We should talk about the massacre in Paris, but which one? Do we mean the
St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572? That was instigated by the French
king Charles IX and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, five days after Charles’
sister (and Catherine’s daughter) Margaret had married the Huguenot leader
Henry of Navarre. Grabbing the opportunity provided by so many Protestant
aristocrats attending the wedding in Paris, Charles and Catherine paid mobs of
Catholic thugs to kill every Protestant they could lay their hands on, the better
to ensure the victory of orthodoxy and true religion. The final death toll across
France may have been as high as 30,000. Apart from enriching English
commercial and cultural life for centuries to come with a sudden influx of
Huguenot refugees, these murders also inspired Christopher Marlowe’s play
"The Massacres at Paris".
Or do we mean the September Massacres of 1792? That was when the French
revolutionary government, facing the imminent threat of foreign invasion and
fearing the possibility of fifth columnists assisting the enemy, ordered the
summary execution without trial of the inmates of Paris’s gaols, carried out
systematically mobs of National Guardsmen, militants and local livestock
butchers. Of the roughly 1400 prisoners thus murdered (half the prison
population of Paris at the time), 233 were Catholic priests who had refused to
submit to the Revolutionary Government’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a
law of 1790 which subordinated the power of the Roman Catholic Church to
the civil, secular authorities. The rest were common criminals, presumably by
and large uninspired by either politics or religion. The massacre was largely
fomented by the radical journalist John-Paul Marat who later, like
Agamemnon and Jim Morrison, died in his bath. The largely freelance nature
of the massacre is believed to have driven the Jacobin faction, led by the
lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, to have formalised Terror under the control
of the state, in the interest of public order. During the ten months of
Robespierre’s government, about 40,000 people across France were
summarily executed.
Or do we mean the Bloody Week of May 1871, when the French Republican
government suppressed the Paris Commune, with a death toll of between
10,000 and 20,000, all murdered by government troops?
Or do we mean the Paris Massacre of 1961? That was when up to 200 people
protesting peacefully against France’s colonial war in Algeria were killed,
either herded into the River Seine by police to drown, or murdered in the
courtyard of the Paris Police Headquarters after having been arrested and
delivered there in police buses. The massacre was the brainchild of Maurice
Papon, previously a collaborationist civil servant under the Vichy
Government, later a prominent Gaullist politician, and at the time Parisian
Prefect of Police. Successive French Governments denied for decades that the
massacre had ever happened.
Of course there’s a fundamental difference between all those historic deaths
and the killings of 2015 - 17 people killed in January at the offices of Charlie
Hebdo and later in a Jewish delicatessen, 130 people murdered on Friday 13th
November in the Bataclan Concert Hall and elsewhere across Paris’s cafes and
restaurants. The question is, where does it lie?
After all, the similarities, even across the centuries, are overwhelming. Each
murder was wrought, almost exclusively though with the occasional Belgian
thrown in, by French citizens or subjects on other French citizens or subjects,
however they might ultimately define themselves according to their own
lights. Each murder, to a lesser or greater degree, was inspired by the twisted,
terrible tangle of political and religious imperatives which bedazzle too many
human minds. Each murder, indeed, was motivated by the kind of religious
considerations that also inspire people to ecstasies of bliss and selfless love.
Robespierre beheaded priests for political reasons, but also beheaded militant
and radical atheists because of his own devotion to the Supreme Being. The
soldiers of the Third Republic, fighting their way street by street through Paris
in 1871, lined the Communards up against the walls of Montmatre for
immediate execution because they were Socialists and Anarchists, for sure,
but also in part because the Commune had ordered the execution of the
Archbishop of Paris. And a fair few of the Communards who survived went
on, a quarter of a century later, to become virulent anti-Drefusards, furiously
insisting on the guilt of the framed Jewish Officer Alfred Dreyfus. Thus they
mined a seam of deep-seated French anti-Semitism which later fuelled the
fascism of the collaborationist Vichy Regime and its servants. Like Maurice
Papon, who later diverted his energies into similarly murderously assiduous
actions against French Muslims.
And given those motivations, it should come as no surprise that none of the
perpetrators of any of these murders would have imagined they were doing
anything wrong. On the contrary, each one certainly believed, wholeheartedly,
that they were doing good, and that the World was an immediately better place
due to the removal of every one of those enemies of the Church, the King, the
Revolution, France, the Republic, Good Order, Commerce, Virtue, the State,
Islam or, perhaps most important, the murderers’ finer feelings.
Because in each case, each corpse helped allay in some small part a previous
hurt and laid to rest an army of affronts. That’s how massacres happen, not
through the evil actions of individual sadistic psychopaths, but through mass
righteousness correcting the repulsive consequences of the crimes, mental and
actual, of the massacred.
