FRENCH REVOLUTION VS. AMERICAN REVOLUTION

For a while now, I have been wanting to delve deeper into the reasons that led up to the French and American revolutions. I also wanted to carefully examine the details of each and seek answers to questions such as, "What was the purpose behind each one?", "How were they similar?", etc. 

As I was reading into the subject with the expectation that each country revolted for the cause of “liberty and equality", to my surprise, I discovered that my expectations could not have been more wrong. When actually, the reasons that fueled each revolution were far more dissimilar than I realized. 

Os Guiness, a best selling author, stated in an interview with Dr. Albert Mohler, (Thinking in Public, June 5, 2017):

"The culture war now at its deepest roots is actually a clash between 1776, what was the American Revolution, and 1789 and heirs of the French Revolution."

The American Revolution was preceded by a Great Awakening Christian Revival, but in contrast, France's Revolution was preceded by the "eroding morals by lewd theater, brazen infidelity, and Voltaire's anti-Christian philosophy."

France had a stable monarchy from 486 AD until 1793, a little over a decade after King Louis XVI helped America gain independence. 

French revolutionaries promised the people a dream of " liberty, equality, fraternity" - fraternity being socialist order. 

"Equality" in America meant equal treatment before the law, but, in France "equality" meant everyone having an equal amount of possessions. 

In the fraternity - the socialist state - thought someone had too many possessions, it used the power of the state to take them away. 

"France's socialist agitators demanded they be tolerated by the king, but, once in power they quickly commenced a Reign of Terror with zero tolerance for those resisting the new secular state." 

"They tore down statutes, defiled churches and desecrated graves in an effort to erase France's Judeo-Christian heritage." 

"Then, with an insatiable lust, they commenced with killing off anyone associated with the older order, beheading tens of thousands. The French Revolution became the model of all subsequent bloody socialist revolutions." 

Lawless leaders opened the floodgates for lawlessness to sweep across the land, as Edmund Burke explained, 

"[The revolutionists] have found their punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid; yet the people impoverished...

everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence...

Were all these dreadful things necessary?...No!...

The fresh ruins of France...are not the devastations of civil war, they are the sad instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in the time of profound peace."

In a "fraternity" or socialist system, everyone supposedly shares equally, but the looming questions are:

• Who decides what is equal? and
• Who does the redistributing?

Inevitably, those in the position of deciding who gets what become the ruling class, a deep-state elite - an oligarchy - with the most politically opportunistic among them acting as the boss so that no one can oppose - in other words it becomes a dictatorship.  

"Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men."

After the lawless chaos of the godless French Revolution, the people were ripe for someone promising to restore order. Along came Napoleon who usurped power and ruled as a dictator.  

Regarding the Revolutions in France, British Statesmen Lord Acton wrote:

"What the French took from the American was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government - their cutting, not their sewing."

Reference

Federer, W. J. (2020). French Revolution vs. American Revolution. American Minute.