Let Them Eat Pizzagate
How "fake news" fanned the flames of revolution in 18th century France
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell predicted a dystopian future in which a subjugated population could be duped into believing that 2+2=5. What would he make of our relatively free society today in which an alarming number of people believe that the Earth is flat? In a world of “alternative facts” and “post-truth politics,” conventional wisdom has become useless. All information is suspect. Data is not to be trusted. As St. Paul once wrote, “For now, we see through a glass, darkly.” An updated scripture for the Trump era might read, “For now, we see through a smartphone screen, cracked.”
Nothing embodies the opaqueness of our times like the paradoxical phrase “fake news.” While often used as a pejorative to discredit information that doesn’t fit with one’s favored narrative, fake news is, in fact, a real thing —or, a real fake thing, that is. An entire industry of yellow journalism has emerged online, flooding social media with fake news stories like, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President,” and, “Woman Arrested For Defecating On Boss’ Desk After Winning The Lottery.”
Fact-checking site Politifact chose fake news as its 2016 “Lie of the Year,” explaining, “In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse – promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters – gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.” Over the last year, pundits and politicians blamed a dissemination of fake news stories across Facebook and Twitter for steering voters towards Donald Trump. President Obama warned voters at a Clinton campaign rally, “The way campaigns have unfolded, we just start accepting crazy stuff as normal. And people, if they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again, as long as it’s on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as its on social media, people start believing it. And it creates this dust cloud of nonsense.”
But fake news has proved to be more than just a danger at the polls. On December 4, 2016, Edgar Welch entered Comet Ping Pong, a popular Washington, D.C. pizzeria, carrying an AR-15 assault rifle. He later claimed that he’d come to “self-investigate” an alleged child-sex ring. He’d read online that wealthy businessmen and high-ranking Democratic Party officials were known to participate in Satanic pedophilia rituals in the basement of the restaurant. As he discovered, there were no child sex slaves. In fact, there wasn’t even a basement. He fired four shots at a wall before surrendering to the police. Luckily, no one was hurt during Welch’s investigation. But to the mainstream media and political establishment, “Pizzagate” became a byword for the dangers of fake news. “It’s now clear,” said Hillary Clinton shortly after the incident, “that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences.”
For older generations raised on Walter Cronkite and traditional print journalism, the pervasiveness of deliberately deceitful media may feel like a recent phenomenon or a symptom of the digital age. But there’s nothing new about fake news (ever heard of a famous radio adaptation of War of the Worlds?). Fake news has been a part of society since the days when our ancestors painted mythical beasts on the walls of caves.
Throughout human history, fake news has had real and often tragic consequences. In the late 18th century, unfounded rumors caused a wave of violence across the French countryside; scandal-mongering publications lead to the death of a king and queen. Ultimately, fake news helped create and shape one of the most important events of the last millennium: the French Revolution.
In the 18th century, kings and queens still ruled most of Europe through divine right — in other words, with no one to answer to but God. A person’s place in society was based on their relation to the monarch; there were no citizens in France, just subjects. But things were changing. The Enlightenment movement had inspired philosophers and statesmen to challenge long-held traditions, in particular the concept of absolute monarchy. By the late 18th century, universities, libraries, salons, and coffeehouses all across Europe were bursting with revolutionary ideas about equality and popular sovereignty.
But it wasn’t just in high culture where people were questioning the authority of the monarch. Even the lowly workers of Paris, who weren’t much for reading philosophical treatises, were losing reverence for their king, thanks in large part to a controversial form of 18th century French literature. Libelles (yes, this is where the word ‘libel’ comes from) were tabloid-esque publications that gave racy — and often totally fabricated — accounts of the private lives of the nobility. Their use of blue humor and pornographic imagery made them immensely popular with the French lower-class. They portrayed Versailles as a carnival of sin, a grotesque world where a narcissist king and queen and their entourage of perfumed and powdered nobles all lived decadent lives of tax-free luxury, drinking, eating, dancing, fucking, oblivious to the widespread suffering beyond their palace walls.
Libelle writers (libellistes) were typically French emigres who lived and worked in London to avoid censorship and arrest. Their reputation for pedaling smut led to their nickname Rousseaus du ruisseau (‘Rousseaus of the gutter’). One of the most popular and influential libellistes was Charles de Morande, whose Gazetier Cuirassé (‘Battleship Gazette’) published lurid tales of sex and intrigue set in the court of King Louis XV. He accused Madame du Barry, the king’s mistress, of sleeping with her butler, and alleged that several noble women had lost their teeth and hair from syphilis.
