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Article Excerpt
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 clapped 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 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.
--Thomas Carlyle, Book VI, Thermidor, from his The French Revolution--a History (1837)
IN JANUARY 2003, a demonstration at the Museum of Nantes, in Brittany, focused attention on a grisly trophy which had been exhibited there for some time: a tanned human skin dating from 1793. The demonstrators, who were from a Breton nationalist group, conducted a symbolic funeral ceremony for the man whose torso, flayed from neck to thighs, was so horribly exposed in the glass case. They shrouded the case in a Breton flag and conducted interviews on the museum steps with representatives of the press. They claimed that the skin was a relic of one of the most horrible episodes of the Republican reaction to the Vendee and Chouan wars of 1792-95, when at...
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