Our Species Has Lived Through the Ages, Leaping from One War to Another

If we look at things from a historical perspective, it becomes difficult to arrive at easy judgments of condemnation. An event taking place today will acquire a different meaning a hundred or two hundred years from now, just as what happened two centuries ago was not understood by its contemporaries in the way we understand it today. The picture was not complete. The future historical context did not yet exist. At any given moment, we may understand how previous moments or centuries led to the moment in which we live, but we are deprived of seeing how our present actions will shape the moments, years, or centuries that follow.

This is what I found myself thinking about during a visit to the Palace of Versailles and its vast grounds on the outskirts of Paris. This is the palace built by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, which witnessed the downfall of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

This is the palace that was stormed by the “rabble” of Paris demanding bread, prompting Marie Antoinette to ask why they did not eat brioche, an elegant type of bread made with butter. Or so the familiar story goes, perhaps invented to demonstrate the ruling class’s ignorance of the suffering of ordinary people.

No one needs further evidence to establish the injustice of kings, the shortcomings of the feudal system, or the exploitation by rulers throughout history of the labor of those they governed. Versailles itself—with its vast gardens, treasures, statues, paintings, and furnishings, along with the hundreds of other palaces and estates owned by the aristocracy—remains enduring evidence of the injustice of a class whose subjects lived lives of hardship, hunger, and disease.

Yet today I look at the queues of visitors waiting to enter the palace, stretching for several kilometers every day throughout the year. I think about the admission fees paid by visitors arriving from every corner of the world and wonder: Did the cost of building this palace three hundred years ago not return to the French people many times over through the millions of visitors who have come since it passed into public hands? Has it not revitalized French tourism and the French economy throughout the years? Do not tens of thousands of French people today earn their livelihoods from working there and at other monuments left behind by bygone eras of oppression?

In this sense, are today’s “rabble”—and I am one of them—not beneficiaries of the injustice inflicted upon their ancestors by the kings and aristocrats of the past? Could one say that Louis XIV and those who succeeded him were building, unknowingly, for the benefit of future French citizens?

I am not trying to justify the age of feudalism or absolute monarchy. I am simply struck by the course of history between the present moment and the ways in which it reveals itself after the passage of time. I am struck by the purposes behind actions and their long-term consequences.

And I wonder: when we judge a historical figure or an entire era, should we take into account the unintended consequences of their actions long after their time, or should we judge their actions solely within their immediate historical context?

There is no easy answer to this question. The worst judges are those who deliver quick judgments based on a partial and momentary view.

Finally, I stood in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom and saw the secret door through which she escaped after the “rabble” breached the palace walls more than two centuries ago. At that moment, she did not know that her escape would only be temporary, and that the guillotine would ultimately claim her life.

I imagined the terror she must have felt in those moments and found myself sympathizing with her rather than with the “rabble” at the moment of their triumph. And I thought that the “rabble”—and I am one of them—continue to violate her privacy and the sanctity of her bedroom every day, two centuries later.

Their victory endured; her defeat was final.

My next visit to Paris seemed like a continuation of the violent thoughts triggered by the memory of the French Revolution at Versailles. This time it was the Military Museum, or the French Army Museum, located within the complex of buildings known as Les Invalides in Paris. The name means “the disabled,” and the complex was originally a vast hospital established by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century to care for military veterans.

The museum focuses on weapons from the late Middle Ages onward, through the two great world wars. I saw an enormous collection of swords, daggers, spears, pikes, lances, bows, axes, rifles, cannons, helmets, armor for humans and horses, and countless other instruments of killing and protection from killing whose names I do not know and whose forms are difficult to describe.

How extraordinarily inventive—and how extraordinarily inventive we remain—in finding ways to kill.

Ever since Cain picked up that unfortunate stone and smashed his brother’s head with it—as the religious stories tell us—our species has built extensively upon that primitive first experience, taking enormous strides in developing methods of individual and mass killing. We have harnessed our manual, intellectual, and technological skills to perfect this ancient “art.”

