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Beaucoup a été écrit et dit sur la Révolution française. C'est un événement paradigmatique de l'histoire, un moment culminant de l'avènement du monde moderne. Maintenant sur les étagères des éditions OAKS, nous trouvons un volume qui permet au lecteur d'avoir un aperçu complet de ce tournant décisif. Nous nous référons au livre d'Albert Savine, Prisons de France sous la Terreur, présenté par Giovanni Damiano (sur commande : 
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Fróði Midjord and Andrew Joyce on Edmund Burke’s classic counter-revolutionary text, Reflections on the Revolution in France. I invite you all to have a listen as Burke’s work, in particular his psychological analysis of the Left, has stood the test of time and remains uncannily insightful in the age of BLM, trans activism, antifa, and all their radical chic apologists.
Burke attacked, with great eloquence, insight, and ferocity, the basic ideas which had emerged in the eighteenth century and still govern our world today: the so-called Rights of Man. For Burke, basing political order on such abstract, ambiguous, and ever-fluctuating ideological fashions could only lead to perpetual chaos culminating yet-more-vicious governments. Instead, he prefers time-tested institutions and customs in tune with human nature.
In terms of practical politics, Burke is in fact quite moderate. One should only cautiously change one’s inherited customs and institutions, always preserving what is valuable. In general, a mixed democratic, aristocratic, and monarchic regime is preferable, but what is actually best will differ according to circumstance (even a democracy might be preferable in some instances). France’s Ancien Régime, he concedes, certainly could be improved upon and capacity for reform is always necessary: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” (21). Revolution is an option in the face of a tyrannical government, but it must be the last option, a gamble to be resorted to in exceptionally grave circumstances.
Burkean Community: An Intergenerational Compact
Burke opposes the individualist and egalitarian tendencies of the Enlightenment. His “social contract” is an organic and indeed intergenerational community:
Society is indeed a contract . . . It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures . . . (96-7)
How sublime is such a vision is as against a politics of maximizing personal choice and fictitious equality!
Society being an intergenerational compact, the current generation must treasure the customs and institutions inherited from the past, which have been patiently built up over the centuries. But let me quote Burke himself:
Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. (34)
Politicians ought to look to “the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a constitution, whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience, and an increasing public strength and national prosperity” (58). However, the revolutionaries “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men” (58).
Burke’s appeal to intergenerational and inherited wisdom also extends to the personal level in the form a striking defense of prejudice. Prejudice is a concentrate of practical and hard-won wisdom handed down from past generations:
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on their own private stock of reason . . . better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just such prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. (87)
Human Nature as the Foundation of Politics
Burke is emphatic in arguing that political institutions must hew closely to the realities of human nature. He says: “I have endeavoured through my whole life to make myself acquainted with human nature: otherwise I should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind” (137). He provocatively dismisses the Enlightenment philosophes saying he is “[i]nfluenced by the inborn feelings of my nature . . . not being illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung modern light” (74).
For Burke, political institutions must not be based on an exaggerated notion of humanity’s capacity for reason, but be carefully adapted to our sentiments: building upon religious piety and ‘irrational’ emotional investment in traditions and institutions, and being careful to not unleash the envy, frustration, and bitterness that lies in every human heart.
Burke is sensitive to the impact of both in-born human nature and upbringing and living conditions in defining men’s character. The ancient lawgivers, he says, “were sensible that the operation of this second nature [upbringing and living conditions] on the first [in-born nature] produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities among men” (185).
