Jack Posobiec and his co-host Blake Neff take a deep dive into one of the most important revolutions in human history: The French Revolution. Jack and Blake discuss the French Revolution, the French Terror, and how it changed the course of history.
00:04:34.880And just to kind of paint that picture, based on what you're saying there, is that, you know, in America, we get taught that there's sort of the, there's the American Revolution.
00:04:42.660And then the French Revolution comes afterwards, as if it was just sort of a perfunctory thing that we, you know, it was a follow on of the American Revolution.
00:04:49.920But, you know, in that context, you know, this is really before, quite frankly, the British Empire had even reached its apex.
00:04:57.180And so you have this massive French Empire, massive French state, which actually would go on to expand after the Revolution.
00:05:04.440But that's a whole other, another story.
00:05:07.220And really, you have this sort of competition between, and it's a very longstanding competition, between the British Empire and between France, between Britain and France.
00:05:16.440That's been going on for really centuries at this point, where Britain is vying for dominance.
00:05:22.320But, of course, France maintains that, that central role on the continent itself.
00:05:27.380And 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.
00:05:42.560They lose the Seven Years' War to Britain, and they lose a lot of these colonial possessions.
00:05:47.900So 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.
00:05:59.960And so this is what actually kind of set them on the path towards the Revolution, because England becomes the great mercantile power of the 1700s.
00:06:08.580They are the ones who are having the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.
00:06:12.200They're the ones with this truly global maritime commercial empire.
00:06:17.960It has substantially more people than Britain still.
00:06:21.760And, but it is losing these wars and it's playing second fiddle as a result.
00:06:30.260That's what really is important to emphasize here, is how central France and French thought was to wider European civilization.
00:06:38.960So, you know, we're familiar with the Enlightenment.
00:06:41.180The Enlightenment is the intellectual phenomenon of the entire 18th century.
00:06:46.140It's what drives a lot of the American revolutionary values.
00:06:49.180So much of that is coming out of France.
00:06:51.560You know, Montescu, that's a French name, if you can't tell.
00:06:54.900And Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French thinker.
00:06:57.740All of these guys are derived, are either French themselves or dried ideas from French intellectual currents.
00:07:05.100And what happens is, France, because of these wars with England, actually, including supporting us in the Revolution, they get into dire straits.
00:07:14.160So despite all this Enlightenment stuff, what France has is they have what we call absolutism.
00:07:19.420They have a principle of the king is an absolute authority over the wider country.
00:07:25.600And 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.
00:07:31.920And this isn't actually something that goes back to, you know, 10,000 BC.
00:07:36.220It's actually kind of a recent political idea.
00:07:39.360It'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.
00:07:48.660And a response to this is this happens because states are weak.
00:09:24.180You know, there's complaints about feudal lords, complaints about the church, as I just mentioned.
00:09:29.020And they're all looking for ways to—the king just wants to raise money.
00:09:34.140But 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.
00:09:41.700And this is where you first get the first kernels of things spiraling out of control.
00:09:46.520The Estates General is divided into three bodies.
00:09:49.680They have the first estate, the second estate, the third estate.
00:09:58.840In practical terms, it mostly represents like the bourgeoisie, like the town dwellers, businessmen who are not themselves noble.
00:10:07.060And 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.
00:10:18.040And so a large share of them go apart on their own, and they do this thing called the tennis court oath.
00:10:24.700They 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.
00:10:36.860And as it happens, America is just making its constitution as all of this is happening.
00:10:42.180And 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.
00:10:56.320It starts off, the early ideas are things like, well, we have this hereditary nobility, we should get rid of that, because it's pointless.
00:11:04.720And this is not – it's a radical idea, but it's not as radical as people think.
00:11:10.420Like, 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.
00:11:19.540That was something people were talking about.
00:11:20.780It was a real thing that even the king might have done.
00:11:23.020But 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.
00:11:36.220And that's kind of what you're setting the stage for.
00:11:43.220They eventually create – it turns into the National Assembly.
00:11:46.400So 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.
00:11:56.960And in fact, we're going to take it away from anyone who currently has it, which eventually turns into the king.
00:12:02.860So it's not incredibly radical at this point.
00:12:05.720They're just sort of reforming their government, and it's somewhat peaceful for like the first couple years, right?
00:12:10.980Exactly, 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.
00:12:29.000And then eventually just the amount of bloodletting further radicalizes it.
00:12:32.980Because most people think that it really starts with like – everybody knows, okay, Marie Antoinette, King Louis, they're getting their heads chopped off, the guillotine.
00:12:43.720But 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.
00:12:52.060Exactly, and this is the first big event.
