29. The Continental Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 is the archetypal "revolution" that invoked by the story of revolution. The story of revolution, as any student of history can tell, bears little resemblance to the actual events in France between 1789 and 1799, where and when the doctrines of the revolution were put into action, tested, and revised during the moment as the needs of the actors involved changed. The revolution showed planned theories and actions, organized coups, and the establishment of not just a new idea but the implementation of the first modern nation-state and the organizational imperatives of nationalism. It also showed that the world did very unusual things as a result of these actions and the actions of the counter-revolutionaries, and the theories of the day from the intellectuals did not match the results on the ground, or the awakened beast in the lower classes who made their interests known, and saw their interests defeated within the revolutionary events. For the people, the revolution was a dismal failure, and yet its legacy made clear that the world would never be the same, and there would be no return to the old order of classes or old assumptions of human nature divided between the ineducable peasants and those with political education. Every ruling program after the revolution accounted for something that was scarcely relevant to any past ruler: the thoughts, deeds, ethos, and daily life of the common people, who either could easily enter the civic life of the nation on their own terms, or had to be actively suppressed to quash that idea. In another time, the peasants had no authority or path to authority regarding the political matter, and such a thing was not pined for. Afterwards, the ruling order would never be so lax regarding the peasants. They were either to be integrated into the civic life of the nation with all of the political rights required of a citizen, or they were to be invaded, crushed, and their bodies mutilated to conform to the conservative order's wishes.

By now, histories of the American Revolution have been entirely rewritten by all interested parties for a very special reason relating to the present global struggle, for such a thing is not welcome in the world to come. The same is not true of the French Revolution, for their interested parties were either defeated or they persist as a force within European and global society up to now that cannot be silenced. The key difference in the French Revolution that became the reason why the revolution became the ur-example of revolutionary narratives is nationalism. There was no hint of an American "nation" before 1776, and little reason to believe any nation had been born by any written document. French nationalism and its precursors arise because the men and women involved were for many centuries a distinguishable nation with little suggesting that they belonged to some other identifiable group. The region corresponding to the modern state of France is distinguished as far back as the Roman imperium as the province of Gaul, and retained distinction ever since the territory entered the imperial contest as a recognizable population group. The future domain of the Franks was distinguished from the Germans due to Romanization, even when both the French and German domains lived under the same empire during the Middle Ages. A longer history of France is unnecessary, but over time the Kingdom of France formed and remained as such until the onset of revolution. The later phases of the ancien regime saw both centralization of authority in the person of the king, established as a formal doctrine and policy under Louis XIV, and the rise of capitalist activity and the cities of modern France. Unlike America which was a frontier country with few large cities and no "bourgeois" as such, the rising class and interests in France were the town-dwellers and city centers, from which the terminology bourgeois enters the global lexicon. Far from the tension between old peasants and urban interests that prevailed in England and was transplanted (erroneously) onto the American situation, the inhabitants of the cities would attain education and standing in the imperial bureaucracy of France, and the version of despotism favored by the late Kings saw the interests of these urban nobles as more worthwhile than the old feudal claims. The stake of the older warrior nobility, or "sword" nobility, was tied to the favorable offices they held in the military and the necessity of the commoners and new nobles, called the "robe" nobility, to remain suppressed and inferior. When the cities of France rise, the interests of each city would seek independence not on the basis of feudal privileges or the contest of petty lords, but the bourgeois of most of the cities resenting the regime in Paris, which would during the Revolution be an extremely left-wing government compared to the moderate Federalists. There was of course not a "left" wing of anything until the distinction arose during the French Revolution, but this distinction should be remembered in part as a distinction between bourgeois groups that came from the same class background and held similar interests, rather than identification with or affinity with the aristocratic and noble order or any particular position regarding the Church. The resurgence of the nobility's interests and the rise of Europe's conservative order should not be lazily conflated with a "right wing" serving as the antithesis of the leftist revolutionaries (or, as the lazier histories write, the conservative thesis to the unwarranted and unprovoked historical anomaly of "leftism"). What became the conservative order of 19th century Europe is a much fouler beast that is at first a creature of happenstance with no worthwhile "theory" or historical basis, until it could adopt its own program. That program is, in various recapitulations, the very "Retarded Ideology" I have written about here. This story, from which associations with the word "conservative" or "leftist" are made, leads to significant confusion of the interested parties at work in politics or the ideas presented by those parties, and rather than me inventing new terminology and a new narrative to carve "liberal conservatives" away from the continental "conservative order", I find it more useful to describe the core ethos and doctrine of the aristocratic conservative order for what it actually was, and allow the reader to draw distinctions between it and the position of bourgeois conservatives like Edmund Burke in Great Britain. These definitions are muddled further when the ideologies of the 19th metastasize into "neo-reaction" of the late 19th century, which begins a new phase of world history leading to tragic consequences for all of us. Ultimately, I hope the reader remembers that each of these persons advanced the ideas they advanced and did what they did for their own purposes and legacies, rather than reducing themselves to mere tools of history to be furnished for a world-historical purpose. If the reader can do that and sort through the interested factions and powers that existed at the time, they can find a much more useful understanding of the great Revolutions of history than the one the grand narrative theory prescribes.

