behind the jubilation, the ghosts of Terror | EUROtoday
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FShould he put into perspective the gatherings of French individuals reveling within the loss of life of Jean-Marie Le Pen by placing them right down to youthism, the intoxication of the second and the violent pleasure that they specific by displaying portraits of the deceased and his family members put to the sword, or singing “Next” – or relatively “Next”?
The loss of life of the politician who had made himself insufferable by talking particularly of the gasoline chambers as “a detail in the history” of the Second World War, who died on the age of 96, justifies the jubilation in a number of cities? He had by no means held the slightest authorities perform, allow us to bear in mind. The query just isn’t even whether or not he deserved such a frenzy or not, however whether or not this celebration doesn’t solid a disastrous gentle on a sure French political tradition and custom.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s media outings have usually dishonored his public dedication, and one can surprise if those that drank from the well being of a nonetheless smoking corpse on the night of January 7, didn’t themselves coated with dishonor the beliefs they are saying are theirs.
It is subsequently not an episode with out symbolic worth that these spontaneous gatherings celebrating the loss of life of a sick outdated man, and calling for the loss of life of recent political figures. These demonstrations odor of blood. At first, I used to be outraged, then step by step I spotted that it was extra critical than that: they are saying one thing about our historical past and are even, from a sure angle, very worthy of it.
Morbid triumph
We usually sing the praises of the France of Voltaire, the Enlightenment, La Fayette, Hugo, De Gaulle and Simone Veil. But if it was the France of Terror, that of Marat and Carrier, the France of shorn ladies in public squares, what have been the January 7 revelers singing to us? It is the paradox of our nation to be one the place, concurrently the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, crowd actions carried out the savage beheading of males thought of enemies of the individuals on the street, although the assassins holding the knife claimed to be supporters of human rights.
The hate speech of tyrants and enemies of equality legitimized, of their eyes, the humiliations inflicted on the corpses and the macabre dances across the heads flanked on prime of pikes dripping with blood. By uniting on the street with the chants of Carmagnole and Ça ira, ça ira, the aristocrats with the lantern!, these crowds reveled in loss of life within the title of the Popular Revolution. They needed to destroy the bodily physique and the symbolic physique of the king and what he represented: that is how the top of Louis XVI was proven to the group, held by the hair; that is how the late king was mocked for having trembled like a coward on the scaffold, which was false since even the executioner Sanson was outraged by this autopsy dejection, explaining that Louis Capet had proven dignity and even braveness.
This is how January 21, the date of his execution, was declared a significant nationwide vacation below the First Republic. The identical morbid triumph surrounds the execution of Charlotte Corday who had simply assassinated Marat: her bloodied head can be brandished at arm’s size and even proudly slapped by an assistant to the executioner; an post-mortem will even be carried out to test if she was certainly a virgin and, sadly for the Jacobins, she was. The identical scenes of well-liked jubilation accompanied the execution of Robespierre, on 10 Thermidor Year II, to the purpose that the day of his loss of life, too, was declared a nationwide vacation, exactly the celebration of freedom. Thus, each January 21 and July 28, massive bonfires have been lit in public squares and the effigy of the 2 “tyrants” burned to mark the hatred they have been imagined to encourage.
Respect for mourning
Would we consider that these avenue demonstrations below the Terror singing and celebrating loss of life have since been banned from our “republican” traditions? It’s fairly the other. We noticed with what relish the lovers of the guillotine confirmed Marie-Antoinette, her head in her fingers at a window of the Conciergerie, on the night of the inauguration of the Olympic Games. Even right this moment, January 21 is widely known as a day of celebration on the Sorbonne by lecturers wishing to reenact the Jacobin ritual, and so they even eat the standard patriotic pig, a glass in hand, to recall the humiliating well-liked picture of Louis XVI. Moreover, in contrast to Jean-Marie Le Pen, allow us to do not forget that this monarch and Robespierre ruled the nation.
Yes, the night time dances on Place de la République, in 2025, style like blood and, for a second, seeing such a avenue spectacle, I believed I noticed the ghosts of the previous resurface, these the identical individuals who have been baptized “Blood Drinkers” and “Anthropophages” after the tip of the Terror, to suggest the barbarity of which the residents of essentially the most stunning of republics are succesful when political hatred involves cowl, or relatively stifle, with its morbid shroud, one of many highest rules of democracies: respect for human dignity. In this case, hatred of racism can not justify males abrogating one of many important values of civilization: respect, for a kind of quick time period, for the mourning of a household mourning the lack of a cherished one.
Retching
It is that this “hatred” extending and accompanying the workplace of the executioner, by glorifying a head planted on the tip of a pike, that Robert Badinter had fought by saying that it was a stain of disgrace on the French flag. “Nothing excuses this degree of violence, not physical but verbal. » And immediately he added that nothing justifies the apology for hatred and the assassination of “any politician, any politician whatsoever” (on the set of France 5 in January 2020). They are the identical ones who don’t respect the minutes of silence within the stadiums, the identical ones who vandalize our statues, the identical ones who play soccer with a ball on which the top of a minister is drawn, the identical ones who block the schools in the course of the between two rounds of elections.
Gracchus Babeuf and Chateaubriand witnessed the primary savage executions of 1789 and noticed these unusual pink fruits on prime of the pikes, and so they each retched on the spectacle of the mob carrying their trophies by means of the streets . ” Oh ! how this joy hurt me! writes Babeuf to his wife. I was both satisfied and dissatisfied; I said so much the better and too bad. I understand that the people do justice, I approve of this justice when it is satisfied by the annihilation of the guilty, but could it today not be cruel? »
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This additionally jogs my memory of what the deputy Adrien Duquesnoy meditated whereas witnessing the scandalous scenes of the “anarchy” of the uncontrollable well-liked demonstrations of the Parisian Revolution: “The good citizens,” he describes, “were groaning at a scene which can make us feel sorry for ourselves. scandal and the laughing stock of Europe. » Duquesnoy was a strong supporter of the ideas of 1789 and had the conviction that democratic peoples cannot behave in the same way as their enemies whom they criticized for what they themselves hasten to imitate.
*Loris Chavanette is a historian, specialist in the French Revolution. He is the author of “The Temptation of Despair” (Plon, 2024).
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/mort-de-le-pen-derriere-la-liesse-les-fantomes-de-la-terreur-10-01-2025-2579679_23.php