During the reign of King Louis XVI, libellistes took particular joy in smearing the queen. Marie Antoinette — or, as the libellistes were fond of calling her, l’Autrichienne (“the Austrian bitch”) — was often portrayed as a cold-hearted nymphomaniac who engaged in deviant sex acts with various men, women, and even members of her own family. When the Revolution began in 1789, the attacks on her increased in number and ferocity. She was said to have conspired against the king and the French people, to have squandered large sums of money, and — most famously — to have suggested that the starving people of France “eat cake.” One especially cruel libelle insinuated that she’d poisoned her own child, who’d recently died from tuberculosis.
The libellistes were only slightly less harsh with the king. They ridiculed him for his passivity and aloofness, portraying him as a pathetic man-child always being deceived by his corrupt ministers and cuckolded by his sex-crazed wife. One cartoon showed him watching in shock as Marie Antoinette made love to his brother, the comte d’Artois. To many, his inability to stifle such criticism only added to his image as an impotent leader and lover.
While libelles might have painted an exaggerated picture of the aristocracy, the French people had plenty of real reasons to be angry with the ruling class. French society was structured around a rigorous hierarchical system known as the ‘estates of the realm,’ which divided the population into three castes: the First Estate, made up of the clergy; the Second Estate, consisting of the nobles; and the Third Estate, which included everyone else (e.g. the urban workers, rural peasants, and a small but budding new class of upwardly mobile commoners known as the bourgeoisie). The First and Second Estates were exempt from most royal taxes, which meant that the lion’s share of the tax burden fell on the Third Estate. The years leading up to the French Revolution were especially hard for France’s poor, as meager harvests coupled with the government’s misguided economic policies led to famine and social unrest. In the Parisian working-class neighborhood of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, residents were spending up to 90% of their income on bread.
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine lay in the shadow the Bastille, an infamous prison and armory, and during the summer of 1789, home to the libertine writer the Marquis de Sade. Sade's work was known for its graphic depictions of sexual violence. He'd spent much of his adult life in prison and exile for rape, sodomy, and blasphemy. During his imprisonment at the Bastille, he wrote his most notorious work, 120 Days of Sodom, a novel so disturbing that it has since been banned in numerous countries and contributed to his legacy as the namesake for the term ‘sadism’.
Peering through the bars of his cell window, Sade could sense the growing angst of the denizens of the surrounding neighborhood. Throughout the summer, riots and looting had become commonplace. Resentment had bred a new, revolutionary class of workers called the sans-culottes (which literally translates to “without britches”) who met at night in the city’s wine shops and taverns to vent their frustrations. “A great revolution is in the works in our country,” Sade wrote. “France is tired of the crimes of our sovereigns, of their cruelty, of their debauches and follies. It is tired of despotism and it is gong to break its ties.”
Over the years, the Bastille had come to be seen as a symbol of royal oppression. Parisian folklore was full of gruesome tales of rat-infested dungeons and torture chambers hidden deep within its castle walls. There were legends of a mysterious man — possibly an illegitimate member of the royal family — who’d spent decades locked in one of the fortress’s medieval towers, forced to wear an iron mask.
In reality, the Bastille was nothing like the hellish gulag most Parisians imagined it to be. It functioned more as a rehab for disgraced nobles who’d slept with the wrong guy’s wife. It was lightly guarded by a small garrison of invalides (veteran soldiers no longer capable of field service) and usually housed fewer than 10 prisoners at any single time. Not only were there no torture chambers, but inmates were actually treated quite well. The philosopher Voltaire, who served two stints in the Bastille, was known to dine each night at the governor’s table and received five to six visitors a day. Prisoners were even allowed to bring their own furniture and servants.
Despite the comforts provided by his hosts during his imprisonment, Sade was not one to pass up a good chance to cause public scandal. On the night of July 2nd 1789, he began to scream from his cell, “They are killing the prisoners here!” The stone walls of his cell created a megaphone effect that carried his cries to the streets below. A crowd formed and demanded to know what was happening. Bernard-René de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, tried to calm the incredulous crowd. He had Sade transferred two days later to the Charenton insane asylum. Less than two weeks later, de Launay was killed in history’s most famous act of mob violence. His head was cut off with a pocketknife and paraded through the streets of Paris atop a pike. He was the first of many who would lose their lives in the coming years over fake news.
