Demonic (21 page)

The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter, and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to today’s dirty waifs smashing Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America.

And yet the
New York Times
has written, “In this millennium, documents like the Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and the American Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791 advanced the universality of human rights.”
¹
This is on the order of
saying, “In this millennium, things like mosquitoes, moths, and DDT advanced the universality of bugs.” Why not throw in the Soviet constitution or Mao’s
Little Red Book
?

One small difference is that the Americans and the English did win freedom and greater individual rights with their documents. France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen led to bestial savagery, followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship, followed by another monarchy, and then finally something resembling an actual republic eighty years later.

In another editorial, the
Times
claimed that France had “helped launch the worldwide democracy movement with its 1789 Revolution against monarchy and feudal privilege,” claiming the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen “inspired democrats throughout the late-18th-century world and reinforced the ideas of America’s own, earlier revolution.”
²
The only movements inspired by the French Revolution were those of other dictators who discovered they could slaughter without mercy, provided they claimed to be acting in the name of the people.

Both revolutions are said to have come from the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, the French Revolution informed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the American Revolution influenced by the writings of John Locke. This is like saying Presidents Reagan and Obama both drew on the ideas of twentieth-century economists—Reagan on the writings of Milton Friedman and Obama on the writings of Paul Krugman.

Locke was concerned with private property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law—as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized—rather than have each man be his own judge. Rousseau saw the government as the vessel to implement the “general will” and thereby create men who were more moral. Through the limitless power of the state, the government would “force men to be free.”

The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on “respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the
creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will.”
³

Contrary to the purblind assertions of liberals, who dearly wish our founding fathers were more like the godless French peasants, skipping around with human heads on pikes, our founding fathers were God-fearing descendants of Puritans and other colonial Christians. As Stephen Waldman writes in his definitive book on the subject,
Founding Faith
, the American Revolution was “powerfully shaped by the Great Awakening,” an evangelical revival in the colonies in the early 1700s, led by the famous Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, among others. Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, was Edwards’s grandson. The churches were so integral to the philosophy behind the revolution that there are books of Christian sermons on the American Revolution. In fact, it was the very irreligiousness of the French Revolution that appalled the Americans and British alike, even before the bloodletting began.

Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, the date our written demand for independence from Britain based on “Nature’s God” was released to the world. The French celebrate Bastille Day, a day when thousands of armed Parisians stormed a nearly empty prison, savagely murdered a half-dozen guards, defaced their corpses, and stuck heads on pikes, all in order to seize arms and gunpowder for more such tumults. It would be as if this country had a national holiday to celebrate the L.A. riots.

Among the most famous quotes from the American Revolution is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Among the most famous slogans of the French Revolution is that of the Jacobin Club, “Fraternity or death,” recast by Nicolas-Sébastien de Chamfort, a Jacobin who turned against the revolution, as “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.”

Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, first rung to herald the opening of the new Continental Congress in the wake of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and rung again to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence.

The symbol of the French Revolution is the “national razor”—the guillotine.

Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, all died of natural causes in old age, with the exception of Button Gwinnett of Georgia, who was shot in a duel with a fellow officer during the Revolutionary War, though unrelated to the revolution.

Exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, on July 4, 1826, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died in their homes at age eighty-three and ninety, respectively. Apart from Gwinnett, only one of our founding fathers died of unnatural causes—Alexander Hamilton. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr because as a Christian, Hamilton deemed it a greater sin to kill another man than to be killed and, before the duel, in writing, vowed not to shoot Burr. President after president of the new American republic died peacefully at home for seventy-five years, right up until Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the French Revolution all died violently a few years after the revolution began, guillotine by guillotine.

The most moblike incident associated with the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party. With no beheadings, disembowelings, or defilement of corpses—or any corpses at all—the Tea Party wouldn’t even merit a passing mention in a history of the French Revolution. It was debated for hours, was carefully planned to avoid damaging any property other than the tea, and was specifically defended for not being the act of a mob. The only event less violent than the original Boston Tea Party is a modern-day Tea Party rally.

Moreover, unlike the French before the storming of the Bastille or Americans today, the rebels had no other ability to influence British policies. In that sense, they were in the position of pro-lifers in modern America with no options for affecting the law except violence.

Forget the cheerful retelling of the Boston Tea Party in children’s books: That event had little to do with the success of the American Revolution. Coming three long years before the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party instigated nothing, other than repressive measures by the British Parliament in closing the Boston port and putting the entire town under martial law.

The Boston Tea Party was considered an embarrassment by many of our founding fathers and was not celebrated at all for another half
century. Benjamin Franklin insisted that the tea be paid for, and a collection was taken up and offered to the India Tea Company. George Washington disapproved of the Boston Tea Party, making a point of saying “not that we approve their conduct in destroying the Tea” even when complaining of Britain’s retaliatory actions in response to the Tea Party.
⁴

America’s friends in the British Parliament, such as Edmund Burke, were appalled by the Tea Party, unable to keep defending the Americans after this destruction of private property. Only when the Americans promised to repay the tea company for the ruined tea were America’s British partisans able to take up the rebels’ cause again.

