American Minute with Bill Federer
French Revolution - Bastille Day & Reign of Terror "liberté, égalité, fraternité"
|
|
In 1781,
27-year-old King Louis XVI of France
sent his navy and troops to help America gain independence from Britain.
In return, France gained very little, except an enormous amount of debt.
On the verge of financial collapse, France then experienced a terrible famine in 1788.
The people blamed the King.
|
|
Anti-monarchists referred to
Queen Marie Antoinette
as Madame Déficit.
According to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
when she was told the people did not have bread, her reply was:
"Let them eat cake."
|
|
On July 14, 1789, an anarchist mob went through the streets of Paris and stormed the the
Bastille Fortress
which had been used as the police prison.
The king, endeavoring to be an enlightened monarch, did not forcibly respond.
Sadly, the more he showed benevolence to the unruly rioters the more they were embolden to commit violence.
|
|
On October 5, 1789, in what started as a peaceful
Women's March
demanding bread, escalated in a mob surrounding the King's
Palace at Versailles.
The
Marquis de Lafayette
vainly attempted to moderate the crowd, who had found sympathy with disgruntled soldiers.
|
|
Finding an unguarded door, rioters barged in.
Two guards were killed, with one's head placed on a pike. The Queen fled through a secret passage to the King's chamber.
With the mob now numbering 60,000, the
King and Queen
were escorted back to Paris, where they became
captives
in the Royal residence called the
Tuileries.
|
|
On June 20, 1791, the
Royal family tried escaping
by carriage at night, and almost made it out of France, but the king's face was recognized from being on a note of French currency.
|
|
One again, they were captives in the
Tuileries.
Left-wing "Jacobin Club" agitators,
most notably
Maximilien Robespierre,
whipped the city into an anti-king frenzy.
The
Jacobin Club
drew its name from meeting on a street in Paris named "Jacob" -
Rue Saint Jacques.)
The Tuileries were stormed
August 10, 1792.
Hundreds of Swiss guards were slaughtered trying to defend the King.
|
|
Following the example
regicide
in England with the beheading of King Charles I in 1649,
France beheaded its King, Louis XVI,
on
January 21, 1793.
The
French Revolution
turned into a
Reign of Terror.
|
|
The
motto
of the
French Revolution was "liberté, égalité, fraternité,"
which stood for
liberty, equality and fraternity
--
"fraternity"
being another word for
socialism.
At issue was the mutually exclusive nature of the three words.
"Liberty"
is experienced
individually,
but
"fraternity"
is
a collective.
Without an individual having Creator–given rights,
fraternity demands a complete surrendering of an individual's liberty
to the "general will," with the deep-state governing class deciding what the "general will" is.
|
|
Also at issue was the two different ways to understand
"equality."
The
first understanding
is
equal standing before the law, equal rights,
and
equal opportunity.
The second way is for
everyone
to have an
equal amount of material possessions.
When the
second definition
is used, the
socialist fraternité
can
forcibly take possessions away
from those it thinks have
too much, accusing them of being selfish,
and
redistribute
the possessions to its supporters.
|
|
Maximilien Robespierre
led the "Committee of Public Safety," France's version of Department of Homeland Security.
|
|
He gave a speech to the National Assembly, February 5, 1794, titled
"The Terror Justified":
"Lead ... the enemies of the people by terror ... Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice."
|
|
Author Don Feder wrote in the article
"Observations and Fulminations-The French Revolution and Jacobins in Our Streets
(July 13, 2018):
"The Reign of Terror wasn’t an episode of the French Revolution, it was the Revolution. In '
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,'
historian
Simon Schama
writes,
“The terror … was not just an unfortunate side effect … it was the Revolution’s source of collective energy ... From the very beginning, violence was the motor of the revolution."
|
|
Robespierre
began accusing, arresting, and beheading:
- then the farmers and businessmen;
- then those hoarding food;
- then the religious clergy;
- then the former revolutionaries.
