opinion

Lies my teacher taught me
by W. E. Gutman

A famous French pre-revolutionary political cartoon depicts a rakish nobleman and a smiling, overfed member of the clergy riding on the back of an old, exhausted peasant. The metaphor, pithy and painfully real, may have inspired the eminent French philosopher, author and encyclopedist, Denis Diderot (1713-1784) to exclaim, "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Indeed, centuries of oppression by the ruling aristocracy and corruption and debauchery among the privileged ecclesiastical class would inspire equally pungent anti-religious epigrams by several of Diderot’s contemporaries, men celebrated for their intellect and mordant wit, all confirmed agnostics and atheists and at a time when both were punishable by death.

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

Voltaire

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.

James Madison

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.

John Adams

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

Ben Franklin

Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.

Thomas Jefferson

It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Religion is a system of superstition that produces fanatics and serves the purposes of despotism.

Thomas Paine

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another.

Jonathan Swift

Newton's infinite space is the only eternal reality. Nothing but matter exists. Religion is a device used by the rich to oppress the poor and render them powerless. Christianity is distinguished by its particularly ludicrous doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Jean Meslier

There is no Absolute, no Reason, no God, no Spirit at work in the world: nothing but brute instinctive will to live.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Marquis de Sade

It began in high school.

My history teacher routinely disregarded the obligatory French secular curriculum and shamelessly injected his personal prejudices and slanted perceptions. History can be --- and often is --- subverted and undermined by opinionated educators.

Armed with a razor-sharp intellect and a tongue to match, my teacher was a strict disciplinarian, a fount of erudition and a skilled pedagogue who would struggle, for two years, to educate me or, as he put it, “to deposit something of value inside this untidy, dissolute little brain of yours.”

The broad knowledge he possessed --- he was licensed to teach everything from algebra to zoology --- was often overshadowed by an appalling lack of objectivity. It was his very scholarship that enabled him, wherever he could, to skew history or to rewrite it by opining unabashedly about people long dead or editorializing about events exhaustively chronicled in the otherwise unembellished secular French government curriculum.

A royalist, as are all devout French Catholics, he steadfastly extenuated the arrogance and cruelty of French monarchs by insisting that they were, after all, “good Christians.” It is true that many of them spent much time genuflecting in their private gilded chapels on ermine stoles and rich brocades while their vassals lived in squalor, starved and died of the plague. Distant abstractions, the Crusades and the Inquisition elicited a kind of nostalgic admiration stripped of all misgivings for the horrific crimes committed in their name.

I remember learning about the events that took place on the night of August 23, 1572, better known as the Saint-Bartholomew massacre, during which 3,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris on orders of Catherine de Medici. Reviewing the incident did not seem to evoke in my teacher any discernible unease. (News of the slaughter had been cheered by Philip II, himself busy purging Spain of Protestants, Jews and Moors, and Pope Gregory XIII who, for lack of loftier pursuits, reformed the calendar).

Injecting personal bias into his instructions, my teacher presided over his own kangaroo court. He openly scorned the Huguenot Henri of Navarre, but lavished him with praise when, crowned Henri IV and fearful for his neck, he cravenly converted to Catholicism. “Paris is well worth a mass,” the king sardonically remarked. Praise turned to condemnation when the king, now firmly enthroned, issued the Edict of Nantes, a decree restoring religious and political rights to French Protestants. It’s amazing how ideology makes feelings run hot and cold. A few chapters forward, my teacher applauded the edict’s revocation, 87 years later, by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, the archetype warmongering despot whose conceit was eclipsed only by his thirst for ostentation.

Unaware of, or utterly indifferent to, the immense suffering his subjects endured, Louis XVI, who spent his reign tinkering with clocks, and his ditsy wife Marie-Antoinette, who plundered the nation’s coffers to keep the court royally entertained, elicited pity and sympathy from my teacher. “They were very pious and joined in prayer several times a day.” As these enormities were being casually spouted, I would retrieve from the depths of childhood memory images of priests sprinkling holy water on tanks and canons and the fuselage of dive bombers so that Christians of one nation could wreak death and destruction upon Christians of another nation with the full blessings of Almighty God.

The French Revolution, my teacher insisted, was “an outrage masterminded by Jewish financiers, Freemasons, degenerate philosophers and other irreligious libertines.” This characterization was nowhere to be found in the history text I had been issued --- nor in any history work I since perused. It is interesting to note that, in reading assigned works by the chief “degenerate” French philosophers Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire students were encouraged to analyze and emulate their elegant literary style but enjoined from embracing their “amoral teachings.”

