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Dec. 26, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec

49:08

EPISODE 634: CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — THE FRENCH TERROR

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	This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
	A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
	This is Human Events with your host Jack Posobiec.
	Deliver us from evil!
	Alright, Jack Posobiec here.
	Welcome, folks.
	Human Events Special Edition.
	We decided that this year, building on the success of the China Files last year, that during the Christmas break, we ran that China Files series.
	It became this incredibly famous, incredibly successful series for us.
	We wanted to recapture that same magic, but also tell new stories during this timeframe that we don't usually get a chance to get into because we're focused on the day's news, the day to day, what's going on in the elections, what's going on with the regime, etc, etc.
	And so I was looking down with the producers of Human Events and I said, what do we want to talk about?
	And I said, the main thing that I think that we need to get into are these revolutions.
	And what do you mean revolutions?
	I said, well, we reference things like the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution.
	We talk about them all the time, but we never actually spend time digging into what they were, what they actually mean.
	And so, for this Christmas break, what I wanted to do is put together, and we're working with my co-host over at ThoughtCrime.
	He is also the producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, the great Blake Neff.
	And what we've done is put together a four-part series on these revolutions called Chronicles of the Revolution.
	And I wanted to start with the very first one, The French Terror.
	Blake, tell us about the French Revolution.
	Oh boy, where to begin?
	It is, you know, the old joke was that Chu and Lai got asked by someone when Nixon was visiting China, like what the effects of the French Revolution were.
	And the saying goes that he replied, too soon to tell.
	Too soon to tell, yeah.
	He probably wasn't actually even talking about that, but we'll set that all aside.
	It would be a perfectly valid answer to it.
	It is, besides being one of the most important events in human history, it's one of the most Complex events in human history people are debating it to this day.
	There's a million different theories about it And it really is it does stand out as the genesis point for a lot of things We're still debating today.
	So the French Revolution, you know, you set the stage for it.
	Well, it's where is it?
	It's in France and Well, what is France at that time?
	Well France at that time was not just this kind of you know Decrepit socialist mid-European power with lots of baguettes and they make weird, you know, commit adultery all the time.
	They were still committing adultery back then.
	But France at this time is the most powerful country in continental Europe.
	They have the highest population of any country in Europe.
	They have this incredibly rich land that's incredibly agriculturally productive.
	They have this huge military.
	Their cultural importance is enormous.
	So, you know, everyone at this time, you may have heard, like, at this time, everyone who mattered learned French.
	If you were in a, if you went to college, you learned French.
	That was the language of international diplomacy.
	It was the language of international science.
	So, you know, Ben Franklin knew French.
	The important American founders, almost all of them knew French.
	And This is the center of the European cultural world, and it had been for hundreds of years, and it completely blows up in a five-year period.
	Everything gets thrown out, everything gets reduced to ashes, and so many of the ideas that take root in that are the ones we're still dealing with today.
	dealing with today, what is it? - Oh no, and just to kind of paint that picture based on what you're saying there, is that in America we get taught that there's the American Revolution and then the French Revolution comes afterwards as if it was just sort of a perfunctory thing that we, it was a follow on of the American Revolution, But, you know, in that context, you know, this is really before, quite frankly, the British Empire had even reached its apex.
	And so you have this massive French Empire, massive French state, which actually would go on to expand after the revolution, but that's a whole other story.
	And really you have this sort of competition between, and it's a very long-standing competition, between the British Empire and between France, between Britain and France that's been going on.
	For really centuries at this point, where Britain is vying for dominance, but of course, France maintains that central role on the continent itself.
	And so we kind of have this skewed view as Americans of sort of that, well, it's all, you know, Britain was really the only part of Europe, but that's not really true, is it?
	Not remotely true.
	It is France, you know, they lost a lot of the big wars.
	So they had Canada, they had Quebec, they lose the Seven Years' War to Britain, and they lose a lot of these colonial possessions.
	So they had sort of been second fiddle to Britain in a lot of these, you know, these early world wars, if you want to call them, these colonial battles in India or in America or in the Caribbean.
	And so this is what actually kind of set them on the path towards revolution, because England becomes the great mercantile power of the 1700s.
	They are the ones who are having the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.
	They're the ones with this truly global maritime commercial empire.
	And France is very powerful.
	It has substantially more people than Britain still.
	But it is losing these wars and it's playing second fiddle as a result.
	That's what really is important to emphasize here is how central France and French thought was to wider European civilization.
	So, you know, we're familiar with the Enlightenment.
	The Enlightenment is the intellectual Phenomenon of the entire 18th century.
	It's what drives a lot of the American revolutionary values so much of that is coming out of France, you know Montesquieu that that's a French name if you can't tell and Jean-Jacques Rousseau French thinker all of these guys are derived are either French themselves or dried ideas from French intellectual currents and what happens is France because of these wars with England actually including supporting us in the revolution they get into a Dire Straits.
