Ça ira!: Opening Ceremony at the Concierge Was More Than Just Bad Taste
Las miradas de los actuantes parecen, en las instantáneas fotográficas de incidentes revolucionarios, mitad cretinas mitad dementes. In the candid snapshots of revolutionary incidents, the looks of the participants seem half cretinous, half-demented. — Nicolás Gómez Dávila Marie Antoinette,...
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Las miradas de los actuantes parecen,
en las instantáneas fotográficas de incidentes revolucionarios,
mitad cretinas mitad dementes.
In the candid snapshots of revolutionary incidents,
the looks of the participants seem half cretinous,
half-demented.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Marie Antoinette, the queen consort of France, went to her death on Oct. 16, 1793, in a horse-cart, so that she might be subjected to the jeers of the mob as she passed down the Rue Saint-Honoré towards the guillotine casting its shadow over the Place de la Révolution. Her hair was closely shorn to her scalp, and she was bound like a dog by a chafing rope leash.
She somehow maintained her queenly dignity to the very end, refusing to speak to the so-called constitutional priest assigned to hear her last confession. When she accidentally trod on the executioner Sanson’s foot, she uttered her last recorded words: “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès.” “Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose.” If those were indeed her last spoken words, her last thoughts, we may safely surmise, were directed towards a power far greater than that of the Committee of Public Safety — le Seigneur, le Père, le Créateur, le Dieu Tout–Puissant.
After her head was separated from her body by the guillotine’s angled blade, and her remains hastily consigned to an unmarked grave in the Cimetière de la Madeleine, the revolutionary mass-murderer Maximilien de Robespierre would greedily claim for himself a memento of his greatest crime: the queen’s prayer book, in which she had written, in her last morning on earth, Mon Dieu ayez pitié de moi! Mes yeux n’ont plus de larmes pour pleurer pour vous mes pauvres enfants. Adieu, Adieu! “My God, have pity on me. My eyes have no more tears to cry for you, my dear children. Farewell! Farewell!”
In perhaps the best-known passage in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke recalled having seen the queen of France, then still a dauphiness, on the luxurious grounds of Versailles, where she decorated and cheered “the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy.” Upon hearing of her mistreatment at the hands of the Parisian mob, Burke had assumed that “ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.” Yet those 10,000 swords remained in their sheathes, leading Burke to conclude that “the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Such is the lasting legacy of the French Revolution.
Opening Ceremony Performance Mocked Marie Antoinette
Our own age is far less chivalrous even than Burke’s, so it comes as little surprise to find Marie Antoinette still being subjected to mockery by the Parisian mob some 231 years after her execution on trumped-up charges of high treason, conspiracy, and “depletion of the treasury.” (Imagine if the last of those remained a capital offense.) And so it was that viewers of the Olympics Opening Ceremony on July 26, 2024, were treated to, among a great many other vulgar images, the spectacle of the heavy metal band Gojira performing the revolutionary anthem Ah! Ça ira from the windows of the Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned, accompanied by decapitated figures in 18th-century attire, and tangles of crimson streamers representing the copious blood shed for what the video screen assured us was Liberté.
Like much of what the Spectator’s Gareth Roberts dubbed “la grande débâcle” in Paris, which included “a headless Marie Antoinette, a piano inexplicably set alight, and – inevitably – a bevy of slaying and sashaying drag queens and ‘non-binaries,’ performing a sassy vogue parody of The Last Supper … the kind of phoney rebellion that was already embarrassing on stage at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1994, but at least was confined safely to bad gay pubs,” the grotesquerie at the Conciergerie was intentionally off-putting. It was also a significant breach of decorum, and a diplomatic faux pas, given that two of the royals in attendance, Juan Carlos of Spain and Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, are direct descendants of the Bourbons.
I am sure that some hear the opening lines of the sadistic sans-culotte version of “Ça ira” —
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les aristocrates on les pendra!
[Oh, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine
Aristocrats to the lamp-post!
Oh, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine
Aristocrats, we’ll be hanging them!]
