Lambs led to the Slaughter

The continuing war over the interpretation of the French Revolution continues. This time, the stumbling block is that of the importance of ordinary people in the course of the revolution. Elitism rears its ugly head in the following quote published in the June 2006 of Annals Australiasia (p.36). This quote also has its chilling reflection in today's world as governments wage a campaign of terror against their citizens:

The ploiticians guillotined one another in order to escape the guillotine themselves, but what of the anonymous hundreds who were sent to their deaths for no better reason that they were 'under suspicion' and consequently under arrest, and because Fouquier had orders, as he phrased it, to 'get heads'? Of what possible crime against the state can the seventeen-year-old hairdresser's apprentice Martin Alleaume have been guilty? Or eighty-five-year old Jacques Bardy? Or Marie Bouchard, an eighteen-year-old 'domestic servant'? Thanks to Fouquier's meticulous clerks, the names and conditions of nearly all the victims who died Danton's execution [along with M. Camille Desmoulins, editor and publisher of Le Vieux Cordelier] are filed at the Archives. And one can only stand perplexed and appalled before the record of these indiscriminate butcheries that tossed together nuns, soldiers, ex-nobles, workmen, servant girls and prostitutes, not to mention the victims without number who belonged to no particular class or category, but who seem to have been caught like sardines in the meshes of an invisible net.

Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, June 1793-July 1794, Lippincott, Philadelphia and New York, 1964, p.239.

Emphasis Mine

As you can see from the quote, it is the occupation and/or the age of the victim that calls into question the original arrest. These victims may well have innocent but the way to investigate it is to uncover the legal foundations and processes used in the arrest and trial. Were the foundations solid? Was the process legal and transparent? These are the questions to be asked to determine the extent of arbitary terror.

Today, the events described here are happening all around us. Innocent people are being accused and caught up in a net of a dubious legal process. The clear intent is to inspire terror in citizens by their governments. No one will know when the knock on the door will lead to disappearance into the US gulag (or its Australian subsidary).

The strange thing is that the French Revolution was the decisive victory of Capitalism over Feudalism. And today, the Capitalist intelligensia want to deny this victory. As Capitalism calcifies into the Acien Regime of the 21st Century, the ruling class must suppress the truth of the birth of Capitalism when ordinary people did extraordinary things and imagined the impossible where a pauper could become the ruler. Station at birth was now longer a barrier to advancement and achievement. It is this example that frightens the Capitalist ruling class: they are no longer confident of competing against the ordinary people.

Let us imagine the future when ordinary people can again do extraordinary things. Let us dare to believe that we can change the world as those hairdresser apprentices, domestic servants, young women, old men did back in 1789. Let us always believe that we can change the world for the better.