I was genuinely surprised to learn that De Maistre, the terrible defender of ancien Europe and monarchy, never doubted the need for reform. He wanted to convene the estates, and address the needs of the commons. But he was so horrified by the attack on all levels of society from the minds and pens of men like St. Just–all committed Rousseauists every one of them– that he decided the revolutionary ideal was a nemesis sent by God to scourge the athiestic nobility.
The guillotines were fed by those who had rushed to welcome every new idea that undermined the old order. Only if I accept a fable about the revolution and ignore the weight of historical fact and experience can I consider it a worker’s revolution or a revolt of the people as better equipped theorists in America and Europe invoked in later centuries.
I hear many invocations of freedom, justice, equality, but precious little informed historical data, as in the lived facts of human experience. The Glorious Revolution birthed many ideas spreading in a firestorm over the world.
The Glorious Revolution also led to the eruption of iconoclasm and the invasion of Ireland. Perhaps these aren’t so bad if you are a Cambridge man, but despite my documented antipathy to the Church, I would never burn down a Catholic sanctuary full of saints and paintings. The response would be that I identify with the elite, that I idolize the lures and vanities of the landed gentry too much to empathize with the people.
I appeal to something set above rationality to say that anyone who can burn a beautiful painting will also burn human beings. A good Protestant makes the best candidate for a sudden uprush of “pagan hysteria”. Just look at what Thatcher got up to in her attic bound existence.
I am heartened that more self proclaimed socialists are turning to the tradition of Luxemburg and Debs which rejected the Bolshevik notion of the vanguard. Millennial would-be radicals would also be well-advised to emulate the sharpness of their forebears rational approach to problems of power and wealth distribution, which means putting the close reading of history at the heart of political action.
It’s no rave, picnic or revival meeting. No American will change anything without taking up the hard work of making more accurate statements about the state we’ve inherited.