Two hundred thirty-one years ago today, July 14, 1789, an angry mob stormed the Bastille, a royal prison in Paris, an act of violence later acknowledged to be the beginning of the French Revolution.
Although the Bastille was a symbol of the King’s power to imprison his opponents, on this day it did not harbor hordes of political prisoners, only seven inmates, all in good condition, one of whom was attended by his own chef. Bernard-René de Launay, the Bastille’s governor, was a fair and patient man, but that did not save him from “revolutionary justice.” The mob dragged him from the fortress and stabbed him to death.
The French Revolution and the American Revolution are often compared and lumped together, separated in time as they are by only a few years, but there is little to compare. The American “revolution” was a war of independence from Britain. Our founders did not did not seek to remake civil society, or to abolish or redistribute private property. There was certainly no assault on religion, as America and Britain were both Protestant, America very thoroughly so, at the time of the revolution. The American founders did not even attempt to institute a new legal system, or throw out the common law of England, which remains our legal heritage to this day. They avoided all of the excesses later seen in the French Revolution. The American Revolution did not lead to a reign of terror, or the liquidation of the upper classes. Indeed the men of property were leading the independence movement. The American Revolution’s most radical reforms were forbidding titles of nobility and creating a republic, rather than a constitutional monarchy, in which an elected president was both the chief executive and the head of state.
The French Revolution was the prototype of all the atheistic, Leftist, totalitarian revolutions that have followed, including most notably the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is presaged in Scripture in Revelation 11, which Ellen White discusses in Great Controversy, Chapter 15:
According to the words of the prophet, then, a little before the year 1798 some power of Satanic origin and character would rise to make war upon the Bible. And in the land where the testimony of God’s two witnesses should thus be silenced, there would be manifest the atheism of the Pharaoh, and the licentiousness of Sodom. {GC88 269.3}
This prophecy has received a most exact and striking fulfillment in the history of France. During the Revolution of 1793, “the world for the first time heard an assembly of men, born and educated in civilization, and assuming the right to govern one of the finest European nations, uplift their united voice to deny the most solemn truth which man’s soul receives, and renounce unanimously the belief and worship of the Deity.” “France is the only nation in the world concerning which the authentic record survives, that as a nation she lifted her hand in open rebellion against the Author of the universe. Plenty of blasphemers, plenty of infidels, there have been, and still continue to be, in England, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere; but France stands apart in the world’s history as the single State which, by the decree of her legislative assembly, pronounced that there was no God, and of which the entire population of the capital, and a vast majority elsewhere, women as well as men, danced and sang with joy in accepting the announcement.” {GC88 269.4}
Some 250 years before, France had rejected the Reformation and consigned its people to the darkness of priest-ridden culture. This led, just as cause leads to affect, to the French Revolution and the reign of terror:
The Reformation had presented to the world an open Bible, unsealing the precepts of the law of God, and urging its claims upon the consciences of the people. Infinite love had unfolded to men the statutes and principles of Heaven. God had said, “Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people,” [Deuteronomy 4:6.] When France rejected the gift of Heaven, she sowed the seeds of anarchy and ruin; and the inevitable outworking of cause and effect resulted in the Revolution and the reign of terror. {GC 230.2}
The militant, violent atheism of the French Revolution has never really been seen in the United States . . . until recently. In the atheistic, violent Marxist movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the spirit of the French Revolution has at last reared its ugly head in America. The revolutionary Left has never enjoyed the degree of cultural power in this country that it does right now. These are interesting times indeed.