Leftism
7. The French Revolution
Looking now at the background of the French Revolution—historically the mother of most of the ideological evils besetting not only Western civilization but also the rest of the world—we have to make an inventory of the roots of this iniquity. We find misinterpretation and distortion of events in America, but there were also other factors leading to the French Revolution and we will consider them later.
It took me many years in the United States to understand what makes that country “tick,” what is the inner meaning of certain words, what is the mind and thought of both the average and the extraordinary American. The confusion among the French (and other volunteers) must have been considerable in many ways.
What has not been done so far is a systematization of his political and philosophical thought which is to be found in a few pamphlets and minor essays while the larger part is dispersed among his pornographic works. One would have to wade through an ocean of smut (shocking, perhaps, in the beginning, but merely tiring in the long run) in order to get a coherent whole. As far as one can see without having undertaken this Herculean task, we have here a real system of thought waiting to be expounded. There was method and logic to this man. His books were widely read but, naturally, rarely quoted because even for the end of the eighteenth century they were far from respectable. And precisely because these were volumes one did not like to boast of knowing, it will always be very difficult to prove unequivocally how influential they were at the time of their publication—and after. One would have to look for their oblique reflection in the sayings, writings, and actions of others.
It is probable that de Sade’s ideology-philosophy was the outflow of his inclinations and aberrations—and not the other way round. It is quite possible that we all have sadistic drives but that in normal, in average persons they exist only within certain limits. It can be argued that de Sade in this respect was not an exception but that, being able to justify his yielding to these instincts, he finally became their slave. They certainly dominate his imagination, his daydreams, his writings, his whole intellect.
Donatien Alphonse Francois Comte de Sade was born on June 2, 1740 in Paris as scion of an ancient southern French, Provençal family. He served in the army and in 1763 married Mademoiselle de Montreuil whose wealthy family belonged to the noblesse de la robe. A few months after the wedding he engaged in sadistic torture of a prostitute and was jailed for fifteen days as a consequence. A similar though graver case occurred in 1768 when he cruelly flogged a girl and was again committed to prison. Released, he engaged in an orgy in a brothel in Marseille which resulted in a more severe sentence in 1772. Imprisoned in Miolans, he succeeded in escaping but was again arrested in Paris in 1777 and brought back to the south of France where, thanks to another escape, he enjoyed thirty-nine days of liberty. Arrested once more, he spent five and a half years in Vincennes followed by another five and a half years in the Bastille and after that a year in the hospital for the criminally insane in Charenton. This long imprisonment was not due to a jail sentence but to a lettre de cachet from the King, issued upon the request of de Sade’s mother-in-law, the Présidente de Montreuil.
Was de Sade then really the main culprit in this sordid affair? He well might have been because the forthcoming destruction of the Bastille was well known and political prisoners were rarely, if ever, locked up behind its walls.
The Governor of the Bastille, M. de Launay, an enlightened liberal, had a tiny garrison of Swiss and some invalid veterans at his disposal when the mob finally gathered around the building on July 14: He offered only token resistance. The delegates of the Town Hall and two appointees of the mob were received and were invited to join the governor at his meals. In the meantime the drawbridge of the outer court was let down and guns were directed at the inner court. The soldiers, sensing that they had no commander willing to take the responsibility, surrendered. The governor was killed after having been atrociously tortured. He implored the monsters to finish him off and when, at last, he had been given the coup de grace, a young cook “who knew how to handle meat” cut off his head with a small kitchen knife. The head was carried around in triumph until the late evening hours. Three of the officers were also murdered fiendishly and two of the invalids who once had heroically fought for France were hanged by the howling mob, which also cut off the hands of a Swiss guard. The surprise came when the “victors” found only seven prisoners. Four were forgers who quickly decamped, two were insane (they had been there only for observation), and one was a dissolute young man of noble descent who considered himself the real hero of the day: he harangued the people with revolutionary phrases. All in all, a nauseating and disgraceful performance, certainly not fit to serve as the basis for a national holiday—and inspired in every way by the “Divine Marquis.”
