The French Revolution eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,095 pages of information about The French Revolution.

The French Revolution eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,095 pages of information about The French Revolution.

Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not mentioned among the other miracles of tanning!  ‘At Meudon,’ says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, ’there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying:  of which perfectly good wash-leather was made:’  for breeches, and other uses.  The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture! (Montgaillard, iv. 290.)—­History looking back over Cannibalism, through Purchas’s Pilgrims and all early and late Records, will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so detestable.  It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort perfide!  Alas then, is man’s civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.

BOOK 3.VI.

THERMIDOR

Chapter 3.6.I.

The Gods are athirst.

What then is this Thing, called La Revolution, which, like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins?  La Revolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing nowhere to be laid hands on, to be clapt under lock and key:  where is it? what is it?  It is the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men.  In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men.  Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality.

To explain, what is called explaining, the march of this Revolutionary Government, be no task of ours.  Men cannot explain it.  A paralytic Couthon, asking in the Jacobins, ’what hast thou done to be hanged if the Counter-Revolution should arrive;’ a sombre Saint-Just, not yet six-and-twenty, declaring that ’for Revolutionists there is no rest but in the tomb;’ a seagreen Robespierre converted into vinegar and gall; much more an Amar and Vadier, a Collot and Billaud:  to inquire what thoughts, predetermination or prevision, might be in the head of these men!  Record of their thought remains not; Death and Darkness have swept it out utterly.  Nay if we even had their thought, all they could have articulately spoken to us, how insignificant a fraction were that of the Thing which realised itself, which decreed itself, on signal given by them!  As has been said more than once, this Revolutionary Government is not a self-conscious but a blind fatal one.  Each man, enveloped in his ambient-atmosphere of revolutionary fanatic Madness, rushes on, impelled and impelling; and has become a blind brute Force; no rest for him but in the grave!  Darkness and the mystery of horrid cruelty cover it for us, in History; as they

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The French Revolution from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.