The Left’s Revolutionary Confusion

[French Finance Minister Jacques] Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding, but, somehow or other, they would not go away when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out of his wits, could only stammer forth, “I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!” At which the devils, with one voice, replied:

“Yes! Yes! We’ll go down! We’ll go down! But we’ll take you with us to swim or to drown!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Specimens of the Table Talk (1835)

As I have noted in these pages before, one of the greatest, most interesting, and most destructive quirks of history is the temporal proximity of the American and French Revolutions. The two revolutions had nothing whatsoever to do with one another, yet because they occurred so closely to one another, they have been permanently conflated in the American popular imagination.  The real-world consequences of this erroneous fusion are visible throughout American society and politics, as the noble but narrow ends of the former “revolution” are subsumed by the ignoble, far-reaching, and deranged ends and consequences of the latter. This is especially true today, as Americans gratuitously and mistakenly take to the streets to avail themselves of their “rights” without fully understanding the consequences of their actions, much less the general foreignness of those actions to the American experience.

To repeat myself: “The American ‘revolution’ was less a revolution than an assertion of existing rights, properly termed a ‘War of Independence,’ waged by Englishmen against Englishmen and made necessary only by the geographical peculiarities of ‘Empire.’” The French Revolution was something else altogether, a full-blown rebellion against the entirety of existing society, animated not by a desire to restore liberty and tranquility but by arrogance, intemperance, and a profound hatred for the order of Creation.

The American Revolution, of course, gave birth to the American nation and its brilliant and judicious yet farsighted Constitution. It nurtured a country and a people that savored and advanced liberty, that produced economic and scientific advances beyond imagination, and that saved the world more than once from the depredations of totalitarianism. The French Revolution, by contrast, gave birth to many of those very depredations. The mass murderers of the twentieth century—Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest—were the ideological successors to the Jacobin Club, the great-grandchildren of Danton and Robespierre, and inheritors of the French revolutionary recklessness.