ABSTRACT
History is not going to allow Goethe this rest. In January 1793 he learns that Louis XVI has been executed, sentenced by a majority of only a few votes in the National Assembly. The guillotine has been in action for six months, working at ever-incfeasing pressure, for the traitors and the guilty are legion. Before it comes to a halt several thousands will have been executed, including the traitors Danton and Desmoulins, who had led the storming of the Bastille, the Girondists who had unleashed the first Revolutionary war, the extreme radicals, and finally the traitors Robespierre and Saint-Just; to these can be added numerous Revolutionary generals such as Luckner, Custine, poets like André Chenier, men of learning like the great chemist Lavoisier, aristocrats, crooks, idealists, conspirators and little seamstresses. Goethe hears only a faint echo of these events and of the sinister intrigues of ambitious personalities engaging in mutual denunciation and murder. The jumble of high-minded idealists and ruthless careerists becomes more obscure to him every day. The innocent are slaughtered like rabbits while the cunning ones slink off like foxes and triumph.
