Mirrors (45 page)

High class, high towers: the ladies, helped out by switches, now called extensions, wore complicated wire frames perched on their heads so their hair could rise floor by exuberant floor adorned with feathers and flowers. The rooftop of the hairdo might have been decorated with little sailboats or farms complete with toy animals. Putting it together was no mean feat, and just keeping it on your head was a challenge. As if that were not enough, the ladies had to navigate while wedged inside enormous crinolines that had them constantly bumping into each other.

Tresses and attire ate up nearly all the time and energy of the aristocracy. Any left over was spent at banquets. All that sacrifice was exhausting. The French Revolution did not meet much resistance when it swallowed the feast and crushed the wigs and crinolines.

THE DESPICABLE HUMAN HAND

In Spain, manual trades were dishonorable until the end of the eighteenth century.

Whoever lived or had lived from the labor of his hands, or who had a father, a mother, or grandparents of lowly, vile occupations, did not merit the courtesy of being called “sir.”

Among those lowly, vile occupations were

farmers,
stone carvers,
woodworkers,
vendors,
tailors,
barbers,
grocers,
and shoemakers.
These degraded beings paid taxes.
In contrast, exempt from paying taxes were
military officers,
nobles,
and priests.

THE REVOLUTIONARY HUMAN HAND

In 1789, the Bastille was attacked and taken by a furious mob.

And in all France the producers rose up against the parasites. The population refused to continue paying the tribute and tithes that had fattened the venerable and useless institutions of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the Church.

It wasn’t long before the king and queen fled. Their carriage headed north toward the border. The little princes were dressed up as girls. The governess, dressed as a baroness, carried a Russian passport. The king, Louis XVI, was her butler; the queen, Marie Antoinette, her servant.

Night had fallen when they reached Varennes.

Suddenly, a crowd emerged from the shadows, surrounded the carriage, captured the monarchs, and returned them to Paris.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

The king mattered little. The queen, Marie Antoinette, was the one they despised: for being a foreigner, for yawning during royal ceremonies, for going without a corset, for taking lovers. And for her extravagance. They called her “Madame Deficit.”

The spectacle drew a crowd. When the head of Marie Antoinette rolled at the feet of the executioner, the audience roared its approval.

A disembodied head. And no necklace.

All France was convinced the queen had bought herself the most expensive piece of jewelry in Europe, a necklace made of six hundred and forty-seven diamonds. Everyone also believed she had said if the people had no bread, let them eat cake.

THE MARSEILLAISE

The most famous anthem in the world came into being at a famous moment in world history. But it was also the child of the hand that wrote it and of the mouth that first sang it: the hand and mouth of its utterly unfamous composer, Captain Claude Rouget de Lisle, who wrote it in a single night.

Cries from the street dictated the words, and the music poured forth as if it had always been waiting inside him.

It was the turbulent year 1792: Prussian troops were marching against the French Revolution. Speeches and proclamations were stirring the streets of Strasbourg:

“Citizens, to arms!”

To defend the besieged revolution, the recently recruited Armée du Rhin was headed for the front. Rouget de Lisle’s anthem rallied the troops. The chorus swelled, tears flowed, and a couple of months later it reappeared, who knows how, at the other end of France. Volunteers in Marseille marched off to battle singing that powerful tune, which came to be called “The Marseillaise,” and all France sang the chorus. When the people attacked the Palace of the Tuileries, that was the song on their lips.

The composer was imprisoned, accused of treason for having committed the indiscretion of disagreeing with the Revolution’s sharpest ideologue, Madame Guillotine.

In the end Captain Rouget de Lisle was released. No uniform, no income.

For years he scrounged a living on the street, devoured by fleas, hounded by the police. When he said he was the father of the anthem of the Revolution, people laughed in his face.

ANTHEMS

The first known national anthem was born of parents unknown in England in 1745. Its verses declared the kingdom would crush the Scottish rebels, to “frustrate their knavish tricks.”

Half a century later, the Marseillaise warned that the Revolution would “water the fields with the impure blood” of the invaders.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the anthem of the United States proclaimed its imperial vocation blessed by God: “Conquer we must, when our cause it is just.” And at the end of that century, the Germans consolidated their delayed national unity by erecting three hundred and twenty-seven statues of Emperor Wilhelm and four hundred and seventy of Bismarck, while singing the anthem that put Germany
über alles
, above all.

Generally speaking, anthems reinforce the identity of each nation by means of threats, insults, self-praise, homages to war, and the honorable duty to kill and be killed.

In Latin America, these paeans to the glories of the founding fathers sound like they were written for funeral pageants:

the Uruguayan anthem invites us to choose between country and
grave
and the Paraguayan between the republic and death,
the Argentine exhorts us to vow to die with glory,
the Chilean proclaims the country’s land will be the grave of the
free,
the Guatemalan calls for victory or death,
the Cuban insists that dying for the fatherland is living,
the Ecuadorian shows that the holocaust of heroes is a fertile seed,
the Peruvian exults in the terror its cannons inspire,
the Mexican recommends soaking the fatherland’s standards in
waves of blood,
and the Colombian bathes itself in the blood of heroes who with
geographic enthusiasm do battle at Thermopylae.

OLYMPE

The symbols of the French Revolution are female, women of marble or bronze with powerful naked breasts, Phrygian caps, flags aflutter.

But what the Revolution produced was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and when revolutionary militant Olympe de Gouges proposed a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she was hauled off to jail. The Revolutionary Tribunal found her guilty and the guillotine removed her head.

At the foot of the scaffold, Olympe asked:

“If we women have the right to face the people from the guillotine, should we not also have the right to face them from the tribune?”

Not allowed. They could not speak, they could not vote. The Convention, the revolutionary congress, closed down all women’s political associations and forbade women from debating men as equals.

Olympe de Gouges’ companions were sent to the lunatic asylum. And soon after her execution, it was Manon Roland’s turn. Manon was the wife of the minister of the interior, but not even that could save her. She was found guilty of “an anti-natural tendency to political activism.” She had betrayed her feminine nature, which was to keep house and give birth to brave sons, and she had committed the deadly offense of sticking her nose into the masculine affairs of state.

And the guillotine dropped once more.

THE GUILLOTINE