During the time of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries tried to erase all public evidence of France’s monarchical past. All across the country, hundreds of statues and monuments of kings and royalty were removed or destroyed. In one particularly absurd episode, in October 1793 a Paris mob tied ropes around the 500-year-old statues of the biblical kings of Israel on the facade of the Notre Dame Cathedral, pulled them down, and beheaded them. In Paris alone over 1400 street names were changed (all that had been named for kings or saints). People who shared a name with a monarch or saint changed their name. They changed their children’s names. They changed the names of the chess pieces, to eliminate kings, queens, and bishops. They changed the names of playing cards—no more kings and queens. They even changed the name of the queen bee to the “laying bee.” Of course these zealots look ridiculous to us today, but in their zeal they had come to believe that allowing a statue of a historical king to remain standing was somehow to endorse monarchy or injustice. But each purge would eventually leave the revolutionaries unsatisfied and, like addicts needing ever stronger doses of a drug, they would ratchet up their radicalism. Eventually they turned on their own, attacking those deemed insufficiently radical. Finally, the people of France became disgusted with it all, and there was a reactionary backlash. In due course they ended up with another monarchy.
Many of the statues in Paris today are reproductions—the originals having been destroyed during the Revolution. And in many French churches and cathedrals today there are empty pedestals in the chapels, where statues that were destroyed during the Revolution or during the iconoclastic frenzy of the Reformation once stood. Fortunately some of them have been restored or replaced. In 1977 workers on a construction project in Paris discovered the heads of the biblical kings toppled from Notre Dame nearly two hundred years earlier. After the mob left a priest had gathered them up and buried them to protect them from further violence. Today they are on display at the Cluny Museum in Paris.