as a day of rest and recreation. The names of the months were changed to correspond to some special character. The days were also re-named and each day divided into ten parts. A new system of weights and measures was conceived and all institutions and customs that possibly could be, were abolished. Their hatred was so intense that all institutions of government, of worship or adoption, that were established by kings and aristocrats, must be abolished.
The design of the philosophers was to dechristianize France, to destroy every evidence of God, of worship, and of the Church. They declared “that the world can never be happy until it has denied the existence of God,” and to show in what manner they proposed to attain their ends they passed resolutions which declared that their avowed object should be, “never to rest until they had strangled the last king with the bowels of the last priest.”
Their animosity was so great that the Assembly legislated specially against priests and all who were in harmony with them. At first the sentence was banishment, but afterwards changed to a decree of death, and the terrible Danton undertook its execution.
The rage of Danton and his followers was one of the most heartless in the long line of cruelties. His first bloody deed in Paris was the murder of three hundred priests, an archbishop and two bishops. When the signal for massacre was given in the Abbey of St. Germain, and some drew back, shuddering, one of the hired assassins called out: “What! Are you afraid of blood? You must get used to it.”
The cruelties into which savage men were led by priest hatred are indescribable. Among the priests murdered at Rheims, was the holy and venerable Alexandre, dean of the cathedral. He was burned alive over a slow fire; his torments were thus prolonged for over an hour. He was compelled, before his own execution, to witness that of his dear friend, the Abbe Romain, Who was most cruelly tortured and burned before him. While Alexandre was being roasted alive his tormentors would, from time to time, withdraw him from the fire, that they might gloat over the spectacle of his sufferings. To augment the distress, they forced his own nephew to carry the wood and place it on the fire. Among the priests murdered at Lyons was the Abbe Regni, a man respected by all for his great virtue and charity. The furious mob hacked his fingers from his hands, tore out his entrails, and then cut off his head, and finished by offering his mangled limbs to the passers-by for relics. Such barbarities were only called “spilling the blood of a few traitors.”
To illustrate the insane desire for revenge and the uncontrolled rage against those who had accumulated wealth, we find the Convention passed the following decree: “The city of Lyons is opposed to the Revolution, the city of Lyons shall be destroyed; every house occupied^ by a rich man shall be demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with edifices especially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to humanity and public education.” Thousands of men were employed to pull down the city, while the frenzied mobs constantly howled, Down with aristocracy! Down with the Church! Down with inequality! The Convention also decreed that a commemorative monument — to serve as a warning — should be established on the ruins of Lyons, with this inscription: “Lyons opposed liberty! Lyons is no more!”
The madness of the people knew no bounds. To obliterate all evidence of Christianity, the Commune closed the Churches of Paris and confiscated their treasures, their altars, and shrines. Even the bells were melted and cast into cannon, The images of Christ and the Virgin Mary were tom down, defaced, trampled upon, and blasphemed against. The busts of Marat and other revolutionists were erected in the place of these beloved representatives of Christian love and faith. As the emancipation of the world was to be wrought through the guillotine instead of the cross, that instrument took the place of the crucifix and was called the Holy Guillotine. All the emblems of Christian worship were destroyed. Even the graves of the dead were desecrated by the hands of the rabble, and over the gates of the cemeteries were inscribed the words: “Death is an eternal sleep.”
The religious madness of the people culminated in the worship of the Goddess of Reason. Churches everywhere were converted into temples of this new worship. The Sabbath day having been abolished, the tenth day was set aside for the services of Reason.
“On the 10th of November, 1793, the church of Notre Dame, in Paris, was made the scene of a most frightful desecration. A woman of ill-fame, with a sky-blue mantle flung around her, and a Phrygian cap on her head, representing the Goddess of Reason, was conducted on a triumphal car into this venerable sanctuary, and there, surrounded by the followers of the new faith, enthroned on (the high altar, with a crucifix beneath her feet; lewd songs then resounded in her praise, and wild dances and hideous excesses defiled the holy place, and crowned the homage thus rendered to the new divinity. The prophecy of Beauregard was thus fulfilled to the very letter. This frightful impiety was enacted not only *in Paris, but also in many other ^French cities, and with it was often combined a hideous mockery of holy things. In one place five hundred prostitutes appeared, clothed in sacerdotal vestments. In another an ass, decked with a mitre and cope, was made to draw along a cart filled with gold and silver altar vessels. Not only did men, in devilish rage, trample the crucifix under foot, but they also stole consecrated hosts, and, to the eternal shame of the ungrateful human race, flung them to unclean beasts to be devoured. If anyone should speak a respectful word with regard to Christianity, or be surprised with a crucifix, rosary, picture of a saint, or other Christian emblem, death was the punishment for such an offense. It was only at their utmost peril that those faithful priests who courageously refused to forsake their flocks, administered the sacrament to the dying. And that such priests might not escape detection of the spies who constantly watched them, they were not allowed, under pain of death, to assume any sort of disguise. Nuns were starved, ill-treated, and led in crowds to execution; whilst public prostitutes were supported at the expense of the State.”
