The opening of the Paris Olympic Games turned the state-murder of Marie Antoinette in 1793 into a comic opera and marked another milestone in the cultural death of France. This cruel affair became the excuse for a hilarious son et lumière entertainment, as the make-believe blood from her torso gushed through the windows of the Conciergerie and the capering crowds below rejoiced, just as they had done in 1793. This was the image that, in all its barbarous wickedness France wanted to show the world, Macron’s Nuremberg: how a helpless young widow was borne in an open tumbril through the streets of Paris before being publicly guillotined.
A guillotine blade, moving far quicker than an executioner’s axe, cuts cleanly and probably seals the blood vessels in the neck, maybe leaving the victim alive and conscious for up to half a minute. Marie Antoinette, her severed head held high by her executioner, might perhaps have seen and heard the baying mob for the closing seconds of her life. That such a foul and dreadful end in 1793 should be part of a semi-comedic state-ceremonial in 2024, which was then widely praised by many French politicians, merely confirms that France has sunk deep into a satanic abyss.
The Conciergerie, now and then, was and is the heart of France’s moral darkness. This was where Marie Antoinette’s seven-year-old son Louis-Charles was imprisoned alone in a cell directly below hers. She could hear him crying for days and nights on end, while he was tended by a semi-literate shoemaker named Simon, later to be guillotined for his trouble. This poor boy, aged seven, was the “author” of a forced “confession” in which he “admitted” that his mother Marie Antoinette, and his aunt, Elisabeth of France, had taught him to masturbate and then obliged him to have sex with them both. These vile and preposterous allegations were used in the trial of his mother. Poor little Louis-Charles would in due course learn of the murder of these two women, while he remained confined in the filth and dark where he lay for two years after her murder, until he finally succumbed to TB, malnutrition and want, aged just nine.
Some 2,780 prisoners in the Conciergerie were mass-butchered by mobs or taken in shackles to be guillotined at this time. Did not the cheering mobs know and most of all enjoy the probability that the heads plucked from the basket and raised above the executioner’s hands could see and hear them as the final sights and sounds of their abbreviated lives?
While the tumbrils were rolling in Paris in 1793, in the Vendée on the Atlantic seaboard the revolutionaries were putting down a Catholic/Royalist rebellion. Faced with the challenge of having to kill very large numbers of civilians, the revolutionaries, rather like their Nazi heirs, thought laterally. Whereas the SS initially used sealed Opel vans with the exhaust pipes pumping lethal carbon monoxide into the Jewish passengers crammed into the back, the French Revolutionaries of 1793 used sea-barges. These were especially fitted with hinged decks which, when the barges were standing well offshore, were opened downwards, dropping their cargoes of hundreds of Catholics at a time into the sea to drown. The destruction of the Vendée in 1793 foreshadowed the horrors of Ukraine in 1930-31, 1941-2 and 1946-47. Rather like a joint NKVD-SS Einsatzkommando, Jacobin forces incinerated crops, burnt homes, razed villages and slaughtered all humans they could. General Grouzat forced several hundred old people, mothers and children to dig mysterious pits before solving the mystery by making them kneel in front of them, and they were then shot, so turning the pits into graves. This useful technique was revived by the Third Reich one hundred and fifty years later, on the grasslands of Belorussia and Crimea. Indeed, even Auschwitz and Treblinka were foreshadowed in the Vendée: a revolutionary chemist examined the possibility of gassing rebels. In all, perhaps a quarter of million people of the Vendée were secretly mass-murdered by Jacobin armies in 1793, while open murder was taking place and being celebrated at the Conciergerie.
This of course was the very building that was used to such comic effect for the opening of the Olympics. So funny, seeing Marie Antoinette’s disembodied head mouthing the words of a French revolutionary anthem, blood spouting from her neck. But they didn’t manage to fit in the lad’s death also. Tant pis!
The important thing is that French leftists loved it all. The parliamentary leader of the leftist France Unbowed party, Manuel Bompard whinnied giddily on Twitter/X: ‘What pride when France speaks to the world.’