By contrast, the French revolutionaries refused to recognize the diversity of really existing men, but spoke only of “man” in the abstract. Burke lambasts them for being at war with human nature and destroying inherited institutions which bound society together in the name of impossible equality:
[Y]ou think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature. (49)
This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. (64)
[Y]ou ought to make a revolution in nature, and provide a new constitution for the human mind. (202)
Man may not always like his nature, but he only loses by despising and being ignorant of it:
Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. (11)
You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. (142)
The Psychology of Egalitarian Revolutionaries
Burke is particularly strong on the psychological mechanisms underlying revolutionary movements. On the moralizing abstract intellectual lacking ‘skin in the game’:
Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent. (63)
In fact, insofar revolutionaries have a vested interest, it is in stoking moral outrage:
[V]ices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. (140)
Burke sees the revolutionaries as destructively critical:
By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. (171)
A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to their posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. (33)
Paradoxically, a democracy can be more oppressive for dissenters than an autocracy:
Under a cruel prince [dissidents] have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds; they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes, are deprived of all external consolation. They seem deserted by mankind; overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species (126)
Democratic Intolerance and Revolutionary Chaos
Burke is emphatic in recognizing the intolerant nature of “the rights of man.” He rightly identifies the rights of man as a kind of declaration of war against all other epochs and societies. All eras and places are judged according to the standards of a gathering of Parisian intellectuals circa 1789, and are ever found sorely lacking. The revolutionaries can have no doubts about the righteousness of imposing their views:
They have “the rights of men.” Against these there can be prescription; against these no agreement is binding; these admit no temperament, and no compromise; any thing withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice. (58)
The upshot of this is that the rights of man are a recipe for perpetual strife and discontent. For those who believe a monarch is legitimate only if elected then “no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of princes who preceded their aera of fictitious election can be valid” (23). All inherited institutions and customs that violate contemporary moral fashions then become illegitimate and can no longer serve to stabilize and unify society.
But can the revolutionaries not build up something new? Here too, Burke thinks not, because the very revolutionary principles of equality stoke and irritate the desires of men:
[H]appiness . . . is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter the real inequality, which it never can remove . . . (37)
The French armies naturally became insubordinate and fractious, as soldiers demanded to elect their officers and felt no loyalty either to the discredited monarch nor to the Assembly upstarts.
Liberal-Egalitarian Ambiguity and Hypocrisy
The moral intolerance of egalitarian principles then leads to a chaotic radicalization and the revolutionaries one-up each other. To avoid chaos and excess, or simple violation of their interests, the revolutionaries themselves must institute limits on liberty and equality. The hereditary tax privileges attached to the nobility as individuals were abolished, but peasants still had to pay taxes for privileges attached to land, because many bourgeois were such landowners.
The right to vote was conditioned upon a wealth qualification: only men paying taxes worth three days’ labor were eligible, meaning only about 60% of French men could vote. Thus the very poor were excluded from suffrage, not to mention women and inhabitants of the French colonies. Burke snorts with sarcasm:
What! a qualification on the indefeasible right of men? (175)
You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences, and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism. (223)
Advocates of the rights of man are universally intolerant of other regimes in the name of these rights, while seeing fit to curtail these rights themselves as the situation requires.
This highlights the basic moral defensiveness of the Right and the universal fervor of the Left. We saw this even in the age of fascism. When a New York Times interviewer criticized Mussolini’s authoritarian regime, the Italian dictator wryly responded: “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.” Hitler was similarly emphatic, against those Western democrats that feared his ideology, that National Socialism was not for export. Meanwhile, the communists patiently worked according to the principle that all humanity must embrace their system and the liberals drafted documents imposing their own principles on all the nations and races of the Earth.
The liberals’ violation in practice of the rights they expound in the abstract is grounded in the very ambiguity of these rights. We cannot accuse the French revolutionaries of too much dishonesty in this respect. In fact, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is often shockingly ambiguous. The American Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” an observation that, unqualified, is a self-evident falsehood. The French Declaration’s notorious Article I affirms by contrast:
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.
One may complain that the latter sentence annihilates the former, but at least it provides a standard for how far rights should extend. In theory, then, even practices of segregation or various hierarchies could be justified if these are considered conducive to “the common good.” The revolutionaries initially did not consider that voting, for instance, was a right, but rather a duty which should only be fulfilled by those best qualified.
Similarly in Article IV’s general provision on liberty:
Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law.
