The Guillotine Mystique
LAST SUMMER, WHEN the short-lived “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in Seattle renamed itself the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” one protester explained to a reporter that the acronym CHOP was a tribute to the Reign of Terror in France more than 200 years ago. “What happened to the people who did not get on board with the French Revolution?” he asked, to which the assembled crowd responded, “CHOPPED!”
This scene was just one manifestation of the guillotine fad that has been sweeping America’s resurgent progressive left. #Guillotine2020 is an actual hashtag on lefty Twitter, mostly (if hyperbolically) dedicated to the malfeasance of Republicans, rich folks, and other baddies. DIY guillotines have been popping up at protests, including ones outside the White House and the Washington, D.C., mansion of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Jacobin magazine, one of the radical left’s most prominent media outlets, has been selling a guillotine poster captioned “Some assembly required”—even though the publication claims its name is a reference to the Haitian Revolution and its “Black Jacobins,” not the French revolutionary faction that perpetrated the Terror in 1793–94.
So far, this revolutionary playacting has been more annoying than terrifying: Much like far-right memes about “helicopter rides,” a reference to extrajudicial executions via helicopter drop, it’s about trolling, not killing, the enemy. But it still signals an embrace of bloodthirsty rhetoric—and of ideological homage to one of history’s bloodier leftist dictatorships.
The new guillotine chic also speaks to the French Revolution’s enduring hold over our cultural imagination. The five-year period from the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 to the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794 has shaped our political language in more ways than we realize. It gave us the terms right and left in their political sense, based simply on the seating of deputies in France’s first National Assembly. It also gave us terror in its political sense, and with it the words terrorism and terrorist. It pioneered violent progressive utopianism and effectively birthed modern conservatism, via Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It even influenced fashions, pioneering short haircuts on women in tribute to guillotine victims—who had their hair shorn before execution—in the Terror’s aftermath. (Choker necklaces, apparently, have a similar origin.)
More important, the French Revolution has inspired radical movements for two centuries—notably Russia’s Bolsheviks, who explicitly claimed the Jacobins as their forefathers. Now, a resurgent American left has revived its romance not only with Soviet Communism (even “Uncle Joe” Stalin has a Twitter fan club!) but with Jacobinism—not a good sign for where modern progressivism is headed.
From today’s vantage point, the French Revolution may look like a distant costume drama mostly of interest to history buffs. But look closer, and its relevance to the current moment is striking—whether it’s the paranoid style, the sentimental idealization of the downtrodden, the quest to remake human nature and reset history, or the view that morality is determined by rank in an oppressor/oppressed hierarchy. (“How tenderly oppressors and how severely the oppressed are treated!” scoffed Jacobin leader Maximilien de Robespierre in response to those who deplored the Terror’s cruelty.) One can read a May 1793 letter to revolutionary legend Georges Danton from American citizen and French National Convention member Tom Paine
