The pawned guillotine

 

It is said that the last of the “sombre dynastie” of Sansons to be the chief executioner in Paris, Henri-Clement, was a well known gambler and epicure, a great favorer of masked balls and card games. Now, in the 1840s, the chief executioner kept that great, terrible machine, the guillotine, in his home on Rue de Marais, which was approximately where Rue Faubourg San Martin in the 10th arrondissement is today. He would sometimes display the machine to guests, just as his father had – at the same house, his father had once eaten dinner with Balzac in which he discussed the chopping off of the King and Queens head in 1793 with the ever curious novelist.

As a gambler, Henri-Clement Sanson was sometimes plunged into debt. To raise money to pay his debts, he did an unusual thing: he put his guillotine in hock. One night, in 1847, he was called on by the messengers from the court to get everything ready for an execution of two prisoners. He confessed that he needed to go to the pawn shop to get his instrument. I don’t know if the messenger loaned him the money to do so. In any case, the court was not pleased, and demanded his resignation.
This is, to my mind, a kind of allegory of Critique, that activity infinitely perfected by Leftists (under which rubric I include myself). Like the pawned instrument of a supreme violence forever associated with Revolution, in time of crisis, when critique should turn into revolution, it finds it has lost its instrument, its connection to any real social force. It has been, as it were, put into hock.
I think a lot about that the instant in which critique fails to turn into revolution, because I often feel that it structures the 21st century Left - it normalizes disappointment. A Leftism of dis-appointment - that seems more of a hindrance than a help, doesn't it?