The Guillotine Mystique: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION HAS LONG INSPIRED PROGRESSIVE RADICALS READY FOR CHANGE AT ANY COST.

• Author: Young, Cathy

LAST SUMMER, WHEN the short-lived "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" in Seattle renamed itself the "Capitol Hill Occupied Protest," one protester explained to a reporter that the acronym CHOP was a tribute to the Reign of Terror in France more than 200 years ago. "What happened to the people who did not get on board with the French Revolution?" he asked, to which the assembled crowd responded, "CHOPPED!"

This scene was just one manifestation of the guillotine fad that has been sweeping America's resurgent progressive left. #Guillotine2020 is an actual hashtagon lefty Twitter, mostly (if hyperbolically) dedicated to the malfeasance of Republicans, rich folks, and other baddies. DIY guillotines have been popping up at protests, including ones outside the White House and the Washington, D.C., mansion of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Jacobin magazine, one of the radical left's most prominent media outlets, has been selling a guillotine poster captioned "Some assembly required"--even though the publication claims its name is a reference to the Haitian Revolution and its "Black Jacobins," not the French revolutionary faction that perpetrated the Terror in 1793-94.

So far, this revolutionary playacting has been more annoying than terrifying: Much like far-right memes about "helicopter rides," a reference to extrajudicial executions via helicopter drop, it's about trolling, not killing, the enemy. But it still signals an embrace of bloodthirsty rhetoric--and of ideological homage to one of history's bloodier leftist dictatorships.

The new guillotine chic also speaks to the French Revolution's enduring hold over our cultural imagination. The five-year period from the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 to the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794 has shaped our political language in more ways than we realize. It gave us the terms right and left in their political sense, based simply on the seating of deputies in France's first National Assembly. It also gave us terror in its political sense, and with it the words terrorism and terrorist. It pioneered violent progressive utopianism and effectively birthed modern conservatism, via Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. It even influenced fashions, pioneering short haircuts on women in tribute to guillotine victims--who had their hair shorn before execution--in the Terror's aftermath. (Choker necklaces, apparently, have a similar origin.)

More important, the French Revolution has inspired radical movements for two centuries--notably Russia's Bolsheviks, who explicitly claimed the Jacobins as their forefathers. Now, a resurgent American left has revived its romance not only with Soviet Communism (even "Uncle Joe" Stalin has a Twitter fan club!) but with Jacobinism--not a good sign for where modern progressivism is headed.

From today's vantage point, the French Revolution may look like a distant costume drama mostly of interest to history buffs. But look closer, and its relevance to the current moment is striking--whether it's the paranoid style, the sentimental idealization of the downtrodden, the quest to remake human nature and reset history, or the view that morality is determined by rank in an oppressor/oppressed hierarchy. ("How tenderly oppressors and how severely the oppressed are treated!" scoffed Jacobin leader Maximilien de Robespierre in response to those who deplored the Terror's cruelty.) One can read a May 1793 letter to revolutionary legend Georges Danton from American citizen and French National Convention member Tom Paine deploring "the spirit of denunciation that now prevails" and think of parallels to current alarm about "cancel culture."

The stakes in 1790s France, of course, were much higher. Less than a year after that letter was written, the two men met in the Luxembourg prison in Paris--Danton on his way to ultimate cancellation, Paine awaiting the same fate, which he would narrowly escape. But the echoes are undeniable.

REVOLUTION

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION is often imagined as a broad, simple morality play: A decadent aristocracy and a tyrannical monarchy lord it over downtrodden peasants and commoners; Queen Marie Antoinette dismisses reports of the poor clamoring for bread with "Let them eat cake"; the people revolt and bring down the Bastille's grim dungeons; royals and aristocrats go to the guillotine; revolutionary leaders become the new tyrants; eventually, they too meet their downfall.

The reality was much more complicated. As Tocqueville later argued in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, revolutions generally happen not when things are at their worst but when there is tangible progress--enough to raise expectations for a better future but not enough to meet those expectations. Toward the end of the 18th century, France was rapidly liberalizing--economically, socially, and politically. The new era was symbolized by Voltaire's triumphant return to Paris in February 1778, shortly before his death, after 28 years of exile. Even the Bastille was already slated for demolition, and some of its former prisoners had published memoirs about their ordeal to celebrity acclaim. On the minus side, there was the constant crisis. The effects of droughts, poor harvests, and cattle disease were exacerbated by heavy taxes from which the aristocracy and the clergy were mostly exempt. The treasury was depleted not only by profligate spending and Louis XV's imperial adventurism but by Louis XVI's aid to America's rebel colonists. (One underappreciated historical irony is that French involvement in the American Revolution, motivated by the desire to kneecap the British monarchy, helped fuel France's own revolution--both by popularizing ideas of liberty and by driving the national debt through the roof.) The deregulation of markets spurred innovation but also increased economic insecurity, and fluctuations in the prices of basic goods were commonly blamed on the machinations of wicked speculators.

It's hardly a stretch to see parallels to America's present moment, in which turmoil follows several decades of unprecedented strides in civil rights for racial minorities, women, and gays--as well as the depressing reality of pandemic, debt (due in part to foreign wars), and widespread perception that ordinary people's economic problems stem from being screwed by evil elites.

The clamor for reform and the urgent desire to raise taxes led to the king in May 1789 calling on the Estates-General, an assembly representing the three estates--clergy, aristocracy, and commoners--to compile grievances and make proposals. In June, the delegates of the commoners rebelled, chafing at their inadequate representation compared to the other two estates, and declared themselves a National Assembly representing the entire people. When Louis XVI tried to rein them in by shutting down the assembly hall on the pretext of carpentry work, the mutineers moved to a tennis court near Versailles, joined by most of the clergy's deputies and by some of the nobles. The king caved.

The events of July 14, 1789--the "official" date of the revolution's start--began as another episode in this ongoing conflict. On July 11, Louis XVI had fired the popular liberal finance minister Jacques Necker; many worried this was a prelude to a shutdown of the...