	So despite all this Enlightenment stuff, what France has is they have what we call absolutism.
	They have a principle of the king is an absolute authority over the wider country.
	And it's not quite the same as saying he has absolute power, but it's sort of an ideal that the king should be very powerful.
	And this isn't actually something that goes back to, you know, 10,000 BC.
	It's actually kind of a recent political idea.
	It's a response to A lot of the traumas of the Reformation, with all the warfare that caused, all the warfare that we have in the early modern era.
	And a response to this is, this happens because states are weak.
	And how do you make a state strong?
	You have a strong monarch at the center of this.
	This is what had been ruling for 200 years, but then the premier absolute estate, France, goes into this crisis.
	And their crisis is simply, they're out of money.
	They've borrowed too much money.
	Take take note about this when you look at Americans history too.
	They borrow too much money.
	This is this is by the way kind of the the overall theme I would say for these chronicles is that all of this has happened before and all of this can happen again.
	So they borrow too much money and what this means is France has a Parliament just like the UK but they haven't called it in a I want to say about 150 years.
	Maybe long, maybe it's like 180 years.
	It's called the Estates General.
	And this is the French Parliament, and you need to call it if you're going to raise new taxes.
	For almost two centuries, they've gotten by without ever having to call a parliament, this Estates General.
	But, they're out of money, they need to raise new taxes.
	So they're, the King, Louis XVI announces, I'm going to call an Estates General, and anyone who has grievances, please submit them to this Estates General.
	And...
	So this is what happens, they spend several months, they go out to all the different regions of France, and France is a very rural country in this time, and people elect delegates to go to this Estates General, and they have all sorts of ideas, you know, we pay too much taxes, we have too many old feudal dues, the church is too corrupt, the church has too much power, you know, there's complaints about feudal lords, complaints about the church, as I just mentioned, and
	They're all looking for ways to... The king just wants to raise money, but the thing is is that the Estates General is probably not going to give him the money he wants unless they get concessions in some way.
	And this is where you first get the first kernels of things spiraling out of control.
	The Estates General is divided into three bodies.
	They have the First Estate, the Second Estate, the Third Estate.
	The First Estate is the nobility.
	The Second Estate is the church.
	The Third Estate is everybody else.
	In practical terms, it mostly represents like the bourgeoisie, like the town dwellers, businessmen who are not themselves noble.
	And what happens is the third estate, because they represent a much greater proportion of France, they have this idea that we're the true representatives of France, much more so than the nobility or the church.
	And so a large share of them go apart on their own and they do this thing called the tennis court oath.
	They meet in an abandoned tennis court, an indoor tennis court that the king has, and they swear an oath that we will not disperse until we get a constitution for France.
	And as it happens, America is just making its constitution as all of this is happening.
	And so this is where it begins.
	And I don't want to burden everyone with details, but what's so interesting about the French Revolution is it very relentlessly grinds forward.
	It starts off, the early ideas are things like, well, we have this hereditary nobility.
	We should get rid of that because it's pointless.
	And this is not, it's a radical idea, but it's not as radical as people think.
	Like it was a mainstream idea in France in the 1780s that we should just make nobility an honorific without any legal benefits that come with it.
	That was something people were talking about.
	It was a real thing that even the king might have done.
	But once this revolution gets moving, ideas that are more and more radical just become more and more possible where they do vote to get rid of it.
	And that's kind of what you're setting the stage for, is they have this financial crisis, then they set up this Estates General, they eventually create the, it turns into the National Assembly, so it's set up in this way, and basically they realize that they have political power, and so because they've decided they have this political power, they also decide, we're not going to give it away.
	And in fact, we're going to take it away from anyone who currently has it, which eventually turns into the king.
	So it's not incredibly radical at this point.
	They're just sort of reforming their government and it's somewhat peaceful for like the first couple years, right?
	Exactly.
	And it's very important to understand how it can start pretty reasonable and it starts to spiral out of control as like more reasonable actors either get shoved aside or flee or people just they get caught up in the moment itself by what seems possible.
	And then eventually just the amount of bloodletting further radicalizes it.
	Because most people think that, you know, it really starts with like, everybody knows, okay, you know, Marie Antoinette, King Louis, they're getting their heads chopped off, the guillotine.
	But what your point is, is that it starts out with this political process and then that eventually leads to, and I think people know this, the storming of the Bastille.
	Exactly.
	And this is the first big event, you know, we just were showing it on the screen there.
	The Bastille was this old prison.
	Uh, in Paris, kind of just this castle.
	And it was, it was mostly a symbol.
	It was like, oh, this is this authoritarian symbol.
	You could disappear into the Bastille and never be seen again.
	The actual prison, there were only like, I think, I'm not even sure there were 10 prisoners inside it the day people storm it.
	It was very symbolic.
	It's that once the, uh, once the Estates General meets and they start talking about really radical political change, what's interesting is very similar to the George Floyd moment, actually.
