The French Revolution Never Ended

Coming to a Drop Box near you.

When Lafayette joined the American Revolution, the French Revolution hadn't happened yet.

The year was 1776, the date was December 7, a date which reappeared in American History in 1941, as Pearl Harbor Day.

On that date in 1776, the young marquis named Gilbert became a major general in the Continental Army of the new nation which had declared independence earlier that year, on July 4.

The young general, back then, was no leftist, because there was no such thing as a leftist.

But to tell the story, we must hear the backstory first, and that can be said to begin three years earlier, in 1773, when Lafayette was a teenager getting engaged to the daughter of a French duke.

Across the wide Atlantic, a loosely organized bunch of men in the British Colonies began to use the slogan, "No Taxation without Representation."

They called themselves the Sons of Liberty, and they were organizing to protest the policy of the British King George III to milk the colonists for cash with a tax stamp law and a tea tax.

The Sons of Liberty thought that the taxation deserved nothing less than an insurrection, and an insurrection is what George III got:

Cosplaying as indigenous people, the outraged colonists chucked a valuable tea shipment into the harbor on December 16, 1773. Yes, Boston Harbor, and yes, the event got the name the Boston Tea Party.

(Side note: there are some politicians who claim that insurrections are un-American. Such politicians never met a Son of Liberty, because they had all died long ago.)

The protests against monarchy escalated in the USA, leading to the 1776 Declaration and the recruitment of the young Lafayette as a military officer.

Now let's temporarily fast forward to July 14, 1789, when another insurrection took place, this time in Paris, when disgruntled non-aristocrats stormed the Bastille prison.

A month earlier, a parliament had been created called the National Assembly, and the Left came into existence:

> The terms "left" and "right" appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: "We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp."

As things escalated in France and the Left soon spun out of control leading to horrific atrocities, much of the world tried to distance itself from the French Revolution. That, of course, included many or most Americans, who saw the Revolution as France's problem.

But, in my opinion, the French Revolution followed America across the Atlantic as wave after wave of bloodthirsty "Leftists" infiltrated American politics until we now have what we have in an upcoming general election of 2022.

There is now even a claim that all "Leftists" are bad, and only the "Right" is capable of decency and political rationality.

There are even factions which claim that the USA, which had no monarchy since 1776, needs one now.

Are they right?

I say not.

More about that later.