The French Revvie, Part IV: The Vengeance

"I am your retribution," says Trump. I wonder what that would look like?

In Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities — about the French Revvie, which was still scaring the English seventy years after the fall of the Bastille —there’s a character called “the Vengeance.” She’s one of the “knitting women” who do mundane handicrafts while attending public guillotining sessions. The leader of these tricoteuses is the implacable Mme Defarge, who has a list of those who have wronged her —all of them naughty, none nice — and is bent on checking it twice: once when naughty folks they are added to her list, and once when they are struck off, along with their heads. The Vengeance is her backup and “shadow.”

If the knitting women remind you of the three Greek Fates, spinning the threads of men’s lives, weaving them, then snipping them off, you get extra points. And a bonus point for mentioning the Nornir, the Norse versions of the Fates, who spin the lives of men, using drop spindles like the kind found at the Viking settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. (The Vikings were keen on vengeance.)

Mme Defarge, Inca-like, has knotted the names of those slated for annihilation into her witchy stichery. (The knitting women really did exist, by the way, but the knitted names are problematical.)

(Share this or I’ll poke out your eyes.)

But the character of Mme Defarge is also inspired by Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution. Nemesis is often shown holding a balance — through tit for tat and eye for eye, she balances things out — and a sword, all the better to punish you with. “Isn’t that a lot like the goddess Justicia, or Justice?” you may ask. Yes, I reply. It is. Vengeance, Retribution, and Justice, as goddesses, look very similar.

Classical style

Modern pop dark-art Dominatrix style. You will find many versions of this if you type “Goddess of Vengeance,” “Goddess of Justice,” or “Goddess of Retribution” into your browser and then hit Images.

The Vengeance, illustration in the original Dickens novel. Not so sexy, eh? Don’t accuse me of body-shaming, please: It’s supposed to show how malnourished the underclass was, since Dickens sees the roots of the Revolution and the Terror in the mismanagement and cruelty of the regime that came before them. When wealth gets too unevenly distributed , insurgencies happen and blood flows, including the blood of the innocent.

Vengeance without true Justice plus the combination of self-righteousnss and the desire to punish and avenge can get extremely out of control, as it did during the witch scares, as it does in Dickens’ novel, and as it did in the French Revvie. The “people’s vengeance” was used as the justifiable excuse for quite a bit of random slaughtering, and was said — at the time, and since —to be the motive force behind the September Massacres and the Terror. The demands for clemency and what we would now call “due process” — bothersome and time-wasting witnesses and evidence, the right to speak in one’s own defence, a jury of one’s peers, etc. – were treated as betrayals of the Revolution, and their proponents were guillotined.

Where am I going with all this, you wonder? Thanks for hanging in through the literature and mythology: Here comes the present-day stuff.

Here’s some of it in a nutshell:

More specifically:

1. The French Revolution is the first modern revolution, by which I mean the first to utilize an enraged urban mob as an implement to overthrow an old regime and and install the largely bourgeois pamphleteers and speech-makers egging it on as leaders (however temporarily). Propaganda wars were a big feature, and were decisive.

   The American Revolution was a different sort of thing, and was more like a war against an occupying army. Both were about money, au fond – who was to manage it, and who was to accumulate it, and who was to be taxed, and how much — and much rhetoric went on, but the urban mobbery and “enemy of the people” features were of the French Revvie. The Cromwellian king-killing civil war of the seventeenth century and the “Glorious Revolution” that brought in William and Mary and constitutional monarchy were both wars between factions each of which already had enough money and political clout to finance and field an army. Urban mobs like the Paris one — armed with pikes, knives, and axes — did not feature

   

2. The Russian revolution, the Nazi movement, the Maoists, the Sandinistas, the Cuban revolution, Pol Pot, and on and on have resembled the French Revolution more than anything preceding it, and many of their leaders studied it and learned from it — especially from its use of the communications technologies of the time for propaganda. Note: a revolution can come from the right or from the left.

