LE MOT DE CAMBRONNE
LE MOT DE CAMBRONNE
June 4, 2020
“The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the thinkers.” Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, 1862
When Napoleon’s army was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, his general, Count Pierre Cambronne, is believed to have exclaimed “Merde” as Wellington’s army demanded his surrender. Cambronne was surrounded by enemy forces, and recognizing his predicament, uttered one word, known as “le mot de Cambronne”: shit. Cambronne was a member of Napoleon’s “Old Guard” – the elite remnants of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard known as “The Immortals”.
When General Mattis published his denunciation of Donald Trump on June 3, 2020, America’s Attorney General, William Barr, probably uttered Cambronne’s mot. Jared Kushner, likely an ignominious monoglot, probably said it in English: shit. Lisa Murkowski likely said the word in an operatic voice as she jumped off the Trump Train, grasping for her ripcord. Senator Tom Cotton probably ruefully said it when he realized he has the worst timing of anyone in the Senate. And Mitch McConnell probably retracted his head into his shell upon hearing of General Mattis’s denunciation of Donald Trump, while mumbling the word “shit” in however they say it in Kentucky.
Mattis’s crystal clear repudiation of Donald Trump and his regime isn’t just any old punch in the gut. It is The Punch in the Gut. He is saying to the nation that the military will not be sucked into Trump’s vortex of anarchy – that the military will not be compromised like all the rest of Trump’s bribed cabinet of bootlickers. Mattis knows his history and knows that a dictator must have control of the military in order to effectuate a coup. Mattis's words warned the US military to not utter Le Mot de Cambronne, because he knows that they are not surrounded, and that Donald Trump is a tin-pot dictator afraid of his own shadow, especially in a bunker. And most importantly, he knows that Trump’s co-conspirators in the Republican Party pose an existential threat to civilian control of the military – a concept encoded in our Constitution.
Perhaps, thanks to General Mattis, we are witnessing the demise of our American “Old Guard” – the demise of the Grand Old Party. For me, “tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd”. Mattis writes: “The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” … We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”
He is speaking to General Milley who improperly appeared with Trump and his minions dressed in battle fatigues - on their march to St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020 - thereby suggesting that Trump has the military behind him in his efforts to extinguish our democracy. And he is speaking to the Americans who are demonstrating in the streets across the country – to each citizen who will no longer tolerate the rule of this Republican regime. As Robert Kagan, a neoconservative who left the Republican Party after the election of Donald Trump, wrote in the Washington Post yesterday:
“Dictators rule by controlling the “power ministries”: the domestic police and intelligence services, foreign intelligence services, and armed forces. U.S. democracy has been sustained by a strong tradition of ensuring that the power ministries serve the Constitution and the broader interests of the American people, not the political and personal interests of the individual in the White House.”
In Shakespeare’s, Hamlet, Prince Hamlet asks himself as he contemplates giving up and committing suicide:
“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay
The insolence of office…
if his surrender would be punished in the afterlife – “the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”.
The demonstrations taking place throughout America are comprised of those people who have born the whips and scorns of time; the oppressor’s wrong; the proud man’s contumely; the law’s delay, and they have decided to fight for their liberty.
America is not willing to commit suicide by keeping this contemptible regime in office. America is not screaming “shit” like Napoleon’s general did at the realization that the Old Guard had lost Napoleon’s empire to the united forces of a Europe unwilling to be conquered by an autocrat. Napoleon’s new French Constitution had preserved the appearance of a republic but in reality, it had established a dictatorship.
America is different because it was founded by a desire to be free of monarchic rule - free from the whims of a tyrant, and free from Donald Trump and a thoroughly corrupted Republican Party. It is now the Grand Old Party that is whispering among themselves “Le Mot de Cambronne”. They are being defeated by an America they sought to divide and conquer. They have lost. They must be removed entirely if we are to restore our Republic.
Image: Ralph Steadman, https://www.ralphsteadman.com/about-us/