— and find it all very stirring. These are presumably the sorts of people, their mindsets the products either of leftist indoctrination or stunted amygdalas, who think that the coldblooded murders of the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova in the basement of Ipatiev House in 1918 were just a bit of sporting fun. For my part, when I hear “Ça ira” I think of the tens of thousands of innocents killed, often without trial, during the Reign of Terror, at the hands of literal freaks like Robespierre, Danton, and Marat. I think of the 1793 James Gillray satirical print The Zenith of French Glory; The Pinnacle of Liberty. Religion, Justice, Loyalty, & All the Bugbears of Unenlightened Minds, Farewell! with its unforgettable image of a sans-culotte posing near a trio of murdered priests and fiddling while Parisian cathedrals burn (as they still do these days, mind you). I think of the anti-Catholic campaign of genocide in the Vendée, as described by the Republican general and notorious war criminal François Joseph Westermann:
Il n’y a plus de Vendée, citoyens républicains. Elle est morte sous notre sabre libre, avec ses femmes et ses enfants, je viens de l’enterrer dans les marais et les bois de Savenay, suivant les ordres que vous m’aviez donnés. J’ai écrasé les enfants sous les pieds des chevaux, massacrés les femmes qui, au moins pour celles-là, n’enfanteront plus de brigands…nous ne faisons pas de prisonniers, il faudrait leur donner le pain de la liberté et la pitié n’est pas révolutionnaire.
[There is no longer a Vendée, my fellow Republican citizens. She died under our free sword, with her wives and children, I just buried her in the marshes and woods of Savenay, pursuant to the orders you gave me. I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, for their part, will no longer give birth to brigands … we do not take prisoners, for we would have to give them the bread of freedom, and pity is not revolutionary.]
Little of the material legacy of the French Revolution remains. We do not wear Phrygian caps, or dance around the Tree of Liberty, or read the deranged scribblings of Anacharsis Cloots, or observe the calendrier révolutionnaire français with its ridiculous 10-hour days and 10-day weeks. Yet its ideological legacy of blood remains, seemingly ineradicable, reminding us of the truth of Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s maxim that “revolutions bequeath to literature only the laments of their victims and the invectives of their enemies.”
Year Zeros Are Predicate by Blood and Barbarism
The grande débâcle of the Parisian Olympics Opening Ceremony has been roundly criticized, in these pages by Messrs. Aguilar, McGee, and others, and elsewhere, with the French public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut disgusted by the “conformist” and “decadent” nature of the proceedings, so devoid of those typically Gallic qualities of “taste, grace, lightness, delicacy, elegance, beauty.” Eric Zemmour, the journalist and leader of the nationalist Reconquête party, focused less on the aesthetic and more on the political nature of the event:
Un spectacle politique jusqu’au bout des ongles fluorescents des drag queens. Un spectacle de mauvais goût, jusqu’à la tête coupée de Marie-Antoinette qui chante le «ça ira». Un spectacle faussement subversif jusqu’à Philippe Katerine qui danse nu au milieu d’une bien laide parodie de la Cène. Le vrai subversif risque sa peau : en 2024, Philippe Katerine ne risque rien à se mettre à poil en blasphémant le Christ. Bref des «mutins de Panurge», qui respectent le nouvel ordre moral, le doigt sur la couture.
[A political spectacle down to the very tip of the fluorescent nails of the drag queens. A spectacle of bad taste, down to the decapitated head of Marie-Antoinette singing “Ça ira.” A falsely subversive show leading up to Philippe Katerine dancing naked in the middle of a very ugly parody of the Last Supper. The true subversive risks his skin: in 2024, Philippe Katerine risks nothing by getting naked and blaspheming Christ. In short, “Panurge’s Sheep [i.e. a fashionable rebel],” respecting the new moral order, standing at attention.]
There are many ways to respond to anti-religious chauvinism and that frenzied antagonism towards normality that is sometimes described as Bio-Leninism, whether in the public square, at the ballot box, as a participant in the market, or just living out a normal, decent existence. Sacrilege is a perverse sort of compliment, a tacit acknowledgment of the power of the target’s faith and values, and the deficiencies of those of the provocateur. As such it can all usually be laughed off. There was something particularly disturbing, nevertheless, about the overtly political spectacle at the Conciergerie, which went beyond mere poor taste.
Those who positively revel in the death of an innocent woman, in the slaughter of ideological enemies, in a political movement predicated on wholesale human sacrifice, in the prospect of an entire nation converted into a gore-flecked hecatomb, deep down are capable of most anything. Hatred of beauty, hatred of faith, and hatred of history invariably produce the worst crimes modernity has to offer. Year Zeros can only be inaugurated amidst a welter of blood and barbarism.
Bear in mind that the very idea of “the Left” came into existence when the Jacobins, together with the even more extreme Montagnards, sat to the left of the president’s chair in the National Convention, and that it was under the Jacobin Dictatorship, with its unholy Reign of Terror, that Marie Antoinette and so many others lost their lives. An unapologetic celebration of revolutionary bloodletting, broadcast to every corner of the globe, speaks to a myriad of lessons unlearned and surely presages new episodes of violence to come. It is to be hoped that those of faith, good conscience, and basic human decency retain the capacity to feel the stain of the Opening Ceremony “like a wound,” and redouble their efforts on behalf of the beleaguered “grace of life” Edmund Burke described so eloquently in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.
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