00:12:53.900We just were showing it on the screen there.
00:12:56.320The Bastille was this old prison in Paris, kind of just this castle, and it was mostly a symbol.
00:13:02.480It was like, oh, this is this authoritarian symbol.
00:13:04.880You could disappear into the Bastille and never be seen again.
00:13:08.020The actual prison, there were only like – I think – I'm not even sure there were ten prisoners inside it the day people storm it.
00:13:16.820It's that once the – 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 is it's like a miasma gets in the air.
00:13:31.300Like, oh, there is a revolution going on.
00:13:33.820And 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.
00:13:44.340But it's kind of like a good day's walk outside of Paris at this time.
00:13:49.360But they're close enough to it that the mob in Paris, which is very rambunctious, starts to exert a control on events.
00:13:59.100And 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.
00:14:08.000But a very outsized role was played by the mob in Paris at many moments.
00:14:15.480So this mob gathers outside the Bastille prison without getting too into detail.
00:14:19.740One 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.
00:14:28.080And it's just this big – it's like when they storm that police station in Minneapolis.
00:14:33.040It'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.
00:14:41.760It's just this radical act against the government as it currently is.
00:14:45.900Well, 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.
00:14:54.120They can see – or what it seems is, though, this mob, not only is it violent, but it's also popular.
00:15:00.260And so they're worried about moving against that popular opinion, so they go along with it.
00:15:04.520And this is how you get Jacob Fry, and this is how you get the whole documentary of Fall of Minneapolis.
00:15:08.960And a common 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.
00:15:20.700He's a good dad, but he's lacking in firmness.
00:15:23.540He doesn't really have the will to, like, crack the whip.
00:15:27.440And 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.
00:15:34.560You need to say, like, this isn't happening.
00:16:09.180And you start getting nobles who leave.
00:16:11.260And 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.
00:16:20.380Because we think of it as the first big modern revolution.
00:16:23.800But this was not the first revolution in Europe.
00:16:25.440The Dutch had had a revolution just two years before that took out their – that made them actually a republic as well.
00:16:33.080And the English, of course, had their civil war that greatly reduced the power of the monarch and made their parliament more powerful.
00:16:39.700So 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.
00:16:48.440They would – if they had podcasts then, they'd be doing podcasts on the English revolution and how it shapes everything we do today.
00:17:02.340And there's just all these rumors spread in rural France that there's going – the king is going to send out his soldiers to attack random peasants and all these different – some of the nobles are in league with him.
00:17:14.640And you just get this spasm of violence.
00:17:17.680You just have – peasants will just break into the manor houses of nobility.
00:17:22.320They'll kill a lot of the nobles or what they often do is they burn any documents related to feudal tenure.
00:17:30.420So, 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.
00:17:39.980There's a huge spasm of violence about this.
00:17:42.780And 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.
00:17:59.700To jump ahead a little bit, and just because I want to make sure that we get this for time, this – 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.
00:18:17.180So 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.
00:18:27.120Today, you know, they talk about influences.
00:18:29.560These are influences, and they're friends of mine.
00:18:43.640And you just get a cascade of actions.
00:18:46.560So, for example, anti-clericalism had existed in France before.
00:18:50.100That's hostility to established religion, the Catholic Church in this case.
00:18:54.760And you start getting – or 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.
00:19:07.920And so I believe the Jacobin Club is actually in a confiscated abbey or – it was like a nunnery that they converted into their club.
00:19:17.240And 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.
00:19:27.760And 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.
00:19:36.600And that comes from the French Revolution because one of their ideas is they literally create a year zero.
00:19:42.240They create a revolutionary calendar where it's only – it's decimalized, like the decimal system.
00:19:47.700So there's 10 months, and all the days are equal, and, you know, each week is 10 days.
00:19:54.660Each month is three weeks of 10 days, and you have 10 total months, and then you just have a few extra days at the end.
00:20:01.460And they're all going to be named after sort of – they're made-up words kind of reflecting what the month is.
00:20:08.340So there's like a month Thermador, which comes from, you know, Thermos Hot.
00:20:22.420I mean it's like literally the exact same thing where they say, okay, we're going to get rid of religion.
00:20:27.580And this is something that when you get taught the French Revolution in school or what I was taught, I never – you know, I just hear that it's like, you know, Thomas Jefferson was generally supportive of it.
00:20:35.680And, you know, it kind of lasted for a while.
00:21:21.200And, you know, you mentioned the loyalty oaths.
00:21:23.420And, 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.
00:21:36.720And they would say, God save King George for the first bits of the revolution.
00:21:41.700You have a lot of people who are pro-monarch.
