Poe's preface to The Pit and the Pendulum

What's up with prefaces in Latin?

Consider Poe's 1842 story The Pit and the Pendulum, which he introduces with this pair of elegiac couplets:

           Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores,
           sanguinis innocui non satiata, aluit.
           Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
           Mors ubi dira fuit, vita salusque patent.

He adds this note: "a quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club at Paris." He apparently got the lines here.

This introduction sums up the entire story. The impia. . . turba. . .sanguinis innocui non satiata - the bloodthirsty Inquisition dedicated to rooting out and destroying religious heresy - can hardly not be equated with the Jacobin Club - the bloodthirsty revolutionaries dedicated to rooting out and destroying political heresy. This unholy mob has fed its longlasting insanity, but now the land has been made safe, the murderous pit has been eradicated and where once there was terrible death, now there is life and well-being. In short, the narrator will not die. There will be a rescue.

This might seem to imply that for the author the ending of the story has almost no importance [note that this notion derives some support from the very abruptness and brevity of the concluding paragraph of the story], that the key thing is to have his reader focus on the elegant effectiveness of his evocation of the dread, terror and despair of someone undergoing this sort of physical and psychological torture. Of course the ending is not without any importance. Probably it was also one of the objects of the author to induce by means of his artistry, not only the necessary suspension of disbelief for any work of fiction, but also a certain oblivion with respect to the already known outcome. In other words one wonders more at the power of the prose for having been duped by it into vicariously participating in the narrator's struggle for life in the midst of such desperate circumstances. Note that without this consideration, the whole conceit seems silly: since the tale is told by a narrator, obviously he must have survived the experience in order to be telling it. With the preface Poe puts the silliness on the table and says to his intelligent reader: "I know you know how it ends - I just told you - now come with me into the mind and body of this narrator and watch me recreate the experience."

Poe could assume a readership adequate to his Latin preface in 1842, a readership knowledgeable about the major events of the relatively recent (within the preceding forty or fifty years) upheaval in France. I doubt that this is any longer the case. Indeed it is probable nowadays that not one in ten thousand high school English teachers (nor one in a million of their students) can read and understand this Latin preface, or know a Jacobin from a jack-ass.

If only a very few actually "get" the preface and its relation to the story, what really is the point of teaching The Pit and the Pendulum in the modern classroom? Is there much left of the story without the preface besides overwrought 19th century guff?