American Demons

Social Metabolic Functions

Up until the French Revolution, only courtiers were granted the royal casino privilege. Gambling took place in a house of pleasure. This was to end after the last Louis was deposed, but in 1793 the same people continued to run and visit such places as before. This kept the American freedom fighter, journalist, diplomat and agent Seymour Coogan busy for weeks. He toured the academies of dissoluteness and told the readers of the Virginia Gazette about snapping cocks with weapons shamefully concealed on their bodies. He talked from the sewing box of charming companies. Fallen from the deranged upper class, their high-born parents and grandparents got by with sex work. You could dance the night away for a Louisdor and forget your misery. Slogans and knocking signs sealed off the events from the revolutionary guards. The titles of the Ancien Régime still circulated in the pleasure dungeons. Some countesses went so far as to offer their own daughters as prostitutes.

The radical democrat Coogan found the disempowered aristocracy without backbone and completely irrelevant. It was inconceivable to the predecessor of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway (as a publishing American in Paris) that it would simply survive the revolution so limp and discarded, only to be formally resurrected at the next restoration. At the courts of the Ludwigs, the business of lickspittle was seen as an apprenticeship. Submissiveness played together with flexibility in alliances that no longer mean anything to us, but were familiar to those of the time to the point of indifference and seemed natural - as they fulfilled social metabolic functions. When the revolution swept away the court, its milieus were often left with only gutter solutions, at least in comparison with a toady accredited to the Sun King.
Those who had been brought up to finesse could make a living as gamblers and fairground fencers. Dealers were also possible. Drugs were highly sought-after commodities in all boutiques of opinion. In an article from August 21, 1793, Coogan placed drugs in a timeless context. Wine had "shaped the old world more than any weapon". Coogan suspected that the millennia that had passed had weakened the effects of wine. He recalled wine festivals of the gods that had gone over the horizon like cocaine orgies. He regarded the mild intoxication of his contemporaries as cultivating moss on the erratic blocks of forces of nature. He emphasized wine as a thing that would outlast conquests. Tobacco was "America's gift to Europe".

Coogan observed the revolution in Paris officially as a journalist, unofficially as a secret agent. He resided in the 8th arrondissement on Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde) in the confiscated Hôtel de Crillon. The palace was built according to plans by the architect Louis-François Trouard. Louis Berton des Balbes de Crillon had acquired it in 1788. His heirs were restituted in 1820.On January 21, 1793, the execution of Louis XVI took place directly in front of Coogan's front door on the largest square in Paris. Coogan made a fortune renting out his balconies and terraces. As a veteran of the American War of Independence, he was nothing less than squeamish and certainly not royalist. Caricatures show him under caustic captions as a messenger on horseback of the world revolution (often depicted as a fire). Preliminary remarks to a poem that was never completed are entitled The Smile of the Guillotine. Coogan greeted the moment of the royal beheading with his pen poised.