Saturday, April 18, 2015

French Experiment with Equality

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The French Revolution’s promise of equality ended with anarchy and Bonaparte in France; the lofty experiment of equality in St. Domingo terminated not in freedom, but military despotism after a fearful destruction of human life. After all the horrors of their bloody revolution, the blacks in Haiti only effected a change of masters. “The white man had disappeared, and the black man , one of their own race and color, had assumed his pace and his authority.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

French Experiment with Equality

“[We shall quote] from the language of Dr. [W.E.] Channing, the scholar-like and the eloquent, though visionary, advocate of British [slave] emancipation. Even as early as 1842, in an address delivered on the anniversary of that event, he burst into the following strain of impassioned eulogy: “Emancipation works well, far better than could have been anticipated . . . Freedom, simple freedom, is in my estimation just, far prized above all price.”

In these high-sounding praises, which hold up personal freedom as “our proper good,” as “our end,” it is assumed that man was made for liberty, and not liberty for man. It is, indeed, one of the fundamental errors of the abolitionist to regard personal freedom as a great substantive good, or as in itself a blessing, and not merely as a relative good.

It may be, and indeed often it is, an unspeakable benefit, but then it is so only as a means to an end. The end of our existence, the proper good, is the improvement of our intellectual and moral powers, the perfection of our rational and immortal natures.

When freedom subserves this end, it is a good; when it defeats this end, it is an evil. Hence there may be a world of evil as well as a world of good in “this one word.”

The wise man adapts the means to the end. It were the very height of folly to sacrifice the end to the means. No man gives personal freedom to his child because he deems it always and in all cases a good. His heart teaches him a better doctrine when the highest good of his child is concerned. Should we not be permitted then, to have something of the same feeling in regard to those who Providence has placed under our care, especially since . . . they stand in utmost need of guidance and direction?

Few of the abolitionists are disposed to offer any substitute for our method. They are satisfied merely to pull down and destroy, without the least thought or care in regard to consequences.

But what is meant by the freedom of the emancipated slaves, on which so many exalted eulogies have been pronounced? Its first element, it is plain, is a freedom from labor – freedom from the very first law of nature. In one word, its sum and substance is a power on the part of the freed black to act pretty much as he pleases. Now . . . would it not be well to see how he would be pleased to act?

This kind of freedom, it should be remembered, was born in France and cradled in the revolution. May it never be forgotten that the “Friends of the Blacks” at Boston had their exact prototypes in “les Amis des Noirs” of Paris. Of this last society Robespierre was the ruling spirit, and Brissot the orator. By the dark machinations of the one, and the fiery eloquence of the other, the French people . . . were induced, in 1791, to proclaim the principle of equality to and for the free blacks of St. Domingo. This beautiful island . . . thus became the first of the West Indies in which the dreadful experiment of a forced equality was tried.

The authors of that experiment were solemnly warned of the horrors into which it would inevitably plunge both the whites and the blacks of the island. Yet firm and unmovable as death, Robespierre sternly replied, then “Perish the colonies rather than sacrifice one iota of our principles.”

The atrocities of this awful massacre have had . . . no parallel in the annals of human crime. “The Negroes,” says Alison, “marched with spiked infants on their spears instead of colors; they sawed asunder the male prisoners, and violated the females on the dead bodies of their husbands.” The work of death, thus completed with such outbursts of unutterable brutality, constituted and closed the first act in the grand drama of Haytian freedom.

But equality was not yet established. Equality had been proclaimed, and anarchy produced. In this frightful chaos, the ambitious mulattoes, whose insatiable desire for equality had first disturbed the peace of the island, perished miserably beneath the vengeance of the very slaves whom they had roused from subjection and elevated into irresistible power. Thus ended the second act of the horrible drama.”

(An Essay on Liberty and Slavery, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1856, pp. 269-278; available from www.confederatereprint.com)

2 comments:

  1. On Social Justice.

    As always our leftist friends fail to understand the differences between the success of the American Revolution and the failure of the French Revolution and how it pertains to the current (dis)order of things. It comes down to the fundamental fact that in order for the seeds of individual liberty to grow into a healthy tree of sovereign self-government it requires the fertile soil of personal responsibility.

    The American Revolution and the system of government that grew out of it was successful because we already had a long history of self-government that evolved from the conditions of the 17th and 18th centuries wherein the distance to Europe was great and communications were slow. These conditions necessitated the creation of systems of self-government. They flourished and grew in spite of the economic restrictions placed upon the colonies that we solely in place for the advantage of the financial and royal elites of Britain. When the restrictions became more onerous and disadvantageous to the colonists the seeds of rebellion began to grow. Our Revolution, like all revolutions, grew more out of economic conditions than social ones. The Founders recognized that our economic success grew from individual liberty not some vague notion of social equality.

    By contrast the French Revolution was a failure, not because of any lack of inspiration created by the American success, but because it quickly devolved into these vague notions of social equality rather than individual liberty and personal responsibility. Quite simply, what the French lacked was any history of self-government. So among the seeds of the tree of liberty were sown the the weeds of egalitarianism. Unfortunately these weeds flourished on the wonton bloodlust of the Jacobins. They produced the pretty but inedible flowers of emotionally appealing rhetoric but not the delicious fruits of a sustainable political economy. In the end, after all the chaos and carnage all they were left with was another tyrant who mouthed the words of liberty and made of himself an Emperor and an empire that resulted in nearly two decades of war and uncounted deaths. Then after Napoleon was gone, and the continent had been bleed of money and lives, the very same institutions and families that the revolution had sought to over throw were back in power. The great hopes of Goethe, Schiller, Von Humboldt and Beethoven for a German Constitutional Republic based on the American model were crushed at the Congress of Vienna and Russia was the dominant power on the European Continent.

    Egalitarianism, such is the breeding ground of tyranny and the demagogue, be they 18th century Jacobins, 20th century fascists or our 21st century advocates of “social justice” and jihadists.

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