A Sad Day in History

 Today is July 14.  It is my birthday and therefore I have always been sensitive to the fact that it is also in France celebrated as Bastille Day, the beginning of the French Revolution.  While the American Revolution turned out well, the French Revolution was a bloody affair and began the modern socialist movement that plagues us to this day.  S. David Sultzer has the story at the American Thinker entitled On Bastille Day we must distinguish the American Revolution from the French Revolution.

Today, July 14, is celebrated as Bastille Day in France. It should be a day of mourning across the rest of Western civilization.

Ten days after we celebrate July 4 as the symbol of the American Revolution, the pinnacle of the Enlightenment Era, the French celebrate Bastille Day on July 14 as the symbol of the French Revolution, an event that marked the end of the Enlightenment Era. These were the two titanic events of the 18th century, and all of world history since then can be analyzed as a competition to see which will win out, the Christianity and liberalism of the American Revolution or the atheism and socialism of the French Revolution.

There is no doubt that the Roman Catholic church in France was corrupt. According to St. Paul, the love of money (and power, one thinks) is one of the roots of all evil. And the church was very greedy, soaking the people in both rents and tithes. It laid a heavy burden on people, something Christ himself spoke against. The government was also too greedy, and in cahoots with the church, never a good arrangement. All this corruption gave an opening to the atheist revolutionaries to rile up the people to revolt. Like all socialists, they promised much, but delivered little relief to the people. It was a sham designed to grab power for themselves. As always, there are useful idiots to help spread the "message" but when they have done their work, they are disposed of. And we even have evidence of the revolution eating its own, for eventually Maximillian Robespierre lost his head to lady guillotine.

While the American Revolution rightly saw government as a necessary organization whose role was to protect the life, liberty and property of the people, the French Revolution sought to replace God with itself. In doing so, the revolutionaries committed the original sin, the sin of pride, of wanting to sit on God's throne.

It is not an overstatement to say that all the ills of modern society were born in the crucible of the French Revolution, just as it is not an overstatement to say that the American Revolution was the culmination of the best of the Enlightenment. All history since 1792 has been a competition to see which will win out in the West, the French Revolution or the American Revolution. Let us hope that it is Independence Day, not Bastille Day.