3. It is my contention that the MAGA movement is a revolutionary movement of this kind. Like the French Revvie, the Nazis, the Russian Communists and so forth, it is stirring up an angry mob, not in Paris but online. It is attempting to topple an old order — namely, American democracy as it has evolved over the past two and a half centuries — obliterate its Constitution, and replace those in power with itself. That is what its rhetoric points to. It has already attempted to storm the Bastille , on January 6, 2021. (It did get in, but, like the Bastille, the edifice was found to be largely empty.) In Arizona, a branch MAGA group even brought a guillotine, lest we miss the symbolic connection.

4. If this is true — and if Trump and MAGA win the election – what might “I am your retribution” look like in real life? Let’s say: a) violence and destruction of property b) wealth and real estate change hands, but the peasants don’t benefit (as in the French Revvie). The poor man crushed underneath the Wheel of Fortune remains underneath.

5. America’s position in the world will go down, as France’s did. Polarization will continue to weaken it.

6. But, more immediately: it will move first to purge, not only Democrats and recalcitrant journalists, but the ranks of its own party — moderates in Congress, Never Trumpers, Liz Cheney et al, any Republican presidential candidates such as Nikki Haley — who have not kissed the Pope’s toe. Trump has already used the word “purge” quite a lot.

7. Let’s suppose he means it. What form might this take? At its most extreme — and these folks are extremists — it would be like the Night of the Long Knives ordered by Hitler after he came to power. The first victims of this mass murder were other Nazis – those who still believed in the “socialism” part of National Socialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

8. In its longer-term form, it would be more like Stalin’s show trials and Great Purge of the late 1930s (https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Purge). Forced confessions, torture, threats to families — the whole Henry the 8th/Anne Boleyn bag o’tricks — were used to make the trials look somewhat real. Stalin thus got rid of the Old Bolsheviks who’d helped him to power, and were still Dreaming the Impossible Dream and wondering why it hadn’t happened yet – killed millions, and destroyed Russian military leadership to such an extent that Russia was easily invaded by Hitler. (Who, however, made the Napoleonic mistake of forgetting his long winter underwear, figuratively speaking.)

9. So if I were a Moderate Republican or anyone else on the Mme Defarge-like, Robespierre-like, Hitler-like, Stalin-like list that Trump and his buddies are undoubtedly compiling, I’d be getting quite worried about now. Does “purge” mean someone will turn up on your doorstep and shoot you in the face? Does it mean Gulags? Does it mean show trials? Does it mean rigged court cases? Or does it just mean being kicked out of government and sent off to brood and plot a revenge of your own? Does it mean the burn-it-all-down destruction of anything Biden/Obama might have done, in which case many will lose their jobs, their health care, and their social security? Will the months and days be renamed after Trump? (Use your imagination.) Will there be a Festival of the Supreme Being, with him playing the part?

Maybe someone should ask Trump what form “purge” and “retribution” might actually take. Anybody’s guess, and I hope we don’t find out.

Meanwhile, the French Revvie was kicked off by a financial crisis. It might be argued that the United States is already in one — the problem of the one percent and the top-heaviness of money — and that it is this that is fuelling the enraged mobs. The remedy? Share the cheese sandwiches, at least more than they are being shared.

For your consideration, here are a couple of publications that underscore some of the above verbiage.

This looks worth ordering, and I shall order it..

The second one is the latest issue of Mother Jones, a leftish sort of magazine. This is a money/inequality issue. It sends a bit of a shiver. I’m sure you recognize the period outfits. The cake is a little unfair — Marie Antoinette never said Lat them eat cake — but it makes the point: too much sugar and cleavage do not bode well.

Next up: Women and the French Revvie. Olympe de Gouges is featured, with and without her head. So is creepy Rousseau. Count the hours till I actually write this lumpy, alarming account of the Jacobins’ stern breast-feeding manifesto! Tits out, or tits up! Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, but that does not mean Sorority! Sorry, ladies: back to your knitting.