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Quote of the Day: Happy Bastille Day
Published in Group Writing“[W]hat truly makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion. (In this the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau, whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought.)”
— Jonah Goldberg, in his book Liberal Fascism
This is funny and sounds like a bit of projection of his own promotion of the power of philosopher king.
“the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau”
As much, or less so, than their being inspired by food and beverage.
“whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought”
Has he never read “Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire” ?
Among the first Google quotes that come up are “Me voici donc seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frère, de prochain, d’ami, de société que moi-même” which pretty much sums up the tenor of the 10 promenades.
The second promenade begins :
“Ayant donc formé le projet de décrire l’état habituel de mon ame dans la plus étrange position où se puisse jamais trouver un mortel, je n’ai vu nulle maniere plus simple & plus sure d’exécuter cette entreprise, que de tenir un régistre fidelle de mes promenades solitaires & des rêveries qui les remplissent, quand je laisse ma tête entiérement libre, & mes idées suivre leur pente sans résistance & sans gêne. Ces heures de solitude & de méditation sont les seules de la journée, où je sois pleinement moi, & à moi sans diversion, sans obstacle, & où je puisse véritablement dire être ce que la nature a voulu.”
Sounds very much like a paean for the individual.
But to the point : “makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion.”
Guess he has never heard of Mohammed.
@toggle I might give your comment a like if I could read French. Could you provide a bit of translation for us, please?
Ah, the Bastille, where de Sade wrote Justine and 120 Days of Sodom, and Voltaire wrote Oedipus.
Do you know how many prisoners were there at the time it was stormed? Seven — four counterfeiters and three who were locked up by request of their families on account of being bat-scat crazy.
Facts never mattered in the French Revolution, even when they were trying to create a God from Reason.
As the MSM might say, “Why let the facts get in the way of good story?”
It does, but in a way that leaves out other persons. That’s not the kind of individualism that will stave off fascist collectivism.
True, but has everybody seen pictures/models of the fortress that was the Bastille? That th people were able to storm it is a fact of tremendous symbolism.
Also, they wanted the armaments that were stored there.
Come on! Call it “giving the devil his due”, if you want, but do not deny what is due to the French Revolution. See my Bastille Day post, “Ça Ira!”
(Not you, @arahant, I know you’ve seen it. I’m givin’ yours a Like even tho’ I don’t agree w/Jonah, just cuz I want to see people remember 7/14!)
You are a confirmed swamp creature if . . .
. . . you remember the annual Bastille Day waiters’ race in front of Dominique’s Restaurant at 19th & Pennsylvania Ave., in which tuxedoed waiters carrying a miniature French flag and tray with champagne and glasses ran to in front of the White House and back, the winner being the first to pour the champagne at the judges table.
Having thus formed the project of describing the habitual state of my soul in the strangest position ever found in a mortal, I have seen no simpler and safer way of executing this enterprise than the fidelity of my solitary walks and the reveries which fill them, when I leave my head entirely free, and my ideas follow their slope without resistance or embarrassment. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones of the day, where I am fully myself, and to myself without diversion, without obstacle, and where I can really say to be what nature wanted.
I guess the French set an outstanding example for the Progressives of today. Few are as devoted to their doctrine as the Left and their ilk.
Looks like Vectorman has not given the commercial, but obviously, this is the Quote of the Day. There are still openings on the schedule, including tomorrow. Sign up. It’s good for you. Builds strong bones and teeth. Or something.
At the risk of introducing low-brow current events and thus harshing the prevailing erudition: I read today that France just announced that she would raise her military spending to meet NATO’s 2% commitment. ;)
Best take on Bastille day: Fr. George Rutler’s Weekly Column
It may be the seasonal heat that incubates revolutionary sentiments, since both Independence Day and Bastille Day occurred in the feverish days of July. One admires the temperance of our Founding Fathers meeting in Philadelphia in un-airconditioned rooms. The other revolution unleashed more violent passions against a devout monarch who, like Charles I and later Nicholas II, inherited the consequences of less benign forebears. There were excesses in the American colonies, but pulling down the statue of George III was unlike the French actually beheading their king and queen.
Inasmuch as the “infamy” that excited the tarring and feathering by Americans was a matter of parliamentary representation and taxation, it was genteel compared to the “infâme” in Paris which meant destruction of the Christian social order. In Philadelphia, no Goddess of Reason was enthroned on the communion table of Christ Church, nor was George Washington drenched in blood when he prayed in Saint Paul’s Chapel before his inauguration. I say this not in a pejorative spirit, for I think many Frenchmen would agree with me, and I have been exhilarated by several Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, with their unsurpassed elegance, albeit absent the concomitant enormities of the Reign of Terror.
What differentiates the two revolutions, is the invocation versus the rejection of God. In one sense, the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, for it asserted the historic claims of citizens as Englishmen mantled with the protestations of the Magna Carta, which had been neglected by more recent German occupiers of the throne. My prejudices are compromised by the fact that my French paternal antecedents were compatriots with Rochambeau and Lafayette, and my English maternal ancestors in their Cheshire regiment may even have taken aim at the Massachusetts militiaman who fired the shot heard round the world.
In America, there were fanatics like Sam Adams, whose eponymous beer should be a caution to God-fearing men, and Tom Paine, who disdained religion. But many more thoughtful American patriots invoked John Locke and, with a few unmeasured exceptions, would have found zealots like the Jacobins ridiculous.
French Revolutionaries tried to substitute the Catholic Church with a mockery of it, rather like what is going on in today’s China. The Constitutional Church would have no pope and its clergy would be compliant state agents, and so forth. The Devil knows how to choreograph religious anarchy. Because Washington did not contradict divine order, he did not end up on the chopping block like Robespierre.
All of that pales in comparison with the only revolution that truly counts, for it changed the world permanently: when Christ rose from the dead, he set free vital germs of human rights, social progress, philanthropy, the philosophical matrix for science, universities, the consciousness of a Creator who made the world a channel of grace strengthened by moral order, and, finally—shown by a mercy divine—the prospect of life eternal.
Immediately, or is this a promise for 2024?
Sometimes life gets busy….
Never made it. I was always a block up the street at Bassin’s.
I have no idea. I don’t know how the French government budgeting/spending works. (Shoot, I don’t know how my government’s budgeting/spending works.)
But I understand Macron signed the increased budget yesterday. It had actually been in the works for awhile.
May I recommend the 1934 film version of “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” Raymond Massey as Citizen Chauvelin is an outstanding portrayal of a modern progressive.