The French Revolution should be a case study in a class on how good intentions can lead to disastrous results.
Instead, it is widely celebrated–a national holiday in France–and the French Revolution became the model for leftist politics. Not every subsequent political disaster can be traced to the malign influence of the Jacobin experiment in utopianism, but a good fraction of them can be.
Today is Bastille Day, a French national holiday that commemorates the Storming of the Bastille in 1789.
The crowd busted down the doors of the prison fortress to free French guards they believed had been imprisoned for refusing to fire on the people, but instead only found… pic.twitter.com/UCQejwgpyC
— Flappr (@flapprdotnet) July 14, 2025
The crowd busted down the doors of the prison fortress to free French guards they believed had been imprisoned for refusing to fire on the people, but instead only found seven prisoners – four counterfeiters, two mentally ill men and a sexual deviant imprisoned at the behest of his own family.
The fall of the Ancien Régime was inevitable, and rightly so. It was morally and financially bankrupt, and whatever complaints the colonists in the 13 colonies had paled in comparison to what the French endured in the badly mismanaged and corrupt kingdom of France.
But while France badly needed to rationalize its regime and model it more along the American or even British styles of government, what they wound up with was mob rule and the Terror–and a world war that set Europe on fire in the name of “liberty.” About 2.5 million people died in the Napoleonic Wars, which began as France’s attempt to spread their revolution, and all the horrors of communism have their origins in the French Revolution, on which communist regimes relied as a model.
The American experiment is 250 years in, while the French are on their Fifth Republic.
The American left has picked up the banner of the sans-culottes and the Jacobins. On this Bastille Day, you can even get a nice discount on the left-wing Jacobin Magazine’s subscriptions.
The current explosion of violence on the left is rooted in the same ideology as the Jacobins, who believed that the current order needed to be wiped away–including all those “bad” people whose only crime was disagreeing with them. The terror began by wiping out the old regime, but continued because utopia was always just one more round of murder away.
Taylor Lorenz on Luigi Mangioni: “Here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart — he’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find.”pic.twitter.com/jnlnOAfqkP
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) April 13, 2025
We are seeing the same impulses today. An “assassination culture” has sprung up in America, with leftists celebrating Luigi Mangione, crowing when people in Texas died in the floods, and constituents demanding that Democratic Congressmen give them blood in the streets.
“There needs to be blood”: Democrats’ voters tell them to “get shot” in Trump resistance push https://t.co/tqOWVnFshu
— Axios (@axios) July 7, 2025
Rutgers University did a survey of Americans, only to discover that more than half of Democrats thought that assassinating Donald Trump would be at least “somewhat justified.” Is it any wonder that two assassins took their shot at glory?
SURVEY: 55% Of Self-Identified Leftists Say Killing Trump Is Justifiablehttps://t.co/fCCPuBbCLR
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) April 7, 2025
Leftists are trying to recreate their version of Bastille Day to kick off a modern American Revolution along the lines of the French Revolution.
That one didn’t end well, and neither would this one.
