The World полностью

Robespierre had demanded death, boasting: ‘I’m inflexible to oppressors because I’m compassionate toward the oppressed.’ The Convention, including Louis’s cousin Orléans who had absurdly changed his name to Philippe Égalité, voted for death. Louis found a confidence in tragedy that he had scarcely known in glory. When his weeping lawyer informed him of the vote and proposed a counter-revolution, Louis replied, ‘Such proceedings would incite civil war. I’d rather die. Order them to make no effort to save me – the king of France never dies.’

The streets were so crowded it took two hours to reach the gallows in the packed Place de la Révolution, where the executioner Sanson awaited Louis with his sons, Gabriel and Henri. Louis started to speak – ‘I die innocent … I pray to God that the blood you shed may never be visited on France’ – but the beating drums drowned him out. Sanson cut his hair and tied to him to the contraption. The blade decapitated him, and Sanson showed the head to the people. ‘Vive la nation!’ cried the crowd. Antoinette and the children heard the roar. Baying citizens bathed in his blood, spattering it on each other.

Antoinette was given Louis’s wedding ring, engraved ‘M.A.A.A. [Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria] 19 Aprille 1770’. In a scene of agonizing drama, played out in their filthy cells, Antoinette, with her daughter Marie Thérèse, curtsied to her son as Louis XVII. But the boy was emaciated and ill. Soon afterwards the children were separated from their mother. ‘My child, we are about to part,’ said Antoinette, gripping Louis XVII. ‘Never forget God who thus tries you, nor your mother who loves you. Be good, patient and kind and your father will look from heaven and bless you.’

Louis’s execution was ‘the foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest,’ said Prime Minister Pitt, who resolved to use British wealth – ‘Pitt’s gold’ – to fund a series of coalitions of European powers in wars against France.^* At home, he feared revolution, legislating to ban trade unions. As French revolutionary armies overran Belgium then invaded Holland, the Convention declared war on Britain.

On 6 April 1793, as the Vendée uprising threatened Paris, the Convention created an emergency Comité de Salut Public (Committee of Public Safety) under Danton ‘to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal’. A democratic constitution was passed in June, but thanks to the war it was never implemented. That month, Danton retired to the country as the Convention announced ‘a revolutionary government until peace’, which gave full powers to the Committee, twelve revolutionaries, mainly provincial lawyers, re-elected every two months by the Convention. On 2 June, Robespierre orchestrated the arrest of Brissot and the Girondins and next month he was elected to the Committee, which ruled from the king’s green study in the Tuileries. The twelve directed the war, and instituted what came to be called La Terreur as a manifestation of ‘justice … severe and inflexible … the emanation of virtue’. On 23 August 1793, a massive conscription programme, the levée en masse, created the first real national army, directed by the ablest of the Committee, Lazar Carnot, ‘organizer of victory’. It was ‘a new era’, said the poet Goethe, ‘in the history of the world’ – the time of nations and ideologies, expressed in mass politics. The end of sacred monarchy inaugurated the cult of the nation and its institutional doppelganger, the nation state, still the basic unit for organizing governments today. Power is the mother of ideology. Nationalism, the identification with a bigger community that shared language, fortified by race and history – both often invented and garnished with plangent myths – developed to justify the nation state. If it looked like reason and virtue would remove families from power, that did not happen: dynasties, old and new, shapeshifted easily and adapted to the new dynamics.