Liberty and Lilies

(I trust this doesn't appear as a mere aside to this post but words are inconsequential in such times and it would be inappropriate to say more - sincere thoughts and sympathy to the people of Japan at this time).


As soon as he heard of the unleashing of the French Revolution, the English poet, William Wordsworth – a young man at that time – hurried to France to be part of this great movement towards liberty and individual freedom. Impassioned and animated by what was happening across the Channel, he believed that people had cast off the shackles of centuries and a new age was dawning and he wrote some of his most wonderful poems...Then he witnessed the murder of a king and the indiscriminate slaughter and bloodshed that followed and he returned disillusioned to England where eventually he bought a beautiful house in the Lake District and wrote some of his dullest poetry!

Wordsworth’s zeal at the outbreak of the French Revolution is understandable. It becomes even clearer in the light of William Blake’s poems (and Blake, in my opinion, is far better and more genuine poet). Blake saw the de-humanising of people that came about throughout the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, where people who had lived a rural life, in tune with Nature, were suddenly – due to the Enclosure Acts, and the advances in technology that led to ordinary journeymen losing their livelihood – thrust into slum dwellings in appalling conditions, deprived of dignity in places where children (especially those poor little pauper apprentices) were horrendously overworked, abused and disposed of in those ‘dark Satanic mills’ (the towers of which, incidentally, still line the ugly view from the train window between here in Leeds and neighbouring Bradford). Seeing the world move towards such a mechanical and inhumane way of being, where people were no longer individuals but simply cogs in the wheel of industry, I think I, too, would have rushed to France for that Revolution or rather that attempt to stop the way that people were being turned into automatons.

The question is, though, what where they rebelling against? And who took the blame and became the scapegoat for all the wrongs that people suffered?

They were rebelling against so-called ‘progress’ that was depriving them of their individual humanity and creating a sense of insecurity, and yet they chose as their scapegoat a king who, without having chosen such a role, actually cared about their well-being. The King, unlike the industrialists, had nothing to gain from turning his people into mechanical parts. He hadn’t looked for power. He hadn’t sought a throne. He did what he thought was his duty and would have been happier mending clocks. Yet this innocent man who had been forced into marriage, humiliated for his early failure to produce an heir and whose life had been mapped out by others from the start became the scapegoat for the angry dissatisfaction of his people.

No matter how deeply I delve into history, I don’t understand this obsession with Revolutions and killing or blaming kings. The average French person in 1789 probably had no more interest in who was on the throne than the average Yorkshireman cared about what was happening in London. What mattered to people then – and matters to people now – is the quality of their lives. If life is hard, if business fails, if there is massive inflation, the immediate response is either to look for someone to blame and be angry with them to the point of rioting or sending them to the guillotine, or to surrender in submission as a victim of circumstance. Are we so weak and dependent and lacking in the ability to take responsibility for ourselves that we need always seek a scapegoat?

There’s another way forward, I think. All these revolutions in the name of liberty merely exchange one notion of tyranny for another. If ever there were anything to learn from history it surely is that no one outside of us has power over us. No one outside of us controls our circumstances unless we allow them to do so. The alternative to ‘allowing them to do so’, isn’t to behead or shoot them, since we would then merely replace them with another perceived tyrant. The alternative is to realise that no one, absolutely no one else, is responsible for our experiences. We get to choose how we view the world and how we are with other people. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’ anymore. There are no ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and so there is no need to squabble over power.

After all, “Look at the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin (nor get up with the clock, nor feel jealousy or fear, nor kill kings nor stir up trouble in other countries so we can make some oil deal) and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these...”

