AND THE STREETS OF PARIS RAN RED WITH THE BLOOD OF THE REVOLUTIONARIES

    The guillotine became one of the best known inventions of the French Revolution during the reign of terror as a means of quick and public execution.  The revolutionaries began their movement in 1789 with the Estates General and the storming of the Bastille.  They removed the king, proclaimed national freedom, and declared war on the Church Herself.  They finalized their conquest by transforming the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral into a temple of reason to proclaim Voltaire to the masses.  Anyone who stood in opposition to this movement, and there were hundreds of thousands who opposed them, was subject to robbery, beatings, rape and a kangaroo court tribunal.  During this faux trial, the guilty verdict was already set, and all that was left to be decided was the level of punishment.  Thousands of executions occurred daily in the streets leading to the development of the guillotine for its efficiency and public imaging. It was said that the streets of Paris ran read with blood. 

    Maximilien Robespierre became an icon of the movement and pushed for the creation of the mock tribunals.  Being one of the most ardent supporters of the revolution, he took a position of power in the movement and pushed for widespread violent enforcement of the revolutionary goals.  For Robespierre, the revolution was against the ideas of the past for an enlightened future of tomorrow.  Everything from the past must be destroyed, erased, and forgotten.  And this was the logic that Robespierre’s very mob used when they took him to the guillotine and chopped off his head.  He had lived too long and the revolutionary had succumbed to his own revolution.  

    I think of this historical precedent when I think of the work of Giancarlo De Carlo.  A revolutionary himself, he levied heavy criticism on the architecture of the past and attempted to support the revolutionaries of his era, ironically also in France. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the the state of architecture, particularly within academia and the student body.  In solidarity with this movement, Giancarlo created a public art display to support he disgruntled architecture students.  His work, however, fell upon deaf ears. Rather than discuss the presentation made, they chose violence.  The revolutionaries, in a blind rage, rushed to Giancarlo’s project and destroyed everything.  To this day, nothing remains of Giancarlo’s work.  

    Revolutionaries rarely care about anything except for throwing rocks at stained glass windows. And although the revolutionaries of the French Revolution took over Notre Dame for a time, it eventually returned to the Church.  Little remains of Robespierre’s revolution.  Likewise, although architecture has departed greatly from the past, such buildings are still around and being produced.  The same cannot be said for the work of Giancarlo and those likeminded.  The revolution will always eat its own.