France in Disarray

Scene 4:

France in Disarray

Accompanied by sounds off-stage of marching feet, of barked orders, and of guns firing, the Ringmaster tells of the march on Paris by 100,000 hungry citizens, three hundred of whom are shot down at the barricades. He adds a warning that such violence will surely beget more violence, and together with Marie Marianne, suggests that only the application of reason to all human affairs can prevent mankind from falling headlong once again into the same old cycle of folly and barbarity... only reason will establish universal acceptance of the Rights of Man. Whilst conceding that there is always a minority of good men and women dedicated to its cause, he momentarily wonders whether there is presently anyone in France who fits the bill. The general feeling is that at this moment there isn’t: even minor reforms carrying almost negligible improvements to the people’s lot are conditional upon continued obedience to the King, and to the principal of his Divine Right – obedience, in fact, to the way everything presently is. It bodes ill for the immediate future.

RINGMASTER
The winter of eighty-eight and nine
Was aching cold, it chilled the very soul
They came from the country in twos and threes
trickle, a river, a torrent, a sea
Driven by hunger, driven by pain
hundred thousand reached the barricade

SERGEANT
Company... Halt!
Present... Fire!

RINGMASTER
Three hundred dead, shot down like rats
Three hundred lives, snuffed out like that
Have a care if you treat your people like vermin
You could end up with bloodstained ermine

But soft as ever in the ebb and flow
Sweet reason, deft and incorrupt
Adoring of the human kind illuminates man’s plight
Should he embrace
The brute and base
Tilt blindly at the carousel
Or note, at least, that other voice
And entertain the choice
Between the darkness and the light?