In the weeks leading up to de Launay’s decapitation, Paris teemed with paranoia. The journalist François-Noël Babeuf wrote:
On my arrival in Paris there was talk everywhere of a conspiracy led by the Count d’Artois [the king’s brother] and other aristocrats… A large number of the population of Paris would be killed, except those who submitted to the aristocrats and accepted the fate of slavery by offering their hands to the iron chains of the tyrants… If the Parisians had not discovered this plot in time, a terrible crime would have been committed. Instead, it was possible to form a response to this perfidious plan, which is unparalleled in all of history.
The sans-culottes scoured the city for guns and ammunition. A mob made its way to the Bastille on July 14th shouting, “Death to the rich! Death to all aristocrats! Death to hoarders! Drown the fucking priests!” After a brief battle, they stormed the fortress and killed the governor.
Peasants in the country felt emboldened by news of the events in Paris, but also feared reprisal. Strange rumors, much like the ones that had led the sans-culottes to revolt, spread from village to village, stories of foreign armies on the march across France and roving gangs of hired brigands terrorizing the countryside. Just like the sans-culottes, the peasants armed themselves and sought out members of the First and Second Estates on whom they could take vengeance.
In villages across France, peasants organized gangs to plunder the wealthy landowners’ manors. They stripped the fields of crops and raided grain silos, kidnapped and murdered noblemen, and robbed and set fire to their châteaux. In the end, the peasants became the very brigands they feared. “There no longer exists either executive power, laws, magistrates or police,” wrote the Venetian Ambassador. “A horrible anarchy prevails.” A royal official in Paris described the anxiety of the nobility in a letter dated August 13 1789:
The flames are sweeping through Anjou and Maine. The comte de Laurencin read out to us yesterday the terrible events suffered by Madame, his sister, at two chateaux in Dauphine: papers burnt, the chateaux pillaged and roofs removed if they were not burnt. They were not even left with the means of gathering and securing their harvest…
In Alsace the inhabitants destroyed the superb forests at Bitche and Hagueneau, destroyed the fine glass-making establishments at Baccarat, and the king’s own magnificent ironworks. They are at work now in the forest of St-Germain, cutting down the finest trees. It is impossible to be sure now, and for the immediate future, where to live in France, or who can preserve their wealth. The king is in a state of despondency and in reply to complaints, says that there is nothing he can do.
The causes of la Grande Peur (‘the Great Fear,’ as the wave of panic and violence came to be called) are a mystery. While it’s easy to view these events as a deadly, politically-charged game of telephone, historians are unable to account for the rapidity by which the rumors spread. In the age before the telegraph and locomotive, news only moved as fast as the quickest horse could take it. Yet, records show that during the Great Fear the same rumor would often arise in villages 20 miles apart on the same day. One historian in the 1980s proposed that the Great Fear might have been caused by peasants eating flour contaminated with ergot, a fungus containing lysergic acid (the hallucinatory compound in LSD).
The Great Fear was a terrifying reckoning for the aristocracy and a pivotal moment in the Revolution. Centuries of hardship and oppression had filled the peasants with pent-up rage, and all it took was some misinformation to unleash their murderous potential. The summer of 1789 was only a preview of the years of carnage that were to follow.
One of Louis XVI’s fiercest critics was Jean-Paul Marat, a former physician whose clientele once included the king’s brother, the comte de Artois. As the Ancien Régime crumbled, Marat quit his successful medical practice to join the revolutionary cause as a pamphleteer. “When the Revolution came, I immediately saw how the wind was blowing,” he wrote. “And at last I began to breathe in the hope of seeing humanity avenged and myself installed in the place which I deserved.”
In September 1789 Marat wrote and published the first edition of L’Ami du Peuple (‘The Friend of the People’). The newspaper was a hit with the sans-culottes thanks to his scathing indictments of the “enemies of the revolution.” However, his writing won him nearly as many enemies as it did readers. He sometimes avoided arrest by living in the sewers and catacombs of Paris where he contracted a skin disease that left him with permanent sores and a terrible odor.
