A Tale of Two Revolutions

As monarchs go, Louis XVI of France wasn’t such a bad guy. He was a devout Christian who wanted to better his subjects’ lives by abolishing torture and involuntary servitude, granting “liberty of conscience” to Protestants, improving conditions in prisons and hospitals, and arguing against warrants that allowed for imprisonment without trial, among other reforms. And as acts of overthrowing naked tyranny go, the storming of the Bastille is hardly the definitive blow for liberty it’s been made out to be. At the time it was overrun, it held “only seven inmates who had been well kept,” including the “unusually disgusting” Marquis de Sade, who, with a “makeshift megaphone,” would shout lies to passersby from his window that a prisoner massacre was imminent.

These are but two historical clarifications explained in Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions, a painstakingly researched and comprehensive analysis of ideologies and personalities steering events in both. It makes clear why one gave birth to a national recognition of individual rights such as the world had never seen and the other quickly devolved into totalitarian hell.

The book is one of many by prolific author Miguel A. Faria, Jr., a retired neurosurgeon and medical journal editor, who as a boy escaped from Castro’s Cuba with his father. Having lived under the evils of communism, he has become a fierce and knowledgeable advocate for freedom. As one of the foremost defenders of the Second Amendment ( “The Perversion of Science and Medicine: Public Health and Gun Control Research,” and America, Guns, and Freedom, are among his works, and he devotes an entire chapter in this book to “The ‘Troublesome’ Second Amendment—The Right to Keep and Bear Arms”), Faria’s testimony before Congress on Centers for Disease Control bias against guns was instrumental in persuading them to cut funding for anti-gun advocacy masked as “research.”

In Contrasting Ideals, Faria not only introduces us to key “players” in both revolutions, like Maximilien Robespierre and other Reign of Terror figures like Jean-Paul Marat, whose differences with “Founding Fathers” like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson could not have been more pronounced. For rebellions that seemingly had so much in common at the outset, the goals of those driving them were antithetical.

“The American revolutionaries were nationalist patriots, who wanted independence from Great Britain and to create a new nation based on the principles of classical liberalism and Natural Rights theory,” a Cambridge Scholars Publishing synopsis explains. “Their goal was the attainment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, inherent in the God-given or Nature-derived rights of free men.”

“The French revolutionists adopted the revolutionary slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but they did not grasp the fact that the leveling of society was incompatible with liberty,” the synopsis continues. “And regarding fraternity, they did not mean the brotherhood of all men because the nobility and common citizens who did not hold the purest aims of Jacobin ideology were exterminated.”

The horrors of that extermination campaign, with key figures ultimately turning on each other (fearful of his designs for them, Robespierre’s rivals sent him to the guillotine first) are recalled in detail, and one can’t continue reading without seeing parallels to modern times and to the ideological heirs of collectivism, right down to phenomena and tactics being used by subversives today. Those include power-hungry elites bent on total control, widespread propaganda/disinformation campaigns (now known as “fake news”), provoked/manipulated self-entitled mobs ready to destroy without cause beyond ignorant covetous fury, and no shortage of useful idiots swallowing and spreading lies oblivious to the historical reality that their turn would come as soon as they’re no longer deemed useful. Equal rights do not mean equal outcomes, and fueling expectations that they do has been a keystone strategy for Jacobins, then Marxists, and now Democrats.

At 485 pages, including seven parts, 22 abundantly illustrated chapters (including a section of color plates) with an Epilogue, 11 supplemental appendices adding rich details and additional considerations to the main narrative, extensive notes, a selected bibliography and an exhaustive index, this is not a book most will breeze through quickly. That said, once started, prepare to find it hard to put down and expect to be anxious to pick it back up again and resume reading as soon as you can. Then urge your friends to read it. And contact your local library and ask them to carry it.

For more, go to the Cambridge Scholars website (cambridgescholars.com) and enter the book’s title in the search field. From there, you can read an excerpt that includes the Contents and goes well into Chapter 2. Because that’s a UK site, U.S. readers can avoid a credit card foreign currency conversion fee and order a copy of Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions by entering the title at Amazon.com.

---