Tag: the French Revolution

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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is a bad movie, but not a terrible one. There are legions of nerds complaining about how Scott got this or that historical detail wrong. Honestly, that’s beside the point. Even if Scott didn’t know Saint Helena from Elba, he could still have made a great movie.

Everyone has heard of Napoleon. But what’s so great about Napoleon? Any film about Napoleon needs to answer that question. But in nearly three hours’ screen time, Scott fails to do so. (more…)

“Those who oppose Chairman Mao: We will crush their doghead.”–Red Guards poster

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In our country we wish to substitute morality for egotism, probity for honour, principles for conventions, duties for etiquette, the empire of reason for the tyranny of customs, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, the love of honour for the love of money… that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic, for all the vices and snobbishness of the monarchy. — Maximilien Robespierre, “On Virtue and Terror” (1794) (more…)

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Patrick J. Buchanan
A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny
Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999

See also: “The Collapse of British Power,” “The Audit of War,” “The Lost Victory,” & “The Verdict of Peace”

If ever there was a call which went unheeded, it is former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan’s admonition that once the Cold War ended, the United States should have reduced its military footprint to a size capable of dealing with its own national interests. (more…)

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F. Roger Devlin talks about translating Alain de Benoist’s The Populist Moment as well as about how populism developed out of the traditional Left-Right dichotomy in this video from the 2023 Counter-Currents Spring Retreat. The text of the talk is here. (more…)

Alain de Benoist

3,032 words

The following is the text of a talk that was given at the recent Counter-Currents Spring Retreat.

The term populism has been on people’s lips in the United States since Donald Trump’s rise, and its popularity goes back a bit farther in Europe, where it had already gained currency as a kind of curse word for anti-immigration protest parties. Following the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election, books on populism began proliferating in the English-speaking world. I expect many of these were solicited by the publishers, hoping to capitalize on a suddenly fashionable subject. During the Winter of 2018-19, Counter-Currents published a series of reviews of these new titles; I contributed four. (more…)

Portrait by Joshua Reynolds

5,714 words

How fares the Truth now? — Ill?
— Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?
— Thomas Hardy, “Lausanne, In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11-12 p.m.”
The 110th anniversary of the completion of the Decline and Fall at the same hour and place

Edward Gibbon was born in Putney, England on May 8, 1737. He was the sole survivor of a family with seven children; he had five brothers and one sister who all died in infancy. (more…)

Gustave Doré, The Fall of Lucifer

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The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? — Jeremiah 17:9

Unde malum? Where does evil come from? I first pondered that question as a child, a childhood of full immersion in a fundamentalist, Baptist Weltanschauung. Evil’s origin and its persistence in the world was the central motif in the narrative of the Great Rebellion, the failure of Angel Lucifer’s insurrection against God. The origin of evil came from a titanic battle of supernatural beings. (more…)

A French Jacobin

3,782 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

1. Introduction: Transcendental Idealism as Political Radicalism

In part one of this essay, I covered J. G. Fichte’s moral philosophy, as set out in his 1798 work The System of Ethics. In the present installment, which is largely self-contained, I shall cover his social and political philosophy, chiefly as expounded in The Foundations of Natural Right. Here we will find many ways in which Fichte lays the groundwork for contemporary Leftism, including a surprising anticipation of what Gen Z calls “real Communism.” (more…)

2,682 words

Introduction here, Chapter 11 Part 4 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

As is well-known, the republican slogan “Liberty — Equality — Fraternity” was first invoked during the French Revolution.[1] At that time it was merely one slogan among many others. Falling into disuse under the Empire, and frequently called into question thereafter, it reappeared during the Revolution of 1848 when it was inscribed as a “principle” of the Republic in the Constitution of February 27, 1848. (more…)

Barricade of the Communard National Guard, Paris, March 18, 1871.

3,377 words

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Introduction here, Chapter 9 Part 2 here, Chapter 10 Part 1 here

The Revolution of 1789 was itself above all a liberal and bourgeois revolution — even “ultra-liberal,” as the very liberal Gaspard Koenig affirms, not failing to celebrate this. (more…)

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The following text is being presented in commemoration of Sir Oswald Mosley’s 136th birthday. — Ed. (more…)

Jean-Claude Michéa

5,916 words

Introduction here, Chapter 4 Part 2 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

In January 1905, the regulations of the French Section of the Workers’ International, the Socialist Party of the time, still indicated that it was a “class party whose goal was to socialize the means of production and exchange, i.e. to transform capitalist society into a collectivist or Communist society, and that its means to this end was the economic and political organization of the proletariat.” Of course, no “socialist” party would dare say this today. Socialists have mutated into social-democrats and, increasingly, into social-liberals. (more…)