Demonic (23 page)

The Declaration was written on behalf of the thirteen colonies unanimously and signed by each member of the Continental Congress, name by name, beginning with the famously supersized signature of John Hancock. These weren’t anonymous brutes chopping off the breasts of princesses in pursuit of “fraternity” or some other amorphous concept.

Our revolutionary document was inspired by God—as put by John Adams, a signatory and second president of the United States. He said,
“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
²⁹

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was inspired by a paranoid hypochondriac who denied divine revelation and original sin: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The very logic and clarity of the Declaration of Independence were qualities specifically rejected by Rousseau. “One of the errors of our age,” Rousseau said, “is to use reason in bare form, as if men were only mind.” Yes, much better to fire up a crowd with emotional appeals. Thus, Rousseau recommended using “signs that speak to the imagination,” complaining that words make too weak an impression. “[O]ne speaks to the heart far better,” he said, “through the eyes than through the ears.”
³⁰

This is the essence of how one riles up a mob—by using images, not words. (Republicans drove the car into a ditch.) Rousseau perfectly describes the governing strategy of all mob leaders, from Robespierre to Fidel Castro to today’s Democratic Party.

The mob’s revolutionary document, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is precisely what one would expect from people who prefer images to logic. The document enumerates lots of abstract principles without ever coming to what used to be known as “a point.” It doesn’t assert any God-given rights, but merely announces that the Declaration is being issued “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.”

Not surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson is said to have had a hand in it, but this time, without the sobering influence of John Adams and the rest of the Continental Congress’s drafting committee. (The committee deleted nearly 500 of Jefferson’s words, made dozens of other changes, and added numerous references to God.)
³¹

The coming bloodshed in France should have been obvious from the title, Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen
. In other words, the document addressed your natural rights as an individual
 … and your duties to the government
.

From the very first sentence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man
swerves off the rails from the ideas of the Declaration of Independence by stating that “the sole causes of public miseries and the corruption of governments” are “ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man.”

You could ask every signatory to the Declaration of Independence—indeed, you could probably poll every colonial American—and not one would have said the problem with King George was that the rights of man had slipped his mind. Rather, our founding fathers believed—as Madison wrote in
Federalist 10
—that men are more likely to oppress another than to “co-operate for their common good.” In particular, he said the power to tax created the greatest temptation to “trample on the rules of justice,” because increasing someone else’s taxes “is a shilling saved to their own pockets.”
³²

According to the French, King George was disregarding the rights of man. But according to Madison, he was merely following “the nature of man.”

That’s why, in our Declaration, the founding fathers cited the only authority even higher than a king. The French reeled off a series of airy “rights” that could as easily have been any other random collection of rights. A sensible reader of the French Declaration might ask, Says who?

The only demand in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which is really more of a suggestion, is that “members of the social body” compare executive and legislative acts to the principles stated in the Declaration. Or not. Whatever.

The National Assembly that drafted the French Declaration never says what it wants changed exactly, except by implication. There are, for example, assertions that all citizens should be treated equally, suggesting that they were not already being treated equally, and the demand that no one “be accused, arrested, nor detained but in the cases determined by the law,” suggesting that some men had been accused, arrested, or detained outside of the law. But who, when, or how—or what the Assembly had done about it—is left to conjecture.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen announces a slew of abstract “rights” of the sort we have come to associate with all bloodthirsty dictatorships. For example, the Declaration proclaims:

“Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others.”

“Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society.”

“No one may be questioned about his opinions, including his religious views, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.”

“[A] common contribution is indispensable; it must be equally distributed between all the citizens, by reason of their ability to pay.”

This mishmash of English natural rights doctrine and Rousseauian argle-bargle was ignored ten minutes later, when the Assembly voted to confiscate church lands, decreed that the pope’s authority was null and void throughout France, and demanded that all priests take an oath to the state-controlled civil constitution of the clergy.

As a tribute to its success, just three days after the completion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the mob stormed the Bastille.

Practically overnight, the greatest nation in continental Europe became a human abattoir. That is why the French Revolution remains an inspiration to liberals everywhere. France’s revolution-by-mob would be imitated in Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere, always with the same bloody consequences. With less success—so far—mob action is the governing strategy of our own Democratic Party.

This is why the British philosopher Edmund Burke—who had been a staunch supporter of the American Revolution—denounced the French Revolution even before the guillotining began. Presciently, Burke wrote in 1789 that the “old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true this may be no more than a sudden explosion.… But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them.”
³³

Similarly, Americans didn’t recognize the French Revolution as bearing any relationship to their own revolution against a king.

Consider the fate of the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. The wealthy and titled Lafayette came to
America to fight for independence, serving with distinction under General George Washington. Lafayette was so important to the American cause that dozens of U.S. cities, towns, parks, and streets across the nation are named after him. When he was buried in Paris, dirt carried from Bunker Hill was sprinkled on his coffin, and an American flag has flown at his grave ever since.