	It's like a miasma gets in the air, like, oh, there is a revolution going on, and so you get turmoil in the streets of Paris, and the government of the regime was actually off in Versailles, which was about, these days you can get there on a quick metro ride, but it's kind of like a good day's walk outside of Paris at this time.
	It keeps it away from the masses, but they're close enough to it that the mob in Paris, which is very Rambunctious.
	Starts to exert a control on events.
	And this is one of the most interesting things about the French Revolution is, if you put a vote to the entire country at any point of this, it almost certainly would not have endorsed what was going on.
	But a very outsized role was played by the mob in Paris at many moments.
	And one of these is the Bastille.
	So this mob gathers outside the Bastille prison.
	Without getting too into detail, one thing leads to another, and this mob storms the Bastille, lets out the prisoners, and they like, lop the head off.
	of the commander of the Bastille.
	And it's just this big, it's like when they storm that police station in Minneapolis.
	It's local actors who get really riled up and they go off and do this and people see that nothing's really done in response to this.
	It's just this radical act against the government as it currently is.
	Well, because it's, as you say, the actual government, the actual authorities, they get caught up in vapor lock because they have no idea what to do.
	They conceive, or what it seems as though, this mob, not only is it violent, but it's also popular.
	And so they're worried about moving against that popular opinion, so they go along with it.
	And this is how you get Jacob Fry, and this is how you get the whole documentary of Fall of Minneapolis.
	And a common The narrative that a lot of historians agree is Louis XVI, he's the king and he's just kind of a very, he's like a weak figure.
	He's, you know, he's kind of a good husband.
	He's a good dad, but he's lacking in firmness.
	He doesn't, he doesn't really have the will to like crack the whip.
	And so what happens is once this starts going and they start getting violent, everyone's constantly urging him like, you need to take a firmer hand.
	You need to say like, this isn't happening.
	Send in the army.
	And it's always a little too late.
	Or when he finally does get firm, it's just too late and it alienates everyone rather than cracking things back into line.
	He just lacks the firmness when he needs to have it.
	And so this is happening.
	His own family members, after the Bastille gets stormed, his brother comes to him.
	I think he has some stupid French title.
	I won't remember it.
	But his brother comes to him.
	He's like, this is a revolution.
	I'm getting out of the country.
	And you should either do that or you should crack down.
	And then he leaves.
	And you start getting nobles who leave.
	And this is where, again, you start seeing things start getting out of control, is people who are more conservative voices leave France because they're like, this is going to go bad.
	Because we think of it as the first big modern revolution, but this was not the first revolution in Europe.
	The Dutch had had a revolution just two years before that made them actually a republic as well.
	And the English, of course, had their civil war that greatly reduced the power of the monarch and made their parliament more powerful.
	So when this is all happening, a lot of people think this will unfold like the English Revolution because they've seen that's their most recent big revolution for them.
	If they had podcasts then, they'd be doing podcasts on the English Revolution and how it shapes everything we do today.
	So the king lacks this firmness, and so you just get this moment where everything starts to break.
	They call it the Great Fear, and there's just all these rumors spread in rural France that the king's going to send out his soldiers to attack random peasants, and some of the nobles are in league with him, and you just get this spasm of violence that's a lot like Floyd of Palooza.
	Peasants will just break into the manor houses of nobility, Uh, they'll kill a lot of the nobles or what they often do is they burn any documents related to, uh, feudal tenure.
	So, you know, you owe the Lord these taxes or this sort of labor, all these old, like these old parts of French society that people are really angry about.
	They, there's a huge spasm of violence about this.
	And what the spasm of violence does is rather than getting the government to crack down against it, it causes them to cede more power to the revolutionaries.
	And then you start getting things.
	They really start, again, gradually going out of control.
	They create this national assembly.
	To jump ahead a little bit and just because I want to make sure that we get this for time.
	I think what you're saying is this sets the stage then for the more radical factions to be able to become the ones that are most popular because they will be the ones that have this purity test.
	So you get into purity spirals and then this basically leads within a couple of years to the rise of the Jacobins and that's really when the guillotines start going.
	Today, you know, they talk about influences.
	These are influences.
	And they're friends of mine.
	Jack?
	Where's Jack?
	Jack?
	He's done a great job.
	Exactly, and you just get a cascade of actions.
	So, for example, anti-clericalism had existed in France before.
	That's, you know, hostility to established religion, the Catholic Church in this case.
	And you start getting all the government starts.
	They start shutting down or like dispersing a lot of monasteries, which are one of the most unpopular parts about it.
	There's this idea that these monasteries have a ton of money and the people in them don't work.
	And so I believe the Jacobin Club is actually in a confiscated Abbey or it was like a nunnery that they converted into their club.
	And so the Jacobin Club is a group of relatively radical French revolutionaries who want more radical change.
	And they start gaining more and more momentum for the things they want.
	And what stands out, you know, you'll sometimes hear revolutionaries described as wanting a year zero, like when they rip down every statue because no one is good enough for them.
