Free Republic

“Democratic Party elites such as those on CNN are not just angry but genuinely confused by the fact that American voters don’t obey them.” — Glenn Greenwald. What’s most amazing about the fiasco that was the French Revolution is that it happened at exactly the same time that the United States successfully organized themselves into an orderly and effective government following the American Revolution. George Washington was elected and sworn-in by April of 1789, with the backing of an exemplary constitution assembled by the best minds in the land. The Bastille fell in July that same year. France then fell...

What can we learn from the blood and terror of the French Revolution? Lawyer to revolutionary to tyrant to butcher to victim of the forces he himself had unleashed — that was the arc of the life of Maximillian Robespierre. The architect of The Terror that engulfed France from 1792 until 1794, Robespierre may have been the first despot of the mind. Throughout history, kings and emperors and such had raged across the world, killing people for power and land and glory and to obliterate opponents. But Robespierre's elected dictatorship was the first to systematically kill people in its own...

....Like many before him, most especially the Girondins who had (fatally to both parties) scorned an alliance with the Dantonists, Danton sought to arrest the revolution where he stood. The confrontation that finished him was precipitated by Danton’s attempt — with the assistance of his longtime confederate Camille Desmoulins, the most notable of the other men to lose their heads this day — to apply the brake to the excesses of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, that lethal organ he himself established as a pillar of order for a time of peril now abated. With the worst of the very...

the genuinely privileged class in America’s big cities consists of radical progressives, who flout mask requirements at mass demonstrations, deface public property with graffiti, and riot and destroy while being called “mostly peaceful demonstrators.” ... The two rioters grabbed national attention when they were arrested because of their elite and privileged backgrounds. ... Colinford Mattis.. embodies elite credentials via affirmative action, “plucked” in Miller’s word, from East New York and educated at elite St. Andrew’s prep, Princeton (where he was a member of two elite eating clubs), and NYU Law. Urooj Rahman, born in Pakistan and brought to the USA...

July 27th, 1794 — the 9th of Thermidor, year II — is inscribed in history as the day Robespierre fell, when a parliamentary coup d’etat between the right and the remnants of the parties he had destroyed shouted him down as he readied the National Convention for his next purge...Even as the month of Thermidor’s eponymous epochal event was unfolding, the daily gears of Revolutionary justice were turning: the usual haul of unfortunates condemned, including seven women from the previous day’s batch of Saint Lazare prison conspirators who had pled their bellies to buy a day. That day was one...

In 1781, 27-year-old King Louis XVI of France sent his navy and troops to help America gain independence from Britain. In return, France gained very little, except an enormous amount of debt. On the verge of financial collapse, France then experienced a terrible famine in 1788. The people blamed the King. Anti-monarchists referred to Queen Marie Antoinette as Madame Déficit. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when she was told the people did not have bread, her reply was: "Let them eat cake." On July 14, 1789, an anarchist mob went through the streets of Paris and stormed the the Bastille Fortress...

he promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next. WASHINGTON, DC — For millennia, King Mob has targeted societies’ icons with varied goals and to varied ends, and few things are more foreboding than his desecration of civic art. Just as the targets have ranged from rulers to clergy, from tyrants to helpless, and from the guilty to the innocent, the outcomes have ranged from victory to defeat depending on the society’s strength and will. The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or...

TORONTO, November 21, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Pastor David Lynn is scrambling to find a home in downtown Toronto for his congregation after the city abruptly kicked his missionary church out of a municipal recreation center for alleged “hate activity.” The founder of Christ’s Forgiveness Ministries received an email October 10 from Aydin Sarrafzadeh, manager of aquatics, “immediately” revoking his permit at the Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre. “It has ... come to our attention that most recently you have been involved in activities that are in violation of the City’s Hate Activity policy,” Sarrafzadeh wrote. “Please be advised that you are...

A French left-wing MEP has hit out at the creators of video game Assassin's Creed over their portrayal of Maximilien de Robespierre. A slight artistic liberty from the creators sees the character of Robespierre presented as a psychopathic mass-murderer, which has enraged the French left, Jean-Luc Melenchon claims the depiction of Robespierre, considered by many to have been the architect of the French Revolution, in the latest installation of the game is 'propaganda against the people'.

For the progressive left, all roads lead to the French Revolution (1789-99) which was the first totalitarian revolution, the genesis of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual foundation for the Russian Communist, Italian Fascist and German Nazi revolutions. A nationalist-populist rebellion, it was established and controlled by a small intellectual braintrust hellbent on killing God, Christianity, capitalism and objective truth thus devolving Western civilization into a savage society based on a political religion that deified "the people," anointed the revolutionary elites as their priests, and destroyed the rights of individuals. As Robespierre put it, "The people is [sic] always worth more...

[Someone]brought my attention to the [recent] tug of war ... over the legacy of Dorothy Day ... between pro and anti-capitalists. The Catholic Worker has criticized both the NY Times and Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute on Day-related matters. Liberals can’t claim her ... because she was anti-abortion and loyal to Church teaching, obviously never having gone the way of radical disobedient feminism. But conservatives and libertarians can’t claim her either because she rejected capitalism.... Or did she? As best I can tell, she neither practiced it or preached it as a way of life.... If you don’t...

The FRC shooting is the latest chapter in the blood-drenched history of the left — from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street. This is the way the left does business — with guillotines, gulags and gas chambers, with bombs, bullets, purges, planned famines and demonizing opponents as a prelude to their slaughter. In 2009, James Pouillon was shot to death while holding a pro-life sign by a supporter of choice. The same year, black Tea Party activist Kenneth Glandney was beaten so badly by SEIU thugs that he had to be hospitalized. In 2010, heavily armed eco-terrorist James J....

Last week, before an audience of millions of Americans, the new president made a telling statement. Alluding to the American founders, President Barack Obama, in his Inaugural Address, stated: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” This seemed to be a reference to the Declaration of Independence, or at least to the principles in that sacred...

An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people. If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense. The individual, with his quirks and quiddities, his mixture of good and bad, intelligence and stupidity, longing for justice but anxiety to promote his own selfish interests, does not fit into a utopian community. Hence utopians, if they are in earnest,...

Virtue and Terror, by Maximilien Robespierre (Verso, 160 pp., $14.95) and On Practice and Contradiction, by Mao Zedong (Verso, 160 pp., $14.95) These two books appear in a new series, “Revolutions,” published by Verso, a well-known British firm specializing in radical leftist gobbledygook. The books come with introductions by Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian psychoanalyst and social theorist, who assaults both the English language and the intelligence of those who actually manage to figure out what he’s saying. If you think that’s harsh, here’s a representative Žižekian sentence: “The claim that the people does exist is the basic axiom of ‘totalitarianism,’...

The American attitude toward the French Revolution has been generally favorable—naturally enough for a nation itself born in revolution. But as revolutions go, the French one in 1789 was among the worst. True, in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, it overthrew a corrupt regime. Yet what these fine ideals led to was, first, the Terror and mass murder in France, and then Napoleon and his wars, which took hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and Russia. After this pointless slaughter came the restoration of the same corrupt regime that the Revolution overthrew. Aside from immense suffering, the...