Schama describing the fate of the Swiss guards assigned to protect Louis XVI at Versailles:
Hunted down, they were mercilessly butchered: stabbed, sabered, stoned and clubbed. Women stripped the bodies of clothes and whatever possessions they could find. Mutilators hacked off limbs and scissored out genitals and stuffed them in gaping mouths or fed them to the dogs. What was left was thrown on bonfires, one of which spread to the palace itself. Other bits and pieces of the six hundred soldiers who perished in the massacre were loaded haphazardly onto carts and taken to common lime pits. It was, thought Robespierre, "the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity."
As I noted yesterday, I can't look away. Not sure what that says about me. I hope it's an indication of a concern that if we fail to acknowledge our capacity as a species for carrying out this kind of violence it's all the more likely to happen again, just as it did on 10 August 1792.
And this is by no means the worst paragraph in the book in terms of sheer bloodiness. There's one on the killing of the Princess de Lambelle a bit later that I just cannot reread.
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