00:21:44.140And 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 think black lives matter?
00:22:32.680And it gets scarier and scarier for him.
00:22:34.760And 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.
00:22:41.380And he tries to flee France, but he makes a botch of it and he gets caught.
00:22:47.720This is about three years into the revolution.
00:22:50.900And this is what one of the big, by the way, one of the big things that I just I 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.
00:23:02.220But also, like with BLM and the 2020 riots, the smashing of statues, the smashing of the iconoclasm of the entire thing.
00:23:13.340So we talk about how Notre Dame, you know, the burning and everyone was so upset about this recently.
00:23:18.620I personally was very upset about that.
00:23:20.580I think there's more to be investigated there from the current situation.
00:23:23.820But 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.
00:23:47.560How 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?
00:23:59.060Well, it's it's and they go even worse.
00:24:25.720Yeah, you bring up the question of how do they define it as reason?
00:24:28.580And 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.
00:24:37.980That not merely like that we have reason as an ideal, but the sense that we're the only ones who embrace reason.
00:24:45.040And that very easily becomes anyone who stands against us is against reason.
00:24:49.100And it's sort of become it's an invitation to take everything from first principles, because as a lot of liberals say, like tradition is not reasonable.
00:24:58.200There's there's nothing reasonable about just doing something because someone did it before.
00:25:01.600And so it becomes a justification to, again, yeah, you go back to first principles, you can do anything completely fresh.
00:25:09.280So you can throw out the old religion, you can throw out the old norms, you can throw out the old calendar.
00:25:15.020Since we're operating based on reason, we can do it all completely new from scratch.
00:25:21.660And this is, I think, what really 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.
00:25:34.740Because one of the traditions is just the slow movement of government.
00:25:38.640It's your right to appeal through this old court system.
00:25:42.200Well, since they're sweeping everything aside, they sweep aside the old organizational system of the country.
00:25:47.540Like France was divided into these old medieval provinces.
00:25:50.660They had things which are confusingly called parliaments, but they're actually more like a supreme court for each area.
00:25:56.380And they're sort of they handle a lot of legal cases.
00:26:55.520And so they get to the point where just being a king is somehow a crime, even though he had been a king or he had been in line to be king since he was born.
00:27:05.900And this had been the form of government.
00:27:08.180And, you know, certainly he hadn't stolen his kingship from from anyone.
00:27:13.040It's it's they they became so twisted in their ideology, which it isn't even really an ideology.
00:27:19.700And when you're dealing with leftism, I say this so many times, especially to the the facts don't care about your feelings crew, is that the leftists don't operate based on facts.
00:27:30.080Appeals to reason will never work with them.
00:27:32.760It's a purely envy, passion, greed, jealousy, anger based argument.
00:27:45.660They hate people who are good looking.
00:27:48.040And it's it's, you know, bio Leninism, by the way, is a term that we've talked about on thought crime that plays into this and really all of these revolutionary groups across history that I think you find across the world that when it when it gets into it.
00:28:02.760You 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.
00:28:10.380And 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.
00:28:17.800And they believe that they should do it.
00:28:20.540And again, the ideology, I think, is all just window dressing, as Mr. Ugrove says.
00:28:24.420Yeah, the amount of just sort of wanton, fiery, like hatred of civilization is something very similar to today.
00:28:33.040You just you destroy something because it feels good to destroy something that's beautiful or orderly.
00:28:38.300It's chaotic impulse in repulsive people.
00:28:40.980And notably, like a lot of the French revolutionaries are very profoundly ugly people.
00:28:48.060There's Marat, who's this major journalist firebrand today.
00:28:52.760He'd have a really aggravating like pro Antifa Twitter account.
00:28:59.660He's the guy who's done all the famous paintings that you've seen in this era, including like, you know, Napoleon on the horse where he's crossing the Alps.
00:29:13.160Not all of them, but this is a common trait.
00:29:15.460And, you know, as you mentioned, it's that wanton destruction.
00:29:18.980Like when they cut off the king's head, they don't just kill him and bury him.
00:29:22.900They do everything in their power to like destroy his body.
00:29:27.280I don't think they destroy his body, but they bury him 10 feet underground in like an unmarked grave.
00:29:31.420And then they also destroy like all of his clothing.
00:29:34.560They're like, there should be no relics of the king.
00:29:36.340And so they're destroying all this other stuff associated with him.
00:29:40.260And it really was the idea was you could not be a king.
00:29:43.220Like 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.
00:29:55.280And then one of the most radical Jacobins, this guy, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, he's only 24 or so.
00:30:03.060And he's a member of the National Assembly and he's part of this trial.