	And that comes from the French Revolution, because one of their ideas is they literally create a year zero.
	They create a revolutionary calendar where it's decimalized, like the decimal system.
	So there's 10 months and all the days are equal.
	And each week is 10 days.
	each month is three weeks of ten days and you have ten total months and then you just have a few extra days at the end and they're all going to be named after sort of, they're made up words kind of reflecting what the month is so there's like a month Thermador which comes from Thermos Hot so it's roughly they're made up words kind of reflecting what the month is so It's roughly July.
	This is kind of like your science worshipper Redditors today.
	Literally the exact same thing where they say, okay, we're going to get rid of religion.
	And this is something that when you get taught the French Revolution in school, when I was taught, I just hear that it's like, you know, Thomas Jefferson was generally supportive of it.
	You know, it kind of lasted for a while, guillotines, they killed the king, they killed Marie Antoinette, and things were bad, then things got better, etc.
	at the end.
	I didn't hear, they're shutting down churches, they're in some cases arresting priests, arresting nuns, nuns are executed at one of the harshest points of this.
	They're requiring loyalty oaths from priests and from nuns to, you know, there's eventually what they call the New Republic.
	And then they create their own sort of state, like, anti-religion religion, like a science-based religion.
	This is what you're talking about.
	They call it the Cult of Reason.
	They even took... And at one point they start desecrating the Cathedral of the Notre Dame itself.
	Yeah, it really gets...
	Out of control.
	And, you know, you mentioned the loyalty oaths.
	And again, one of the most interesting things, there's multiple moments in the revolution where they start off like pro-King, you know, kind of like actually how the American revolutionaries initially sort of say, like, our problem is with Parliament, not the King.
	And they would say, God save King George for the first bits of the revolution.
	Same thing in France.
	You have a lot of people who are pro-monarch.
	And this is again where his weakness comes into play is Much like we do these, you know, these stunts in our recent woke moments where they'll sort of surround people and be like, do you do you think black lives matter?
	Do you think black lives matter?
	They would do this to the king.
	They would have this mob.
	Mob would march out to Versailles and kind of stand there and say, like, we love you, king.
	You know, how do you feel about the revolution?
	And then the king would come out and he would do a very superficial gesture of support.
	For the revolution.
	And everyone would be like, oh, that's great.
	The struggle session of the king.
	They would do a struggle session on the king.
	And so he'd come out and say like, yeah, I like the revolution.
	And that would fix it for the moment.
	But now the king has given his endorsement to these people.
	Right.
	And they come back and they want more.
	And so they do this repeatedly and it gets scarier and scarier for him.
	And then where things get really bad is rather than crack the whip, what he finally decides to do is he's like, I need to get out of France.
	And he tries to flee France, but he makes a botch of it and he gets caught.
	He gets caught trying to flee France.
	This is about three years into the revolution.
	By the way, one of the big things that just occurred to me before we move topics is that, as you say, they have the struggle sessions for BLM, just like we have the struggle sessions, but also, like with BLM and the 2020 riots, the smashing of statues, the smashing of the iconoclasm of the entire thing.
	Right?
	This is what they do.
	They go through churches, they go through cathedrals.
	So we talk about how Notre Dame, you know, the burning, and everyone was so upset about this.
	Recently, I personally was very upset about that.
	I think there's more to be investigated there from the current situation.
	But if you go back to the French Revolution, you had the revolutionaries going in there, smashing the stained glass windows, smashing those statues which are the kings of Israel that are on the front of it, destroying their own cathedral.
	What do they turn it into?
	A temple of reason.
	So the idea, and I guess Blake, the question I wanted to ask you, I guess, in terms of this is, philosophically, right, how do they square holding these beliefs at the same time, that they have to destroy everything, but at the same time they are the ones who are being reasonable and rational?
	Well, it's, It's such a, and they go even worse.
	They don't even just smash windows.
	They, they literally desecrate, they destroy the tombs of the French kings.
	Like every French king for a thousand years have been buried, I think in St.
	Denis, uh, just outside Paris.
	And a mob breaks into that, rips them open, like desecrates the bodies, throws them all everywhere.
	And they do these like very wantonly destructive things.
	And it's interesting.
	Yeah.
	You bring up the question of how did they define it as reason?
	And I think.
	What's most important is when you have this cult of reason, which is really what it is, there's a huge amount of arrogance that comes with it that not merely like that we have reason as an ideal, but the sense that we're the only ones who embrace reason.
	And that very easily becomes anyone who stands against us is against reason.
	And it's sort of become, it's an invitation to take everything from first principles because as A lot of liberals say, like, tradition's not reasonable.
	There's nothing reasonable about just doing something because someone did it before.
	And so it becomes a justification to, again, yeah, you go back to first principles, you can do anything completely fresh.
	So you can throw out the old religion, you can throw out the old norms, you can throw out the old calendar.
