While Light Shined Brightly in One Nation, Darkness Befell the Other by Miguel A. Faria, MD

Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (December 2024) describes and contrasts salient episodes in the American and French Revolutions, revolutions that deeply affected the history of the world and whose impacts reverberate to the present age.

Even though some politicians and historians in America and Europe have likened the American and French Revolutions to each other, those two landmark events in world history developed differently and ultimately were as dissimilar to one another as the men who forged them. But politicians never miss the occasion to congratulate each other and use photo up opportunities to celebrate the two revolutions with historical fanfare at every opportunity.

The Bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution in the United States in 1989, for example, was one such occasion. Never mind the American revolutionists were nationalist revolutionaries who pursued primarily independence from Great Britain and then established a new nation based on the salient principles of Natural Rights theory, influenced by men like John Locke (1632–1704) and Baron Montesquieu (1689–1755).

Edmund Burke (1729–1797), one of the founders of the modern conservative movement was a leading Whig politician and a model classical liberal, who later parted ways with his former Whig liberal confreres, including his long-time friend Charles James Fox (1749–1806), over the radicalism of the French Revolution, which Fox supported. And yet, Burke recognized the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. While condemning the French revolutionist radicals, Burke supported the colonists and American independence. He recognized the difference in the course each revolution was taking. He sided with the Americans. He noted that the ideals and goals of the American Revolution were freedom and independence; for the French, they were violence and authoritarianism, despite their slogans seemingly to the contrary.

The goal of the American patriots was the attainment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. inherent in the God-given or Nature-derived fundamental rights of men that were not created by government but only protected by the state with a written constitution. The American revolutionists, therefore, did not seek to overturn the basic institutions of society or turn the world upside down, as eventually the French revolutionists did when they committed mass murder, destroyed churches, desecrated tombs, and even renamed the months of the year and created a new revolutionary calendar.

The French adopted the revolutionary slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (liberty, equality, and fraternity), but they did not grasp the fact that coerced equality of results was incompatible with liberty. And regarding fraternity, they did not mean the brotherhood of all men. The nobility was exterminated outright as well as all other purported enemies of the revolution. Insurrectionists who did not serve the purist Jacobin ideology and did not fight with vigor toward that cause were likewise serially liquidated.

As I related in one of the many sanguinary pages of the book:

Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756–1794) became the murderer of Nantes (Brittany). Carrier orchestrated the grisly noyades (“execution by drowning”) in the Loire, the longest river in France, to speed up the destruction of the purported “enemies of the Revolution” since he deemed trial to be a waste of time. Barges were loaded first with priests and taken to the middle of the Loire and scuttled. Naked men and women were bound together in what Carrier called ‘Republican marriages,” and placed aboard the barges. Their children were included because ‘Wolflings grow to be wolves.’ The barges were then towed to the middle of the river and the victims were thrown overboard. Those who tried to cling to the boats had their hands or fingers cut off with swords by the revolutionary thugs. In this manner, Carrier ‘disposed of some four thousand undesirables in four months.’ The total number of deaths by the noyades was estimated to be in excess of six thousand victims, according to a member of Carrier’s committee.

Thus, the touted slogan, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité of the French revolutionists literally ended in rivers of blood, as people were drowned by the thousands and heads fell under the guillotine by the tens of thousands. Sadly, as the book shows, the distant echoes of the French Revolution continue to resound and reverberate through the ages.

A century and one quarter later the French Revolution inspired the destructive Russian Revolution of 1917 with its communist aftermath and legacy of suffering and death. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels studied the French Revolution, hoping that a truly communist revolution would exceed it. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky reveled in their achievement, recognizing some French revolutionists, particularly Maximilien Robespierre, as mentors.

Shortly after the October Revolution, Lenin raised a monument to Robespierre close to the Kremlin walls in Moscow and signed a decree describing the Jacobin leader as a ‘Bolshevik avant la lettre’—that is, a Bolshevik before the word existed. Joseph Stalin also applied a tactic Robespierre utilized by presiding over endless purges and reigns of terror. The rest is history as encapsulated in my previous book, Stalin, Mao, Communism, and the 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China.

Suffice to say, the American republic has endured for nearly two and a half centuries by upholding the U.S. Constitution, its laws, ideals and traditions; but like the French republics, it is subject to disorder and decay.  As the history of the great empires—such as the French, German, and Russian—demonstrated in the 18th and 20th centuries, civilization is only one generation away from disorder, turbulence, and savagery. Therefore, each generation must remain well informed and vigilant and must be willing to defend its freedoms anew. I hope Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions will serve this purpose towards the end of preserving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for at least most of mankind.

This article is excerpted from Dr. Faria’s new book Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions.

Dr. Miguel A. Faria is Associate Editor in Chief in neuropsychiatry; and socioeconomics, politics, and world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is the author of numerous books, the most recent, Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and Espionage (July 2023); Stalin, Mao, Communism, and the 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China (2024); and Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (December 2024)—the last four books by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.

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