What “does not harm others”? Does a 70 IQ hereditary idiot fathering 20 children “harm others”? In practice, the reality of universal interdependence annihilates the principle of individual liberty. Today, our liberal democracies regulate every aspect of life, from forcing children to spend years in State education to the hyper-regulation of economic life on redistributive, environmental, and consumer grounds, among many others. Not to mention the massive curtailment of civil liberties and micro-management of citizens’ behavior to fight coronavirus. But, for some reason, our rulers believe that demographic trends, which determine the very character of the nation, should remain wholly unregulated and random.
And Article XI on free speech:
The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law.
The principles may or may not be sound, but they are surely ambiguous and abstract. The United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights by contrast build upon an Anglo-American political and legal tradition, these posit practices (and limits upon them), not merely general principles.
One should not necessarily read too much into the 1789 Declaration. The fundamental points were fairly straightforward: hereditary privileges are abolished, the church must be relegated to a secondary role, sovereignty resides in the nation/people (whatever that means), and the law must rule rather than the king. It’s striking the degree to which later nationalism and indeed fascism took on many of these French revolutionary principles (the Italians quite openly, Mussolini after all started out as a militant socialist atheist).
The revolutionaries of 1789, essentially lawyers and liberals, dreamed of a meritocratic and moderate regime founded on reason: hereditary privileges were abolished, the king was subject to the nation’s representatives and (in theory) the rule of law, and the churchlands were nationalized to shore up government finances. This revolution was achieved partly through the boldness of the men representing the Third Estate but also by periodic and chaotic uprisings of the Paris mob against the state’s forces and even the king himself.
Burke could already see that the precedents and principles the revolutionaries had set could only lead to a chaotic situation spiraling out of control. The unifying institutions of monarchy and church had been dragged through the mud, aristocrats and pious peasants had been turned into enemies, while the hungry Parisian mob, those peasants still smarting from taxation, and the fanatical and paranoid revolutionary elements had not been turned into friends. Thus, said Burke, France could only degenerate into civil war, military dictatorship and an ignoble financial oligarchy: “Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men”! (196)
Burke lamented the end of the European aristocracy:
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. (76)
In retrospect, the conflicts of the late eighteenth century can seem rather quaint. From our vantage point, we can see that Britain, America, and France were fundamentally on near-parallel and converging trajectories.
The old constraints and disciplines – the specialization of the sexes, the separation of nations, the very idea of legitimate authority – have steadily disintegrated. Appeal to tradition and religion could no longer sustain them. For a time, from the 1860s to the 1930s or so, it seemed as though Western nations might embrace a biopolitics which, combining old philosophical and new scientific principles, would recognize natural differences and inequalities, thus preserving healthy traditions and indeed healthy progress, tending to biological and cultural perfection.
That tendency stalled and was finally annihilated. Custom, that “tyrant unto man,” has been destroyed in the name of name of the basic principle that humans, “the measure of all things,” are all basically equal and interchangeable atoms. Therefore, our ineradicable social inequalities and specializations can only be the result of our societies’ and cultures’ perversion. We must therefore wage war against our history and our societies – and above all against White men, the great malefactors of humankind.
I cannot help but think that this trend is more driven by a kind of petty self-love, vain and injured amour-propre, than by true self-knowledge, whereby each of us would, with due humility, take up with right pride our particular station in the great chain of being.
There is no telling when and how the current strife will end. On a positive note, Western man’s sensitivity to ‘justice’ as an ideal may lead to perpetual strife, but is also clearly a great source of the experimentation and dynamism which characterizes our history. In Europe, the state is smoothly leading the totalitarian march towards the mirage of equality. In America, there is chaos and neither history, nor culture, nor race, nor anything else seems to keep that great landmass-cum-economic zone together. What will be the new equilibrium and when will it arise? Will the liberals, holding true to their ideals over inconvenient facts, completely wreck their own cities? Will the regime stabilize under a Biden presidency tending towards European-style social-democracy? When will meet our Bonaparte?
