“In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king, and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all princes of the blood who had escaped with their lives, the revolutionaries were determined to rewrite the past by abolishing the enduring symbols of the French nation. Walter Scott, in his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte observes:
“The name of king being pronounced detestable, all the remembrances of royalty were to be destroyed . . . the royal sepulchers . . . were not only defaced on the outside, but utterly broken down, the bodies exposed, the bones dispersed . . .”
Notre Dame’s “gallery of Judean kings” [was] destroyed (the mob supposedly mistook the 28 statues for portraits of French kings).
The revolutionaries wanted to make the past, even more than the future, a tabula rasa on which they can scrawl their puerile obscenities. Even the calendar had to be reinvented. The Jacobins . . . took only a few months before adopting a system that was as “rational” (i.e., inhuman) as it was stupid . . . All over Paris and throughout France, the churches’ precious art treasures were vandalized, and gold and silver communion vessels were stolen and used in mock ceremonies that travestied the Mass.
We must always remind ourselves that the entirely sordid activities of the French Republicans were the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project, whose objects were freedom of thought (that is, the freedom to be a servile follower of the Encyclopedists), social and political equality (the destruction of all authority), and a society based solely upon reason (the destruction of Christian civilization).
And what of Americans, so eager to escape the shackles of their history that they, too, have rewritten both calendar and curriculum?
America, where Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil-rights “revolution” takes precedent in the calendar over Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and even Lincoln; where Christian symbols are removed from schools and public squares and “Happy Holidays” has replaced “Merry Christmas”. . . where some State legislatures have removed the fine old flag under which brave Americans from the South fought in what they and many non-Southern Americans regarded as the noble cause of constitutional liberty . . .”
What can be said of this America, if not that, over the course of 150 years, we have gradually achieved the revolution which Rousseau imagined and for which Jacobins and Marxists fought and slaughtered?
The way back – if there is to be a way back – will not begin with a counter-revolution that will commemorate its own set of uprisings, heroes, and martyrs but with a quiet determination to restore the Christian calendar in our own lives; to display Christian symbols in our homes, shops and offices; and to teach our children and friends the stories and traditions that the Jacobins have done their best to destroy.”
(Living the Jacobin Dream, Thomas Fleming, Chronicles, March 2003, excerpts pp. 10-11 – www.chroniclesmagazine.org)
A little know or discussed aside to the rise of the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Namely that they were largely financed and controlled by British and Swiss banking interests. Firstly as the reign of Louis XVI began to destabilize the holders of his debt paper (at that time French and most European debt was the personal debt of the Crown not the nation per se) in concert with the Duke of Orleans, forced Louie to accept one Jacques Necker as his Finance Minister and later as his First Minister. The Duke set about to further destabilize the situation by organizing the sack of the Bastille (there was at that time only one prisoner, a violet psychotic) and further pushed the rabble to force Louie's abdication. (Which conveniently made the Duke first in line for the throne.) Meanwhile Necker further destabilized the economy by channeling the majority of French income into debt service.
ReplyDeleteNow at that time the violent and soon to be infamous Jean Paul Marat and Georges Jacques Danton were in exile in London hiding from a French arrest warrant. If there was one thing the British establishment feared more than a populist revolution in France it was a revolution that adapted the American model and led by the circles around Gilbert Marquis de Lafayette who had prepared and we're ready to provide Louis with a new Constitution modeled on the new American one. A Constitution that while it would have reduced the King to a head of state with limited powers, it would have destroyed the ambitions and plans of the Duke and the Calvinist bankers in Switzerland and London.
It was this fear that that lead Lord Shelburne, George III Prime Minister and chief officer of Barings Bank of London, to dispatch the aforementioned Marat and Danton to Paris to unleash the Jacobin's horror of blood saturated, anti-Catholic, secular egalitarianism and bury forever any hopes of a French Constitutional Monarchy. (Remember of course that anti-Catholicism still had derp roots in England.)
Fast forward past the thus created consequences of the Napoleonic Wars and the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne. We now encounter one Karl Marx and his association with Joseph Mazzini's Working Man's Association which was a residual out growth of Mazzini's Young Europe movement which was run out of the same Swiss Canton that had produced Jacques Necker. Mazzini was the George Soros of his era, promoting pan-Europeanism and any cause that appealed to "disaffected" youths rebellion against their parents and their institutions.
At the time of Marx's publication of "das Kapital" he was also associating with a famous German Jewish poet, who later converted to Protestantism, Heinrich Heine whose poets were set to music by Schumann and Schubert. Heine was also was pamphleteer in his own right which is how his association with Marx had started. Heine had previously written in 1820 "Where they burn books they will end burning people." But when Heine published his own pamphlet exposing how the Jacobin's movements were financed and controlled by the same financial interests they claimed to oppose Marx took to virulently attacking him in the most dispicable terms, even attacking his Jewish heritage which he shared with Marx.
I leave it to the reader to draw their own parallels and or conclusions how this feeds into present day agitators like AOC and the disintegration of Christian Europe under the onslaught of Islam. But as Shakespeare said in Act 2 of "The Tempest" What's past is prologue". Note also some unknown to me American bureaucrat had the line inscribed on a statue named "Future" outside the National Archives building in Wash. DC.
"Where they burn books they will end burning people."
DeleteAs they did in Saigon. Thanks for the history. I appreciate it. Reminds of my friend Bazz who died at 55. http://www.namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=2780&highlight=childress