Over 40,000 were beheaded in Paris.
|
|
Don Feder continued:
"Slaughter in the name of the 'people,' atheism, thought police, the ruthless suppression of dissent, mass murder for ideological purity, – all started in the orgy of murder and nihilism unleashed by the furies of
Jacobinism.
|
|
... They started by killing
aristocrats
and
royalists,
then
moderates
(like the
Girondists),
then
dissidents,
then
any who had doubts,
until, finally,
an emperor
(Napoleon) with a genius for conquest
took the place of a relatively benign monarch.”
|
|
The French Revolution
initiated an intentional campaign to
separate French society from its Judeo-Christian past
and replace it with a civic religion of state worship.
|
|
Not wanting a constitution that was "Done in the year of the Lord," as the U.S. Constitution was,
the French made 1792 the new "Year One."
|
|
They did not want a
seven day week
with a
Sabbath day rest,
as this was derived from the Bible, so they devised
a ten day "decade" week,
and
ten month year.
|
|
"French Revolutionary Time" divided the day into
10 decimal hours,
with each hour consisting of
100 decimal minutes,
and each minute made up of
100 decimal seconds.
|
|
Every measurement was to be divisible by ten, as
ten
was considered the
number of man,
counting on ten fingers.
|
|
This was called
"the metric system."
|
|
The new secular government proceeded to:
- Forbid crosses as being offensive;
- Religious monuments were destroyed;
|
|
- Statues were torn down, including that of Good King Henry IV;
- Christian graves were desecrated, including that of Ste. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris who called the city to pray when Attila the Hun was attacking in 451 AD;
|
|
- Public and private worship and education outlawed;
- Priests and ministers, along with those who harbored them, were executed on sight;
- Churches were closed or used for "immoral," "lurid," "licentious," "scandalous" "depravities."
|
|
Robespierre
put a prostitute in Notre Dame Cathedral, covered her with a sheet, and called her "the goddess of reason" to be worshiped.
The Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg was turned into a
Temple of Reason.
|
|
In America,
Yale President Timothy Dwight
gave an address on July 4, 1798, tracing the origin of the
radical, left-wing Jacobin organizers,
who agitated a violent overthrow of France's government:
"About the year 1728,
Voltaire,
so celebrated for his wit and brilliancy and not less distinguished for
his hatred of Christianity
and his abandonment of principle, formed a systematical design to
destroy Christianity
and to introduce in its stead a general diffusion of
irreligion and atheism ...
|
|
... With great art and
insidiousness
the doctrines of ... Christian theology were rendered
absurd and ridiculous;
and the mind of the reader was insensibly steeled against conviction and duty ...
The
overthrow of the religious orders
in Catholic countries, a step essentially necessary to the
destruction of the religion
professed in those countries ..."
|
|
Dwight
describe further Voltaire's plan:
"... The appropriation to themselves, and their disciples, of the
places and honors of members of the French Academy
... In this way they designed to hold out themselves ... to
dictate all literary opinions
to the nation ...
The
fabrication of books
of all kinds against Christianity, especially such as excite
doubt
and generate
contempt and derision
...
|
|
... The
being of God
was
denied and ridiculed
...
The
possession of property
was pronounced
robbery.
Chastity
and natural affection were declared to be nothing more than
groundless prejudices.
Adultery, assassination, poisoning,
and other crimes of the like
infernal nature,
were taught as lawful ...
provided the end was good
...
|
|
... The
good ends
proposed ... are the
overthrow of religion, government,
and human society, civil and domestic.
These they pronounce to be
so good
that
murder, butchery, and war,
however extended and dreadful, are declared by them to be
completely justifiable."
|
|
The
anti-christian French government
sent its army to a rural, very religious Catholic area of western France called the
Vendée.
Hundreds of thousands of religious citizens
who refused to embrace secularism
were
killed
in a what is considered
the first modern genocide.
|
|
French General Francois Joseph Westermann wrote to the Committee of Public Safety stating:
"There is no more Vendée ...
|
|
... According to the orders that you gave me, I
crushed the children
under the feet of the horses,
massacred the women
who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands.
I do not have a prisoner to reproach me.