Yes, pride.
His colleague, Mathilde Panot, thanked the organisers ‘for having sublimely represented our revolutionary heritage and France as it is, in all its richness.’ The leader of the French Socialist Party Olivier Faure hailed the celebration of French values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, now enhanced by ‘sorority, parity and inclusivity,” this being “the best response to the rise of fascism and of the extreme right.”
Yes, that’s right, the trivialisation of murder into a carefree burlesque, the very quintessence of fascism, was hailed as a suitable reply to it. The Greens’ leader Sandrine Rousseau yodelled: ‘What a slap in the face for the obscurantists.’
I know, I know, it doesn’t really translate, though the core values of the Modern France most certainly do, perhaps best expressed in the more general words of the Marxist and unapologetic supporter of the terror, Alain Baidon: “The concept of the subjectivity is constituted through the termination of a political sequence.” No, me neither. The core values were also evident with a re-enactment of the Last Supper, though now in vast parodic mode, with Jesus and the Disciples being represented by drag queens and transexuals. We don’t need to dwell on this for a single second: would the organisers of this sacrilegious farrago ever have so satirised an event from the life of Mohommed?
Paris is of course the home is of the Vel’ d’Hiv, the infamous velodrome where just eighty-two years ago last month the French police confined over 13,000 Jews for a week without food, water or any sanitation or toilets of any kind. None. For a week. The survivors were then sent to a series of holding camps before being worked to death or gassed in Auschwitz. Just four hundred survived. Serving the Petainist regime responsible for this little chapter of the Holocaust was the future French President Mitterrand, who would later (and successfully) conceal his wartime service with Vichy, which brings us to finches and the Ortolan.
The Ortolan finch is noted for its song, which resembles that of the yellowhammer finch and is often mistaken for it. These finch songs have inspired many composers, including Messiaen and Beethoven, but Ortolans have another reason for celebrity. They are netted by the thousand in the autumn as they fly to overwinter in Africa, and are then kept in completely lightless cages, rather like Louis-Charles, but unlike him, in the dark they are fed millet. When a bird has roughly doubled its weight, it is taken by the feet and gently lowered upside down into a bowl of Armagnac, a process which not merely slowly drowns the bird but also deliciously infuses its lungs with brandy. Its corpse is left to marinate in the Armagnac for another day or so before being doused in spice and peppers and fried in its own fat for several minutes. The Ortolan is served whole, its consumption being the reverse of its final moments in life, for the diner usually holds the bird’s head and lowers it feet first into his mouth, covering his face with a napkin as he chews. This ritual has two possible explanations: one, to allow the diner to inhale and revel in the various delicious fragrances emitted by the Ortolan as he crunches its ribcage and entrails and the tongue that had once uttered the exquisite song for which the bird is so famous, or two, to conceal this shameful deed from God.
History does not record if the former Petainist Mitterrand, when he ate his final Ortolan, devoured the head with the meticulous care that this operation deserved, perhaps with his still-living tongue caressing the tiny dead one, or if you like, a double-dose of necrophilia. For this was the deathbed dish of his choice, his last act on this world and therefore utter barbarism beyond any redemption, not least because the Ortolan was being netted and devoured in France close to species-extinction. One cannot decently compare the genocidal events at the Vel’ d’Hiv with the consumption of a mere songbird, and yet….
As I have said here before, France is on its deathbed, steadily being destroyed by combined forces of welfarism, trade unionism, mandatory, mandarin-led secularism, campus-Marxism, a woefully inaccurate imitation of a completely misunderstood America and finally, and not least of all, by uncontrolled immigration of the culturally inassimilable. I speak as a Francophile who fell in love with almost everything French decades ago. I must now watch the pageant of French culture turning into a plague-afflicted charivari heading for the cliff edge, flags flying, trumpets blowing, as wild, hysterical laughter echoes around the bloodied windows of the Conciergerie before being swept away in the wind, along with perhaps a vagrant finch or two.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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