Such were the wild excesses of the Commune that to defy religion, to defy the truths of Christ, and to disgrace the Temples of God, they would lend their mockery in a pretended worship of vice, and in the elevation of disgraced humanity they would compare the purity of divine inspiration with a debased and lustful shame. It was not that a debased nature was preferred to a life of purity, but in the desecration of God’s Holy Altar no contempt could be stronger, nor no mockery greater, than to bow in pretended adoration to a soiled and debased woman. No insult could be stronger to the divine purity of Christianity than this act of eternal shame. Churches could be demolished, crosses hewn down and cast into the fire, sacred vestments trampled underfoot, emblems of veneration desecrated by the hand of the vandal, but to convert the House of God into the excesses of degradation, to supplant the altar of Christ with the representation of crime, and to convert the forms of Christianity into the beastly triumphs of an idolatrous worship, was the greatest of all disgraced ignominy, and as we follow these awful desecrators of
God’s Holy Worship, we find them meeting the judgment of an outraged Deity. As they meted out murder and desecration, so were their crimes avenged by the visitation of a just punishment.
In the worship of Reason, the orators of the day gloried in the achievements of the Revolution, and in the height of exhortation, blessed the hour when the people were no longer oppressed by the kings of earth nor by a king in heaven.
With the disappearance of religion there came, as a plague-spot upon the social life of France, a season of vice, sin, and degradation. The brutal nature of man was loosed in all its wildest terror. The corrupting influence of sin and shame was destroying the moral atmosphere of the social life of family, state, and nation. It was no longer held in obedience to the teachings of honor, truth, and fidelity. It had been loosed to the lowest infamy of hell’s debasing shrine.
It was bathed in the blood of the noblest lives of Christian faith, and it was wallowing in the mire of a depraved lust, an unforgiven mockery, and a defiled and condemned nature.
It became a wild scene of idolatrous worship. No God, no Bible, no Christ, no Virgin Mary. The Goddess of Reason was the philosophy of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. It became the condition of the present, but no future; mind but no soul; nature but no God. The cry of the Commune was to dethrone the King of Heaven as well as the kings of earth. One of the most dangerous leaders of the Commune was Hebert, who would overthrow all forms of religion, all forms of past government, and establish society upon the foundation of Communism and Atheism. To this Robespierre, the great leader of the revolution, objected. He wished to sweep away Christianity as a superstition, but he would stop at Deism. He did not believe a government could be established on Atheism. There must be some Supreme Being for the people to worship. It was, and always had been popular, and must be continued. He said: “If God does not exist it would behoove man to invent him.” Accordingly, this blood-thirsty revolutionist presented the following resolution, which was adopted by the Convention: “The French people acknowledge the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.” The temples that had been converted to the worship of the Goddess of Reason were now consecrated to the worship of the Supreme Being.
Strange as it may seem, yet at the very time when Robespierre was offering resolutions recognizing the existence of a Supreme Being and establishing the new worship, he was desolating France with murders and massacres of such terrible atrocity that the world had never seen its equal except in the most frightful days of Rome. The terrorist of the man was beyond conception. With self-organized power, his will became the ruling force of destiny. Lives to him were as nothing, so great was the execution of men, women and children. He was devoid of heart, soul, or conscience. The blind fanaticism of ancient savagery controlled his power of reason. In the name of liberty, he committed crimes unspeakable. He murdered thousands of human beings, blasphemed against God, and persecuted Christianity, and all in the name of the Republic of France.
Persons opposed, or even suspected of opposition, were crowded to the guillotine in almost countless numbers. The prisons contained two hundred thousand persons suspected of sympathy against the reign of crime and destruction. By the swift process of the Revolutionary Tribunal justice became a mockery, a slave to passion, and a cloak to cover the sanction of crime. So swift was judgment pronounced that not one, but ten, fifty, were dragged before the tribunal at once, and, without trial, except the accusation of their enemies, they were pronounced guilty and hurried to execution.
