- The American Revolution: “a revolution not made but prevented”…
- The bloody legacy of the French Revolution…
- Kiyosaki: TRUMP’S CURSE: $35 Trillion Meltdown Ahead?
Dear Reader,
Today is le 14 juillet in France — Bastille Day.
On this date in 1789 the Parisian rabble besieged the Bastille fortress-prison… raising the curtain on the French Revolution.
Today we contrast the French Revolution with the American Revolution.
Each revolution undid a king — George III in the American example — and Louis XIV in the French example.
Yet while both are labeled revolutions, their aspirations were as night is to day..
Caveat lector: You do not hold a history book in your hands. You hold instead a financial newsletter in your hands… and a disreputable one at that.
Its writer is not a historian at a lectern. He is instead a popinjay in an armchair.
And he is given to the simplifications, half-truths, errors and pomposities of the type.
Thus I paint with a brush that is wide. I omit much of the subtlety, much of the shade and shadow of the full historical portrait.
I nonetheless proceed… in the spirit of scholarly inquiry.
The Difference
The French revolutionists were out to end the Ancient Regime that sat upon them and hagrode them.
That was the old throne and altar social and political system of the Bourbon kings.
The American revolutionists — meantime — were out to reclaim the ancient rights of Englishmen.
It was these rights that George III was invading and molesting… as they saw it.
And so the American revolutionists were not out for revolution. They were out instead for a sort of reset, as a man resets an erring grandfather clock, or a wayward thermostat.
They did not seek change, that is — but to stay largely the same.
Did they qualify then as revolutionaries?
Enlightenment statesman Edmund Burke labeled England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 “a revolution not made but prevented.”
The same may be said — the same has been said — of the American Revolution.
It was in many respects a revolution not made but a revolution prevented.
You Need Form in Order to Reform
The American revolutionists pursued reform, it is true. Yet reform has no existence without preexisting form.
The form is first, there in its three dimensions. It has bulk. It is solid.
Reform chisels it, sands it, paints it, renews it.
Reform does not wreck it. It is true to the underlying form.
The Americans had their preexisting form: their British cultural and political heritage.
They clung to the Magna Carta and the ancient rights of Englishmen. They modified, updated and molded the existing form into a new American shape.
That is, they kept the old and good. They cut away the old and diseased.
They reformed.
The French Revolution
Yet the French revolutionists did not reform. They proceeded with axes, hacksaws, sledgehammers and wrecking balls.
They razed all prior social, cultural, religious and political forms. All structures came down, all bridges to the past.
Nothing remained to reform.
The revolutionists threw aside their “political servitude,” argued Burke — but at the price of their souls.
That is because they threw aside the “yoke of laws and morals” that had bound them to Christian virtue.
They deformed society… rather than reforming society.
From one summary of Mr. Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France:
- The French Revolution… was tending towards anarchy rather than reformation. Burke valued tradition and the structures that had built up over time rather than the shattering of state, culture and religion that had taken place in France.
These French revolutionists had no past, as stated. They had only a future. Do I misstate or stretch the facts?
I do not. I speak by the literal book.
Redrawing Time
In 1792, French revolutionists emptied the existing calendar into the hellbox… and tacked up a new calendar commencing at “Year One.”
All twelve months of the calendar were rechristened, primarily after the rhythms of nature.
The months themselves were broken into three weeks, each consisting of ten days.
Each day — in turn — was reduced to ten hours under a decimal system. One new hour counted 144 miniatures or 2.4 times the old hour.
Churches, meatime, were reconfigured as “temples of reason.”
Libertarian writer, Mr. Lew Rockwell:
- Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined… The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday.
- The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards… People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.
Now you have the flavor of it. Imagine it — a lunatic nation dynamiting its foundations — and beginning anew at Year One.
How does a man know his birthday… or when to purchase his wife an anniversary gift?
The Democracy of the Dead
The revolutionists, argued Burke, lowered their axes upon what Mr. Lincoln later labeled the “chords of memory.”
These are the chords of memory that link past to present, past and present to future. In this democracy of the dead, the dead are granted a vote.
Yay or nay… they have a say in a nation’s doings.
The French revolutionaries stripped the dead of their vote. They replaced it with the tyranny of the living. And the unborn would never learn the ancient wisdom.
In Burke’s telling:
- As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
An Enduring Disaster
The French revolutionists may have struck the old shackles from their wrists. Yet they merely exchanged old shackles for new shackles.
Attending them was the slaughter of civilization. Attending them were rivers, lakes, seas and oceans of blood.
A man on a pale horse soon came attending… and continental war ultimately.
Following them were two centuries of ideological lunacy.
Messieurs Lenin, Mao, Pot, Castro and other 20th-century devils took their examples from the French revolutionists and their great bloodlettings.
Thus I declare — wholeheartedly — for the American Revolution.
It was the revolution not made… but prevented.
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
