Paris, Thursday
AROUND 5000 French royalists, wearing fleur-de-lis badges and black
ties and carrying bunches of white lilies, emblems of the monarchy,
massed on the Place de la Concorde in Paris today to commemorate the
200th anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI.
At the same moment, on the opposite side of the huge square, several
hundred diehard revolutionaries called the Vigilantes of St Just, a
group founded by Scottish sculptor and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1989,
were joyfully celebrating the monarch's death and the birth of the
Republic.
Mr Finlay remained in Scotland today, but his group's attempts to
celebrate in style without him were blunted somewhat when royalists
stole the revolutionary guillotine and burned it.
Before their centre-piece was stolen amid scuffles, the Vigilantes had
made their mark on the occasion. They splashed red wine on the ground to
symbolise the royal blood spilt in 1793 and read poems and texts by
revolutionary leaders Robespierre, St Just and sexual eccentric the
Marquis de Sade underneath a crowned pig's head stuck on a pike which
was then eaten at a ''republican eucharist''.
The royalist demonstration was the most important held in France since
1830 and took place around the site of the guillotine which beheaded
Louis XVI, covered with turf for the occasion.
The king, after confession and mass, had been taken to the scaffold on
what was then called the Place de la Revolution in a covered carriage
which took two hours to rumble through the streets of Paris from his
prison cell.
Today, under monarchist banners topped with black sashes, the
royalists observed a minute's silence in memory of the execution which
ushered in the Revolutionary Terror during which 25,000 people were
guillotined.
After an actor had read out the king's last will and testament,
Protestant and Roman Catholic priests read the psalm De Profundis and
the Lord's Prayer. Loudspeakers then boomed out extracts from Mozart's
Requiem as sympathisers started laying bunches of white lilies on the
site of the guillotine.
There were scuffles when a life-size wooden guillotine being taken on
a lorry to the celebration of the Vigilantes was seized only yards from
the Place de la Concorde and set alight by young royalists.
Paris lawyer Jean-Marc Varaut, a member of the committee which
organised the royalist demonstration, stood on the guillotine, calling
for people to bring paper to help the blaze.
Mr Finlay, when contacted at his Lanarkshire farm today, said he was
unable to be in Paris but was ''terribly excited to hear news from the
front line''.
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