Les raisons de ce relatif abandon intellectuel sont multiples : mondialisme, faiblesses intellectuelles et historiques chez la grande majorité du personnel politique et l’inventaire de la Révolution est de plus en plus connu… Cela étant, un homme situé à l’extrême gauche de l’échiquier politique républicain n’a pas hésité, tout récemment, à commettre une œuvre dans laquelle il assume se reconnaître dans l’héritage jacobin.(1)
Ancien rédacteur à la Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire et auteur d’ouvrages sur les hérésies, Pierre de Meuse s’attaque à un continent historiographique, politique et culturel immense : la Contre-Révolution. Dans Idées et doctrines de la Contre-révolution (préface de Philippe Conrad, Éditions DMM, 2019, 410 p., 23,50 €), l’ancien militant passé par l’Action Française examine à partir de nombreuses sources l’histoire et la postérité de cet univers intellectuel.
Mais en 89 Burke sent que cette fois la France ne se relèvera pas. Il en donne les raisons, avant Chateaubriand, Tocqueville, Balzac ou Bernanos : 
Such an apology and a reform (or series of reforms) the real revolutionaries mightily feared. Never had they actually sought reform of French society, whatever their claims and protestations. Instead, from the moment they began the revolution in 1789, they wanted to destroy and overturn all that opposed them and to do so utterly and completely, leaving no remnant and no possible opposition. To destroy as violently and wholly as possible, they needed to make a caricature of the aristocrat and the monarch. They needed to take the particular evils of each and make the average person believe them the universal and norm of each. Rather than examining the human condition, the true revolutionaries exaggerated its faults as manifested in the elites of society. They, Burke claimed in true Aristotelian and Thomistic fashion, redefined the thing, claiming its accidents to be its essence. Being revolutionaries, they could not create, they could only mock and pervert. Though the revolutionaries claimed to hate the violence and errors of the aristocracy, they submitted themselves to the very same evils, creating excuses for their own sins, as if necessary to expiate all of those of the past.
Pourtant, les Considérations sur la France sont bien autre chose, comme le souligne ce même Pierre Glaudes, qu'un simple pamphlet contre-révolutionnaire puisque ce texte «est aussi un essai de philosophie politique et une vaste méditation sur l'histoire, aux ambitions métaphysiques» assez évidentes, preuve que la grande et mystérieuse «illumination» (voir p. 185 de l'Introduction précédemment citée) qui au cours de l'été 1794 a modifié profondément la vision qu'avait Joseph de Maistre de la Révolution n'a pas été qu'une simple métaphore derrière laquelle, d'habitude, se cache un événement finalement banal mais qui aura pu être, pour l'intéressé, comme l'impureté autour de laquelle l'huître forme sa perle. Pierre Manent lui aussi est d'accord pour souligner l'importance du texte de Joseph de Maistre, dans lequel son célèbre providentialisme est mis à l'honneur, bien qu'il n'ait pas manqué d'opposants. Pourtant, comme Pierre Manent le remarque, «toute la pensée européenne, à la suite précisément et en conséquence de cette même révolution, allait devoir faire face à la même difficulté : si les événements ne sont pas intelligibles à partir des intentions et des actions des acteurs politiques placés dans des circonstances données, où est le principe d'intelligibilité ?» (p. 9).
Le providentialisme de Joseph de Maistre ne saurait être séparé de la théorie d'une régénération de la France par l'épreuve et le sang. L'image suivante est saisissante à ce titre : «Chaque goutte du sang de Louis XVI en coûtera des torrents à la France; quatre millions de Français, peut-être, paieront de leurs têtes le grand crime national d'une insurrection anti-religieuse et anti-sociale, couronnée par un régicide» (p. 31). C'est la Providence, donc, qui punit. Certes, elle n'a pas besoin de punir «dans le temps pour justicier ses voies» mais, précise Joseph de Maistre, «à cette époque elle se met à notre portée, et punit comme un tribunal humain» (p. 33), étant donné que «tous les monstres que la révolution a enfantés n'ont travaillé, suivant les apparences, que pour la royauté» (p. 36).