The scenes around the guillotine were indescribable and beyond the power of expression. People were devoid of pity, shame, or conscience. They screamed with delight at the awful spectacle of bloodshed and death. They built benches around the guillotines to better witness the executions of the condemned. Special sewers were constructed to carry away the blood of the victims, and yet, in the frenzy of this Reign of Terror, women, whose natures abhor the scenes of strife, gloried in the awful butchery of human life. They forgot their womanhood, and in the cry for retribution they urged the executioner to more swiftly wield his knife of death.
While this was the condition in Paris, yet, even worse, was the destruction of life in the cities of Toulon, Marseilles, Nantes, and Bordeaux, where the slow process of the guillotine was superseded by a swifter mode of execution. Individuals were bound together and thrown into the water; boats were crowded with victims and then scuttled; long columns of condemned were mowed down with musket and cannon; rooms were filled with victims and then suffocated. By these various methods over fifteen thousand victims were massacred in a single month, and during the three months of Robespierre^ wildest terror over thirty thousand were victims of this awful persecution.
Terrible and inhuman as was this execution, still the blackest deed of horror is yet to be told — a deed that stands without a parallel in all the annals of despotic crimes; a deed that blots the name of France, of liberty and fame; a deed so vile that hell itself revolts against its shame. This deed was the execution of three hundred innocent children, orphans of those who had suffered death by execution. In one night, these children were gathered on the banks of the Loire and cast into the river, the mob crying: They are eggs of the reptile! Down with the brats, and they will never rise up to oppress us!
The heart grows sick at the awful dispensation of crime from the mobs of infuriated men. Wild beasts kill to sate their thirst? men kill to gloat over the victory of oppression, and the wild frenzy of uncontrolled reason. They become madmen, despots, tyrant? and in their persecutions they lose their manhood, their honor, and their God. They become slaves to passion, slaves to ambition, and slaves to eternal destruction.
When we understand that forty-four thousand guillotines were erected in France we may have some conception of the magnitude of the slaughter, and all the awful results in this Reign of Terror. Often a word, a tear, a look was enough to proclaim sympathy and send the unfortunate victim to his execution.
At La Vendee, a district in the west of France, where piety and love for Christian worship was strongest in the hearts of the people, they suffered the greatest indignities, cruelties, and murders. Its inhabitants had taken up arms in defense of their rights, and had gained some brilliant victories. These disasters of the Republicans only infuriated their wild rage. New forces were gathered against the Christians and with fire and sword they marched through this province, destroying farms, burning villages, and murdering every man, woman, and child who might fall in their way. Age nor sex had any immunity from these devils who traversed the country destroying every form of Christianity that might arise before them. Armed mobs, with the guillotine in their train, traversed every direction, and when captures were made they were dragged to the wagon of death, there beheaded and the bodies left by the roadside.
Terror, like a pestilence, was each day spreading farther and farther, demanding fresh victims to sate the thirst of these destroying angels. A black cloud of despotism and incarnate madness was brooding over France. Her victims were counted, not by hundreds, but by hundreds of thousands. The soil was drenched with the blood of innocence, and the whole fabric of social life was steeped in shame.
But as all things come to an end, so. too, did the black days of France. The butcheries of Robespierre and his creatures had sated the thirst for human blood. The strain was too great for human endurance. The conscience of man, which had been covered by an insane desire for vengeance, was asserting itself. Reaction was made manifest everywhere. Further crimes were considered unnecessary, and they began to turn with horror and pity from the blood-stained guillotine. Robespierre was being denounced as a tyrant. His terrible executions were coming home to demand the penalty of his despotism. Once more did the hatred of revolution break forth in all its ghastly form. Robespierre, himself, was the victim. Finding that his power was broken and that an outraged nature had demanded his execution, he sought to end his life by his own hand. The shot only shattered his jawbone, and before he could again seek destruction he was seized by the mob, dragged through the streets, and at the house where he lived, they halted for execution. A troop of women had gathered, who sang songs of levity, executed dances, and as his head fell, the whole crowd clapped their hands and shouted applause, and uttered curses on his memory. The waters of the bloody deluge began to subside, the greatest tyrant in all France had met the fate of his thousands of victims. The insane madness was over, and France had awakened from the ghastly dream of the Reign of Terror.