In July 1791, two men crawled under a wooden bridge in Paris.
They had drilled small holes through the planks, not to set bombs or plant gunpowder, but to peer up the skirts of women strolling above. It was lewd, stupid, and almost comically small in the scale of history. But that afternoon, someone shouted that they were saboteurs—that they were hiding explosives meant to blow up patriots gathered on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition against the king. Within minutes, the rumor moved faster than truth could crawl. By nightfall, the crowd was firing on itself.
That day—what we now call the Champ de Mars Massacre—was not the bloody climax of a grand ideological struggle. It was a panic attack disguised as politics. The Revolution, which had promised reason and virtue, was undone by voyeurism, gossip, and fear. A few holes drilled in a bridge were enough to convince thousands that counterrevolutionaries lurked everywhere.
History is generous with such moments of farce-turned-tragedy. The French didn’t invent it; we’ve simply mechanized it. Today, the bridge is digital, the holes are algorithmic, and the voyeurs have been replaced by millions of us scrolling, posting, peering. One rumor misread, one video misframed, one lie repeated often enough—and the moral panic takes on a life of its own. The mob doesn’t need torches; it only needs Wi-Fi.
The Revolution’s voyeuristic rumor could survive because it confirmed what people already feared: that someone, somewhere, was out to destroy their side of history. Every age of upheaval has its own upskirt incident. What changes is the speed with which shame turns to rage. The 18th-century crowd needed an afternoon; we need ten seconds and a trending hashtag.
Lafayette’s soldiers opened fire that evening, killing perhaps fifty Parisians. Officially, it was called a restoration of order. Unofficially, it was a confession that truth had already lost the argument. Once a public starts shooting at its own reflection, it doesn’t stop easily. Within two years came the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, and the machinery of suspicion that devoured its makers.
It’s comforting to think we’ve outgrown that hysteria. We haven’t. We still live beneath bridges of our own construction—places where private perversities and public fears mingle until the difference collapses. The only real update is that now the whole world can watch the panic live-streamed.
Camille Desmoulins once said that revolutions begin with “a word, a gesture, a leaf torn from a tree.” He wasn’t wrong. Sometimes they begin with a hole drilled in a bridge. And when the rumor hits the crowd, when a foolish act becomes a national crisis, reason retreats again behind locked doors.
Two centuries later, the echo remains: the sound of a crowd mishearing itself, and answering with bullets. The upskirt scandal at the Champ de Mars was never about lust or decency—it was about how fragile sanity becomes when fear is fashionable. That bridge still stands, in one form or another, and the holes are everywhere.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