Lafayette began as a supporter of the French Revolution, foolishly imagining that it would proceed along the lines of the American Revolution. In the summer of 1789, he joined the National Assembly, the populist outgrowth from the class-based Estates General. It was Lafayette, the National Assembly’s vice president, who presented the soon-to-be-ignored Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Assembly.

But for the next three years, Lafayette commanded the French National Guard in a losing battle against the lunatic Jacobin mobs. In the summer of 1792, he was declared a “traitor,” subject to immediate execution, whereupon he fled France just ahead of the guillotine.

Apart from Lafayette, the only prominent supporter of the American Revolution to sign on with the mob revolt of the French was Thomas Paine, who was not born in America and perhaps never fully understood its philosophical underpinnings. (Even the French revolutionaries grasped this, refusing the request of an American delegation to release Paine from prison on the grounds that Paine was not an American but an Englishman.)
³⁴
Paine hit his peak with the American Revolution, but got bored after the war was won, crossed the ocean to France, and leapt into the middle of a much less noble endeavor. He was a historical one-hit wonder, desperately trying to find that follow-up single that would put him back on top.

Paine justified the insanity of the French Revolution with the argument that all royalty was bad and therefore any alternative was better. When the French revolutionaries threw him in prison, Paine found out there were some political systems worse than a monarchy.

In so little esteem did Americans hold mob action, particularly the atheistic French mob, that when Thomas Paine returned from participating in the French Revolution, he was universally reviled, his name written on the bottom of people’s shoes to indicate their disdain. Paine’s
only American defender was, of course, Thomas Jefferson, mob sympathizer and father of the Democratic Party.

The French Revolution was spontaneous, impulsive, passionate, emotional, romantic, utopian, resentful, angry, dreamy—anything but rule-bound and reasoned. No one knew, from one year to the next, where the Revolution was heading. That’s why, at the end of it all, they enthusiastically threw themselves into the arms of the dictator Napoleon.

By contrast, Americans concluded their revolution with a Constitution, meaning we have agreed rules, baselines, and standards, as well as continuity, stability, and legal reasoning.

Indeed, it was a mob uprising after the Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, that propelled Americans to abandon the Articles of Confederation and create a strong national government capable of suppressing mobs. Shays’ Rebellion was instigated by Daniel Shays and other poor farmers and debtors in Massachusetts, who couldn’t pay the taxes being levied to pay for the war. They were a motley rabble, attacking debtors’ courts and armories.

Not only aristocrats but “lowly farmers” as well were terrified by Shays’ Rebellion and driven to support a national government that would have the power to protect their rights against the mob. In his introduction to the
Federalist Papers
, Isaac Kramnick cites an “obscure farmer,” Jonathan Smith, arguing in favor of the Constitution purely as a response to Shays’ Rebellion:

People I say took up arms, and then, if you went to speak to them, you had the musket of death presented to your breast. They would rob you of your property; Threaten to burn your houses; oblige you to be on your guard day and night … poor persons were set in the front, to be killed by their own friends. How dreadful. How distressing was this. Our distress was so great that we should have been glad to snatch at anything that looked like a government. Had any person that was able to protect us, come up and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had been a monarch, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant. So that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny, and better have one tyrant than so many at once. But the new Constitution is our cure.
³⁵

The
Federalist Papers
, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to make the case for a national Constitution, are brimming with warnings against mobs. In
Federalist 9
, Alexander Hamilton cites with contempt the “tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage” that periodically swept through Greece and Italy. Even in peaceful times, he said, one feels regret over the certainty that “the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed” with angry mobs.
³⁶

Hamilton assured Americans that their new Constitution would incorporate “wholly new discoveries” in the science of government able “to suppress faction and to guard the internal tranquility of States.” He denounced the flimsy Articles of Confederacy precisely because they created “tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord.”
³⁷
By creating “an assemblage of societies,” the Constitution would calm the unruly crowds. Under the Constitution, should “a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states,” Hamilton said, “the others are able to quell it.”
³⁸

Clearly, the framers recognized how bad mobs were and created a government designed to squelch them. James Madison dedicated
Federalist 10
to explaining how the Constitution would cure the “dangerous vice” of factions, or what we might call “special interests.” Democracies were threatened, he said, by groups of people “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion,” opposed “to the rights of other citizens” or the “interests of the community.” Madison complained of the propensity of democracies to become “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” unable to safeguard either property rights or personal security.

Because democracies were generally unable to control mobs—or factions, as Madison called them—they have been “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Pure democracy, even in the hands of “enlightened statesmen,” was no good because, as Madison said in
Federalist 55
, even if every Athenian had been a Socrates, “the Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
³⁹