It is not my objective here to rewrite thoroughly a history of the revolution to say what you should believe, but it is important to mention this as I summarize the situation that began with the revolution and has remained in the world ever since. The French Revolution was "the revolution" in a real sense. The stories and narratives attributed to revolution have a real origin, and it in this place that "the revolution" most resembles the phraseology of revolution utilized in all others. If we wish to make broad judgments about history, the French Revolution is perhaps the only revolution to be "a revolution" in the sense that term is invoked. The revolutions in the Americas did not involve an overturning of a longstanding historical order, but were instead the local elites of colonies asserting authority over those colonies that was already invested in them, or that was captured by the local elites who were challenged by nothing in particular. The great exception is the Haitian Revolution which ties into the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution was a slave revolt—notably the only slave revolt in human history to succeed at establishing a state of affairs where slavery was abolished. The Russian Revolution was the result of an acute war crisis and then a civil war won by the Bolshevik party only after a protracted struggle, where the Party's hold on authority remained tenuous and the type of rule the Party represented being something far removed from anything in the politics textbooks. Since that type of polity is scarcely mentioned even to this day in the political textbooks of our time, and such polities are the topic of the next book in this series, it is sufficient to say that the narrative of revolution came into vogue precisely at the time that "revolution" of the sort that happened in France was a political and material impossibility. The Russian Revolution and the particular program of the Bolsheviks was a real one, and one that had to permit some notion of democratic society and a democratic basis for the organ of the Party to exist. It is also, as a "narrative revolution" something very different from the conditions of France, where a nation that was already centralized under the absolute government of a single sovereign became a constitutional monarchy functioning as a republic, then a republic proper, and then a wartime emergency government that brought most of Europe under its boot and introduced the world to the true power and presence of a thing called "modernity". The Russian Revolution, if it has any other revolution to look back to, only has the American Revolution as something similar, in which a union of states comprised of many nations are united by an economic program and ambition to bring the world into that program, and the new republic ruled over a large landmass and pursued immediately a program of expansionism and consolidation. For Russia, this meant consolidating its domains in the east, incorporating territories close to its historical nemesis Turkey like the "stan" countries, and exporting the revolution to the west where communist insurgents saw their mission as both liberation and civilization. Further, the greater ambition of the world communist movement was to bring the whole of the colonial countries into the communist orbit, and so the reach of communism and thus the Party's objective extended to all of Asia. This though is a very poor comparison, for the domains the Soviet Union incorporated or wanted to incorporate were either Old World cultures that were familiar to the Russians that already raised communist parties, and the position of the colonial countries in the early to middle 20th century was a wholly different situation than anything the colonized faced under the earlier imperialism or trading companies. The Russian Revolution, or the revolution of global communism, is something more than a "revolutionary story", and perhaps greater than the most exalted retelling of the revolutionary period by the communists around the world, which is saying a lot. The revolution of the communists is, from my vantage point, the great event in world history humanity should look to in its own right for what it was, and so singular was the call in 1917 in human history that it is the highest imperative of liars and the dishonest to negate the existence of such a call, and substitute what really happened