00:30:05.860And 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.
00:30:16.920The problem was he's the line he says is no one can reign innocently.
00:30:20.820In other words, merely by being a monarch, you are guilty of a death penalty offense.
00:31:23.500This gives all the momentum to the radicals.
00:31:26.280And then that Marat 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.
00:31:37.640I don't remember the details, but she assassinates him.
00:31:46.060You have mobs break into the prisons where various aristocrats and pro-royalists are.
00:31:51.440And they just hack them to death in the prisons, hundreds of people.
00:31:55.160And once this happens, you just do this cascade.
00:31:57.720Yeah, 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.
00:32:05.980And you go from this very ponderous debate over whether we should execute the king to these quick 10-minute trials where, oh, yeah, this person denounced you as a traitor to the revolution.
00:32:17.360So now you're going to go to the guillotine.
00:32:19.700And the rate at which this goes just gets insane where you start with a few people a day.
00:32:25.180And 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.
00:32:33.880And as is always the case, you know, the first people you target are not necessarily actual enemies.
00:33:14.080And finally, you have essentially Robespierre is the only guy in charge who's the most radical guy.
00:33:20.260And the only thing that happens is there's enough people who are just cynically political who look around and think they're going to kill all of us eventually.
00:33:29.120And these sort of cynical centrists who aren't really ideologues at all, they just drum up charges against Robespierre and lop his head off.
00:33:37.340And it's kind of funny how they do it.
00:33:40.660I was going to say right before that, there's that movie that I know that I know that.
00:33:46.100And 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.
00:33:56.180These 16 nuns are actually taken by Robespierre because they refuse to swear the loyalty oath.
00:34:06.600And 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, OK, this is going a little bit too far.
00:34:17.480Yeah, I have a book here, which I recommend to anyone who wants to spend many hours reading this topic.
00:34:25.000Schama is a bit of a lib, but it's sort of everyone's conservative about what he knows best.
00:34:29.980And so anyone who writes a thousand-page book on the French Revolution ends up coming away thinking these guys were completely insane.
00:34:36.120And 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.
00:34:44.760And 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.
00:35:04.500And then in just the first nine days of Thermador, so one-third of a month, they have 342 executions.
00:35:11.700So on pace for more than 1,000 that month when they finally are like, this is too far.
00:35:16.640And they just – they take Robespierre, and Robespierre was apparently actually, to his credit, incorruptible apparently.
00:35:25.240He was a true believer in the truest sense of the term.
00:35:27.940But they framed him for corruption so they'd have an excuse to just chop his head off to.
00:35:32.880And afterwards, you get this sort of – they lop off a lot of other people.
00:35:38.720They call it the Thermadorian reaction, and they take a lot of the people who are most guilty.
00:35:42.360And 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.
00:36:26.060And a huge number of royalists and relative conservatives to their – yeah, like Louis XVI, whatever else is – he was not a great ruler, but he dies with tremendous dignity.
00:36:36.700He, 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.
00:36:57.680And then they lop his head off, and these people who hate him come, and they're kicking his head like a soccer ball.
00:37:02.300And he just – it's really fun to read about because it's – you know, these people were horrible.
00:37:07.300They absolutely deserved what they got.
00:37:09.780And 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.
00:37:17.960Like, 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.
00:37:26.920Like, you thirsted for blood, so drink your fill.
00:37:31.760So how does it all – 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 – you got to mention it, man.
00:37:42.340We're not going to get into it here, but, you know, they do show Marie Antoinette.
00:37:46.360But I think that's probably the best part of the movie is sort of that – those beginning scenes.
00:37:51.160And then it gets up to when Napoleon sort of quells this local uprising within Paris and, you know, it's famously referred to as the whiff of grapeshot.
00:38:01.580And that's kind of referred to as the end of the revolution.
00:38:04.760Then we know that eventually Napoleon takes power.
00:38:07.800But what is that process that goes from the excesses of the revolution, the guillotines, and then eventually to Napoleon taking power?
00:38:16.360Well, this is one of the most interesting things about the revolution is overall I would say it is a bad event.
00:38:48.360And there was discussions of doing it.
00:38:50.080But what you get is you have – Robespierre gets thrown out.
00:38:53.300You have these moderate sort of cynical politicians take over.
00:38:57.440And their idea is mostly just keep a hang on power.
00:39:01.300But they realized a lot of what the revolution did was pretty popular.
00:39:05.000It got rid of all the feudal obligations.
00:39:06.800So it really – it flattened out French society in a way a lot of us would find agreeable.
00:39:11.920Like 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.
00:39:23.200This is why Napoleon was somewhat on board with this.
