World Revolution Against Monarchy

The tragedy of the French and Russian Revolutions:

A warning to the uninitiated who think bloody revolutions are made by ordinary people FOR ordinary people.

."France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England......"
Oswald Spengler, "Decline of the West" p.403

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Both these revolutions were designed to and achieved the overthrow of the monarchy in France and Russia, with terrible and bloody results which no sane person could regard as beneficial to the people as a whole and were a tragic lesson to many of the chief participants, who, having helped to overthrow the restraints which underpin a stable society, became themselves the victims and were exterminated in their turn.

The French Revolution was an un-necessary tragedy because much needed reforms were on their way with the King Louis XVI attempting to oversee their progress, and the picture of the downtrodden peasantry was false and according to several English observers like Arthur Young the situation was far worse in England than in France, whose peasants Young found strong and happy.

Before we look briefly at the measures which the King tried to take, let us examine also the groups which  "opposed these reforms" and why.

• The Orléanistes, under the Duc d'Orléans who used his immense wealth to pay the mobs to riot and other unsavory members of the aristocracy who had for one reason or other fallen foul of the Royal Court (and in the case of the Duc who had been exiled) and wished their revenge. Some of these reserved special hatred for Marie Antoinette to whom they had made sexual overtures and had been rebuffed and they too wanted revenge. 

• The Subversives, both in France and from abroad, chiefly Prussia, who merely wanted to destroy everything - to quote two:

"All memories of history, all prejudices resulting from community of interest and of origin,
 all must be renewed in France; we wish only to date from today" - Barrère

 "To make the people happy their ideas must be reconstructed, laws must be changed, morals must be changed, 
men must be changed, things must be changed,
 everything, yes, everything must be destroyed, since everything must be re-made"
 - Rabaud de Saint-Etienne.** He was one of those exterminated by the terror they unleashed !!

• The Prussians - because of the alliance of France with Austria through the marriage of Marie-Antoinette to Louis XVI, who sent agents to spy and to de-stabilise the country.
  

• The grain monopolisers, who cornered the market as far as they could and thereby worsened the threat of famine caused by a bad harvest around Paris region, thereby obstructing the King and his ministers moving grain around to where it was short.
  

• The revolutionary intellectuals whose literature went to the educated bourgoisie.
  

• English money from unstable elements in London with whom many of the French revolutionaries met before and during the revolution.  Marat lived in Soho; Danton, Brissot,Pétion, St. Huruge,Theroigne de Mericourt, Rotondo all frequented London. The Duc d'Orléans deposited between 10 and 12 million francs in London banks.

France in the early part of 1789 had moved to or was near to a very satisfactory political system which one could call "Royal democracy" and was one which the people had voted for through their representatives in all the regions. On the following three points the "cahiers de doléances" which the King had sent around the country in which the people were to list their grievances came back unanimous; 

1. The French government is monarchic.

2. The person of the King is inviolable and sacred.

3. His crown is hereditary from male to male.

On the following points the great majority were agreed:

4. The king is the depository of the Executive power.

5. The agents of authority are responsible.

6. The royal sanction is necessary for the promulgation of the laws.

7. The nation makes the laws with the royal sanction.

8. The consent of the nation is necessary for loans and taxes.

9. Taxes can only be imposed from one meeting of the States-General (Parliament) to another.

10. Property is sacred.

11. Individual liberty is sacred.

"It has been said that the Revolution was made in public opinion before it was realized in events;
  that is true, but one must add that it was not the Revolution as we saw it....
 it was not by the people that the Revolution was made in France."
 - Hua, deputy of the Legislative Assembly.

Indeed as part of the tax reform the King had imposed new taxes on the "privileged classes" which further upset his enemies in that class.

So what went wrong when reforms and accord was so near?

The States-General through which the people in Paris had their representative democracy was composed of "Orléanists" who concealed their true intentions to the people (because the King was extremely popular in the proper sense of that word )and who wanted to depose the King and put the Duc d'Orléans on the throne of France. there was also the anti-monarchy faction who wanted the total abolition of the monarchy.  So, when the grain crisis arose, instead of uniting together, which they would have done to solve trhat problem, they continued to argue with each other over future constitutional arrangements to suit their particular objectives.

All the while the Duc d'Orléans had his agents around the whole of France propagating false rumours against the King and particularly in Paris that the King was trying to corner the grain and starve the people.  In truth the king and his ministers were trying to combat the grain monopolies and distribute grain to where there were shortages.  

All the while the Duc d'Orléans had pamphlets distributed in Paris trying to stir up the people and his money was used to pay for incredible ruffians from Marseille and Italy to be brought to Paris.  To cut a long story short these ruffians and many other local ne'r-do-wells were paid to terrorise the ordinary people of Paris whose common sense and stability made it initially hard for these ruffians to achieve the Duc's objectives until they started to press-gang and terrify the citizens into joining their escapades. This was in the spring of 1789.  So whilst the reformers and the revolutionaries were operating neck and neck, on the 27th of April a rumour was started that a prosperous and popular local paper manufacturer (whom the local people had elected to the States General in preference to the Duc's candidate) had slighted the local workers while speaking in the Assembly.  Since the man was a good local employer, and popular, the ruffians had to resort to force to get a mob.  In the end his factory was burned down and troops had to be called in to quell the riot, with inevitable bloodshed. Evidence from rioters who had been shot confirmed that they were being paid to riot.

