Do the French Know Something We Don't?

Most Americans are unfamiliar with French History.  They know little of the era when France was the superpower of Europe and less about the events that brought an end to French hegemony.  It would be helpful if they knew more.

French revolutionaries ended the Old Regime and imagined they could lead the world by example.  The ability to demonstrate the benefits and blessings of freedom -- civil liberties and laisser-faire economics -- became an illusion.  Religious zealots (militant, traditional Catholics) regarded republican policies and practices as blasphemous and heretical.  They responded to the new secular state with civil disobedience that quickly turned to violent opposition. 

Simultaneously, the defenders of royalism formed a coalition to restore the traditional power.  Both international war and civil war developed and grew.  Robespierre, before taking leadership of the group that carried executive power, warned that international warfare would subvert the exercise of fundamental freedoms of the press, speech and assembly.  His arguments proved to be true.  His worst fears were realized and, ironically, he became an agent who played a key part in fulfilling his own prophecy. 

The domestic response to the civil war included a Law of Suspects.  Details of this legislation are strikingly similar to the Patriot Act.  In the name of defense of the doctrines of rights and responsibilities, the French government and people launched what we now call the Reign of Terror.  Fear of dissenters turned neighbor against neighbor.  Due process and civil liberties disappeared in the shadows of the call to patriotism and the defense of republican principles and La Nation.  Capital punishment, once opposed by Robespierre as a contradiction to the fundamental values and dignity of human life embraced by republicanism, lost out to Dr. Guillotine. 

Unable to engage in traditional forms of military
combat, people in Castile and Aragon created
the foundations of what we now call terrorism.

A citizen army defeated opponents in the civil war.  Resisters went underground and waited to act.  The republicans organized victory.  They turned from a policy of preservation of freedom at home to preemptive action to install sympathetic regimes and thereby prevent threats from abroad.  Imperial leaders (Napoleon Bonaparte) cloaked conquest in the garb of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

In time, French armies with great technological advantage and enormous power set out to liberate the Iberian Peninsula.  They were not welcomed in a region where the militant Catholicism of the reconquista and the power of traditional religion were deeply embedded in the culture.  Traditional elites, from the nobility and the church mobilized peasants.  They responded to the French promise of the "liberation of Spain" with guerilla warfare.  Unable to engage in traditional forms of military combat, people in Castile and Aragon created the foundations of what we now call terrorism.  They claimed legitimacy on the basis of resistance to state terrorism.  The goals, strategies and tactics employed against the French mark a turning point in world history.  Thereafter, groups throughout the world have found the resources and will to challenge traditional uses of overwhelming state military power. 

Many historians date the decline of France to the death and destruction that flowed from the republican era and Napoleonic Wars.  Some argue that the vitality of the French economy -- considered the largest and most thriving in the world -- never recovered from the loss of human life and material resources. 

Is George Bush a combination of Robespierre and Napoleon?  Are Islamic zealots similar to militant European Catholics?  Will the efforts to spread the secular Republican gospel be viewed as a deception designed to install American Imperial power?  Will the human treasure of the United States, the young people called upon to kill in the name of freedom, face a future of debt and decline engendered by the policies and practices of our current leadership?  Is it possible that contemporary French leaders, understanding their own history and decline, are trying to save us from making new mistakes that will lead us down a similar path?   

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