	Since we're operating based on reason, we can do it all completely new from scratch.
	And this is, I think, what really What eventually leads to the radical violence of the revolution is they start ripping away every barrier that is sort of a barrier against really wanton violence.
	Because one of the traditions is just the slow movement of government.
	It's your right to appeal through this old court system.
	Well, since they're sweeping everything aside, they sweep aside the old organizational system of the country.
	Like France was divided into these old medieval provinces.
	They had things which are confusingly called parliaments, but they're actually more like a Supreme Court for each area, and they're sort of, they handle a lot of legal cases.
	These get swept aside, they create the Departments of France, which is what they still have today, they're all about the same size, and they're like just, they're assets of the national government, and they create a new system with a new justice system, and all those old rules are swept away.
	And that makes it so much easier for, well, if we're doing everything completely new, what else do we want to do new?
	And especially after the king flees, that gives a lot of impetus to the most radical people.
	And so more and more radical ideas become mainstream.
	It starts off with, let's make him a constitutional monarch.
	And then it gets to, we should be able to depose him as a monarch.
	And then eventually, you get to the radicals who say, we should lop his head off.
	And we should put him on trial.
	He's not Louis XVI.
	His name is Louis Capet.
	He is a citizen of France.
	And they put him on trial, and they vote to lop his head off.
	Until they get to the point where just being a king is somehow a crime, even though he had been in line to be king since he was born, and this had been the form of government, and certainly he hadn't stolen his kingship from anyone.
	They became so twisted in their ideology, which it isn't even really an ideology.
	And what you're doing with leftism, and I say this so many times, Especially to the Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings crew, is that the leftists don't operate based on facts.
	Appeals to reason will never work with them.
	It's a purely envy, passion, greed, jealousy, anger-based argument.
	These people are all extremely ugly.
	They hate people who are successful.
	They hate people who are good-looking.
	And it's, you know, bioleninism, by the way, is a term that we've talked about on ThoughtCrime that plays into this and really all of these revolutionary groups across history that I think you find across the world, that when it gets into it, You know, this is how you get to the point where saying, no, we must kill the king and then dig up all of his ancestors and desecrate their bodies as well.
	And you have homeless people, like, going into the palaces, these beautiful palaces of France, and like, just just just crapping all over the floors and everything.
	And they believe that they should do it.
	And again, the ideology, I think, is all just window dressing, as Mr. Egrove says.
	Yeah, the amount of just sort of wanton Fiery, like, hatred of civilization is something very similar to today.
	You destroy something because it feels good to destroy something that's beautiful or orderly.
	It's a chaotic impulse in repulsive people.
	And notably, like, a lot of the French revolutionaries are very profoundly ugly people.
	There's Marat, who's this major, like, journalist firebrand today.
	He'd have a really aggravating, like, pro-Antifa Twitter account.
	He's a very weird-looking fellow.
	Jacques-Louis David, he's the guy who's done all the famous paintings that you've seen of this era, including, like, you know, Napoleon on the Horse, where he's crossing the Alps.
	He did that one.
	He's a very ugly guy, looks, like, very strange.
	Robespierre, very ugly guy.
	Not all of them, but this is a common trait.
	And, you know, as you mentioned, it's that wanton destruction, like, when they cut off the king's head, they don't just kill him and bury him.
	They do everything in their power to Like, destroy his bo- I don't think they destroy his body, but they bury him 10 feet underground in, like, an unmarked grave.
	And then they also destroy, like, all of his clothing.
	They're like, there should be no relics of the king.
	And so they're destroying all this other stuff associated with him.
	And it really was, the idea was, you could not be a king.
	Like, when they're having this trial, there's all these arguments that say, well, he literally had no choice in this matter because he was the monarch and essentially had to, you know, he had to execute this person or he had to enforce order.
	And then one of the most radical Jacobins, this guy, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just.
	He's only 24 or so, and he's a member of the National Assembly, and he's part of this trial.
	And he gives a speech, where he basically, the climax of the speech is saying, well, actually, it doesn't matter whether the king is specifically, like, had a choice or not.
	The problem was, the line he says is, no one can reign innocently.
	In other words, merely by being a monarch, You are guilty of a death penalty offense, and that is what wins the day, and then they lop his head off.
	And the idea becomes, yeah, like, all monarchs should die.
	These are all being run through these things they call the people's courts.
	Tell me about Robespierre and the people's courts.
	So once they lop off the king, that's where you get this cascade of radicalism.
	You know, this also inspires counter-revolution, which is also what eggs this on.
	Like, foreign powers, Prussia and Austria, declare war on France over this, and they invade with the order, like, you have to bring the king back.
	And that, of course, makes it more radical, because they don't close the deal.
	They come in with an army, and they make these demands, but then their armies aren't really ready, and they lose this one battle really quickly, and they're like, oh, gotta bail, and they retreat right away.
	Worst possible thing they could have done.
	You either have to invade and win, or just don't bother at all.