However, for the revolutionaries this test run proved that their tactics could work, given enough force, and was the precursor of the storming of the Bastille.

The Bastille had been depicted as a dreadful place of incarceration in order to stir up the mobs but once again this was part of the plan and the Bastille eventually was taken and dismantled.

Then the revolutionaries turned their attention to Versailles and the King's palace and mobs were organised to march on Versailles and overthrow the King.  Such was his popularity that even these failed even after some bloodshed.  But then the King, ever caring for his people was beguiled to go to Paris and the States General and from then on we know the rest. Both he and the Queen were executed in those dreadful scenes which films and television portray. Many of the revolutionaries, having unleashed the Reign of Terror themselves became its victims, which is a warning to all who would join such adventures.

This summary is taken from "The French Revolution by Nesta Webster. "The sequel to the great French Revolution was thus eighty years of unrest....the immense reforms were not the result of the revolution..it was to the King and his enlightened advisers..that these were due..it was the royalist Democrats, abhorred of the revolutionary leaders, who drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man and framed the Constitution. The work of the Revolution was to destroy all these reforms...." - page 487/488.!!

France even in relatively modern times has been renowned for its instability of republican government.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1917

"There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interests of MONEY,
 in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money - and that,
 without the idealists amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact"
 - Oswald Spengler "Decline of the West" p 402.
"...and every socialistic outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism"...p.454

This was another un-necessary tragedy brought about by complicity between revolutionaries and the German army. The true story of this revolution was attempted to be told to the world by the fluent Russian-speaking London Times correspondent on the spot Robert Wilton, who wrote in "The Last Days of the Romanovs"  p22.:

"In 1917, the Germans sent Lenin with a horde of revolutionaries to take possession of Russia.  A Red Government, composed
 of persons selected in Berlin, was now in power, but they were vassals.....dutifully sending the tribute gold to Berlin...
 by order of their German masters....(General) Ludendorff  has related frankly how simple and wonderful had been this operation.
 Not only was Russia out of the war; the food stuffs obtained from the Ukraine had literally saved Germany and her allies." 

"By sending Lenin to Russia our government had, moreover, assumed a great responsibility......
but our government should have seen to it that we also were not involved in her fall."  - War Memoirs. Ludendorff.

"Ludendorff's plan was to substitute a more agreeable form of government in place of the Soviets....
but Sovietdom re-asserted itself..here we have the key to the removal of Tsar Nicholas II from Tobolsk."
  - end of quotes from "Last Days of the Romanovs"

It took the BBC until 2003 to broadcast a TV docudrama outlining the true story of the butchering of the Romanov Royal Family similar to the story told by Wilton.  Wilton's dispatches having been suppressed he died in 1925 in poverty having left to the world his evidence in his book.

 It is worth reminding readers here that the same fate overtook many of those early revolutionaries in Russia as had befallen those in France who unleashed a similar Reign of Terror there.  Many were liquidated by Stalin in subsequent purges.  But, as is well-known, he went on to organise the famine in the Ukraine which liquidated millions of peasant farmers who did not want to be collectivised etc etc!

 Were the people of Russia really better off after the revolution or did the unseen upper echelons of the subversives alone get what they wanted?  We in the West can hardly believe that "the people" benefited. We in the West then became at odds with "communism" for the next 75 years and all the expense fear and misery that this brought to both sides of the Iron Curtain.  

 " The revival of revolutionary action on any scale sufficiently vast will not be possible unless we succeed in utilising the existing disagreements between the capitalistic
 countries, so as to precipitate them against each other into armed conflict.  The doctrine of Marx-Engel’s-Lenin teaches us that all war truly generalised terminates
 automatically by revolution.  The essential work of our party comrades in foreign countries consists then in facilitating the provocation of such conflict."

I hope that you will remind the comrades, those of you who direct the work.  The decisive hour will arrive."
 - Stalin. at a session of the Third International,or Comintern,  Moscow, May 1938.

Douglas Reed, one of several Times journalists in Europe saw war being stoked up in Germany by organised unrest. He too had his despatches blocked and resigned in disgust to write a series of revealing books up until his death, all of which explained some aspect of the "behind the scenes" activities the ordinary people are not allowed to see.

Many of Europe's monarchies fell victim to the Communist (revolution) takeover of Europe after WW2 which clamped an iron dictatorship over the whole area.

The English had a further (socialist)  revolution in 1945 with the "election" of a Labour government but there was no need for bloodshed as the "democratic" mechanisms had long been in place and the monarch had been stripped of any power years before - see Democracy - the permanent revolution against the Constitution.

It should also be remembered that England had its own bloody revolution long before with the execution of Charles 1 followed by abortive period under Cromwell, before the restoration of the monarchy.

Not even the English monarchy survives as a "Royal democracy" in the sense that the French nearly had, (and which this website seeks to promote elsewhere) in which the monarch acts as a long-stop (to use a cricketing term) or referee to prevent oppressive laws being passed.  Thus "democracy" in England means a monarchy which has to obey the dictates of the elected government, thus preventing the monarchy acting as a safeguard for the people's liberty, so that in the opinion of this website many oppressive laws suppressing the liberty of the English people have been passed in order that certain people may ** re-make society (sic) according to their desires by Parliamentary means or "elective dictatorship" (see rest of website).

Forward to: "Democracy" - The Permanent Revolution against the Constitution