So the murderers of the five cartoonists in the offices of Charlie Hebdo on 7th
January 2015 are practically indistinguishable from all the other Parisian lynch
mobs across hundreds of years. Offence having been taken, the sentence was
death. The only way they and their rival jihadis 10 months later differed from
all the other murderers was that they managed to kill far fewer people and
were not sponsored by the French state. They appealed instead to a higher
authority.
Note that. From St Bartholomew’s Day to the Bataclan, every murderer
murdered outraged on behalf of some higher authority or other. None of these
murders were individual crimes passionnel, but always - always - on someone
or something else’s behalf, invariably something allegedly infinitely more
powerful than the victims who had, through word or deed (or drawing), given
the initial offence. Apart from the perennial and eternally pointless
observation that God, History, Destiny, Kings and States should grow a pair
and stop being so thin skinned, it’s also worth observing how a murder is so
much easier and sweeter when it’s committed in behalf of victims, even if the
victims now become the perpetrators and vice versa (which is, of course, what
revolves in a revolution). Whether it’s the soft-hearted servants of aristos or
apostates at a prostitution party, the inherent guilt of the victim lies in their
secret identity as perpetrators by association, even if this has never for a single
moment entered the victims’ heads, even at the moment of death.
Which gets us where? To something innately violent in the nature of Paris? Or
of France? In fact, the innate violence - if you like, the violence inherent in the
system - has much more to do with France being a state than France being
French. Likewise, the Islamic aspect of Islamic State should alarm us less than
the fact they aspire to be a state, because being a state authorises the atrocities.
In other words, you can literally get away with murder if you’ve got a head of
state and a cushion of bureaucracy to soak up the blood.
Again, where does this get us? Sadly, back to the beginning. Back, moreover,
to basics, to the fatal riddle at the heart of all human affairs, between the mass
and the individual; the unresolvable blathering bullshit that sought liberty in
gutters of blood beneath the guillotine or equality in gulags full of the enemies
of the people or truth and justice in mawkish death cults like Islamic State. Or,
for that matter, in European Romanticism, which elevates the suffering of the
sovereign individual self all the way to the gates of Auschwitz, guarded by
Romantic heroes shovelling the massed ranks of their oppressors into the
ovens.
Parts of which might explain how it could be, when we’re surrounded on
every side by screaming injustice, economic atrocities, never-ending war on
all fronts and the continuing hegemony of a ceaseless cavalcade of charmless
psychopathic cunts, British university students’ unions are creating "safe
places" where students will never be in danger of hearing anything that may
upset them, including Germaine Greer possibly saying something disobliging
about transsexuals.
This is partly thanks to the unforeseen consequence of social media trepanning
humanity to allow our collective id to squirt incontinently forever from our
skulls; partly it’s a laudably democratic extension of the notion of lese
majeste. Either way, offence is now taken at every turn even when it isn’t
given. Twitter and Facebook abound with people waiting to be offended on
someone else’s behalf so they can start posting the death threats from their
"safe places".
This madness is becoming universal. The powerless evoke it as a tactical
slingshot, the powerful evoke it as a strategic weapon of mass destruction.
Even though it should be obvious that the most offensive thing anybody can
ever do to anybody else is kill them, wholly decent people have told me, when
I’ve spoken to them about the Charlie Hebdo killings, that of course Charlie
Hebdo’s cartoons were appallingly racist and sexist, and seem entirely unable
to understand my point when I ask them over and over again when it was that
racism and sexism became capital crimes. Even when I’ve asked what
Frederic Boisseau, Charlie Hebdo’s janitor, had done to deserve being shot
down with assault weapons, it seems in these good people’s minds that words,
though cheap, are so deadly that human lives are rendered cheaper.
This tendency is manifest at its worst on what we still loosely call "The Left",
and I think I know why. This urge to trample of free expression, which along
the way scoops up a deranged kind of tacit approval for a ragtag army of
child-raping slave owning murderers like Islamic State, is motivated by
kindness. Although, as a satirist, I target my offence exclusively at the
powerful, other people take the offence, albeit unoffered to them on their
behalf because being rude about anyone - everyone - is unkind. [stet italics]
So if I draw a bunch of murderous thugs like the Saudi Royal Family or their
familiars in IS, this has the potential for being Islamophobic; cartoons about
Israel are automatically anti-Semitic; a cartoon of Obama, as likely as not, is
racist. And on it goes forever. In this truly bizarre two-way transubstantiation
dynamic, where individuals become universal and universes become personal,
I suspect it won’t be long before a Twitterstorm assails The History Channel
for their truly offensive repeated Nazi-ism.
Thus we kill, or acquit the killers, through kindness, through the kindest of
motivations. Which I think you’ll find alternate with good intentions in the
crazy paving on the way to Hell. Or am I being Hellist? Though to their credit
I think the Satanists are about the only religious group none of whose
adherents has ever threatened me, however loosely, with death. Meanwhile,
which Paris massacre should we talk about? I know, let’s wait, heads in hands,
for the next one.