I have exterminated all."
|
|
A young French officer, named
Napoleon,
pleaded poor health in order to avoid participating in the slaughter.
|
|
In 1798, John Robison documented the ambitious plans of
anarchist Jacobin organizers
in his book,
Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe,
Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, Collected From Good Authorities
(NY: George Forman, 1798).
|
|
George W. Snyder of Fredericktown, Maryland, wrote of this book to
President George Washington,
August 22, 1798:
“To His Excellency George Washington.
Sir,—You will, I hope, not think it a presumption in a stranger, whose name, perhaps never reached your ears, to address himself to you, the Commanding General of a great Nation ...
Our present time pregnant with
the most shocking events
and calamities,
threatens ruin to our liberty
and government.
The most secret plans are in agitation;
plans calculated to ensnare the unwary, to attract the gay irreligious, and to entice even the well-disposed to combine in the general machine for
overturning all government and all religion.
It was some time since that a book fell into my hands, entitled
‘Proofs of a Conspiracy, &c. by John Robison,’
which gives a full account of a Society of Free Masons, that distinguishes itself by the name of ‘Illuminati,’
whose plan is to
overthrow all government
and
all religion,
even natural; and who endeavor to
eradicate every idea of a Supreme Being,
and distinguish man from beast by his shape only.
A thought suggested itself to me, that some of the Lodges in the United States might have caught the infection, and might co-operate with the Illuminati or the
Jacobin Club in France ...
I send you the
‘Proof of a Conspiracy,’ &c.
which I doubt not, will ... afford you matter for a train of ideas, that may operate to our national felicity."
|
|
President George Washington
replied from Mount Vernon to George W. Snyder, September 25, 1798:
“Sir, Many apologies are due to you, for my not acknowledging the receipt of your obliging favor of the 22d. Ulto, and for not thanking you, at an earlier period, for the book you had the goodness to send me.
(John Robinson's Proof of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe.)
I have heard much of the
nefarious, and dangerous plan,
and doctrines of the Illuminati, but never saw the book until you were please to send it to me.
The same causes which have prevented my acknowledging the receipt of you letter have prevented my reading the book, hitherto; namely, the multiplicity of matters which pressed upon me before, and the debilitated state in which I was left after, a severe fever had been removed.
And which allows me to add little more now, than thanks for your kind wishes and favorable sentiments, except to correct an error you have run into, of my presiding over the English Lodges in this country.
The fact is,
I preside over none,
nor have I been in one more than once or twice, within the last thirty years.
I believe notwithstanding, that none of the Lodges in this Country are contaminated with the principles ascribed to the Society of the Illuminati.
With respect, I am & c.”
(Washington, George, 1732-1799.
The Writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library)
|
|
Washington
wrote again to George W. Snyder, October 24, 1798:
“Revd Sir ... It was not my intention to doubt that, the doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of
Jacobinism
had not spread in the United States.
On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am.
The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavored to propagate the
diabolical tenets
of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation.)
That individual of them may have done it,
or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the people from their government in view,
is too evident to be questioned
...
With respect, etc.”
|
|
In 1799,
Alexander Hamilton
condemned the
French Revolution's
attempt to
overthrow Christianity:
"... (depriving) mankind of its best consolations and most animating hopes, and to make a gloomy desert of the universe ...
The praise of a
civilized world
is justly due to
Christianity;
- war, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors.
The French renounce Christianity,
and they
relapse into barbarism;
- war resumes the same
hideous and savage form
which it wore in the ages of
Gothic and Roman violence."
|
|
Hamilton
wrote further:
"Opinions ... have been gradually gaining ground, which
threaten the foundations of religion, morality, and society.
An attack was first made upon the Christian revelation,
for which natural religion was offered as the substitute.
The
Gospel was to be discarded
as a gross imposture, but the being and attributes of god, the obligations of piety, even the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments, were to be retained and cherished."
