The Tarpeian Rock

 Reading Anatole France's classic historical novel of the French Revolution, The Gods Will Have Blood, one is astounded to realize that here, in a novel published just a few years before the First World War, is a prophecy of all the madness and delusion of the century of revolution that would follow it. Of course, it is no original insight in me that the Bolsheviks ended up recapitulating all the errors and obscenities of the Jacobin Terror. But it is astounding to see just how closely the parallels ran—and how much suffering humanity might have avoided if they had heeded the lessons of France's great novel—instead of proceeding to re-enact all of its bloodiest events, just a few years after it was published. 

In France's fanatical protagonist, Évariste Gamelin—who turns himself into a mass murderer and metaphorical parricide, all through the purest of Rousseauian intentions—we find all of the sophistries that the twentieth century's own revolutionaries would later use to acquit themselves of their own atrocities. He tells himself—we are killing the enemies of the state in order that it may one day be possible that the state will no longer have to kill. We are executing for the sake of ending capital punishment. One is reminded of that absurd quotation attributed to Lenin: that he and his fellow Revolutionaries were deploying coercion only so as to bring about the abolition of all coercion...

One also thinks of a poem by Brecht—one of his finest. In a piece written to "those born later"—presumably those who will come after the Revolution—Brecht appeals for forgiveness. He tells them that, he would have liked to show mercy. He would have liked to have practiced the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, and not to "repay evil for evil." But, he had the misfortune to live in "dark times." Therefore, he could not have done otherwise. He hopes that those who inherit the brutal dirty work of the Revolution, and who are, by its hands, rendered free at last to practice the arts of charity and mercy, will not judge too harshly those who made that future possible for them... 

Gamelin utters to himself much the same noble sentiments. Passing a child in a park, he tells him: "You will grow up to be free and happy, and you owe it to the infamous Gamelin. I am steeped in blood that you may be happy. I am cruel, that you may be kind. I am pitiless so that tomorrow all Frenchmen will embrace one another with tears of joy." (Davies trans.)

But was he right? Is that what all their bloodshed wrought? Did kindness spring from their cruelty—did flowers of charity grow from ground watered with blood? 

Or did France not rather succumb to a series of Napoleons, and pettier tyrants still, for a century thereafter...

So too with the Bolsheviks and their successors whom Brecht praised—did all of their coercion lead to the abolition of coercion? Did the apparatus of the state, having been rendered unnecessary through the elimination of class distinctions, simply and mercifully "wither away"? Did those who were "born later" manage to practice superhuman charity because the brutality of their Bolshevik ancestors had cleared the way for them to do so? 

Or did not rather Stalin succeed to Lenin's place, and unleash still greater terrors—and did not Putin succeed to the wreck they all left behind, and continue to inflict their "joyless experiment in force and fear" (E.E. Cummings's phrase) on Russian citizens to this day?

Note too the way Gamelin justifies to himself the bloody summary justice that he metes out as part of the Revolutionary Tribunal, against the victims of the Terror. He claims: the elimination of procedural safeguards (such as the calling of witnesses and the presumption of innocence) may seem at first like an act of tyranny... But one must not be deluded by false equivalencies! What would certainly be an abuse of power in a court of the monarchy becomes simple efficiency and justice in a court of the People. Gone are the empty forms and lawyer's tricks that veiled the eyes of justice under the ancient regime! Now, he declares, the direct insight into truth—the pure revolutionary instinct—of the sans-culotte masses shall determine guilt or innocence!

One is reminded of another Brecht poem—one of his worst. He appears to be describing a show trial in Russia—the stringing up in slow motion of some helpless scientist accused of being a "saboteur." One can see unmistakably that Brecht knew full well these sham proceedings were a farce. And yet, the poem labors, by the most astounding moral sophistry, to reach its foreordained conclusion: the so-called "saboteur" must be destroyed. One thinks at first that Brecht means it as satire, when he pens the refrain: "The People's Court is never wrong." But, one eventually discovers, as the poem gathers to its pseudo-logical conclusion —he really means just that. 

The twentieth century, that is to say, gave birth to many Gamelins and successors to Gamelins. And now, of course, the twenty-first century is as well. 

All of those doltish believers in the false gods of the "MAGA Revolution" in this country—those who acclaim Mike Pence one day, when he is in Trump's favor, and hound him out of the party the next, so soon as Trump turns on him. That fickle mob who are ready to heave Trump's erstwhile allies off the Tarpeian Rock as soon as they show the slightest moral backbone and resistance to Trump's vilest demands—they are no different from the crowds in Anatole France's novel, who mock and revile the Jacobins' victims one day, and then mock Gamelin himself with the same epithets when it is his turn in the tumbril...

Fools, fools, endlessly repeating the same tired mistakes, the same wearying crimes, the same travesties and shames, the same "wrongs to man and insults to God"—to borrow a phrase from Robert Browning's invective. Why will they never learn? Why will they keep following the demagogue of the moment, and never heeding the lesson of yesterday? 

The answer is simple: because mankind suffers. Because mankind labors in darkness and pain and horror. Because we live for a brief moment of daylight between two infinite sleeps, with one generation succeeding to another with barely time to learn how to earn its daily bread, before it too succumbs to darkness—so who can fault them for not also learning the lessons of every prior generation too? Who can fault humankind for never learning to "use the lessons of yesterday" as Carl Sandburg kept prophesying (perhaps deludedly) that they would. Who can fault them for having to repeat the same mistakes their ancestors already made? 

The mystery of humankind, as Erich Fromm puts it beautifully, is not why we never learn from our mistakes, and keep repeating these same political atrocities—that, as I say, is easily explained—but why anyone ever conceived of anything else. That is the miracle of our species; our unique departure from the foreordained natural order. It's not that we are capable of evil. That is sufficiently explained by the cruelty of the universe and the ignorance into which we are born. What astounds us is that any human being ever proved capable of imagining or doing anything better. 

Fromm writes, in his Escape from Freedom: 

There is no reason to wonder why the record of history shows so much cruelty and destructiveness. If there is anything to be surprised at—and encouraged by—I believe it is the fact that the human race, in spite of all that has happened to men, has retained—and actually developed—such qualities as dignity, courage, decency, and kindness as we find them throughout history and in countless individuals today.  

This is the true wonder that France's novel reveals as well. It's not really that he managed to describe the excesses of demagoguery and cruelty and depravity in a way that so closely foretold the coming sins of the Bolsheviks or of our would-be "MAGA" revolutionaries today; it's that he also managed to depict simple human goodness in the midst of it. It's not his Gamelin who should surprise us; it's his Monsieur Broutteaux—or his Athenaïs; two souls who sacrifice themselves beneath the guillotine not for the sake of being heroes or martyrs—still less for any "Revolution" or "patrie"—but out of simple loyalty, kind-heartedness, and ordinary charity. 

This was also the lesson that Stevie Smith taught, in one of the greatest poems ever written; the same lesson that Fromm's passage conveys; the same I take at last from France's novel: 

Man aspires

To good,

To Love

Sighs;

Beaten, corrupted, dying

In his own blood lying

Yet heaves up an eye above

Cries, Love, love.

It is his virtue needs explaining, 

Not his failing.