“But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation — and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.“
The above excerpt is from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a pamphlet he published in 1790, after the 1789 kickoff to the French Revolution but before the literal decapitation of the monarchy.
He hadn’t even seen the abyssal chaos that was to be unleashed by the Jacobins in the coming years — had not yet seen the guillotines come out in force — and yet he saw quite clearly the coming apart of French society, and by extension the threat to the West more broadly. Americans have an image of the French Revolution as a copy/paste of the their own revolution, just in a different language. But what occurred in France was a new animal on the Western scene, beyond class conflict or an attempt to remove a malfunctioning or disliked leadership structure, as occurred in the American colonies.
It was an attempt by a malignant intellectual caste to rip the French nation from history. To mobilize forces of resentment and utopianism and lay waste to the preexisting world, then to manufacture a society built on "Reason." Revolutionary France was the first large-scale society in the history of the world that purported to be scientific in its construction, and thus applicable to the entire globe — a society built to save the world. It rose from what we now recognize as a Leftist conception of human nature — that it doesn’t really exist, and that humans and their accordant social structures can be perfected and planned out with the rigor of the scientific method.
The insanity that overtook France during this grand experiment — the blood-thirsty proscriptions, the mass slaughters of priests and nuns, the literal resetting of the calendar to Year Zero — wasn’t some sad wrong turn in an otherwise noble endeavor. It was the inevitable result of untethering a society from history and reality, of severing the natural bonds between men while claiming their egalitarian commonality. The egalitarian Leftism of the Revolution was anti-reality, and so the effort to impose it on the world led invariably to ideological lunacy and the annihilation of not just a despised autocrat or an oppressive ruling class, but of populations whose crime was their affiliation with structures that held up the preexisting society at a foundation level — in France’s case the Catholic clergy and the “bourgeois” economic class, and in later eras the Soviet Union’s landowning kulaks and the educated professionals of Kmer Rouge Cambodia. The past must be destroyed and the new world built by brute force. Always a nasty enterprise.
It’s impossible to pinpoint precisely the birth of a major historical force. The waves of history flow and cross and crash amongst each other in ways beyond the linear. But if you’re trying to track back the rise of the Left and better understand our current moment, you could do worse than to key on what happened in France in the 1790s. It looms out there deep in that thick fog of history. A storm-shrouded obelisk that sprung from the depths of the Earth to mark the beginning of the end of a great civilization rather than to welcome a new era of Enlightenment and Progress, as so many now believe. As the West as it was known for a millennia fades toward oblivion, one might see a mortal blow in that now-distant event. A shank to the gut that leaves one to bleed out and die long after the wound is delivered.
I’ll write more on the French Revolution at a later time. For now it’ll stay out there, looming, as its children continue their march.
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