[Cincinna]

Loved "humanity" but hated people. How typical of all these totalitarian types.

The roots of the V Republic in the Terror explain much of what is happening in France today. Mob rule.

So many innocent people were slaughtered under Robespierre. It is said that the guillotine in the Place de Revolution, now la Place de la Concorde in central Paris ran 24/7 for almost a year.

Our great American hero, Lafayette, lost his entire family to the terror. His in-laws in their 80's were marched to the guillotine and executed in the name of Liberté,Egalité,Fraternité.

[nothingnew]

For the Communists, it was a classless society; for the Nazis, racial purity; for Islamic terrorists, their interpretation of the Koran. The shared feature is that the ideal, according to its true believers, is immune from rational or moral criticism, because it determines what is reasonable and moral.

'Nuff said. Sums it up for me. It's a lot like what's going right here, right now, without the massive bloodshed.

Pinged myself for further read.

FMCDH(BITS)

[Coleus]

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: French Revolution

 

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: John Dubois

[beckett]

Robbespierre is mostly unmentionable today among polite circles on the left, although it so happens there was a book review about him just posted on Arts and Letters Daily, --- here ---, which tries to be as sympathetic as possible to the man, and the book reviewed, from what I can tell, also appears to cast him in a sympathetic light.

But although all those severed heads make it hard for the left to justify Robbespierre too well, they never tire of mentioning Rousseau, who undoubtedly would have been up to his elbows in blood right alongside his disciple had he been born a few decades later. The ideological content and temperamental disposition of both men -- if not, in Robbespierre's case, the man himself -- are still passionately defended on the left.