American Vs French Revolutions.

Patrick Joubert Conlon or as he calls himself ‘Born Again Redneck’ is a very active blogger and a valuable source of the more interesting things going down.

He has just put up a great post on the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, which I thoroughly recommend. Below is the start of it.

Today was Bastille Day which the French celebrate as the first day of their Revolution of 1789; their Independence Day - sort of but not quite.

Washington, Adams and Hamilton immediately realized that the French Revolt was not quite the same as our War of Independence. Even Thomas Jefferson, who was very enthusiastic about the French Revolution at first, eventually recoiled from it.

Our revolution's watch-words were "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The watch-words of the French Revolution were "liberty, equality, brotherhood." In other words, the Americans understood freedom to be an individual right while the French saw it as a collective right. In order to bring about "equality" and "brotherhood" it is an absolutely necessary requirement to sacrifice individual sovereignty for the "greater good" and that can only be achieved by coercion.

Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau died in 1778, it is his ridiculous romantic ideas of equality that inspired the French Revolution. We can thank Rousseau and the French Revolutionaries for introducing emotionalism and subjectivity.