	But they do the worst thing possible.
	This gives all the momentum to the radicals.
	And then that Murat guy, the journalist I mentioned, he gets stabbed to death in a tub by this royalist woman who's upset because I think maybe her brother had been arrested or executed or something.
	I don't remember the details, but she assassinates him.
	And after this, they just go berserk.
	You have mobs break into the prisons where various aristocrats and pro-royalists are, and they just hack them to death in the prisons.
	Hundreds of people.
	And once this happens, you just use this cascade.
	Yeah, they have these courts where they're essentially saying anyone who's an enemy of the revolution can be a traitor and can be executed, and you go from this very ponderous debate over whether we should execute the king to these, you know, quick 10 minute trials where, oh yeah, you know, this person denounced you as a traitor to the revolution, so now you're going to go to the guillotine.
	And the rate at which this goes just gets insane, where you start with, you know, a few people a day, and by the very end of the Great Terror, as they call it, they're executing dozens of people in Paris every single day, all of them as enemies of the revolution.
	And as is always the case, you know, the first people you target are not necessarily actual enemies, it's your own political foes.
	You have the Hurondans, who are considered the moderates among the people who've already decided to kill the king, so they are not really monarchists by any stretch of the imagination, but they get denounced as traitors to the revolution because they disagree with the prevailing sentiment.
	They go to the guillotine.
	Well, now you've shifted the entire assembly to the left a bit, and what does that mean?
	Well, now there's a new group of people who are too conservative for everyone else, so Like, the Dantonists, they're supporters of Danton, who's one of the revolutionaries.
	They go to the guillotine.
	And finally, you have essentially Robespierre as the only guy in charge, who's the most radical guy.
	And the only thing that happens is, there's enough people who are just cynically political, who look around and think, they're gonna kill all of us eventually, we need to stop this.
	And these sort of cynical centrists, who aren't really ideologues at all, they just Drum up charges against Robespierre and lop his head off.
	It's kind of funny how they do it.
	There's a movie, I was going to say, right before that, there's that movie that I know that I know that, and for a lot of Catholics and just anyone out there, Christians who want to see this, it's called The Martyrs of Compagnon or The Dialogues of Compagnon, where they actually take these, from a nunnery, these 16 nuns where they actually take these, from a nunnery, these 16 nuns are actually taken by Robespierre because they refuse to swear the loyalty
	They aren't just in prison, they're actually executed by this, and then 10 days after the mass execution of nuns in Paris, that's, as you say, that's when the centrists go to Robespierre and they say, okay, this is going a little bit too far.
	Yeah, I have a book here, which I recommend to anyone who wants to spend, you know, many hours reading this topic.
	It's Citizens by Simon Schama.
	Schama's a bit of a lib, but it's sort of, everyone's conservative about what he knows best, and so anyone who writes a thousand page book on the French Revolution ends up coming away thinking these guys were completely insane.
	And he has these figures here about, that I want to bring up here, about like the rate of executions when they finally got rid of Robespierre.
	And it's literally, so the month of Germinal, that's one of those fake months they came up with, they had 155 executions in Paris and 59 acquittals.
	And then the next month, 354.
	Then the next month, Prairial, 509 executions.
	And then the next month, 354.
	Then the next month, Prairie Alt, 509 executions.
	Then in Mesador, 796 executions.
	And then in just the first nine days of Thermador, so one third of a month, they have 342 executions.
	So on pace for more than a thousand that month, when they finally are like, this is too far.
	And they just, they take Robespierre.
	And Robespierre was apparently actually, to his credit, incorruptible apparently.
	He was a true believer in the truest sense of the term, but they framed him for corruption.
	So they'd have an excuse to just chop his head off too.
	And afterwards you get, This sort of, they lop off a lot of other people.
	They call it the Thermidorian Reaction.
	And they take a lot of the people who are most guilty.
	And I'd say one of the most satisfying parts of this revolution is a lot of the most radical people get the end that they definitely deserve.
	There are these radicals called the Hébertistes.
	They followed another journalist named Hébert.
	And they were just, he was this guy just publishing the most bloodthirsty of all the broadsides in Paris.
	You know, kill these people, kill these people.
	Imagine the most repugnant Twitter antifas you can imagine.
	And these guys all get rounded up and they get shoved into a prison.
	And they're in the same prison as a lot of royalists at this time.
	And the royalists leave these memoirs and Hebert himself is like sobbing because he's having a huge meltdown and is screaming against the bars and just having no dignity whatsoever.
	And a huge number of royalists and relative conservatives- I thought it was- Yeah, like Louis XVI, whatever else is He was not a great ruler, but he dies with tremendous dignity.
	He, uh, you know, he's with a priest and the priest is telling him, he's like, you know, remember you are suffering like Christ suffered and Christ forgave his tormentors.
	And so he's like, you know, forgive them father.
	They do not know what they are doing.
	And, you know, he goes calmly to the guillotine and they chop his head off.