00:39:25.740He was from a lower level of nobility in this isolated province of Corsica.
00:39:30.480So he could have never risen to be this general right away like he did under the revolution.
00:39:35.200A ton of people joined with the revolution for this reason.
00:39:38.840And 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.
00:39:47.120And 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?
00:39:55.340And Napoleon himself takes advantage of this.
00:39:58.400So, you know, he claws his way to the top.
00:40:01.520He becomes an important general in the directory.
00:40:03.620Then there's kind of this coup d'etat that – there's nothing ideological about it.
00:40:07.420They just – they want to get rid of the directory and have power themselves.
00:40:10.360So Napoleon makes himself first consul.
00:41:16.060There's a huge amount of change that comes out of the revolution.
00:41:20.280And 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.
00:41:26.920And I think as conservatives, what we recognize is, well, Britain managed to do all of these things without killing nearly as many people.
00:41:35.520And America managed to do these things without killing nearly as many people.
00:41:38.500And so, right, so part of it is, you know, as you say, the American War of Independence was a war of independence.
00:41:47.780But when you add on the Constitution and the Declaration, which both really bear so many of these, 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.
00:42:04.520And, you know, obviously we can argue as to how enforced those are today in daily life.
00:42:09.900There at least, you know, is some legal basis for them after these reforms.
00:42:14.140But to your point, it's not necessarily something that had to be done through so much violence and so much anger.
00:42:21.460And to the point, England still has a, right now has a king.
00:42:26.660They 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.
00:42:36.700It's, it's a, the sad thing about the French Revolution is a huge amount of people die, and you just come away thinking, was any of that really necessary?
00:42:45.840Or was it just this spasm of bloodletting because the wrong people were given too much power for too long?
00:42:53.040And 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.
00:43:01.520And the French pretty quickly realized this, is all the people who are the most psychopathic, they kill a ton of people, and then they die themselves.
00:43:09.640And then everyone looks around and says, well, that, that sucked.
00:43:12.820And they end up, like, they literally have a monarchy again within 15 years.
00:43:18.360And 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.
00:43:27.620This is basically how it would play out, isn't it?
00:43:31.780I mean, we had this giant George Floyd-a-palooza, and then we have, you know, the murder rate goes up 50%, and we have this wanton destruction.
00:44:41.520So 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,
00:44:50.840and last year we talked about how that's something that Mao actually tried to put into practice,
00:44:55.020where he would go into these factories, kill the foreman, obviously kill the owners,
00:45:00.920and then he would take whoever was, like, the lowest-ranking guy in that factory and make him the new manager.
00:45:07.320And you had CCP cadres that were doing this all over the country of China and saying that, well, clearly the person who, you know,
00:45:14.240because, you know, he is the day laborer knows better how to run this factory than the manager or the foreman or the director.
00:45:22.800And then, you know, within, you know, within less than a decade, within a couple of years, you get the great leap forward,
00:45:30.920which, of course, turns into this massive famine and everybody's dying because these people have no idea how to run anything.
00:45:36.800And Chairman Mao's running around saying, oh, we need more, you know, we need more plows for the military,
00:45:42.720so you have to melt all your iron and your steel, that we're worried about the, you know, the birds are a problem,
00:45:50.600so go kill all the birds and the locusts and everything.
00:45:53.260It's just a complete abject disaster, and it leads to 50 million people dying, the outbreak of cannibalism, etc., etc.
00:46:01.900So 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.
00:46:09.280And this is why I always tell people, don't even bother arguing with Marxists or with, like, these hardcore leftists,
00:46:15.800because they have, they, at their basis, they have no idea what they're talking about.
00:46:21.100Yeah, there's a line a, like, a Polish historian wrote about communism.
00:46:26.720He wrote a book called, I don't remember his name, but there's a book called Main Currents of Marxism,
00:46:30.780and one of the things he said is that mendacity is the heart of Marxism,
00:46:36.560that it is essentially a movement premised in, you know, whatever arguments it makes,
00:46:42.060it is rooted in the resentments and anger of the people in it,
00:46:46.100that they feel that, you know, they'll claim that they're agitating for the equality of all men,
00:46:51.220but really they're bitter that they themselves are not superior to others, and this is how they feel it.
00:46:55.940And definitely the French Revolution fits into that prototype.
00:47:01.100You have these very ugly, violent people on the inside who dress things up as the cult of reason,
00:47:07.920and reason is their excuse for killing vast numbers of people and doing these enormously destructive things,
00:47:16.860and, you know, it's a logical fallacy to say that doing that's bad.
00:47:21.000You're just making an appeal to emotion.