The reason most of our founding fathers opposed the Boston Tea Party was that it seemed to be the act of a rabble. Interestingly, even Samuel Adams, who is believed to be an instigator of the Tea Party, immediately defended the raid by arguing that it was not the action of a mob but a reasoned protest when all other avenues of redress had failed. Paul Revere, who participated in the Tea Party, made sure to replace a broken lock on one of the ships and severely punished a participant who stole some of the tea for his private use.
⁵
Though they destroyed the tea, the rebels fervently believed in otherwise following the law, much like the overwhelmingly law-abiding abortion clinic protesters today.

John Adams, Samuel’s second cousin, privately approved of the Tea Party, exalting in a letter, “The die is cast! The people have passed the river and cut away the bridge!” But even he stressed how calm and orderly the town of Boston was immediately following the Tea Party.
⁶

Just a few years earlier, in 1770, John Adams had famously defended the British soldiers who shot and killed Americans in what came to be called the Boston Massacre, and Paul Revere testified for the defense.
⁷
Five Americans died in the incident, but Adams argued to the jury that the Redcoats were justified in firing because they had been attacked by a mob.

Although Adams blamed Britain’s policy of quartering soldiers for provoking the citizens of Boston, he blamed the mob for instigating the violent altercation.

In his closing argument, Adams portrayed the crowd as a howling “rabble” that shouted, “Kill them! Kill them!” and threw “every species of rubbish” at the soldiers: “We have entertained a great variety of phrases
to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, [it was] most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And why should we scruple to call such a people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.”

The American jury acquitted the British officer involved, as well as six of his eight soldiers. After the verdict, there was no rioting or looting; all was calm. Respect for Adams increased, and he would later say that his defense of the British soldiers for firing on the mob was “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
⁸

This country’s founders were strongly against the mob—as are today’s Tea Party patriots. Noticeably, modern Tea Partiers haven’t engaged in one iota of property destruction, in contradistinction to nearly any gathering of liberals. Violence and property destruction are specialties of the Left. As the
New Yorker
reported, a twenty-six-year-old Tea Partier from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thought about printing out a copy of the entire 2,000-page 2010 health care bill and throwing it in Boston harbor, but changed his mind when he found out it would be against the law.
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That’s why—until recently—it has been liberals pushing the Boston Tea Party as a crucial event in the American Revolution, while conservatives have preferred to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the bicentennial of the Constitution. Liberals hate the idea of a revolution by gentlemen, which is why they celebrate hairy, foul-smelling revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Susan Sarandon. They want to elevate the rabble and place the spectacularly unique American Revolution in the tradition of France’s mob revolt.

Thus, for example, Russell Bourne, a regular guest on NPR and PBS, has written a sad little book titled
Cradle of Violence: How the Boston Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution
. More accurately, the waterfront mobs nearly derailed the revolution.

Fear of mobs was a primary rationale of the Loyalists. Even those wishing independence from Britain worried that without British protection, the hoodlums might run wild. As the left-wing historian Howard
Zinn admits, the “well-to-do merchants” of the Sons of Liberty “worried about maintaining control over the crowds at home.”
¹⁰

Consider the case of Lord Hugh Percy. He had been a fervent supporter of the Americans, taking their side repeatedly in the British Parliament, including voting against the hated Stamp Act. When he arrived in Boston as a brigadier general of the British army in 1774, Percy was a strong advocate of American independence. But he took one look at the Boston waterfront and changed his mind, so “shocked” was he “by the mobbings he witnessed.”
¹¹

This is why, today, we know Patrick Henry’s name. We know Paul Revere’s name. We know the names of John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and of all the other signatories to the Declaration of Independence. We know the names of the authors of
The Federalist
. We know the name of pamphleteer Thomas Paine. We don’t know the names of the lowborn workers at the Boston Harbor engaging in tumult and property destruction. (Other than by the general catchall term “Celtics fans.”)

The men behind the American Revolution—the militias, the Minutemen, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the framers of the Constitution—were the very opposite of a mob. Today we would call them “Republicans.” They were educated, aristocratic property holders, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and other respectable tradesmen with everything to lose should the revolution fail.

The Minutemen were called that because they could be ready for battle in a minute, having been preparing for years to launch a disciplined military response. They were not a rabid mob, full of festering hatreds, ready to dash out and impale their fellow citizens. (And virtually none of these brave men under arms, I might add, were dating one another.) They were a citizen army with ranks, subordination, coordination, drills, and supplies.