	And when a bear goes to the guillotine, he's sobbing and screaming and kicking, and they have to like shove him in there.
	And then they lop his head off.
	And these people who hate him come and they're kicking his head like a soccer ball.
	And he just, It's really fun to read about because it's, you know, these people were horrible.
	It's exactly what they deserve.
	And it's a lot like, you know, when you read about these radical leftists who get, you know, murdered by gangbangers in these cities after they endorsed all this radical stuff.
	Like, you know, it's not good that they died overall, but at the same time, if anyone is going to suffer, it should be the people who, you know, brought all on this.
	Like you, you, you thirsted for blood.
	So drink your fill.
	So how does it all end?
	And I think people know, of course, there's the new movie, terrible movie, but the new movie is out on Napoleon, where, you know, they certainly got to mention it, man.
	I got to mention it.
	And we're not going to get into it here.
	But, you know, they do show Marie Antoinette.
	I think that's probably the best part of the movie is sort of that those beginning scenes.
	And then it gets up to when Napoleon sort of quells this this local uprising.
	within Paris and the, you know, it's famous referred to as the whiff of grape shot.
	And that's kind of referred to as the end of the revolution.
	Then we know that eventually Napoleon takes power, but what is that process that goes from the excesses of the revolution, the guillotines, and then eventually to Napoleon taking power?
	Well, this is one of the most interesting things about the revolution is overall, I would say it is a bad event.
	A huge number of people die, a huge amount of stuff is destroyed irrevocably, and I don't think most of it was necessary, but it does make some changes that overall were probably necessary.
	I think they could have just happened without the revolution.
	Like I said, they could have abolished the nobility without needing to kill thousands of people.
	It might have taken a decade longer than it did, but they could have done it, and there was discussions of doing it.
	But what you get is, You have Robespierre gets thrown out.
	You have these moderate sort of cynical politicians take over.
	And their idea is mostly just to keep a hang on power, but they realized a lot of what the revolution did was pretty popular.
	It got rid of all the feudal obligations.
	So it really, it flattened out French society in a way a lot of us would find agreeable.
	Like before, in the Ancien Regime, a huge amount of things were actually only available to people who were from this tiny sliver of aristocratic families that were about half a percent of the population.
	This is why, you know, Napoleon was somewhat on board with this.
	He was from a lower level of nobility in this isolated province of Corsica, so he could have never risen to be this general right away like he did under the revolution.
	A ton of people joined with the revolution for this reason.
	And so there's a lot of stuff that they do want to keep around from the revolution, even after Robespierre gets his head lopped off.
	And so this is what creates the opportunity, like this negotiating process is what parts of the revolution are we going to keep and what are we going to throw out?
	And Napoleon himself takes advantage of this.
	So, you know, he claws his way to the top.
	He becomes an important general in the directory.
	Then there's kind of this coup d'etat that there's nothing ideological about it.
	They just they want to get rid of the directory and have power themselves.
	So Napoleon makes himself first consul.
	And how does he secure his power?
	They don't show this in the movie, but what he does is He says, hey, I know a lot of you like the Catholic Church.
	I'm going to, you know, re-legalize the Catholic Church.
	And it's going to be on way more of a leash than it was before.
	It's going to be weakened.
	But we're not going to be shooting priests in the head.
	We're not going to be burning churches down.
	We're not going to be, you know, beheading nuns.
	We're going to allow the church to be a part of French life again.
	And once he's willing to do that, like this Greatly moderates the French Revolution, and you start getting a lot of people who fled overseas come back to France.
	They're willing to participate in French life again.
	And you get other changes.
	I mean, Napoleon's civil code that he does, even after he tumbles from power, that remains the legal code of France.
	Everyone wants to keep it around.
	The departments they create, that stays the way France is organized instead of the old provinces.
	No one brings back feudalism.
	There's a huge amount of change that comes out of the revolution, And that's what the defenders of it would say it was good for, is all of these, they would say it brought about necessary historical change.
	And I think as conservatives, what we recognize is, well, Britain managed to do all of these things without killing nearly as many people.
	And America managed to do these things without killing nearly as many people.
	And so, right.
	So part of it is, you know, as you say, the American,
	War of Independence was a war of independence, but when you add on the Constitution and the Declaration, which both really bear so many of their ideas within that wellspring of the Reformation, that having these ideals put forward, having them then enshrined in these documents, and then obviously having that enforced, and you know, obviously we can argue as to how enforced those are today in daily life, there at least is some legal basis for them after these reforms.
	But to your point, It's not necessarily something that had to be done through so much violence and so much anger.
	And to the point, England still has a, right now, has a king.
	They retained their monarchy without going, and they have their palaces, they have the royals, and they were able to do all this without executing all of them.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The sad thing about the French Revolution is a huge amount of people die, and you just come away thinking, was any of that Was it really necessary, or was it just this spasm of bloodletting because the wrong people were given too much power for too long?
