Enfants de la patrie

 One of the reasons I stopped taking delivery of my local paper was the amount of godawful right wing idiocy that showed up in the op-ed pages--usually from local lunatics, since they had no need to pay the syndicates for them when they could get it all for free. ( I became one of those lunatics only once, when I tried to explain what a scientific theory was and what it wasn't, and why a creationist could not be a scientist. I learned my lesson: it turned out the writer of the screed I was reacting to wasn't too sure about gravity or electromagnetism either.)But one of the screeds I still remember was an argument that the American Revolution succeeded because it was prosecuted by christians and the French Revolution failed because it was prosecuted by stinking atheists. America, the writer went on, became the greatest nation on Earth because it was a Christian Nation. I was tempted to write in, I really was, if only to point out that America's enemies, like England and Spain, were also....but there's really no point in doing that rant even now.

In my own shallow way, what I was disappointed in, France-wise, was not so much the short-term deterioration of the Revolution into terror and empire, but the whole blithe if decrepit return of the Bourbons and the  wretched Second Empire in the medium term. Eventually, of course, France got to democracy, but for all its cultural richness, it's still partly crippled (sez who? sez me!) with the taint of aristocracy--and is thus less-than-competitive against the popular transforming wave of American culture for all that it beats us in food, fashion, film, comic books, the giant slalom and the equestrian events.

In the short term, American Democracy may have been saved by little more than the extraordinary character of George Washington. It was, of course, the good ol' Atlantic Ocean that allowed us to thrash about with our Articles of Confederation while France tried to put itself together while under constant attack by the rest of Europe--but not only did Washington refuse the kingship, he used his preeminence to protect and promote  the Constitutional Convention. And he did it without saying a word and with no religious invocation to Almighty God. Had  Washington been even a little more like Bonaparte (say, shorter) things might have been a whole lot worse.

And of course, if you take the longer view, America did not escape its Terror. We in fact killed our aristocratic supporters by the millions at places like Antietam and Shiloh. The dirty atheists who led the French Revolution understood the necessity of changing the culture of aristocracy and tyranny that informed France, and set about it in a horrible way--or rather, allowed the looniest and most driven of them to take over, Lenin-like, and invoke the the Destroyer, the Omelet Maker, with whose works the 20th century was littered, and who seems to have His manicured-yet-reeking hand resting on the shoulders of George Bush and Dick Cheney. On the other hand, we dodged the problem, tried to build a country dedicated to the proposition  that all men are created equal while accommodating half of its territory to those for whom other men were animals, to be owned and whipped and fucked and killed at their pleasure. We rejected the French need to tear down society and purge it of the elements of privilege and divine right, and so avoided the guillotine, but ended up having to do it in a way that would make Danton weep tears of blood.

And it worked, of course: we got our constitution, we survived and grew as a nation, and didn't invite the House of Hanover back in. But we debased our ideals and our national morality. We avoided the catastrophic failure of the French Revolution in favor of a partial failure and a partial paralysis and a national poisoning that looks like hypocrisy.

We've made it through, as has France. France was destroyed not once, but three times: the Franco-Prussian War, and world wars I and II--devastations Americans can't begin to imagine.  At the end, they could simply accept the modern ideas of polity as a given--as has the rest of Europe--and look with puzzled horror as we struggle with questions that should be as dead as Napoleon III.

So happy birthday, children of your homeland. It took a while, but your day of glory, muted now with long waiting, may finally be come. 

As for us, it's hard to tell, but we may have been incautious enough to let our Bourbons back in. Or maybe we should remark that the Committee on Public Safety and the Department of Homeland Security sound uncomfortably similar. Wish us well, friends, as we raise the bloody banner.