in Russia with a convenient story that pleased the favored of the inheritors and vaporized the great toil and suffering that precipitated the revolution and that the revolution entailed if it was to mean anything. I would also dare say that the revolution of 1917 was only a revolution in the sense that a government was overthrown in Russia as expected, and the true nature of the events surrounding the rise of the Bolsheviks were the opening stage of the true war of human history—the beginning of what may be called "The Eternal War". That war is in my estimation the great war of Eugenics against the world, for it would be the eugenists that instigate the Great War of 1914, the numerous events that set the groundwork to drive Europe to war during the preceding decades whose origin in my estimation is the closure of the American Civil War of 1865, and the eugenists who push every terrible idea, every democide, and every compromising position that told the people of the world to sacrifice more and deny themselves any fruit of their supposed freedom. This applied within the communist world, but it applied even more so to the imperial countries where the engine of total war would be fomented for the foulest purposes, and whose populations would be subjected to a regimentation and splitting of the mind that has left the human race permanently stunted and incapable of ending "The Eternal War", even though this stupid war never should have had to happen. During the period of communist ascendancy, the most horrible pigheaded stupidity would grip the political classes of all nations, leading them to make poor decisions to defend bad ideas while ignoring any indicator from the masses and society suggesting something was very, very wrong with the narratives that were produced during the 20th century. I do not want to dwell on the 20th century for too long here, for a better recounting of this is only possible by describing the technocratic polity, or the type of government that was ostensibly the future of the world, whose interested parties claimed what was due to them and faced no serious opposition but who never could say they won anything or realized what was promised. One difficulty that plagued the thinking of 20th century political writers and social commentators is a failure to understand the French Revolution of 1789, and then transposing an already faulty understanding onto a condition of humanity very different from that the Frenchmen and their opponents knew in their time. Historians could identify nationalism, democracy, liberalism, new economic thought, new technology, the new basis for armies and tactics, and what the revolutionary regime was in its context. They usually did not have a solid basis for knowing why the revolution happened, what motivated the men and women who were part of this event, or how it went to the extreme period of de-Christianization and the vanguard of cruel events that marked the period of the Jacobins. When the extremists of the French revolution are mentioned, they are dismissed as radical agitators conjured by some dark magic or conspiracy, whose message of strident and violent atheism was a sudden aberration of history that wasn't going to matter for serious or real politics. It was difficult then and now for the political mind to grasp that de-Christianization and the positions of the enragés were reactions to something foul in Christianity itself, foul in the culture of Europe, foul in the very republican ideals the revolution stood for, and would become over time a type of antidote to the excesses of everything ideology would impose when ideology was invented in the 19th century. It was not a good antidote, but the pressing need to tear down and rip asunder the hitherto known social order and institutions would become both something to harness under managerial control for very different aims, and something the desperate turn to as a far more accurate program that their dire circumstances will increasingly tell them is a necessary answer to move forward with any future project. Seeing de-Christianization as "mere culture war" or an arbitrary affinity tragically misunderstands the malcontents during the Revolution, the malcontents under capitalist rule, and the malcontents who found what socialism and communism became far less than they hoped or, worse, saw communism as the same sort of menace they had always known.