	And I think that's probably the biggest takeaway from it, is that you don't need this dramatic explosion of violence to get what you want.
	And the French pretty quickly realized this.
	All the people who are the most psychopathic, they kill a ton of people, and then they die themselves.
	And then everyone looks around and says, well, that sucked.
	They end up, like, they literally have a monarchy again within 15 years.
	And this is kind of what would, you know, let's let's say, you know, the wokest of the woke or the most radical, you know, left wingers get in charge today.
	This is basically how it would play out, isn't it?
	That's how it did play out.
	I mean, we have this giant George Floydapalooza and then we have, you know, the murder rate goes up 50 percent and we have this wanton destruction.
	All these cities become a mess.
	We have tent cities everywhere.
	And then now you have a lot of Democrats look around and think, wow, wait, that was stupid.
	We did all of this insane stuff and they're just going to try to undo it.
	And I would say, actually, I'd say the key difference is I conceded that some changes of the French revolution were good.
	Like I think getting rid of feudalism was probably desirable.
	I don't think any of the changes that we got in the George Floyd revolution were worth it, but the premises of that were so insane.
	It was that the police were racist and we should get rid of them.
	And that meritocracy is bad and we should get rid of it.
	And, you know, in a sort of ironic way, and also like we should get rid of equality of races and create this elaborate racial hierarchy.
	You could actually say that the Floyd Revolution is a dark inverse of the French Revolution.
	The French Revolution, for its many flaws, did have, you know, equality as a premise.
	It had meritocracy as a premise.
	And now we get revolutions that want to not even have those things.
	They want to get rid of them.
	Right, so you're taking whatever is the basis of like the lowest rung of society and then saying that should be the highest rung of society, which by the way is, you know, last year we talked about how that's something that Mao actually tried to put into practice where he would go into these factories Kill the foreman, obviously kill the owners, and then he would take whoever was like the lowest ranking guy in that factory and make him the new manager.
	And you had CCP cadres that were doing this all over the country of China and saying that, well, clearly the person who, you know, because, you know, he's the day laborer knows better how to run this factory than the manager or the foreman or the director.
	And then, you know, within, you know, within Less than a decade, within a couple of years, you get the Great Leap Forward, which of course turns into this massive famine, and everybody's dying because these people have no idea how to run anything, and Chairman Mao's running around saying, oh, we need more, you know, we need more plows for the military, so you have to melt all your iron and your steel, that we're worried about the, you know, the birds are our problem, so go kill all the birds and the locusts and everything.
	It's just a complete Abject disaster and it leads to 50 million people dying, the outbreak of cannibalism, etc, etc.
	So I guess the idea is that when you put these crazy people in charge that there isn't anything on the back end of it.
	And this is why I always tell people don't even bother arguing with Marxists or with like these hardcore leftists because at their basis they have no idea what they're talking about.
	Yeah, there's a line a Polish historian wrote about communism.
	He wrote a book called, I don't remember his name, but there's a book called Main Currents of Marxism.
	And one of the things he said is that mendacity is the heart of Marxism.
	That it is essentially a movement premised in whatever arguments it makes, it is rooted in the resentments and anger of the people in it.
	That they feel that You know, they'll claim that they're agitating for the equality of all men, but really they're bitter that they themselves are not superior to others, and this is how they feel it.
	And definitely the French Revolution fits into that prototype.
	You have these very ugly, violent people on the inside who dress things up as the cult of reason, and reason is their excuse for killing vast numbers of people and doing these Enormously destructive things and you know, it's a logical fallacy to say that doing that's bad you're just making an appeal to emotion and Do you have a source for that?
	Do you have a source for that?
	An entire revolution done by redditors.
	Oh, man, and By the way, I just looked that up.
	That's um, that's Legek Kolakowski.
	Oh, yes, thank you I'm glad I got it well good enough for you to look it up.
	Yeah Kolakowski I'm gonna check that out.
	We're down to our very last minute, folks.
	We've been talking to Blake Neff.
	This is Chronicles of the Revolution.
	He's walking us through this better, and we're gonna educate ourselves.
	We're gonna take some time over this Christmas season, over the holidays, between now and New Year's, to dig into these revolutionary movements.
	Because guess what, folks?
	It isn't the first time that we've lived through this.
	These ideas have been around forever.
	It is the politics of resentment.
	It is greed.
	It is pride.
	It is envy.
	It's endemic to human nature.
	It's been something that's been with humans since the fall, since the garden.
	It is part of our nature.
	So whether you call it the Jacobins, whether you call it the Marxists, whatever name it takes, or whether you call it the response to systemic racism, whether you call it Black Lives Matter, it is always the same ideas and it will always result in the same thing.
	Ladies and gentlemen, you have my permission to lay ashore.
	Live from Studio 6B with Damon Roberts.
	Has nothing to do with minorities.
	Has everything to do with power.
	Power Grab.
	Every weekday at 8 p.m.

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