Imagine a student today being told, “Write like Hemingway but take care not to espouse his leftist values….”

The reign of terror that followed the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was summarily blasted as a “grotesque act of barbarism against Christian values.” Yes, many innocent heads rolled during the two–year frenzy. But my teacher could not bring himself to regard the insurrection as the cathartic articulation of centuries-old misery and oppression or as the impetus that would help rid France, for the first time in history, of the yoke of feudalism, a dissolute clergy and a mercenary absolute monarchy.

The assassination, in his bathtub, of Jean-Paul Marat, a populist physician, lawyer, journalist and legislator in 1793, was flippantly dismissed as the “extirpation of a Jewish scoundrel by a brave Catholic young woman [Charlotte Corday].” Marat was not Jewish --- his parents came from Sardinia --- but my teacher had a quirky sense of humor that did not prevent him from creating myth where none existed.

In contrast, the beheading of two royal idlers who bankrupted France while they wined, dined, gambled, gathered in prayer, made war and cheered their dogs on helpless foxes, he insisted, was murder. Nor would he consider the notion that revolution, as I perilously argued, is a process, not an incident. Many people tend to judge the French Revolution as a single event rather than a trend whose seeds were sown centuries earlier. The burgeoning concepts of human rights, equality, suffrage and the abolition of monarchy actually took root 100 years before the storming of the Bastille.

In 1789 France was a nation of 26 million. Society was made up of three distinct and grossly dissimilar groups. The “nobility of the sword” --- some 500,000 people (or about two percent of the total population) among them the high aristocracy consisting of 4,000 families close to the throne, hangers-on and inveterate sycophants; the petty nobility, composed of provincial gentlemen of lesser means but matching greed; and the nouveaux-riches, the coarse bourgeois who bought nobility titles and who, despite their wealth, were scorned by the traditional bluebloods for their miserly origins.

The clergy, 120,000 strong, was also divided between high clergy (members of the aristocracy) and the common clergy --- both depraved and decadent.

Last was the Third Estate, the masses representing day workers, farmers, peasants, craftsmen, bankers, lawyers and trades people.

The king’s power was absolute, limitless and issued from God himself. The king hired and fired his cabinet at will. All authority was centralized in Paris and in the hands of Louis XVI, a meek and irresolute monarch who would have rather flown kites and repaired clocks than govern. Injustice, ineptitude and corruption were rampant. Instead of addressing the problem. Louis tightened his authority, an act that led to the kind of despotism in vogue in Austria, Prussia and Russia at the time.

A widely circulated caricature dated 1787 (two years before the storming of the Bastille) shows a monkey (the king) asking the fowl in the yard (the people) in what sauce they would like to be cooked.

In 1777, with Lafayette and his volunteers, then in 1779 with Rochambeau and the French Royal Expeditionary Corps, France fought alongside the Americans against the British, culminating in the 1781 victory at Yorktown and the surrender of General Cornwallis. This little adventure cost France two billion gold pounds.

This was the twilight of the 18th century, the dawning of Enlightenment, and France was tired and wary of the ancient and traditional order in which the king is commander in chief, judge, jury and executioner, an order that called for the nobility to defend the nation with its sword, the clergy to pray for victory while engaging in political intrigue and cavorting with women of ill repute, and the rabble to toil and pay merciless taxes until they dropped. But this king was an inept military strategist. His officers had lapsed into mediocrity and the Church, fat and venal, made a mockery of religion. The clergy paid no taxes but charged tolls on behalf of the crown, and sold indulgences and first-class passages to paradise, with much of the gold they collected diverted and adding to the personal fortunes of many princes of the Church. The commoners --- peasants and bourgeois alike --- crushed by unfair and exorbitant taxes and levies, were fuming. Soon, they’d open the shutters wide, lean out their windows and shout, “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore….”

Meanwhile, philosophers, writers, scientists --- Voltaire, Diderot J.J. Rousseau (author of the Social Contract), Saint-Simon (he articulated the principles of socialism) and Lavoisier (he elaborated the first version of the Law of conservation of mass, discovered and named oxygen and hydrogen, introduced the Metric system, invented the first periodic table including 33 elements, and helped reform chemical nomenclature) saw in revolution a weapon against the despotism of absolute monarchy and the clergy’s fanaticism and cupidity.

Unlike Louis XIV, the “decider” who kept the aristocracy in check, Louis XVI sheepishly shirked his responsibilities. “Oh, what an odious occupation,” he said of his kingly duties. Other kings let their ministers make their mistakes for them, but this Louis insisted on making the important mistakes by himself.

