I enjoy visiting the sites of former jails and prisons, and the Conciergerie did not disappoint. Originally part of the the Palais de la Cite, the building housed prisoners during the French Revolution, including Charlotte Corday and Marie Antoinette.

While Robespierre was never imprisoned there, his presence permeates the building because it was the Committee of Public Safety that created the Revolutionary Tribunal. One of my favorite passages in Blake is about the Reign of Terror:

Domestic carnage now filled the whole year

With feast-days; old men from the chimney-nook,

The maiden from the bosom of her love,

The mother from the cradle of her babe,

The warrior from the field—all perished, all—

Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,

They found their joy,

They made it proudly, eager as a child,

(If like desires of innocent little ones

May with such heinous appetites be compared,)

Pleased in some open field to exercise

A toy that mimics with revolving wings

The motion of a wind-mill; though the air

Do of itself blow fresh, and make the vanes

Spin in his eyesight, that contents him not,

But, with the plaything at arm’s length, he sets

His front against the blast, and runs amain,

That it may whirl the faster.

I find this passage eerie, and though no one was executed at the Conciergerie, many of its prisoners were ultimately sentenced to death by guillotine. Wordsworth perfectly captures the horror that must have gripped many people during the Reign of Terror, in which no one was safe–old men, women, and children all suffered the same fate. Wordsworth’s imagery of the guillotine is haunting, and he gives the impression that the guillotine is nothing more than a toy to Robespierre and the Jacobins and that they delight in using it against their enemies, both actual and perceived. 

The idea that the “windmill” cannot run quickly enough for Robespierre and that he plays with it with the reckless abandon of a child with a new toy is powerful. I thought quite a bit today about how awful the Reign of Terror must have been–surely many wondered whether they had replaced a bad system with a worse one.