Dès lors, le châtiment doit être exemplaire, l’Église et le Roi mais aussi les croyants, eux, doivent être humiliés, tamisés et même, nous l'avons dit, émondés, avant que la contre-révolution qui, nous le savons aussi, est tout ce que l'on voudra, et d'abord le «Contraire de la Révolution», mais n'est en aucun cas une «révolution contraire» (p. 157), puisse apporter son baume sur les plaies ouvertes de la France et redonner, là encore paradoxalement, toute leur place aux hommes, qui ont été balayés par un esprit d'abstraction devenu fou (4).
Ceux-ci, dans le sillage de Sieyès, vont très vite s’affirmer « représentants de la nation ». Cela est faux : juridiquement et statutairement ils ne représentent pas la « nation » mais l’Ordre qui les a élus (la Noblesse, le Clergé ou le Tiers Etat). De fait, les trois Ordres délibèrent séparément et chaque député vote au sein de son Ordre. Celui qui représente la nation, qui incarne le Royaume, c’est le Roi (théorie des deux corps : le Royaume est un corps mystique incarné par le corps du Roi). Cependant le 15 juin, passant outre, les députés décident illégalement de la délibération en commun et du vote par tête. Le 17 juin, ils se constituent même, tout aussi illégalement, en « Assemblée nationale ». Leur objectif ? : marquer, au nom du peuple français qu’ils disent représenter, leur prééminence sur le Roi, affirmer que ce n’est plus le monarque qui incarne le Royaume mais la « représentation nationale ». Dès lors, les députés de l’Assemblée captent la légitimité pour légiférer et gouverner en lieu et place du Roi. Il s’agit véritablement d’une prise illégale de pouvoir, le corps de l’Assemblée remplaçant celui du Roi à la tête du Royaume.
Recensé : Hamit Bozarslan et Gaëlle Demelemestre, 
En France, l’identité politique des historiens de la Révolution est toujours passée au crible et leurs conclusions soupçonnées d’être biaisées par un parti pris idéologique. La polémique récente, 
Ces idées communes incarnent ce qu’il nomme « la libre pensée ». Cochin dénonce la logique nihiliste de cette esprit né des idéaux philosophiques des Lumières qui tend à déraciner les hommes en les coupant de leurs attaches traditionnelles. Elle s’attaque violemment à l’ordre ancien sans lui proposer d’alternative. Cette philosophie fondée sur un idéal d’égalité entre les individus représente pour lui une abstraction dangereuse. Quand l’ancienne société était organique, composée d’ordres et d’états, la nouvelle société jacobine, dont on voit l’avènement sous la Révolution, est caractérisée par « l’anomie ». Le peuple devient un composé « d’atomes politiques » désorganisé et affaibli. L’historien Gérard Grunberg explique : « Pour Cochin, la Révolution est davantage l’avènement d’un nouveau type de socialisation qu’une bataille sociale ou un transfert de propriété. Elle est discours plus qu’action. » Ce phénomène se concrétise en 1789, mais il est, pour Cochin, l’aboutissement d’un travail de sape amorcé autour des années 1750. « Avant la Terreur sanglante de 93, il y eut, de 1765 à 1780, dans la république des lettres, une terreur sèche, dont l’Encyclopédie fut le comité de salut public, et d’Alembert le Robespierre. » L’enjeu de ses recherches est ainsi de montrer la passerelle entre ce pouvoir intellectuel et le pouvoir politique.
Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.
Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.
This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”
En 1781, il passe en France afin de récolter des fonds pour la cause indépendantiste, puis se morfond dans la ferme que le nouvel État de New York lui a offerte pour ses bons services. En mai 1787, il propose à l’administration royale française, en grosses difficultés financières, un projet de pont métallique, qui sera réalisé en 1796, en Grande-Bretagne.
Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne, contrairement à ce que l’on dit habituellement, n’est pas l’Oradour-sur-Glane de la Vendée, c’est bien Oradour-sur-Glane qui est Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne du Limousin. 
Toegegeven, het is niet gemakkelijk de woelige tijd van de Boerenkrijg te reconstrueren. Ongetwijfeld bevatten beide voormelde thesissen een kern van waarheid. De Boerenkrijg was een georganiseerde opstand van de plattelandsbevolking tegen het Frans imperialisme. En ja, de Boerenkrijg ontstond uit spontane woede en was een verbeten wanhoopsdaad om het tij te keren. Maar eigenlijk dringt zich een derde thesis op: Dé Boerenkrijg heeft zich nooit voorgedaan!
De ware aard van deze "bevrijding" onder de leuze "vrijheid, gelijkheid, broederlijkheid" werd snel duidelijk. De "nieuwe departementen" werden systematisch geplunderd. Naast deze plunderingen - het Louvre dankt er een groot deel van haar collectie aan - waren er de belastingen; de vorderingen van graan, hooi, vee en paarden; de inkwartiering van Franse soldaten bij de bevolking; de invoering van assignaten, papieren geld dat na herhaaldelijke devaluaties niets meer waard was; de vervolging van priesters die de eed van trouw aan de republiek weigerden af te leggen; de invoering van de republikeinse kalender die de jaartelling startte op 22 september 1792 en de vloer aanveegde met de traditionele feestdagen (Van de 80 dagen waarop er niet diende gewerkt te worden tijdens het "Ancien Régime" bleven er na 1795 nog amper 40 over...).
Het is ontegensprekelijk zo dat het romantische beeld van de Boerenkrijg zoals het in de 19de eeuw is ontstaan nood had aan bijsturing. De Boerenkrijg was géén avant-première van de strijd voor Vlaamse onafhankelijkheid en was ook, in tijd en plaats, geen unieke gebeurtenis. Eerder had in onze streken onder impuls van gelijklopende motieven de Brabantse Omwenteling plaatsgevonden. Elders in Europa waren er de opstanden in de Vendée en in Süd-Tirol; de Klöppelkrieg in Luxemburg, de Chouannerie, het gewapende verzet van Charles Jacquemin de Loupoigne in Vlaams én Waals Brabant, de opstand in het departement van de Ourthe...
In fact, says Cochin, justification in terms of “public safety” or “self- defense” is an intrinsic characteristic of democratic governance, and quite independent of circumstance:
Malgré les préparatifs fébriles en vue de commémorer le 200ème anniversaire de la Révolution Française, malgré l'unanimisme des partis politiques français autour des "acquis" de 1789, un certain nombre de travaux tentent encore et toujours de cerner l'histoire de cette révolution, non d'une point de vue républicain, partisan et politicien mais d'un point de vue analytique, objectif et historique. L'ouvrage d'Elie FOURNIER, que nous évoquons ici, tente de nous expliquer ce que fut réellement, sur le plan du vécu, la Révolution française, après les brèches ouvertes ces dernières années par des historiens comme François FURET ou Pierre CHAUNU. Il ne s'agit pas de la Révolution de Paris ni de celle des membres du Club des Jacobins ni celle des "représentants du peuple" à la Convention, mais celle des peuples qui constituaient alors l'ancien royaume de France, présentement transformé en "République une et indivisible".
Une critique politique de la révolution et de l’esprit révolutionnaire est souvent à courte vue. Le phénomène de la révolution est multiforme. La révolution peut être violente comme celles de Robespierre ou de Lénine. Elle peut aussi se dérouler sans violence apparente mais bouleverser la société en profondeur. Les Canadiens parlent de « la révolution silencieuse » des années soixante où la pratique religieuse a diminué, le taux de natalité s’est effondré, la délinquance a augmenté, etc… On a bien eu dans les années 68 comme on dit en France, une sorte de révolution dans les mœurs (au sens large) qui a été reprise notamment par le parti socialiste et qui n’a pas fini d’avoir de l’influence, y compris sur la vie politique.