Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2006-06-07 12:03 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2006-06-07 12:03 am
Entry tags:
Not-a-eulogy.
Hello, citizens. This is Enjolras.
I've been asked by my typist and by Jean Prouvaire to give a eulogy for the 174th anniversary of our deaths, but a eulogy isn't what we need. You know who we were. You know us as people; you know who we were when we lived; but you pay frighteningly little attention to who we were when we died: we were soldiers. We were men, not little lost boys playing at being crusaders and crying foul when we realized the blood on our hands was real. We knew from the start that we might be forced to do terrible things, and that terrible things might happen to us; all the same, we endured those dual horrors in order to do what was right. What was right, what was brave, and what was honourable. You ask, Is there honour in dying for an ideal, to no immediate gain? I answer, Not all gains are immediate, and there is no greater honour than to die for the most sublime ideal the world has ever known. Do not think I have no guilt in my soul for what transpired in the rue de la Chanvrerie. I will be haunted for the rest of my existence by the shadows of the men I killed and of the three dozen men I led to their deaths. But there are more important things than life and death; not only does the dawn of liberty outshine the darkness of those hours and of all those lives snuffed out, its light is all the sweeter for having been born from so black a night.
But let us return to the idea of dying for one's beliefs. Is that such a bad way to leave this earth? Is this community really so cynical as to believe that dying at twenty-six for the Republic is more pointless than dying at eighty-six after having done nothing with one's life? The young do not like to hear that one day they will lie in the ground as well, but they will, and sixty years of life cut short pale beside the weight of centuries. To be a part of history, to work important events, and to die young for them, is more valuable than to shun danger in order to preserve one's own limited lifespan.
And what events! The fandom I address this to seems under the impression that dying alone, abandoned, in a cul-de-sac or the attic of a wineshop, means the death takes place in a vacuum and has no effect--simply because the event appeared ignominious and unwitnessed when it transpired. But even if the only physical eyes open by three in the afternoon on 6 June belonged to the troops who shot us, in the aftermath the eyes of all the city were upon us. Discount all you like the silent power of martyrs, but it exists, and Louis-Philippe pardoned Charles Jeanne to avoid creating one. You ask what our sacrifice was for, you ask what our legacy was; I'll tell you what our legacy was: 1834, 1839, 1848; the societies of the Rights of Man, the Familles, the Saisons; insurrection, montagnardism, the overthrow of Louis-Philippe; the Third Republic, the Résistance, the fact that France is a republic today. 1832, still set in the formative years of the Orléans regime, set the tone for the era to come, and caused our republican brothers to cast aside their hesitation and the moderation that supported the monarchy of July. I am proud to have died for that. What value in our petty handful of lives compares to the setting in motion of the revolutionary underground? We had our roles and we played them.
And were those roles inevitable? Only God can tell. Was our deathly assumption, that a people so eager to depose a monarch in 1830 would be equally ready to complete an aborted revolution and depose the monarch who had taken his place, founded on pure naïveté? That is not for us to know. We saw the right and we led the people to it, and if the people did not wish to follow yet, their will reigned supreme. That is as it should be. We misjudged, and that was our undoing, but we were hardly doomed from the start; to accept the possibility of one's death in combat is not to accept its certainty. The massacre of '32 was unexpected--we had prepared ourselves for losses, for the possibility of defeat, for the shadow of Madame la Guillotine to loom over us for our so-called treason. What actually happened was a shock. That my friends and my comrades dealt with this shock with courage, honour, backs straight and heads held high, is a testiment to their strength and their patriotism. Every one of them died a hero, and despite the tragedy of so many lives cut short--so many people close to me mown down--when I consider what we have gained, it was worth every drop of blood spilled in the rue de la Chanvrerie.
[typist: *fails at being hugothique*]
I've been asked by my typist and by Jean Prouvaire to give a eulogy for the 174th anniversary of our deaths, but a eulogy isn't what we need. You know who we were. You know us as people; you know who we were when we lived; but you pay frighteningly little attention to who we were when we died: we were soldiers. We were men, not little lost boys playing at being crusaders and crying foul when we realized the blood on our hands was real. We knew from the start that we might be forced to do terrible things, and that terrible things might happen to us; all the same, we endured those dual horrors in order to do what was right. What was right, what was brave, and what was honourable. You ask, Is there honour in dying for an ideal, to no immediate gain? I answer, Not all gains are immediate, and there is no greater honour than to die for the most sublime ideal the world has ever known. Do not think I have no guilt in my soul for what transpired in the rue de la Chanvrerie. I will be haunted for the rest of my existence by the shadows of the men I killed and of the three dozen men I led to their deaths. But there are more important things than life and death; not only does the dawn of liberty outshine the darkness of those hours and of all those lives snuffed out, its light is all the sweeter for having been born from so black a night.
But let us return to the idea of dying for one's beliefs. Is that such a bad way to leave this earth? Is this community really so cynical as to believe that dying at twenty-six for the Republic is more pointless than dying at eighty-six after having done nothing with one's life? The young do not like to hear that one day they will lie in the ground as well, but they will, and sixty years of life cut short pale beside the weight of centuries. To be a part of history, to work important events, and to die young for them, is more valuable than to shun danger in order to preserve one's own limited lifespan.
And what events! The fandom I address this to seems under the impression that dying alone, abandoned, in a cul-de-sac or the attic of a wineshop, means the death takes place in a vacuum and has no effect--simply because the event appeared ignominious and unwitnessed when it transpired. But even if the only physical eyes open by three in the afternoon on 6 June belonged to the troops who shot us, in the aftermath the eyes of all the city were upon us. Discount all you like the silent power of martyrs, but it exists, and Louis-Philippe pardoned Charles Jeanne to avoid creating one. You ask what our sacrifice was for, you ask what our legacy was; I'll tell you what our legacy was: 1834, 1839, 1848; the societies of the Rights of Man, the Familles, the Saisons; insurrection, montagnardism, the overthrow of Louis-Philippe; the Third Republic, the Résistance, the fact that France is a republic today. 1832, still set in the formative years of the Orléans regime, set the tone for the era to come, and caused our republican brothers to cast aside their hesitation and the moderation that supported the monarchy of July. I am proud to have died for that. What value in our petty handful of lives compares to the setting in motion of the revolutionary underground? We had our roles and we played them.
And were those roles inevitable? Only God can tell. Was our deathly assumption, that a people so eager to depose a monarch in 1830 would be equally ready to complete an aborted revolution and depose the monarch who had taken his place, founded on pure naïveté? That is not for us to know. We saw the right and we led the people to it, and if the people did not wish to follow yet, their will reigned supreme. That is as it should be. We misjudged, and that was our undoing, but we were hardly doomed from the start; to accept the possibility of one's death in combat is not to accept its certainty. The massacre of '32 was unexpected--we had prepared ourselves for losses, for the possibility of defeat, for the shadow of Madame la Guillotine to loom over us for our so-called treason. What actually happened was a shock. That my friends and my comrades dealt with this shock with courage, honour, backs straight and heads held high, is a testiment to their strength and their patriotism. Every one of them died a hero, and despite the tragedy of so many lives cut short--so many people close to me mown down--when I consider what we have gained, it was worth every drop of blood spilled in the rue de la Chanvrerie.
[typist: *fails at being hugothique*]