The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: Let us look momentarily at the prerevolutionary
world in France through the eyes of King Louis XVI. Much of what he
saw seemed to be the same reality that previous kings had faced. The
king was still considered the absolute ruler of France, divinely
appointed to lead the nation. The various classes and estates in France
remained quite stable; the distinctions among the nobility, the clergy,
and the rest of the French people were still largely respected. The
commoners enjoyed the relative prosperity that Louis himself had
inherited from his grandfather.
Yes, there were financial problems, but the great Louis XIV himself
had faced such crises, and they had passed. Versailles was still the
glittering jewel of Europe, the center of everything civilized. Louis’s
beloved queen, Marie Antoinette, hosted the most spectacular parties,
which were the envy of all European aristocrats. Louis himself did not

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care for such amusements, but he had his hunting parties and his other
rather pedestrian hobbies that obsessed him.
Life at the palace was rather sweet and relatively tranquil. Most
important to Louis, the glory and the majesty of France, as embodied
in its ceremonies and visual symbols, still carried the same weight as
before. Who could help but be impressed by the splendors of Versailles
itself, or by the rituals of the Catholic Church? He was the ruler of a
great nation, and there was no reason to believe that the monarchy
would not continue for as many centuries as it had already lasted.
Below the surface of what he saw, however, there were some
troubling signs of discontent. Beginning during the reign of Louis XV,
writers such as Voltaire and Diderot began to ridicule the church and
the monarchy for all of their backward, superstitious beliefs. They
reflected a new scientific spirit spreading throughout Europe, and it
was hard to reconcile this with many of the practices of the church and
the nobility. Their ideas became known as the Enlightenment, and they
began to gain influence among the expanding middle class, which had
felt excluded from power and was not so immersed in all of the
symbolism of the monarchy.
Below the seemingly tranquil façade of the nobility, there were quite
a few cracks. Many aristocrats had come to loathe the absolute power
of the king, whom they saw as weak and not worthy of their respect.
They hungered for more power for themselves.
Secret societies were sprouting up everywhere, promoting a whole
new way of socializing, far from the stuffy environment of the court.
Supreme among them were the Freemasons and their lodges, with
their own secret rituals. Danton himself was a member. The
Freemasons’ lodges were hotbeds of discontent with the monarchy,
their members highly sympathetic to the ideas of the Enlightenment.
They craved a new order in France. In Paris, the theater had suddenly
become the most popular place to frequent and to be seen at, much
more popular than the church. And plays were now being performed
that mocked the monarchy in the most brazen manner.
And all of those majestic symbols and ceremonies of the monarchy
that had remained relatively unchanged were beginning to seem rather
empty, masks with nothing behind them. Courtiers no longer really
understood what they were doing, or why, when they engaged in their
elaborate rituals in company with the king. The paintings, statues, and

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fountains ornamented with mythological figures were as beautiful as
ever, but they were simply seen as surface pieces of art, not as
indications of a deep connection to France’s glorious past.
All of these signs were subtle and disparate. It was hard to connect
them all to any kind of trend, let alone a revolution. They could pass as
novelties, new pastimes for a bored nation, without any underlying
meaning. But then came the worsening crisis in the late 1780s, and
suddenly these separate examples of disenchantment began to
combine into an undeniable force. The price of bread had risen, as well
as the cost of living, for all French subjects. As the discontent spread,
the nobility and the bourgeoisie smelled weakness in the king and
demanded more power.
Now the king could not ignore what was happening, and at the
Estates General the loss of respect and the disenchantment were all too
visible to him in the behavior of the Third Estate. Louis, however,
could only view these events through the lens of the divine monarchy
that he had inherited and clung to so desperately. These French
subjects who were disrespecting and disobeying his absolute rule must
be godless individuals, and only a noisy minority. To disobey his word
was tantamount to sacrilege.
If such people could not be persuaded by the symbols of the
glorious past, he would have to use force to make the past and the
traditions prevail. But once something has lost its spell and no longer
enchants, no amount of force can bring it back to life. And as he rode
in that carriage in October of 1789 that carried him away forever from
Versailles and the past, all he could see were people who were not his
subjects but aliens of some sort. He had to include Danton in such a
group. At his execution, he addressed the crowd as if he were still the
king, forgiving them their sins. The crowd instead saw just a human,
stripped of all his previous glory, no better than they were.
When Georges-Jacques Danton looked out at the same world as the
king, he saw something quite different. Unlike the king, he was not
timid or insecure but the opposite. He had no inner need to rely upon
the past to prop him up. He had been educated by liberal priests who
had instilled in him Enlightenment ideas. And at the age of fifteen, at
the coronation he caught a fleeting glimpse of the future, intuiting for a
moment how empty the monarchy and its symbols had become, and
that the king was just an ordinary man.

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In the 1780s he began to pick up the disparate signs of change—
from within the King’s Council and the growing disrespect among the
lawyer class, to the clubs and street life, where a new spirit could be
detected. He could feel the pain of the lower classes and empathize
with their sense of exclusion. And this new spirit was not simply
political but also cultural. The youth of Danton’s generation had grown
tired of all of the empty formality in French culture. They yearned for
something freer and more spontaneous. They wanted to express their
emotions openly and naturally. They wanted to get rid of all the
elaborate outfits and hairstyles and wear looser clothing with less
ostentation. They wanted more open socializing, the open mingling of
all the classes, as occurred in the clubs in Paris.
We could call this cultural movement the first real explosion of
Romanticism, valuing emotions and sensations above the intellect and
formalities. Danton both exemplified this Romantic spirit and
understood it. He was a man who always wore his heart on his sleeve
and whose speeches had the feel of spontaneous outpourings of ideas
and emotions. His disinterment of his wife was like something out of
Romantic literature, an expression of emotion unimaginable some ten
years before. This side of Danton was what made him so relatable and
compelling to the public.
In a way that made him quite unique, Danton was able before
anyone else to connect the meaning behind all of these signs and
foresee a mass revolution on its way. An avid swimmer, he compared
all of this to the tide in a river. Nothing in human life is ever static.
There is always discontent below the surface, and hunger for change.
Sometimes this is rather subtle, and the river seems somewhat placid
but still moving. At other times it is like a rush, a rising tide that no
one, not even a king with absolute power, can hold back.
Where was this tide carrying the French? That was the key question.
To Danton it soon became clear it was heading toward the formation of
a republic. The monarchy was now just a façade. Its show of majesty no
longer stirred the masses. They now saw that the actions of the king
were all about holding on to power; they saw the aristocracy as a bunch
of thieves, doing little work and sucking up the wealth of France. With
such levels of disenchantment, there could be no turning back, no
middle ground, no constitutional monarchy.

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As part of his unusual perspicacity and sensitivity to the spirit of the
times, before any of the other revolutionary leaders, Danton
understood that the Terror he had unleashed was a mistake and that it
was time to stop it. In this one instance, his sense of timing was off, as
he moved on this intuition at least several months in advance of the
public, giving his enemies and rivals an opening to get rid of him.