The weapons on display are weapons with histories, known or unknown. Some belonged to kings, but most were the weapons of ordinary warriors.

I saw an enormous number of swords. Some had retained their “splendor,” while others had lost their shine, rusted, and acquired notches along their blades. I would stare at one sword or another for a long time, almost imagining old blood flowing from it once again.

And I would wonder: How many heads did it split? How many necks did it sever? How many chests did it pierce? How many backs did it break? How many arms or legs did it cut off during its “glorious” military history? How many women did it leave widowed? How many mothers bereaved? How many children orphaned?

Was its killing confined to battles between armies on the battlefield? Or did it witness the storming of cities and the killing of women, children, and the elderly?

How many hands killed with this sword? Was it retired after its owner was killed or died in some other way? Or was it inherited from father to son, shedding new blood in every generation?

I did not see iron behind glass cases in that museum. I walked through rivers of blood and dismembered bodies. I heard screams and mourning, witnessed terror and horror, weeping and pain, and saw countless corpses speaking of human cruelty and folly.

It was as though death could not find a way to reach us quickly enough, so over the centuries we taught it how to hasten toward us, how to take us in groups rather than individually, without having to wait for old age, disease, epidemics, famine, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, or hurricanes.

There were wars.

We offered them to death as an effortless harvest.

One of the ironies that becomes apparent to anyone contemplating the weapons museum is that humanity’s ingenuity in creating instruments of death reflected the stark class divisions embedded in societies throughout history. Even the tools of killing were not exempt from discrimination between rich and poor, noble and commoner.

People were not equal in death or in the tools of killing, just as they were not equal in anything else.

Thus we find swords, daggers, and stilettos with handles made of gold or ivory and inlaid with precious gemstones. The wealthy nobleman had to be elegant even in killing and in the tools he used for it, just as he was elegant in his food, clothing, and other possessions.

For the poor man from the lower classes, a sharpened iron blade was enough to accomplish the task.

Another irony I noticed was that the makers of death and its instruments, in their elaborate decoration of certain weapons, did not limit themselves to personal arms. I also saw enormous cannons weighing several tons and requiring an entire team of soldiers to move and operate them.

At the end of one such cannon, at the point where I imagine soldiers would push it when moving it, there were two statues—a man and a woman embracing and exchanging a kiss.

Was the designer of this cannon aware of the stark irony? An instrument of death and hatred decorated with two figures representing an act of love and life?

Did he intend to distract the soldiers from the reality of the death they were raining upon others, and which might also descend upon them from an unexpected direction?

Or did he intend to remind them of the pleasures awaiting them if they succeeded in “killing” as they were supposed to?

My journey of reflection on the history of violence ended with a seat that could only be described as uncomfortable—not merely as a chair, but because of the bloody history embedded within it.

It is one of the exhibits at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, created by a contemporary Mozambican sculptor named Gonçalo Mabunda.

The metal chair is assembled from weapons that Mabunda collected from the remnants of the civil war in his country, which lasted 15 years, from 1977 to 1992.

Weapons that had served their purpose.

They had killed and orphaned. Widowed and maimed. Dismembered bodies. Scattered limbs. Pierced skulls, chests, and backs.

Then they ended up as “scrap metal” in the hands of an artist who assembled their pieces into this unique exhibit, displayed in a gallery dedicated to the remnants of war and its impact on human beings.

Our species has lived through the ages, leaping from one war to another.

It is as though this chair bristling with weapons—this chair made entirely of weapons—symbolizes humanity itself, which has spent the ages of its primitive and civilized existence, right up to the present day, “sitting on a powder keg.”

Yet the chair on display is empty.

No one is sitting on it.

Could it be a prophecy of humanity’s destruction through its own folly, leaving behind nothing but the remnants of its weapons and wars?

Originally published in Asharq Al-Awsat.