“The reason we didn’t have guillotines was because ignorant mobs filled with blood lust didn’t run our revolution.”
But that is exactly what I am saying! Our revolution was run by landed, well-read, smart men. The French revolution was run by starving, ignorant, peasants. You and I agree on the reasons that our revolution was better both in the final government that resulted and in the lack of retribution.
But please don’t let you hatred of the French peasantry excuse the French aristocracy. We are all aware of how violent the revolution was, but perhaps you are not aware of hot violent the French aristocracy was prior to the revolution. They killed tens of thousands of peasants before the peasants killed tens of thousands of the aristocracy. (There were other peasant revolts leading up to 1790, and those were put down with as much brutality as the peasants later demonstrated.)
Most of the people that were killed by the French Revolutionaries were peasants not aristocrats. (The king did not kill those peasants, the revolutionaries killed them.) Proportionally, the clerics of the Catholic Church suffered the most, but the total number of the clergy in France were relatively small (about 10,000 or so) compared to the slaughter inflicted upon the peasants by the revolutionaries. Heck, that doesn't even get to the purges, when the French Revolutionary leaders started executing, their fellow revolutionary leaders to get rid of their revolutionary rivals.
If the aristocracy was so bad, and the French revolutionaries were so good then why did the French Revolutionaries have to kill hundreds of thousands of French in the Vendée? The truth is that most of the French still respected the king before and during the revolution. That is why he was not killed in 1789. Instead of getting rid of the king in 1789, the French created a constitutional monarchy until 1793. It is not until Louis tried to flee from France that the more radical forces in the National Assembly finally had an excuse to justify killing the king to the people. (There is ample evidence that the king's execution was not for criminal reasons but because of political concerns.) Almost half of the National Assembly wanted Louis to live which doesn't make him sound like too much of tyrant.)
So to recap the French Revolutionary spirit: Mass murder of peasants, purges of fellow members of the national assembly, murder of fellow revolutionaries once power was obtained, show trials with forgone verdicts, attack on the Church and a decade of dechristianization, laws against crosses in public and wearing cassocks, and more. The French Revolution has more in common with the Bolshevik Revolution than it does with the American Revolution. Even the revolutionaries themselves said that they wanted to rule by "reason" and "terror".
By the way, though many of the Founding Father's of the US had been sympathetic to the French Revolution at first, once when they realized what the French revolutionaries were doing even they recoiled from it and condemned it.
It's not just the French with me.
I've never found a group of mass murderers that I admired. Not Stalin, or Hitler, the French Revolutionaries, Pol Pot, Tutsi killing Hutu and vice/versa, North Korean starvation, Chinese kill-offs, Russian starvations - the whole murder of innocents doesn't work for me. Especially in a country like France - that theoretically was supposedly somewhat modern.
The principles defining our culture caused us to chose the type of men who lead our American revolution.
It was the same in France. They chose their leaders - their leaders chose the way of the mob. Ours didn't.
Liberal democrats in 'Occupy Wall Street are choosing the way of the mob - like the French peasants did. Liberal elites want to rouse the rabble - have violence in the streets - Bill Ayers type blood lust. The Tea Party would never start a fight with police hoping to cause a riot. Liberals did it this week.
The Occupy Wall Street liberals charged the police trying to get them to overreact...they WANTED a riot. Modern day liberals are the philosophical children of the French killer mobs. And yeah, they would do the same here if they could, but our traditions are strong - and we can hold the mob off... Something Europe might not be able to do - thanks to the romanticizing of the French mass murderers.