SUSAN DUNN
85
rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of
Paris, was like a mockery. " "Pity," Arendt concluded, "taken as the spring of
virtue, has proved
to
possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty it–
self." One hundred years earlier, Victor Hugo, in his great poem
Le
Verso de
fa
page,
had condemned Jacobin pity for being the annulment of itself: "C'est
par exd:s d'amour qu 'ils abhorrent. Et par misericorde, ils sont inexorables"
("Out of an excess of love, they abhor. Out of misericord, they are inex–
orable.").
In our own century, Albert Camus, like Michelet, was haunted by the
problem of the regicide. For Michelet, the French Revolution marked not only
a rupture with an anachronistic past, it also marked the Year One of a new
era. For Camus too, the Revolution signified divorce [i-om the past, but it was
an end more than a beginning. In
TILl'
Rehel ,
he mourned the demise of a
world wh ich had embraced a sacred order: " It is certain ly a repugnant
scandal that the public assassination ofa weak but goodhearted man has been
presented as a great moment in French history. That scaffold marked no
climax - far Ii-om it. The condemnation of the King is at the crux of our
contemporary history.
It
symbolizes the secularization of our history and the
disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now God played a part in history
through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been
killed, for there is no longer a king. TherefOl-e there is nothing but a sem–
blance ofGod, relegated to the heaven of principles." Men were left alone to
create the meaning of their own destiny entirely within history. Camus be–
lieved that "historicism" was the most pernicious of doctrines and that it led
directly
to
political crime, violence, and to the nihilistic and pitiless ideologies of
the twentieth century.
Michelet had deeply regretted the Jacobins' lack of pity for the king, but
Camus felt that the tragedy of the Revolution was the loss of a king who felt
pity for the French . A king, who cou ld bestow pardon and who incarnated
the misericord of God, appeared to him to wreak less havoc on humanity
than Jacobin or Soviet myths of infallible and absolute justice. Referring to
Biblical and medieval concepts of monarchy, he portrayed a king as the
compassionate, merciful father of the desperate and dispossessed: "The king
is the divine emissary in charge of human affairs and therefore of the
administration ofjustice. Like God Himself, he is the last recourse ofthe vic–
tims of misery and injustice. In principle, the people can appeal to the king for
help against their oppressors. ' If the King only knew, if the Czar only knew .
. . ' was the frequently expressed sentiment of the French and Russian
people during periods of great distress. It is true in France, at least, that,
when the monarchy did know, it often tried to defend the lower classes
against the oppression of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie." Of course, the