THE SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTIONS

The first divergence from a story of a revolution driven by the economic interests of the bourgeoisie can be seen in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, an aspirational document written by those who were inspired by and even fought in and for the American Revolution. Some might dismiss the aspirational aims of the document as incidental or the peculiar fixation of the Marquis de Lafayette, where grand promises were made haphazardly without thinking through the meaning of what was written. I believe it is not an accident nor a half-thought ideal, but a necessary statement of how such a revolution could hold true meaning in France. In the American example, no one involved in the revolution believed for a moment that the stakes were something spiritual; this was always about who controlled the money and who could levy taxes. In the English-speaking world, concepts of rights as property date back to the Magna Carta and the English system of common law. One of the grievances of the revolutionaries in France was the arbitrary, contradictory, and archaic system of law and customs that had prevailed up to that point. In short, there was both an old ruling system and church to overthrow, and there were among the revolutionaries those who did not see a need to overthrow too much until they saw a large preexisting society that had little want of the revolution that was given to them. For the Americans, the rebellion was met with a shrug as the local elites did what they wanted to do without anyone providing a good reason why the rebels couldn't have their own government. There was no old order to eliminate—only a new world order to establish out of a place that had up to then been governed for little more than colonial survival. In of itself, the old French ways were only bothersome so far as they impeded the wants of the new revolutionary nobility; which is to say, they were eager to normalize capitalism and eliminate the Church's tithe collection racket. If religions were interchangeable and disposable, this would be for all of the talk a routine matter for the state. Property would be seized by the victors, life would go on, and whatever protests those outside the revolutionary order had were irrelevant. Catholicism was not the same as the American brand of Protestantism, and France was not a colonial blank slate. There was also no ideology as such in either revolution; the revolutionaries acted in what they considered their immediate interests, rather than in accord with an ideological "Great Working" that might be envisioned to move history. Even if the "secret Working" was to transform France into something English, those who had to implement any policy knew the push-back would not be a mere question of motives for a propertied interest. If there were to be the sort of Deist religious idea that the revolutionaries shared across borders—for all them were at least initiates into the occult mysteries and saw this as a great game—it would be necessary to remove the old religion altogether, or reduce it to something that could easily be excised. Then there was something that had always been present; that the economic ideas commonly read by Frenchmen did not resemble the free trade imperialism of the British. Why would they copy the economic model of a hostile empire whose model was very clearly a global prescription? Here was an opening to do something not just different but oppositional. The interested classes had the same general idea—enrich themselves and scorn all other men—but how they would do so would have to be different. The country must be on board with it, and this would deepen as the country converted to a war economy with a very large army.

The French Revolution was the first sense of nationalism in the modern sense, because that was what the country needed to secure the revolutionary order. The mass army arises only after the revolutionary state defends its claim, and while the mass army and all that was needed to support such an effort is where modern democratic nation-states were proven viable, there is no mass army without democratization and nationalism as a force from the declarations in 1789. The revolutionaries didn't do this because they "half-believed" a naive version of history or generously handed out political rights to the Paris mob for some scurrilous game. Bringing that angry mob on board was necessary for the revolution's survival. Insisting everyone was supposed to love the starvation regime that is "free trade" was not at the top of a list of revolutionary priorities. And so, just as free trade disrupted the grain supply, the second revolution, the one that established the First Republic, passed emergency price controls. While free trade matched bigotries the English long held and only imperiled the lowest class who were targeted for the most severe humiliations, free trade in France had already been a proven failure, and it predictably failed again every time it advanced.^[1] Rather than the revolution's appeal to the poor being extended for political favors, which is what the somewhat better off poor in America got and what was successfully and wholly neutralized in Britain,^[2] democratization had to answer the social question, or the question of social class in a way that had never been asked before. It was one thing to make a philosophical or legal argument for the abolition of classes as such. It was another to address anything social class actually entailed, because in the first revolution of 1789, the social class structure did not fundamentally change forever. The only thing that happened is that everyone met in the Third Estate, with clear expectations that a new nobility and new slate of venal office holders would take over. All of the rights of property are the same sort of rights that the feudal nobility considered theirs and actively defended right up to the calling of the estates.