(Lodge, Henry Cabot,
The Works of Alexander Hamilton,
vol. 8, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1904, pg 425-426.)
|
|
During this time,
French privateers
ignored treaties and by 1798, had
seized nearly 300 American ships
bound for British ports.
|
|
Talleyrand,
the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, demanded
millions of dollars in bribes
to leave America's ships alone.
|
|
Talleyrand
was a master of deceitful political speech called
"obfuscation" -- intentionally being obscure,
speaking out of both sides of his mouth to as convince both sides he supported them.
Talleyrand
state:
"We were given speech to hide our thoughts."
|
|
Known as the
XYZ Affair,
the American commission of
Charles Pinckney, John Marshall
and
Elbridge Gerry
refused to pay bribes.
The cry went across America,
"Millions for defense, not a cent for tribute."
|
|
American college campuses were being infiltrated by
"decadent, ungodly and immoral Francophiles"
-- the term used to describe those fascinated with
culture, infidelity and irreligion
which was being
exported from France.
|
|
As America and France came perilously close to war, second
President John Adams
asked
George Washington,
now retired at Mount Vernon, to again be
Commander-in-Chief of the Army.
|
|
Washington
agreed, writing the year before he died, July 13, 1798:
"Satisfied ... you have ... exhausted, to the last drop, the cup of reconciliation, we can, with pure hearts,
appeal to Heaven
for the
justice of our cause;
and may confidently trust the final result to that kind
Providence
who has, heretofore, and so often, signally
favored the people of these United States
...
Feeling how incumbent it is upon
every person
...
to contribute
at all times to his
country's welfare,
and especially in a moment like the present, when
everything we hold dear and sacred is so seriously threatened,
I have finally determined to accept the commission of
Commander-in-Chief."
|
|
President Adams
declared a
Day of Fasting,
March 23, 1798, and again, March 6, 1799:
"The people of the United States are still held in jeopardy by ...
insidious acts of a foreign nation,
as well as by the
dissemination
among them of those
principles subversive to the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations
...
I hereby recommend ... a
Day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer;
|
|
... That the citizens ... call to mind our numerous offenses against the
Most High God,
confess them before
Him
with the sincerest penitence,
implore His pardoning mercy,
through the
Great Mediator and Redeemer,
for our past transgressions,
and that through the grace of
His Holy Spirit,
we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to
His righteous requisitions
...
That
He
would interpose to arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice so offensive to
Himself
and so ruinous to mankind ...
'Righteousness
exalteth a nation but
sin is a reproach to any people.'"
|
|
In retrospect, it was seen that
France's abandonment of sexual restraints
was followed by an
abandonment of societal and physical restraints,
leading to
open violence.
France's godless Revolution,
instigated by
Jacobin agitators,
became the blueprint for
subsequent socialist and communist revolutions;
that a
bloody tearing down and killing off of the old order
was
justified
as a necessary
transition
to usher in
the promised utopian paradise,
which inevitably resulted in
totalitarian dictatorships.
|
|
Best-selling author
Os Guinness
stated in an interview with Dr. Albert Mohler,
(Thinking in Public,
June 5, 2017):
"The culture war
now at its deepest roots is actually a clash between 1776, what was the
American Revolution,
and 1789 and heirs of the
French Revolution."
|
|
British Statesman
Lord Acton
wrote:
"What the
French
took from the
Americans
was their theory of
revolution,
not their theory of
government
–
their cutting, not their sewing."
|
|
President John Adams'
leadership and
call to prayer
successfully led the young nation of the United States to
avert war with France.
|
|
Where secular France pulled away from God, America experienced a religious revival called the
Second Great Awakening
which spread across country.
|
|
In contrast to the
irreligious French Revolution,
in America, religious enthusiasm spread from frontier camp meetings to college campuses.
A foreign missions movement
began, impacting the world, reaching as far away as the Caribbean, Burma, China and Hawaii.
|
|
The Second Great Awakening Revival
gave birth to organizations which promoted Biblical values, including:
- hospitals,
- prison reform,
- care for the handicapped and mentally ill,
- American Bible Society,
- Society for the Promotion of Temperance,
- Y.M.C.A. chapters,
- Salvation Army outreaches, and the
- abolitionist movement to end slavery.
|
|
Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
wjfederer@gmail.com
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
