Liberty, Egalitie, And What The Heck Were They Thinking?
By Ann Huggett (02/24/03)
It’s so easy to despise the French; they practically beg for it with their supercilious smugness. I’m not alone in this summation either. Political analysts Ann Coulter (Town Hall), Jonah Goldberg (The National Review), and Charles Krauthammer (Jewish World Review) expressed their disdain for them recently. Why? For a variety of reasons, which range from the unfortunate comment made recently by the French ambassador about Israel being a "s***** little country" to France’s unfortunate tendency to surrender to enemies at the drop of a sou or to their nasty habit of blocking our fighter planes from using their airspace during critical military strikes.
However, I have a different bone to pick with them, one that has bugged me for years. It’s their rallying cry of "Liberty, Egalitie, and Fraternity" actually. I mean, what the heck were they thinking? The French managed to single handedly screw up the cause of Freedom that America promised to the world with her own motto of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
We both honor Liberty in our own ways. We strive to provide it to our people and France unloads the Statue of Liberty on us telling the rest of the world to wash up on our shores. This is now accepted as some sort of universal right by the Third World and multi-culturalists quote that "Give me your tired, your poor..." poem like it was enshrined in our Constitution.
But that’s where any similarity ends. We go on to celebrate Life and the Pursuit of Happiness. That there are two lines of thought in this country about what those concepts mean marks the basic differences between liberals and conservatives and is the cause of much of our internal frictions. Conservatives look at Life as a challenge and a risk where the pursuit of Property, which was the original wording of our motto before the vague Happiness was substituted, is celebrated. Life is worth living when you are free and able to control the fruits of your labor whether it’s money in the bank, a house, a car, whatever. Liberals interpret Life as what one does away from productive labor, as in "Get a life!" ("Like yours? No thanks!") and Happiness as unreasoning licentiousness to be pursued without consequences for their actions.
The French, however, diverged with their insistence on Egalitie and Fraternity. During their revolution, they sacrificed whatever liberty they had for equality and brotherhood. Equality before the law is to be desired and is inherent in our concepts of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But with the French, the desire to do away with aristocratic privilege made them go against the very fabric of human nature.
We understand that "All Men Are Created Equal" but they surely do not end up equal. Some are born to wealth and some to poverty. Some are born ambitious and some are born lazy. Some are born smart and some born stupid. There are smart failures and stupid success stories; there is no guarantee of outcome in Life. It’s a crapshoot. The polished lady can end up a Mayflower Madame as readily as an orphan can go on to start a hamburger chain called Wendy’s. It’s what inside a person that counts and no amount of social engineering is going to change that.
The French, on the other hand, wanted all results to be the same for everybody and instituted a Reign of Terror to make it so. Instead of elevating the common man up to the level of the educated, the educated were pulled down to the level of the common man with many losing their heads in the process. In exalting the common over the refined, the French merely brutalized themselves in a different way. They went from the exquisite sensibilities of the late Rococo and early Romantic period to the vulgar era of Napoleonic excess. Secret police, informers, and rabble rousing political agitators alternately cowed, persecuted, or forced the populace into an artificial brotherhood whether they wanted to be part of it or not.
Because the French went for an inherently unstable political structure based on a false understanding of human nature, they needed a strong-arm government to force through such unpopular measures as the confiscation of Church property, the imposition of the State over the Church, taxation, censorship, and mock trials. The French quickly abandoned their version of a Constitution and embraced tyranny.
Their revolution plunged Europe into yet another round of international warfare. In turning back the Prussian-Austrian army at Valmy on Sept. 20, 1792, they decided on exporting their revolution across France’s borders and declared that all governments were their enemies while all peoples were their friends.
In effect the French set the stage in prototypical fashion for international communism. They inspired Marx to create the loathsome theory of Communism with their Paris Commune of 1871 and thus foreshadowed the Russian revolution and elevated the concept of State as all. They embraced atheism as a State religion and actively sought to destroy their own history in order to glorify their new elites. Instead of becoming a beacon of hope for mankind, the French burned themselves out in intrigue, revolution, warfare, despotism, and terror.
To quote Napoleon, "Liberty is a necessity felt only by a not very numerous class. It can therefore be restricted with impunity. Equality on the other hand pleases the multitude."
It pleases the multitude by offering false hope and empty promises. And now you know why I despise the French.
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