Despite his previous connections to French high society, he espoused a fanatical hatred for the First and Second Estates and the bourgeoisie, whom he believed had “built their fortunes atop the ruination of others.” He beseeched his readers not to trust the king and his ministers, nor the National Assembly, the recently established legislative body created by delegates of the Third Estate, whom he saw as complicit in the king’s conspiracy to preserve the absolute monarchy.
In one of the first issues of L’Ami du Peuple, Marat wrote:
Then there is the prince [Louis XVI], who has become once more the supreme arbiter of the law, seeking to oppose the Constitution even before it is finished. Then there are the ministers, so ridiculously exalted, whose only thought is to return to the hands of the monarch the chains of despotism that the nation has taken from him. Here then is the nation, itself enchained by its representatives and delivered defenceless to an imperious master who, forgetful of his powerlessness, violates his promises and oaths.
Marat was joined in his condemnation of the king by the equally venomous Jacques Hébert and his paper Le Père Duchesne. Hébert wrote from the point of view of an imaginary, foul-mouthed sans-culotte named Père Duchesne (Father Duchesne), who’d recount fictitious interactions he’d had with those in power. He gave blistering critiques of the aristocracy, but held a special loathing for the clergy. He began one of his many rants, “Oh the fucking priests and all they fucking wanted us to believe!” Street-criers would sell new issues of Le Père Duchesne by yelling, “Père Duchesne’s damn angry today!”
The radicals didn’t have a monopoly on rabble-rousing newspapers. Le Babillard was a conservative-leaning gossip rag that blamed the sans-culottes for France’s problems. In its issue published July 6th 1792, it declared:
Citizens of every sort are beginning to lose all patience with the workers. The National Guard, merchants, manufacturers, les bourgeois, les artisans alike all cry out against these people who are in the pay of sedition-mongers…One hears everywhere that they ought to be swept out of the way by a blast of cannon fire.
In the wake of the storming of the Bastille and the Great Fear, L’Ami du Peuple broke a story that seemed to confirm the sans-culottes’ fears of a coming counter-revolution. On October 1st 1789, a banquet was held at Versailles to welcome soldiers of the Royal Flanders Regiment, as was tradition in the royal court. Like many such banquets, there was plenty of booze and, as the night wore on, the visiting soldiers became progressively more inebriated. Rowdy displays of allegiance to the king were made and songs celebrating the monarchy were sung.
Under normal circumstances, such a party would have attracted little notice, but these were revolutionary times. The story of the banquet was twisted and distorted by the radical press and sold to the sans-culottes as a tale of debauchery and betrayal. According to Marat, a royal orgy had taken place in which soldiers had stomped and pissed on the tricolor cockade while the king and queen looked on approvingly. The sans-culottes now felt vindicated in their suspicions of the king.
Their feelings of betrayal were further inflamed by a rumor that the queen was hoarding large amounts of grain at Versailles in a plot to starve the Third Estate. On October 5th, a mob of between five to seven thousand market women converged on the Hôtel de Ville to demand bread. When their demands went unheard by the city leadership, they gathered weapons — clubs, picks, scythes, muskets, and even a few small cannons stolen from the Hôtel de Ville — and began a 12-mile march to Versailles.
They were joined along the way by more women and some men, many of them veterans of the storming of the Bastille, so by the time they reached Versailles their numbers had reached the tens of thousands. They laid siege to the palace throughout the night, with several episodes of sporadic violence taking place; in the most severe case, two soldiers were killed and dismembered by a group of women attempting to break into the queen's chambers. The next morning, the frightened royal family was forced to move into the Tuileries palace in Paris where they could be closely watched by the National Guard and the sans-culottes.
Marat continued to stir revolutionary passions over the next three years with stories of collusion between the king and the Austrians and Prussians. According to Marat, foreign enemies were planning a daring raid on Paris to free the royal family from their virtual captivity. On August 10th, thousands of sans-culottes, suspecting such a raid to be imminent, attacked the Tuileries. The royal family escaped, but several hundred members of their Swiss Guard were killed and mutilated by the mob. Hundreds more were taken prisoner, and in September, on Marat’s urging, killed in what came to be known as the September Massacres.
The rumor-fueled events that culminated in the attack on the Tuileries and the September Massacres forced the Revolution in a more radical and vindictive direction. The king was dethroned and a new government was formed composed of radicals like Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Marat himself. France’s destiny would no longer be molded in the the halls of Versailles or the chambers of the National Assembly, but in the streets of Paris. The ensuing political climate of populist rage and mob violence soon gave rise to a new, innovative machine that promised to liberate the people of France from tyranny once and for all and spread democracy across the globe.