Donatien de Sade stayed at Charenton only until April 2, 1790, when he was released, thanks to a decree of the National Assembly, which declared all lettres de cachet of the King null and void. It was Good Friday. His wife sued for separation from the monstrous man and got it. De Sade felt “betrayed.” Yet he soon engaged in local politics and became a leader of the Place Vendôme section of Paris. After the September massacres in 1792 he was even appointed its secretary. It is evident that he was somewhat torn between a certain snobbery—after all, the de Sades belonged to the highest nobility—and his materialistic and atheistic convictions which drew him toward the left. The mere fact that he was of noble origin proved to be no obstacle either in his case or in others to a “career” in Republican circles. Yet at the height of the Terror, in spite of the fact that his section had been directed by Robespierre, de Sade was in danger of being guillotined. The 9th Thermidor, the day of Robespierre’s fall, saved his life.
However, de Sade’s writings are of even greater interest. In 1791 he published his first great pornographic novel Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. Here philosophical remarks and debates are wedged in between scenes of sexual debauchery. His Addresse d’un citoyen de Paris au roi des Francais, issued in the same year, is purely political and shows not the extreme leftist materialist views which we encounter in later writings, as for instance in Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman Philosophique, a “novel” in four volumes that was printed three times between 1793 and 1795. With its total of more than 1,700 pages, it had an enormous impact on the French Revolution which was, in so many ways, a sanguinary sex orgy.
Even worse, from a purely moral-esthetic as well as from an ideological point of view, were La philosophic dans le boudoir (1795) and La Nouvelle Justine, suivi de l’histoire de Juliette ou les prospérités du vice (1797). De Sade, especially during his jail terms and his sojourn in Charenton, must have had a prodigious capacity for work and a truly limitless imagination, because the abovementioned works by no means exhaust the list of his opera omnia. Some of his manuscripts were destroyed by his son or by the police. Others were published posthumously—for instance the very important Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond which contains the quintessence of de Sade’s atheistic, materialistic outlook, while the more scandalous Les 120 Jours de Sodome ou l’Ecole du libertinage is onesidedly pornographic.
To what extent Rousseau not only laid the foundations of the French Revolution but also of the modern totalitarian state can be gleaned even better from Werner Kägi’s fascinating essay, “The Constitutional State and Democracy.”
The first president of the Jacobin Society in 1790 was the Due d’Auguillon, and even the man who, in moderation, spread the Revolution over the map of Europe, Napoleon, came from a noble family. The pioneers of the Revolution also belonged frequently to the clergy. The “philosophizing abbés” could be found everywhere, men such as Sieyès, Raynal, (Bishop) Grégoire, Mably, de St. Pierre and Barthélmy. Voltaire owed his deism to the Abbé de Châteauneuf and not without reason did Rousseau put the summary of his sentimental -deistic philosophy into the mouth of his Vicaire Savoyard. Enlightenment and the Revolution had little to fear from the more intellectual clergy. Voltaire and Diderot both had been educated by the Jesuits (who are by no means the mind molders a certain type of propaganda makes them out to be). And since the totalitarian movements of the last hundred years are in parts or even predominantly Christian heresies if not caricatures of the monastery, it is not so surprising that men and women with a distinctly Christian background fall for them. Neither the clerical state nor seminary training are by any means prophylactics against such deviations. Who could imagine the French Revolution without the participation of clerics and exclerics, Russian Bolshevism without Stalin and Mikoyan, both former seminarians? Nor could one conceive of the earlier leftist currents without Arnaldo di Brescia, Joachim de Floris, John Ball, John Wyclif, or Campanella. Corruptio optimi pessima. We will revert to this theme some time later.
Still, the fact that radical changes took place completely upset the inner balance of the masses. Anarchical peasant risings occurred and mad, weird sects made their ubiquitous appearance. Luther strongly invoked the secular arm, and since secular authority had not been shaken by this purely religious evolution, order was preserved and restored. In the French Revolution, however, secular authority was undermined and attacked after religious loyalties had been gravely weakened. Only outside military intervention could help the Old Order, but the energies let loose by the revolutionary volcano were too strong. For twenty years Continental Europe was at the mercy of the French Revolution and its Bonapartist aftermath, with the United States a virtual ally of Napoleon in the War of 1812.
