4,989 words
Marcel Gauchet
Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most
Princeton University Press, 2024
This 191-page study of Robespierre’s revolutionary career is not a biography in the usual sense. Such works have already patiently collected everything that can be known about the man’s life before the French Revolution, but the main lesson to be drawn from them is that nothing from Robespierre’s formative years is of much use for explaining his political behavior. (more…)
1,920 words
Another day, another article written in response to an act of desecration and vandalism perpetrated by those who seek to spoil whatever is left of that thing we once could call “Western Civilization.” Honestly, I was reluctant to write this. After having typed thousands of words on the exhausting farce that was the recent European Cup, perhaps I can be forgiven for not having the muster to write about yet another attack on our race, our culture, our traditions, and our senses. As I wrote in my essay on EURO 2024, life in the West today is like fighting on the parapets of a fortress as wave after wave of enemy soldiers relentlessly scales the walls. (more…)
1,829 words
As you probably already know, the “Left wing” versus “Right wing” political chasm first appeared when it cracked through the French National Assembly during the Revolution of 1789, when defenders of France’s monarchy and the Catholic faith positioned themselves on the right side of the Assembly, and supporters of the republican revolutionaries aligned themselves on the left side. The most technically correct and pedantic definition of “Right wing”, therefore, is a political system or ideology which favors hierarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, tradition, and Catholicism. (more…)
2,079 words
Robert Darnton
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985
Historical dissident literary and artistic movements that have had an impact on the political realm are worth studying. One such example is the literary underground in pre-Revolutionary France. In The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, historian Robert Darnton advances the thesis that dissident writers and publishers played an important role in undermining the ancien régime. (more…)
2,076 words
Seth David Radwell
American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing Our Nation
Austin: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2021
It is no secret that the American political scene is polarized. The last two election cycles have brought considerable political violence — most fueled by the Democratic Party and its mainstream media enablers. Recently, Seth Radwell, a Manhattan businessman, took several years off work to write a book that explores this divide. (more…)
1,523 words
Wolfram Siemann
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019
Julius Evola called Klemens von Metternich the “last great European.” The Right-wing philosopher saw the Austrian statesman as his ideal leader instead of the fascist strongmen he saw in his own time. Statements like this have made the Right partial to Metternich, seeing him as a leader who tried to reverse the poison unleashed by the French Revolution. (more…)
7,658 words
Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, Part V here, Part VI here, Part VII.1 here, Part VII.2 here, Part VIII here
A successful nationalist movement cannot be guided by free-market orthodoxy. For over two centuries the principles of free market economics played a crucial role in Western countries. (more…)
2,442 words
Napoleon has generally been viewed harshly by anti-liberal thinkers, with a few notable exceptions such as Nietzsche, Léon Bloy, and Francis Parker Yockey. A great deal of criticism has been leveled at him. He has been accused of being a mere petty dictator without any higher authority legitimizing him, an enemy of the Catholic Church, a liberal egalitarian who brought the violence of the French Revolution to the legitimate monarchies of Europe in his conquests. (more…)
Francisco Goya, “Saturn Devouring his Son,” c. 1819–1823
Francisco Goya, “Saturn Devouring his Son,” c. 1819–1823
4,030 words
Editor’s Note:
The following essay was later incorporated into Kerry Bolton’s The Psychotic Left: From Jacobin France to the Occupy Movement, available from Black House Publishing.
In order to understand how such outbreaks of mass psychosis [as the French and Bolshevik Revolutions] manifest with the intent of bringing about the overthrow of civilisation and the resurgence of the atavistic, (more…)
5,103 words
Editor’s Note:
The following essay was later incorporated into Kerry Bolton’s The Psychotic Left: From Jacobin France to the Occupy Movement
The ‘Right’ of the political dichotomy, including even social and moral values that have traditionally been regarded – until recently – as normative, has for approximately eighty years, been the subject of analysis not just politically and sociologically, but psychologically. (more…)
10,020 words
Augustin Cochin
Organizing the Revolution: Selections From Augustin Cochin
Translated by Nancy Derr Polin with a Preface by Claude Polin
Rockford, Ill.: Chronicles Press, 2007
The Rockford Institute’s publication of Organizing the Revolution marks the first appearance in our language of an historian whose insights apply not only to the French Revolution but to much of modern politics as well. (more…)
