Eduardo Galeano - Mirrors - Stories of Almost Everyone

The first known national anthem was born of parents unknown in England in 1745. Its verses declared the kingdom would crush the Scottish rebels, to “frustrate their knavish tricks.”

Half a century later, the Marseillaise warned that the Revolution would “water the fields with the impure blood” of the invaders.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the anthem of the United States proclaimed its imperial vocation blessed by God: “Conquer we must, when our cause it is just.” And at the end of that century, the Germans consolidated their delayed national unity by erecting three hundred and twenty-seven statues of Emperor Wilhelm and four hundred and seventy of Bismarck, while singing the anthem that put Germany über alles , above all.

Generally speaking, anthems reinforce the identity of each nation by means of threats, insults, self-praise, homages to war, and the honorable duty to kill and be killed.

In Latin America, these paeans to the glories of the founding fathers sound like they were written for funeral pageants:

the Uruguayan anthem invites us to choose between country and

grave

and the Paraguayan between the republic and death,

the Argentine exhorts us to vow to die with glory,

the Chilean proclaims the country’s land will be the grave of the

free,

the Guatemalan calls for victory or death,

the Cuban insists that dying for the fatherland is living,

the Ecuadorian shows that the holocaust of heroes is a fertile seed,

the Peruvian exults in the terror its cannons inspire,

the Mexican recommends soaking the fatherland’s standards in

waves of blood,

and the Colombian bathes itself in the blood of heroes who with

geographic enthusiasm do battle at Thermopylae.

The symbols of the French Revolution are female, women of marble or bronze with powerful naked breasts, Phrygian caps, flags aflutter.

But what the Revolution produced was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and when revolutionary militant Olympe de Gouges proposed a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she was hauled off to jail. The Revolutionary Tribunal found her guilty and the guillotine removed her head.

At the foot of the scaffold, Olympe asked:

“If we women have the right to face the people from the guillotine, should we not also have the right to face them from the tribune?”

Not allowed. They could not speak, they could not vote. The Convention, the revolutionary congress, closed down all women’s political associations and forbade women from debating men as equals.

Olympe de Gouges’ companions were sent to the lunatic asylum. And soon after her execution, it was Manon Roland’s turn. Manon was the wife of the minister of the interior, but not even that could save her. She was found guilty of “an anti-natural tendency to political activism.” She had betrayed her feminine nature, which was to keep house and give birth to brave sons, and she had committed the deadly offense of sticking her nose into the masculine affairs of state.

And the guillotine dropped once more.

A tall doorway without a door, an empty frame. At the top, poised, the deadly blade.

She went by several names: the Machine, the Widow, the Barber. When she decapitated King Louis, she became Little Louise. And in the end, one name stuck, the guillotine.

Joseph Guillotin protested in vain. A thousand and one times, the doctor and sworn enemy of the death penalty protested that the executioner who sowed terror and drew multitudes was not his daughter. No one listened. People went right on believing that he was the father of the leading lady of the most popular show in Paris.

People also believed, and still do, that Guillotin died on the guillotine. In reality, he breathed his last breath in the peace of his own bed, his head well attached to his body.

The guillotine labored on until 1977. Its last victim was a Tunisian immigrant executed in the yard of a Paris prison by a superfast model with an electronic trigger.

To sabotage the Revolution, landowners set fire to their crops. The specter of hunger roamed the cities. The kingdoms of Austria, Prussia, England, Spain, and Holland prepared for war against the contagious French Revolution, which insulted tradition and threatened the holy trinity of crown, wig, and cassock.

Besieged from within and without, the Revolution reached the boiling point. The people were the audience watching a drama performed in their name. Not many attended the debates. There was no time. The lineups for food were long.

Differences of opinion led to the scaffold. All the revolutionary leaders were enemies of monarchy, but some of them had kings in their hearts, and by a new, divine revolutionary right, they were the owners of the absolute truth and absolute power. Whoever dared to disagree was a counterrevolutionary ally of the enemy, a foreign spy, a traitor to the cause.

Marat escaped the guillotine because a mad girl stabbed him in the bath.

Saint-Just, inspired by Robespierre, accused Danton.

Danton, sentenced to death, asked them not to forget to put his head on display, and as a bequest he left his balls to Robespierre. He said the man would need them.

Three months later, Saint-Just and Robespierre were decapitated.

Without wanting it or knowing it, the desperate, chaotic republic was working for the restoration of the monarchy. The Revolution, which had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, ended up paving the way for the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte, who founded his own dynasty.

In 1835, German dailies published this notice from the authorities:

WANTED

GEORG BÜCHNER, DARMSTADT MEDICAL STUDENT,

21 YEARS OLD, GRAY EYES,

PROMINENT FOREHEAD, LARGE NOSE, SMALL MOUTH,

NEARSIGHTED.

Büchner, a social agitator, organizer of poor peasants, traitor to his class, was on the run from the police.

Soon thereafter, at the age of twenty-three, he died.

He died of fever: so much life in so few years. Between one leap and the next in his life as a fugitive, Büchner wrote, a century ahead of his time, the plays that would found modern theater: Woyzeck, Leonce and Lena, Danton’s Death.

In Danton’s Death , the German revolutionary had the courage to put onstage, painfully and mercilessly, the tragic fate of the French Revolution, which had begun by proclaiming “the despotism of freedom” and ended up imposing the despotism of the guillotine.

The black slaves of Haiti gave Napoleon Bonaparte’s army a tremendous thrashing, and in 1804 the flag of the free fluttered over the ruins.

But Haiti was a country ruined from the first. On the altars of French sugar plantations, lands and lives had been burned alive, and then the calamities of war exterminated a third of the population.

The birth of independence and the death of slavery, feats accomplished by blacks, were unpardonable humiliations for the white owners of the world.