The Kerenskys usually appear on the scene in a time of reform. They take over and pretend to be the originators of all improvements. In fact they not only continue the reforming-liberalizing policy of their “reactionary” forerunners, but soon they lose hold and are defeated by a combination of wild demagogues and frantic mobs. The Lafayettes, Lameths, Mirabeaus, in precisely this fashion, failed to stem the mounting tide of radicalism. As in a Greek tragedy, events had to run their course. The anarchical tyranny of the many had to evolve into the despotism of a single man. Civilian chaos became military order. Skytalismos, the rule of the club, yielded to the rule of the sword. Tyranny “settled down” to becoming a monarchy, as foreseen by Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius. However, the “royalization” of tyranny, unfortunately, is no longer possible. Totalitarian tyrannies no longer evolve because Big Brother cannot become a father. Thus we get endless intrigues, palace revolts, and assassinations. Only total military defeat breaks the evil chain.
The Enragés, the left wing of the Montagne, with men such as Roux, Varlet, and Leclére, increased their protest against the inequality of wealth. The equality of civil rights, they insisted, was senseless without financial equality. Hébert spoke in the same way and Saint-Just declared war on the rich. It was Joseph Lebon, the butcher of Arras, who started the methodic warfare against the “rich” in the North: 392 were guillotined in Arras, 149 in Cambrai. In a famous speech before the National Convention Jacques Roux had demanded equal incomes for everybody. Identitarianism wanted to go all the way, and it was only the fall of Robespierre and later the defeat of Gracchus Babeuf, the first modern Communist leader (in 1797) which prevented a further development in this direction. In the course of the French Revolution, however, the inner connection between democratism and socialism again had become clearly visible.
The tragedy of the intellectual leftist nobleman is best personified by Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a liberal of somewhat sectarian cast and a pillar of the Enlightenment. In 1750, at the age of 29, he became President of the Cour des Aides of the Paris parlement while his father was made Chancellor (but left all the work to his son). He used his position to promote the Enlightenment and, trying desperately to appear “tolerant,” “progressive,” “broadminded,” he not only gave every imaginable aid to those who undermined the old order but even persecuted opponents of the Enlightenment. This was easy for him because his office entailed the censorship of all printed matter published in France. As one can see, the Holy Illiberal Inquisition in the literary field already worked effectively even in those days. In all these “establishments” of the left, then as now, the pink intellectual, fearing to be out of tune with the times, is not only the most contemptible, but also the most ridiculous creature.
Malesherbes, we can be sure, finally saw the light, but then it was too late. He returned from Switzerland, where he had been given asylum, in order to defend the King before his judges, and it was his bitter task to tell the monarch that he had been sentenced to death. He then retired to the country but was arrested in December 1793 together with his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchildren. They were all condemned to death and, with the great delicacy that always distinguishes convinced leftists, the executioner had all the family beheaded in the presence of the old man (the grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville) before his turn came (April 23, 1794). Certainly he expiated all his sins. The road leading to the hell of leftist radicalism is not only broad, it is also fast and steep. Under such circumstances the brakes rarely work.
In the French Revolution this was quite different. In spite of the Roussellian fancies, it soon became obvious what a depraved individual the average man can be. One literally danced around the guillotines. Various military and civil commanders openly and officially boasted about their bestial deeds, which in all their nauseating horror were perpetrated above all against the “internal enemy.” Thus General Westermann in his message to the Committee of Public Welfare, after the defeat of the Chouans near Savenay, could declare:
The spirit of the Marseillaise was already Nazi and racist: “To arms, citizens, form your battalions, let us march, march, so that impure blood will drench our furrows.” A clever inversion of the blood-soil complex, Blut und Boden, seems to be contained in these lines.