An event that is murkily described as the "Great Fear" has to be explained as "unnatural", since obviously peasants don't "rebel on their own". The Great Fear was not a revolutionary force or an ideological program. Its origin was very simple: those who had nothing but their bodies and no condition of slavery, who were subjected to the first free trade experiments, turned on an obvious source of the problem that aggravated starvation, where the peasants had to fend for themselves against the market while paying feudal dues. The ideologue can only imagine a constant pressing and humiliation of the masses and claim "this always works". Behind the magic of instigation and insinuation is a simple truth: None of the conceits held by aristocracies since time immemorial were backed by anything in Nature or any reason why they should be followed. They were largely followed out of a threat, sometimes acted on, that failure to comply meant being singled out for particular humiliation, or that a general slaughter would commence for greater revolts. The Fear was true to the democratizing tendency; taking from the rich and also driven by paranoia regarding vagrants and the historical lowest class, who had been on the rise due to all of the starvation going around. The fear was as much about putting down these lowest class vultures as it was about any program against the nobles. If the nobles failed to police their territory so nakedly and cared so little, then what are the nobles doing, anyway? As much as possible, the histories do everything to avoid answering this question, since in their version of reality history is moved only by agentur and grand machines in the employ of those who move history at the highest levels. Of course, agentur were among the peasant bands who were not at all averse to the event that enriched them and weakened those who weren't in the revolutionary party. The burning of records is not, as an ideological retard would believe, a sort of magic spell by which information is destroyed to alter history. This idea is central to the very concept of ideology and everything the whiny, faggy conservative order stands for. Almost certainly the systematic burning of records was the agreed-upon conclusion rather than a spontaneous decision; it would not have meant anything to burn the records if the central government would reinstate them and ignore the act. The speed with which the revolutionary government abolished feudalism was not a reaction but the expected outcome for their part. For the peasants who were affected by these dues, it was already clear that the feudal rights were no longer enforceable. The first act would have been refusing to pay anything to a failed system, rather than any essential act of liberation and smashing. The burning of the records would be a formality, almost always with the lord stepping aside to let it happen. To the peasants doing this, it was not some great event or story. After the declarations of the end of feudalism, the National Assembly wanted to pull back from it and insist the peasants had to pay after all, and this almost certainly indicates that the leaders of the Third Estate believed the peasants were disposable and had to be cast down as soon as possible. What they thought really didn't matter. The peasants weren't going to pay, and it was as simple as that. Here is the essential ingredient that made the French Revolution, democratization, nationalism, and all that is associated with the modern nation-state possible, and why we shouldn't indulge those who see revolution as something for cloistered fools to cajole. The aim of the peasantry was the very simple demand that the lower two orders of humanity have always had, and it was a simple program: "leave us alone and stop the bullshit". That was all it had to be, and for a time, the bullshit did stop. No one saw much in restoring the property rights of the expropriated nobles. The peasants gained no more property than what they were spared in taxes, and by this time the dues were an onerous and unpayable burden at an already bad time. It wasn't even a brotherhood or association of men with a coherent definition, where the peasants vowed to stay together as an association bound by this act. Most of the peasants saw a way to be rid of the feudal dues forever, and probably distrusted those who obviously saw them as a prop to be used and discarded as is the habit of these revolutionaries. There was no controversy or insinuation to be made. There was, for the time being, none of the habit of instigation that by all reasonable assessment created the recurrent, inexcusable decrepitude of the ancien régime. Someone can ask here if any of the inexcusable duties demanded for people to go along with rulers were necessary, and a liberal can ask this question halfheartedly, for the liberal knows the real reason why this doesn't change despite a lack of any good purpose for the dues and a lack of any accountability for how the proceeds are spent. Maybe if a government refused to choke people for a little while, they would have far more to call upon, but that is not intrinsically interesting to the peasants. Usually the thing the government sells itself as doing is some scheme to choke people, whether it is a domestic enemy or a foreign enemy. Certainly, the Assembly's self-asserted leadership would lead the charge for war, regardless of the complete unreadiness of the French to wage such a war. The particular factional interests and intrigues are there, but the drive for war served the sort of men who really benefit from revolutionary events.^[3] Even when extending assistance or charity, it is habitually granted as a way to choke efforts of people to live independently of such a ruinous social order like the only ones humans had ever seen as a reality.