The Revolution was less an act of insubordination against royal tyranny than an insurrection against the social order, inequality, favoritism and discrimination. It was a social, not political movement. Social movements always prevail.

A liberal, compassionate bourgeois is atypical. People who have enough to eat generally avert the gaze, let alone sight of the empty belly of the hungry. A greedy bourgeois is more common, with the ambitious go-getters leading the way. These were by and large intelligent and educated people who lived close to but in the shadow of an aristocracy that showered them with contempt. They were bitter and, justifiably upset, they would expediently court the working class. With its support, they would force political decisions and, eventually, smash their way into the Bastille. The Revolution would soon lurch into a free-for-all reign of untold savagery.

The economic crisis sweeping France accentuated the inequality between the classes. Quite simply the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Thousands died of hunger. It was obvious to most that France could not escape revolution. Would it be short or protracted, violent or peaceful? Could needed reforms forestall the inevitable? Only the king, his queen, the blue-bloods, the knights and the princes of the Church could answer that, but they were all opposed to change. Louis wavered. In a rare moment of introspection, he protested against the challenges and responsibilities of his office and told a staff member, Malesherbes, who tendered his resignation, “Oh, how I wish I could join you!”

Louis hid behind his neurotic piety (and a bad case of phimosis --- a condition in which the foreskin of the penis of an uncircumcised male cannot be fully retracted). He neglected his wife in favor of hunting and tinkering with clocks. He was drawn neither by royal duty, love, sex, politics, nor war, which he entrusted to pompous and inept generals. Deaf to facts, unwilling to heed advice, incapable of making a decision on his own, he took solace in his wife’s opinion of him, “poor man, he is so good.” Goodness in 1789 was apparently not enough.

Marie-Antoinette wielded little influence on her husband. A spendthrift with a colossal disregard for the well being of her people, her reputation further sullied by the famous Necklace Affair and allegations of infidelity, she had become not only unpopular but loathed.

Contrary to legend, Marie-Antoinette never suggested that “if the people have no bread, let them eat brioches.” She was so out of touch with the lives of her subjects that she had no way of knowing whether they ate bread, escargots or frogs’ legs. Revisionists of all stripes have attempted to rehabilitate the queen --- or at least lend her a "human" visage. She was in fact a pretentious scatterbrain and a squanderer who, with her cuckold husband Louis' approval, ruined France. Some have argued that she was tried on trumped-up charges. Indeed, Marie-Antoinette's trial had nothing to do with the legal definition of treason and everything to do with treachery, meaning deceitfulness, disloyalty and duplicity. Her accusers fittingly charged her (and Louis) with unscrupulousness; corruption; embezzlement; cruelty; a perverse disregard for the well being of the people; profligacy; avarice; squandering the national treasury; and when all was lost, flight to avoid prosecution --- all of which were legitimate charges and any of which, today, will send someone up river for a very long stretch.

I understand the hatred, the seething rage Louis and Marie-Antoinette’s bankrupt, abject, merciless and dehumanizing reign provoked among the people. Everyone is fixated on the royal heads that rolled into the wicker basket but no one seems to remember the wretched misery of the masses or the thousands of Lettres de Cachet, signed by the King and princes of the Church, which sent innocent people, among them Huguenots, mavericks, dissenters and iconoclasts, to their deaths.

I have come to regard royalty as an anachronism, if not an obscenity. I will forever question the means by which royal glory and power are attained and never cease to deplore the imbecility of their highnesses’ subjects. I wait for the time when only four kings are left: The king of spades, the king of hearts, the king of … you know the rest.

The French Revolution was an extraordinarily complicated affair, ignited by the antagonisms between the first two Estates --- the bloated nobility and a corrupt and gluttonous clergy --- and the third Estate --- a crushing mass of dirt-poor, uneducated and downtrodden people --- as well as antagonisms rooted in decades of abuse and frustration.

Unlike the American Revolution, which has been likened to an act of defiance by a prodigal son against his mother --- and much like the Russian Revolution, which had already begun to simmer --- the French Revolution was a genuine insurrection born from centuries of colossal mismanagement, corruption, oppression and exploitation of the masses by small, all-powerful, brutal elites.

* * *

My history teacher would have none of that. Precocious, inquisitive and innately skeptical, I survived and outgrew his sinister brand of encoding. It wasn’t until one of my sons came home one day from grammar school crying, “the teacher said that Jews murdered Jesus,” that I knew that encoding is alive and well in America, the enlightened Jefferson and Paine and Franklin and Madison and Adams and a new generation of freethinkers notwithstanding.