The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.
For millennia, King Mob has targeted societies' icons with varied goals and to varied ends, and few things are more foreboding than his desecration of civic art. Just as the targets have ranged from rulers to clergy, from tyrants to helpless, and from the guilty to the innocent, the outcomes have ranged from victory to defeat depending on the society's strength and will. The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after, however, is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.
In 1790, mobs looted and pillaged Paris's treasured Notre Dame. To the revolutionaries, the cathedral symbolized everything that was wrong with France's history and society — a history of kings, tradition and religion, and a society beset by royal injustice and systemic inequality.
Over the next three years, the 12th-century church's riches and artifacts were stripped, stolen, and destroyed, their remnants hidden by the faithful and sold off by the faithless. Statues of the Virgin Mary were removed and statues to the Goddess of Liberty took their place on desecrated altars.
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