Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [72]
This is why the British philosopher Edmund Burke—who had been a staunch supporter of the American Revolution—denounced the French Revolution even before the guillotining began. Presciently, Burke wrote in 1789 that the “old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true this may be no more than a sudden explosion.… But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them.”33
Similarly, Americans didn’t recognize the French Revolution as bearing any relationship to their own revolution against a king.
Consider the fate of the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. The wealthy and titled Lafayette came to America to fight for independence, serving with distinction under General George Washington. Lafayette was so important to the American cause that dozens of U.S. cities, towns, parks, and streets across the nation are named after him. When he was buried in Paris, dirt carried from Bunker Hill was sprinkled on his coffin, and an American flag has flown at his grave ever since.
Lafayette began as a supporter of the French Revolution, foolishly imagining that it would proceed along the lines of the American Revolution. In the summer of 1789, he joined the National Assembly, the populist outgrowth from the class-based Estates General. It was Lafayette, the National Assembly’s vice president, who presented the soon-to-be-ignored Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Assembly.
But for the next three years, Lafayette commanded the French National Guard in a losing battle against the lunatic Jacobin mobs. In the summer of 1792, he was declared a “traitor,” subject to immediate execution, whereupon he fled France just ahead of the guillotine.
Apart from Lafayette, the only prominent supporter of the American Revolution to sign on with the mob revolt of the French was Thomas Paine, who was not born in America and perhaps never fully understood its philosophical underpinnings. (Even the French revolutionaries grasped this, refusing the request of an American delegation to release Paine from prison on the grounds that Paine was not an American but an Englishman.)34 Paine hit his peak with the American Revolution, but got bored after the war was won, crossed the ocean to France, and leapt into the middle of a much less noble endeavor. He was a historical one-hit wonder, desperately trying to find that follow-up single that would put him back on top.
Paine justified the insanity of the French Revolution with the argument that all royalty was bad and therefore any alternative was better. When the French revolutionaries threw him in prison, Paine found out there were some political systems worse than a monarchy.
In so little esteem did Americans hold mob action, particularly the atheistic French mob, that when Thomas Paine returned from participating in the French Revolution, he was universally reviled, his name written on the bottom of people’s shoes to indicate their disdain. Paine’s only American defender was, of course, Thomas Jefferson, mob sympathizer and father of the Democratic Party.
The French Revolution was spontaneous, impulsive, passionate, emotional, romantic, utopian, resentful, angry, dreamy—anything but rule-bound and reasoned. No one knew, from one year to the next, where the Revolution was heading. That’s why, at the end of it all, they enthusiastically threw themselves into the arms of the dictator Napoleon.
By contrast, Americans concluded their revolution with a Constitution, meaning we have agreed rules, baselines, and standards, as well as continuity, stability, and legal reasoning.
Indeed, it was a mob uprising after the Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, that propelled Americans to abandon the