If you look at these events as just the intrigues or the machinations of political agents doing their thing, the machinations were ill-thought, and so far as the habit of conspiracy to push revolutions as a sham went, the "good revolutionaries" that started out were more than ready to pull back the whole thing and do what was probably the plan before events were in motion. If the revolution was just those machinations, the goal was a constitutional monarchy based on the British model, free trade "no matter what", and a neat state to regiment and realign to the new world order. That was dead on arrival because history does not work that way, and since this is a time before the poison of German ideology made the intellectuals profoundly retarded and believe history did work that way, the men who had to work with this in the real world knew this. This gives rise to the narrative theory that the Revolution was a morass of confusion and weirdness, and that there wasn't any machinery save for ad hoc measures from the wartime dictatorship that were improvised on the fly. This is silly. Enough writers then and forever after had a keen enough sense of what shit was afoot, and what drove angry mobs to take bread and land so they didn't starve. So too do all of these people note the plots and threats of the other participants. There is a machinery that is actually at work, and a few prescient minds could foresee what this would be, and could see clearly what this was as it happened. There was no need to snivel and look for a theory to tell people what they're supposed to think about what is happening. There were of course plenty of writers then who had theories for everything, and for anyone who found this sort of thing intrinsically interesting, reading material was abundant to say the least. The first political education to be denied in the 20th century is any essence that would speak or think about such things, let alone act on those ideas. This it did not by control of information, as many are trained to believe, but systematic beatings that were at this time neither possible nor desirable or even a particularly interesting prospect for would-be rulers.

THE ENRAGÉS

Where there is nationalism, there is an underclass of that nation that is evidence of that nation's genuine existence. That is to say, any theory or notion of nationalism as it was understood by the revolutionaries is nonsensical if the nation is not comprised of individuals who have lives and an existence apart from the nation. It is possible to speak generally of nations without any theory of "nationalism", to say that this or that group is operative, and that these groups or associations appear as another horde or grouping of entities that is taken as a whole. The nobility looks at an angry mob of peasants, male and female together, as just the mob, and does not see any individual faces nor want to see any individual faces. If nations are to be recognized in political thought beyond the assertion of primitive tribalism—if they are to be integrated into a public matter where nations exist under any Law beyond the arbitrary dominance of one nation over another—there are individuals in these nations that may be more or less than each other, and possess distinctions within the nation that will be recognized. Nowhere in this nation is an "ideal subject" found, which the nation is meant to be conform to. Nothing about a nation or a gathering of humans in some association requires its members to subsume themselves into such a crass definition of "human". There may be a baseline, as is the habit of political associations, where some enjoy the franchise and others do not. For the French Revolution, this distinction was drawn in 1789 between "active citizens" who held some property and paid taxes, and "passive citizens" who really didn't exist as anything other than subjects so far as the new Law was concerned. The idiotic Germanic conceit is that the error of the revolution was granting to the passive citizens any dignity whatsoever, and this is what such retards, and they are retarded, harp on constantly without any thought or purpose. In practice though, no nation is ever so cleanly divided by a Law in a way that is regarded or needed. For the active citizens, they had a theoretical stake in the state that the passive citizens did not, and their stake was to be protected, but there could be no active citizens without a concept of a Frenchman that was not contingent on a corporate entity asserting who was and was not a Frenchman based on some legal criteria. The passive citizens had no reason to believe they didn't have a stake in society, if they were going to be subject to the Law that considers the affairs of all a public matter. The active citizens could easily see that some of their number could easily make a common cause with the masses for all of the purposes that would be beneficial to them individually, or to groups within the active citizen body. In some way, this is unavoidable in any political society, regardless of its theoretical claims. The conflicting interested parties are brought to some situation that is irreconcilable without questioning those interests only under particular conditions. In the Americas, the "active citizens", those who were invested in anything the United States meant, remained segregated from the rest of the rabble, and the rabble in turn had little interest in the games of the politically favored. This was possible because America was a big country, and the chief aim of everyone was to find some cheap piece of land to exist outside the public matter as much as possible. The public thing in America was a matter of some business, and the democratic base was only to be called upon for labor or some purpose like summoning the militia, as had happened in 1812. In France, the situation is very different. The country would soon be mobilized for war and required a mass army that was not just a militia to fight a defensive war or a war against Indians, but an army that could challenge and defeat accomplished standing armies and maintain a large officer corps. The country would not allow the underclasses to escape or ignore the revolution, leading to civil wars while France is battling the armies of Europe. All throughout, poverty that existed before the revolution remained unaddressed. Then, finally, there grew ideas in the French Revolution that were not heard of in any prior revolution, that were developed in part because of the happenstance that particular men and women were born in that time and place, and came into contact with each other. Something different was at work here and it had finally found an environment where its ideas, radically different from those of the past, could be expressed as something more than a brief uprising. It is in the "enragés" or the "madmen" that this "something different" is best exemplified. The legacy of these madmen is not that they existed for a time as a brief marker in an otherwise orderly liberal revolution, but that what we call today the extreme left persisted after their political liquidation, and the survivors of the far left without scatter and disseminate very different ideas in the world to come. They would always remain on the fringes, forever defeated—a boot stamping on a human face forever—and in time, the "madmen" would see no complication whatsoever in being a boot stamping on a bourgeois face forever at the first opportunity they found.