Marat was one of the guillotine’s most zealous advocates. In the December 18th 1790 edition of L’Ami du Peuple, he wrote:
I tell you again, this is the only way which remains for you to save the country. Six months ago, five or six hundred heads would have been enough to pull you back from the abyss. Today because you have stupidly let your implacable enemies conspire among themselves and gather strength, perhaps we will have to cut off five or six thousand. But even if it needs twenty thousand, there is no time for hesitation.
He’d eventually raise that figure to 250,000 heads. He also expanded the scope of his attacks, demanding not just the heads of monarchists, but also those of revolutionaries he deemed not adequately radical. He gave his readers these commands:
Begin then by making sure of the king, the dauphin and the royal family: put them under a strong guard and let their heads answer for events. Follow this up by cutting off, without hesitation, the general’s [Marquis de Lafayette’s] head, and those of the counter-revolutionary ministers and ex-ministers; those of the mayor and the anti-revolutionary municipal councillors; then put all [counter-revolutionaries in] the National Assembly, all the known supporters of despotism, on the edge of the sword.
France’s new republican government faithfully followed Marat’s instructions. On January 21st 1793, Louis Capet, as the dethroned former king was now known, was decapitated in the Place de la Révolution as thousands of Parisians watched and shouted “Vive la Nation! Vive la République!” Marie Antoinette followed her husband to the guillotine on October 16th. Such events would have seemed unimaginable only a few years earlier. In 1789, the ill-fated king had assured his ministers, “The French people are incapable of regicide.” Even firsthand witnesses to the execution had trouble comprehending what they were watching. Writer and politician Louis Sébastien Mercier wrote of his disbelief, “Is this really the same man that I see being jostled by four assistant executioners, forcibly undressed, his voice drowned out by the drums, trussed to a plank, still struggling, and receiving the heavy blade so badly that the cut does not go through his neck, but through the back of his head and his jaw, horribly?”
On July 13th 1793, Marat was taking one of his frequent baths to relieve his painful lesions when Charlotte Corday, a 24-year-old follower of the moderate Girondins, sneaked into his home and stabbed him to death. Rather than silence Marat as she intended, Corday made him a martyr. His murder kicked off a year-long political purge known as the ‘Reign of Terror,’ in which Marat’s vengeful disciples, who now controlled the French state, arrested and executed anyone they suspected of harboring counter-revolutionary views.
At its best, the French Revolution symbolized the end of absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings and the establishment of a society based around reason rather than superstition. In the French First Republic, a person’s destiny was no longer determined entirely by the circumstances of their birth. All Frenchmen (emphasis on ‘-men’) were citizens — not subjects — and granted equal rights before the law. At its worst, the Revolution demonstrated what John Adams called “the tyranny of the majority.” By the summer of 1794, over 50,000 people in France had been executed by the radical government for “crimes against liberty.”
Thomas Jefferson, an early supporter of the French Revolution, believed that a well-informed citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy. For a free people to govern themselves, they must have access to education and reliable information in order to make good decisions. The French Revolution made clear that when ignorance and confusion are allowed to prevail, the results are chaos and tyranny.
It’s hard to argue that today's Americans would meet Jefferson's criteria for a well-informed citizenry. Under the guise of fairness and balance, 24-hour news networks provide a platform for the loudest, most incendiary voices, allowing public opinion to be shaped by modern-day pamphleteers like Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow, and Bill O’Reilly. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of social media has spawned countless digital-age libelles, clickbait sites like InfoWars, Breitbart, and Occupy Democrats. The result is a media landscape in which sensationalism is valued over accuracy and rumors are given the same credence as facts. Carl Bernstein wrote, “The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives — has overrun real journalism.”
Like all revolutions, the French Revolution was a battle over narrative. Nobody understood this better than the charismatic general and master propagandist Napoleon Bonaparte. When the revolutionaries’ narrative of liberty, equality, and fraternity fell apart, he was there to fill the void with his own narrative of glory, patriotism, and empire. The sans-culottes, the once rabid democrats whose hands were barely clean of the blood of their former king, whose minds had been made pliable by years of riotous rumors and demagogic editorials, were more than willing to be led by a new tyrant and his simple, vague promise to make France great again.
