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To: Goetz_von_Berlichingen
Touche, mon ami. Actually, I am thankful for France's taking our side, and eventually having their own revolution, which help spread freedom and the idea of droits de homme. Although England still has their monarch, I suspect theirs was a bloodless revolution much on account of the USA's and France's travails.

I am puzzled by France's most recent history of appeasement to Nazism and Islam, though. I guess I need to think about this some more.

16 posted on 01/17/2002 9:24:34 AM PST by lds23
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To: lds23
The fact that we're still paying the butcher's bill from the French Revolution yet is more proof, if more is needed, that nothing really good ever happened after 1789.

their own revolution, which help spread freedom and the idea of droits de homme... I guess I need to think about this some more.

I hope you do. You may discover that above all things, the French Revolution was the precursor to State Terrorism, waged aganst its own citizens, in the service of an ideology, to make them New Men, sundered from the tradition, culture, and history that teach them their identity and guarantee their dignity.

Have a look at this excerpt from Eugen Weber's first-rate review of Simon Schama's Citizens, published in the NYT:

Because they were reminiscent of aristocratic ways, elegance, manners, wit were denounced as treason. The King was deposed, and a new calendar opened with ''Year One of French Liberty.'' In revolutionary newspeak, liberty, of course, meant its opposite: a police state, in which spying, denunciation, indictment, humiliation and death threatened all. The sententious religion of universal brotherhood gave way to the polemics of paranoia: Rousseau with a hoarse voice, as Mr. Schama puts it. Personal scores became political causes. Nuts came out of the woodwork. Marat was one, but a nuttier enthusiast, the Marquis de Bry, gauging the mood of the hour, offered to found an organization of tyrannicides - 1,200 freedom fighters dedicated to the murder of kings, generals and assorted foes of freedom.

Thus was the joy of living replaced by the joy of seeing others die. Mr. Schama is at his most powerful when denouncing the central truth of the Revolution: its dependence on organized (and disorganized) killing to attain political ends. However virtuous were the principles of the revolutionaries, he reminds us that their power depended on intimidation: the spectacle of death. Violence was no aberration, no unexpected skid off the highway of revolution: it was the Revolution - its motor and, for a while, its end.

In the National Assembly Mirabeau had argued that a few must perish so that the mass of people might be saved. It turned out that more than a few would perish. Politicians who graduated from rhetoric to government found that rhetoric made government impossible. If patriotism was to triumph, politics had to end; liberty had to be suppressed in the name of Liberty; democracy had to be sacrificed so that Democracy should live. Speaking from the ruthless precinct of the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just, who is one of Mr. Schama's favorite antiheroes, insisted that the Republic stood for the extermination of everything that opposed it. And absence of enthusiastic support was opposition enough. [Homeland Security, anyone?]

With the likes of Saint-Just and Robespierre (a state scholarship boy, typical of old regime meritocracy), doublespeak was in the saddle. Murderously weepy, sadistically moralistic, fanatically denouncing as fanatics those who did not share their fanaticism, men like Robespierre stood for the will of the people as long as the people's will matched their own visions. Ever offering to die for their beliefs, they got the sour satisfaction of undergoing the martyrdom they professed to seek: murderers murdering murderers before being murdered in their turn, until the last days of July 1794 brought an end to the Terror, though not to continuing terrorism.

This is where Mr. Schama's chronicle of the Revolution ends, before successive regimes - Directory, Consulate, Empire - tried to pick up its pieces. But not before its author presents the bill for access to French citizenship: a quarter-century of warfare, with its fallout of militarism, nationalism and xenophobia; the disaster of the Vendee, where civil war wiped out one-third of the population; the ruin of port cities and textile towns that had been the growth areas of 18th-century France; the losses to French trade, which, by 1815, was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1789. One could add that, by enforcing and thus discrediting paper money, the Revolution set back its popular acceptance by a century and accentuated national problems of credit and cash flow.

Mr. Schama reacts against intellectual cowardice, against self-delusion, against ascribing greatness to great horrors and painting brutish acts in brilliant colors. Above all, he reacts against violence, against the way violence as means was allowed to become violence as end, against the way politicians, historians and simple-minded nincompoops rationalize violence as pathological, or sanitizing, or necessary, or whatever.

20 posted on 01/17/2002 9:49:18 AM PST by Romulus
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To: lds23
" . . . and eventually having their own revolution, which help spread freedom and the idea of droits de homme"

You might want to re-think that. The results of the French Revolution were every bit as noxious as those of the Russian Revolution, but without the technology to kill really LARGE quantities of people, although Robespierre's boys certainly did their level best, with drownings, shootings, and decapitations. The guiding spirit of the Revolution was Rousseau, whose thought is embodied in modern American liberalism.

The reason why the American Revolution yielded a successful result is because it wasn't really a "Revolution" at all. When the smoke cleared, we still had the same ruling class, the same established churches (for a few years, at least), and the same basic rights as Englishmen. This is why most historians now speak of the American War of Independence rather than the American Revolution.

If anything, the real American Revolution started with the expansion of the franchise, the disestablishment of the state churches and the growing hegemony of the central government, culminating in the bloody 1860-65 assertion of federal absolutism -- in other words, the gradual repudiation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution. And it is all done in the same barely concealed elitist spirit of Robespierre "the Incorruptable" with his "Republic of Virtue."

21 posted on 01/17/2002 9:57:33 AM PST by Goetz_von_Berlichingen
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To: lds23
Touche, mon ami. Actually, I am thankful for France's taking our side, and eventually having their own revolution, which help spread freedom and the idea of droits de homme.

...as well as the ideas of desecrating churches, outlawing God, and chopping off the heads of those who disagree with same. Vive le Roi.

22 posted on 01/17/2002 10:10:09 AM PST by B-Chan
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