The "madmen" were not supposed to happen by the theories of history permitted for us. They do not form a coherent faction or hold consistent political goals. They ranged from politically active agitators railing against Christianity with names and reputations to defend, to fringe characters possessed by some madness to choose this as their time to join a cause to give their lives some purpose beyond mere existence. Certainly many of the voices were, either fully or unwittingly, assets of those who instigate and foment discord for the sake of doing so. Very rarely was De-Christianization pursued out of an earnest and sincere belief that Christianity damned the souls of the adherents and everyone around them, or a belief that the destruction of Christianity would lead to something good and virtuous. There would be a rejection of Christianity by those who have always reviled the Christian hypocrisies and cruelties, and numerous schemes and fantasies were hatched in this time that finally found an audience. In one way or another, all hitherto known spiritual authority had failed, and it was left to whatever genius may exist among these dregs to find something, anything, that allowed a passage to a better life than the one that they presently knew. Certainly the aristocratic atheism that was common among revolutionary elites and members of the clergy was so prominent that it could no longer be denied. What should have been clear at this time is that the very republic that was established, itself a product of Christian civilization, was born deformed because republicanism itself was born deformed. We see at last the true character of revolution and what was at stake. So that history may be edited and scrubbed of inconvenient truths, it was a high imperative to de-emphasize the "madmen" as a political nuisance, rather than a sign of things to come.

This makes clear a running theme for the remainder of these books I write. What would have, and should have, happened in modernity was not a retrenchment of these deformed republics, but a transition to some new type of rule that disavowed past forms and no longer required the despotism that was inherent to civilization and its companion, the ritual sacrifice of the temple. This idea was felt and could at last find expression and a means to be communicated, but it had no inherent potency and did not have any structure or idea ready-made for it. There had been, from time to time, those in ancient history that questioned whether republican government was needed, but without any sound theory of human society or grounding in science, their investigations could give few answers, and in any event, the necessities of their time were war and a command structure that was familiar. New, untested things were not to be trusted.

The corporate government, the rule of property and the firm, is an attractive story to its partisans. Yet, at first contact, anyone with a sense of smell and some investigation into the human condition can easily see that the rule of Companies and firms is, without a doubt, the worst and most retarded idea one could hold. They did not have the benefit I have today of hindsight to see how corporate government and the firm turn out, but enough could foresee that nothing good would come from this ethos of mindless imperial avarice. In some way, the partisans of corporate government were open to the new or technological novelty. Corporate government and its Law were, through and through, creatures of the technological interest, and it was these men who seized the revolutionary movement—who indeed are the only class that had any appetite for "revolution" as such. Without any religion to call their own or a true association that bypassed the political mediators entirely, those who saw that the train humanity was on was destined to ruin had little to go on but their individual genius and whatever ideas that may spawn. What has resulted from the encounter of the revolutionary idea with the modern nation and its members is the permanent installation of these groups of "madmen". They persist because the revolution created, for the first time, both the necessity of such people and methods by which they could exert an effect on political society, where before they were entirely locked out and so far removed from political life that they could be safely ignored. This is the true lasting legacy of the revolution, and it is the necessary legacy that made every other consequence of the revolution possible. Without the madmen, there is no concept of nationalism beyond a dry recitation of some story or excuse that ostensibly resembles a nation as we understand it in these books. The madmen, however few their number and however few followers they can call upon, are the only voice of the nation that can be true and unfettered. The screeds of those higher in the ruling program, whether they are trained agentur or men who are able to harness vitriol to gain a greater following than a mere madman, are only possible because the "madmen" are possible. There is no Marat without the existence of more radical forces like Hebert. If revolution is to be a genuine force in history, the madmen will always be there, always with some ominous aura that far outstrips their genuine power over events; and there will be those who see that it is the madmen who speak to the true wants of a nation and its most oppressed.

