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Thanks for the ping! We have seen this one before, I think, on 26 March. Since that time I have been reading Yuval Levin's The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, which I strongly recommend. Paine had his own input on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and like Lafayette, it nearly cost him his head. That tends to happen a lot when radicals fall into doctrinal squabbles.

That book proposes a model that you and I have discussed before: Paine's concept of a structure of government based on immutable rights and Burke's of a more organic growth that respects traditions despite their obvious flaws. Those two interpretations of government came to a titanic clash in the French Revolution and the result was, first madness and murder, then a strongman and order, then that strongman attempting to conquer the world, and then a rather unsatisfactory return to a more controlled monarchy that was Lafayette's conception in the beginning. That was not unprecedented - the English civil wars ended up following a very similar arc a century before that and provided a historical template for Burke's thought.

And then it happened again in 1917-23 in Russia. What happened, from a Burkean perspective, was that theory ran afoul of custom and tradition, only that time there was no return to any semblance of what went before (unless you try to fit the events of 1991 into that mold, and it may be too soon go judge that one). These appear to me to be structural problems with revolution in general.

Enough of that for now. I look forward to the next installment.

The French Revolution, for all its professed antipathy toward absolutism, was absolutist to the core. Its end goal was the complete destruction of the ancien regime. No consideration given to those institutions and values that had proven useful and valuable over time. Everything had to go. Even the calendar and the language had to change.

Ironically, in rejecting the abolutism of monarchy, all the revolutionaries did was replace it with far more bloodthirsty absolutists.

The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew the Czar and replaced him with the Terror of Joe Stalin.