Rest in peace, monsieur. Revel's book "How Democracies Perish" was one of the foundation stones in the building of my own conservative worldview during the 1980's.
You beat me to it! "How Democracies Perish" was a major influence on my conversion to conservatism as well!
“The great misfortune of the twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought.”
The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information
1991, Random House Jean Francois-Revel
"What is ideology? It is a triple form of dispensation: intellectual, practical, and moral.
The intellectual dispensation consists of retaining only facts favorable to the thesis one is defending, even, if necessary, inventing them, and of denying, omitting, or forgetting others to keep them from becoming known.
The practical dispensation suppresses the criterion of effectiveness in judging policies, depriving setbacks and failures of all refutational value. One of the functions of ideology is also to fabricate explanations that absolve it. Sometimes the explanation is no more than a mere affirmation, an act of faith: "It is not to socialism that one should impute the difficulties encountered In their development by socialist countries," wrote Mikhail Gorbachev in Perestroika. Reduced to its logical armature, this sentence amounts to saying, "It is not to water that one should impute the problems of humidity that afflict flooded countries."
Finally, for the ideological protagonists the moral dispensation abolishes all notion of good and evil; or rather, for them it is the service due to ideology that replaces morality. What is crime or a vice for the common run or mortals is not one for them. The ideological absolution for murder and genocide has been dealt with at length by historians. The point is less often made that ideology sanctions bribery, nepotism, corruption. So lofty is the idea that socialists have of their own morality that, listening to them, one is almost ready to believe that they make corruption honest by indulging in it and that their virtue is untarnished when they succumb. "
From The Flight From Truth - The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. Random House, 1991