The Praslin Affair

Shortly before dawn on Monday 18th August 1847 blood-curdling screams shattered the silence of the Hôtel Sébastiani, the Parisian residence of the Duc and Duchesse de Praslin. Startled into action, servants scrambled along the corridors to the rooms of the thirty-year-old Duchesse, only to find the doors bolted. As they struggled to force the locks, the screams gradually faded until at last the door opened from the inside and the Duc appeared in the entrance. Behind him lay an appalling scene: amid overturned furniture covered in blood, the Duchesse - her throat half-cut, her hands slashed and her head bludgeoned by a candlestick - lay gasping her last. The Duc, feigning shock, was quick to state that this was the work of an intruder but, within minutes of the arrival of the Sūreté Nationale, it was established the Duc himself was the culprit. Not only were his blood-stained clothes and hunting knife found in his adjoining room, but the whole of Paris knew he had a definite motive for murder.
Behind of their façade of domestic harmony, the Duc and Duchesse de Praslin had, for more than five years, endured a strained co-existence. Amid rumours and hints of child abuse, the Duc had forbidden his volatile wife from playing any part in their children’s upbringing, handing over all authority for their welfare and education to their English-trained governess, Henriette Deluzy, who was rumoured to be his lover. While the hysterical Duchesse ranted and raved, French newspapers gloated in reporting details of the supposed affair until at last under pressure from his father-in-law, the Duc was compelled to send the unfortunate Henriette on her way. Far from easing the situation, her departure served only to increase the tension in the household, culminating in the frenzied attack on the 18th August.
“What a mess!” sighed King Louis Philippe as the Duc de Praslin, still protesting his innocence, was brought before a Court of Peers and found guilty of murder. To appease the public’s demand for justice, he was condemned to death but before the sentence could be carried out he poisoned himself with arsenic and died after six days of agony.
There the domestic tragedy might have ended, but these were unsettling times in France and the scandal involving a well-known aristocrat was enough to shake public confidence in an already teetering monarchy.
Queen Victoria wrote, “This horrid Praslin tragedy is a subject one cannot get out of one’s head. The Government can in no way be accused of these murders, but there is no doubt that the standard of morality is very low indeed in France, and that the higher classes are extremely unprincipled. This must shake the security and prosperity of a nation.”
Within six months the security of the nation - and its monarch - would be shaken to the core.

I remember, as a small child, watching the old film, based on this event,: All this and Heaven Too and thinking it was very beautiful Alas, the reality was far less romantic and it is interesting how often in history a government is toppled or a king overthrown by some event over which he has no control but which either appears to be symbolic of the discontent of the age, or is used as an excuse by those who are desperate for change.

Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette

I read a Primary School article today about the French Revolution. It said more or less that Louis XVI was tyrant who incarcerated anyone who disagreed with him in the Bastille; and Marie Antoinette was a heartless woman who said, when people were starving, "Let them eat cake." The revolutionaries, on the other hand, according to this article for children, wanted people to be free and to be fed and cared for.

Of course, being an article for children, it didn't say that Robespierre was utterly paranoid and a megalomaniac who was so tyrannical he even knew what 'happiness' meant for everyone, and no one else's idea of happiness was valid. It didn't mention, being an article for children, that The Terror led to the bloody mass slaughter of countless innocent people (rich and poor) or that some of the revolutionaries were so intoxicated by their own power that they thought they were suddenly kings...and, in the case of Robespierre, that vile, vile man, ended up going to the guillotine with half a face (the other half having been shot away by the same rabble that he had created).

Nor did it mention - which would have been more accurate - that Louis XVI was a man who ardently loved his country; a man who would had no desire for power but would have been far happier among his clocks and clockwork mechanisms; a family man (like Nicholas II) and nothing like the tyrants who came afterwards. Nor did it mention that Marie Antoinette was first officially married to him when she was still an infant; was actually married to him when she was still a child, was sent from her home to a foreign place and was stripped of her clothes on the border in order to symbolise that passing and was then at so tender an age thrown into a completely different world with a husband she didn't know. It didn't mention the way in which she, like Alexandra of Russia, suddenly was treated as an enemy simply because of where she was born, nor how, later, she might have escaped from France but chose to stand by her husband...There is so much more to say of them both...

Oh please...stop writing glib lines!! Disagree by all means but don't keep repeating the same old, same old lies!!