What argument do the favored classes have in this model of society I have described? The argument of the favored classes is entirely premised on a self-absorbed and disgusting conceit about themselves, while the barest conditions of security and sustenance are denied not just for the lowest class but for the majority of humanity. Revolutionary society is given two choices: to attack those who have historically dominated the Earth through torture and avarice, or to kick down the weakest and exultantly shout "DIE!" The rise of the "madmen" makes this the predominant choice for the whole society and the only real choice. The course of events now cannot avert this choice or insist it is secondary to how the society of humans will continue. If it is to be nothing but a contest to kick down the undesirables, then the society is worthy of damnation. Certainly the lowest class who will be kicked down have no reason to ever support such a society. If the revolution is to question the hitherto known arrangement of mankind, it can only do so on the soundest grounds—when its discoveries are in line not with a preferred theory of what humanity should be or its political instincts, but with science. There is a reason why this recurring cycle of torture and culling exists, and it's not a good reason. Did the revolution "instigate" this inquiry and make it inescapable? No. The rise of corporate government and the inevitable aims of such a program made revolution a potential for whole nations, where before revolutions concerned a politically connected class only and had nothing to do with the rural peasants or the slaves. The very statement of corporate government's intention would make revolution a specter for the whole of the world, in one way or another. For America, the revolution was the sole history of a thing called "The United States". There is no pre-revolutionary history to return to, for the American revolution was practically predestined by the establishment of the colonies and the function of those colonies in the global system of its time, and of the institution of slavery that prevailed in those colonies. For Europe, the revolution would always be a geist waiting to come, and it was the true revolution—the revolution where the madmen could speak clearly and without fetters—rather than a canned revolution or a theory of revolutions that could be gamed and controlled. For the colonized countries^[4], the revolution meant nothing more than the invasion of these smelly white people who take their land, their resources, their lives, and boss them around. The revolutionary ethos has nothing to say to the colonial subject, even those who become compradors; yet, revolutions nonetheless happened, and the void when the native government fell would have to be replaced with something that was the result of struggle.

The existence of the "madmen" is not the result of some strange alchemy inherent in the nation, as if there were evil spirits that had to be excised for the nation to be saved. The madmen exist because the very premise of human society, organized as it has been, has been madness. The whole operation can only continue so long as there is a lowest class, and this became the center of political and social life with the rise of corporate government and free trade. The idea that the "madmen" can be edited out of history has been the overarching obsession of the political class ever since, so they can have their clean, unbroken revolutionary program imposed on history. Those who want a quick and horrendous solution turn to ideology or bald-faced lying, holding the utmost contempt for anything but power or the expression thereof. The more effective rulers ask instead a scientific question about human society that had been, up to this point, neglected and seen as uninteresting. The revolution and its history do not in of themselves begin modernity in one act, where all history must return to the revolutionary crisis and events, recasting the revolution as a Primordial or a "Satan" to summon by some ritual. The real work, which is carried out every day through the lives of all of the people, is in the most basic institutions of a society, and the study of that society from the view of those members, regardless of their class. The most vociferous of these people are those of the technological interest, who possess the money, inclination, and purpose that requires them to ask this question for the sake of their continued security in the liberal order. The true work, almost never written of except by their mortal class enemies, is carried out by labor and the lowest class. It is among a few of the lowest class, whether they arrived there by the poor circumstances of birth or because they were cast down from a higher order early in life, that the true view of society can be laid bare.