September 23, 2008

France Loses its Head (1793)

Not satisfied with remaking the government, the revolutionaries in France turned to remaking time. Their design, unveiled on this day, was logical, rational, poetical ... and awesomely insane.

In short, it was French.

Apart from the 12 months, the system was based on tens. Ten days in a week. Thirty days in a month. The day was divided into 10 hours, 100 minutes, 100 seconds.

The months had new names, derived from French, Latin or Greek: Vendémiaire ("grape harvest"); Frimaire ("frost"); and Thermidor ("summer heat"). Not only were the days renamed, but each one in the year was associated with a noun. Days ending in 5 were linked to animals, to 0 to a tool, the rest a plant or mineral. To align the calendar with the solar year, four days were added at the end of the year as festivals, five during leap year.

Adjusting to this brave new calendar took time and difficulties. Clocks were made to display the 10-hour day. There were arguments about when exactly to begin the new calendar, from the start of the revolution, or about when the king was deposed.

Surprisingly, the system managed to work. Although the time system was dropped two years later, the calendar hung on until Napoleon abolished it in 1805.

But while the revolutionaries were bending to the task of creating a logical calendar, they were lopping off heads. Earlier in September, the Committee of Public Safety was formed, headed by Maximilien Robespierre. Its duty: to root out enemies of the state, which turned out to be anyone who was disagreeable with anyone with the power to sign an arrest warrant.

By the time the "Reign of Terror" ended 10 months later, the guillotine had separated as many as 40,000 heads from their bodies (no one really knows for sure) for crimes as varied as being aristrocrats, evading the draft, or hoarding food. Fittingly Robespierre was one of its last victims.

For the three writers below, their fate in the shadow of the blade seemed to be determined almost at random:

* Thomas Paine: At first, the author of "Common Sense" and "The Rights of Man" was an entheusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. And the French admired him in return, not only granting him citizenship, but also electing him to the National Convention, despite the handicap of not knowing French.

It also shouldn't be a surprise that his loyalties also would be considered suspect during the Terror. He was arrested in December of 1793 and imprisoned. Despite retaining American citizenship, he was unable to enlist the support of the ambassador, and Paine suspected that both he and George Washington had abandoned him to the guillotine.

And he would have been, but for a trick of fate:

The room in which I lodged was on the ground floor, and one of a long range of rooms under a gallery, and the door of it opened outward and flat against the wall; so that when it was open the inside of the door appeared outward, and the contrary when it was shut. I had three comrades, fellow-prisoners with me, Joseph Vanheule of Bruges, Charles Bastini and Michael Robyns of Louvain. When persons by scores and by hundreds were to be taken out of the prison for the guillotine it was always done in the night, and those who performed that office had a private mark or signal by which they knew what rooms to go to, and what number to take. We, as I have said, were four, and the door of our room was marked, unobserved by us, with that number in chalk; but it happened, if happening is the proper word, that the mark was put on when the door was open and flat against the wall, and thereby came on the inside when we shut it at night; and the destroying angel passed by it.

A few days later, Robespierre fell, ending the Reign of Terror, and Paine was freed a few months later.

* Marquis de Sade: The notorious libertine had been imprisoned several times, so when the revolution came, he knew exactly what to do. He dropped his aristocratic bearing, titled himself "Citizen Sade," elected himself to the National Convention and wrote a eulogy for Jean-Paul Marat, the revolutionary who was stabbed in his bath. It didn't work. He was arrested and imprisoned, destined for a date with the blade.

But whether through bribery or incompetence, when it came time for the guards to locate one "Sade, former count, captain of Capet's guards in 1792, has corresponded with enemies of the republic," they couldn't. He was released three months later, but the experience left him a marked man. "Those few months in the shadow of the guillotine did me more harm than all the years of my incarceration under the King," he wrote a friend.

* In a just world, Olympe de Gouges would be known as highly as Thomas Paine. A woman who detested her first (arranged) marriage, thereafter she took up the pen to advocate for equal rights with a ferocity and stubbornist that was admirable for the risks she took. You could say she went farther than the radical Paine. She opposed slavery and capital punishment, and that included executing King Louis XVI. She argued that women should enjoy the same rights as men, even have sex outside of marriage.

Naturally, she supported the revolution, but grew disenchanted when she realized that the revolution's motto of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" applied only to the male half of the population. Defiant to the end, her last writings condemned the Terror and demanded a vote on a new form of government. She was only 45 when she was executed.

Born today: Euripides, playwright, 480 B.C.E.; William McGuffey, educator, Washington County, Penn., 1800; Mary Church Terrell, civil rights activist, author, Memphis, 1863; Baroness Emmuska Orczy, novelist, Tarnaörs, Hungary, 1865; John Avery Lomax, ballad anthologist, Goodman, Miss., 1867; Walter Lippmann, journalist, political philosopher, New York City, 1889; Pauline Réage, erotic novelist, Rochefort-sur-Mer, France, 1907.

Died: Wilkie Collins, novelist, London, 1889; Sigmund Freud, psychiatrist, London, 1939; Elinor Glyn, novelist, short-story writer, London, 1943; Pablo Neruda (ps. Neftali Ricardo Reys Basualto), poet, Santiago, Chile, 1973; Robert Bloch, horror novelist, short-story writer, Los Angeles, 1994.

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