Revolution

The blacksmith, neither clean nor gentle, punctuated his fierce and drunken speech with an iron hammer, leering derisively, as he laughed at Louis the Sixteenth, effeminate and fat. Louis’s gold and gilded mirrors were no help. He was as pitiful as a beaten dog. “Sir, we forged the plows and plowed the land, sweating and singing under the hot sun. You sent our your bastards, preening like peacocks, to fill your palace with the smell of our girls, and extort our pennies to gild your Louvre. You rewarded your fawning minions; your gold went to factory owners with chains, landowners with whips. They urged us to work harder, to work into the night, to lighten their black hearts, so we tried with all our might, while they went to our homes and took away our children. “We were so stupid. We were pleased to build the grand bridges and raise the towers. We took delight in the bountiful harvests, the smell of grain, rich earth, comforting bread and beer. We’d stand around our stoves burning cow dung, and sing of fairies and ogres, palaces and princes. It turns out that the princes were actually ogres and that the whole thing was only a fairy tale. “Our grandfathers built the Bastille in the reign of Louis the Fifth, but you used it as a place to punish our fathers because they loved France more than you. You covered every stone with our blood, so we pulled down its leprous walls with our oxen and horses, and destroyed the dark shadow of the past. Drunk with hope, we proclaimed our strength and love. “Violence breeds violence like rats in a granary. Crowds swarmed before the doors of the rich, with howls, hammers, and iron pikes. Your agents infiltrated us and incited hatreds for petty inequalities among honest workers who were only trying to divide up the harvest. We were not immune from the disease of greed that had already rotted the hearts of the bourgeois.” The blacksmith took the sweating king by the arm, tore the velvet curtains from a window, and showed him the terrible crowd that howled below like the sea of bleeding rags. “Sir, that mob is full of scoundrels like me who think they’ll find bread in your gardens! Their sons and daughters were taken from them. The women are crying; the men are howling. All their lives, they were chained up like mad dogs, and, now they are free, nobody feeds them. They’re hungry, angry, dirty, and damned. “These are the men whom you’ve treated like pigs. These are the mongrels whom you’ve trained to be greedy and cruel, like your bourgeois. They are desperate now, but they have hopes. They hope that some day their work will build strength, and strength bring dignity, and dignity devotion, and devotion pride, and pride happiness. They hope for a France in which free men don’t need to bow and cower to survive. “Not now. Now the air is full of smoke. We are scoundrels, a terrible rabble, full of desperate hoarders and informers. We are free, but we are filled with terror. We pull your cannons over cobblestones and prop them up before your walls to give us courage. The aristocracy from all over France marches their regiments against us, so we might as well dash our own brains on the stones.” With this show of defiance, the blacksmith raised his blackened hand, muscles bulging, as if to strike the fat king, and tossed his red cap on the king’s brow.