Is the U.S. Facing a “Thermidorian Reaction?”
It’s 1789. In March, the U.S. Constitution supersedes the Articles of Confederation and becomes the supreme law of the United States. In April George Washington is sworn in as our first president. A stabile and orderly government was born.
In July the Bastille Saint-Antoine in Paris fell to a mob, signifying the beginning of the French Revolution.
Thus began a years’ long orgy of beheading and chaos.
The radical Jacobin faction, led by Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, coalesced into a power-seizing majority. The Jacobins were named after the Jacobin Club, a group of anti-royalists that ultimately numbered over 500,000 members.
The Jacobins’ political platform became increasingly extreme as the revolution lurched toward pandemonium. An estimated 40,000 political enemies were sent to the guillotine in their “Reign of Terror.”
One of the Jacobins’ most extreme changes was to scrap the traditional Gregorian calendar we use today and implement the French Revolutionary calendar. The calendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, plus five or six intercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of a solar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar.
Oh, and the days of the week were all renamed.
If that wasn’t enough, time was decimalized, meaning:
Each day in the calendar was divided into ten hours
Each hour into 100 decimal minutes
Each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds
This caused every clock in use to be worthless.
The Jacobins also changed the months and years. So, for example, “Thermidor” was roughly July as it started on July 19 or 20. The standard years were changed to begin with the fall of the Bastille. Therefore 1789 ultimately became “Year 1.”
During their year in power, the Jacobins turned the life of the nation upside down in their zealous quest to create a perfectly equitable society. They:
Instituted price and wage controls while printing money which triggered monetary inflation
Confiscated grain from farmers
In short, the Jacobins made a bloody mess of things and pissed-off a lot of their countrymen.
By the summer of 1794, the general population finally had enough of the Jacobin nightmare. On July 27 (or 9 Thermidor II in their Revolutionary calendar), Robespierre gave a speech denouncing his enemies and crying for blood when the out-group members present started throwing food at him and shouting him down. That was the magic moment when everything collapsed — the recognition that the Jacobins had lost power. The chamber fell into a melee. Robespierre and his cronies were chased across town to Paris’ city hall (Hôtel de Ville) and barricaded themselves inside.
The mob broke through and arrested them. Somewhere in the confusion a policeman shot Robespierre in the face, shattering his jaw and the very next day, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and seventy of their associates were sent to the guillotine.
Thus ended the French Revolution.
* * *
Will the U.S. have something similar to France’s Thermidorian Reaction? I think perhaps.
For example, nobody is changing the calendar or the clocks.
But, without getting into specifics, I think we’ve seen a segment of the governing body, corporate media, higher education institutions and technology companies make outlandish pronouncements. We’ve heard ridiculous beliefs from this group in the areas of:
Healthcare
Sexuality
Criminal Justice
Climate
Race relations
And more.
Vendettas are pursued against people who challenge these beliefs. Often 99% of the population must suffer or sacrifice so that the remaining 1% are not “offended”.
There is no guillotine, but “cancel culture” causes those who speak out to be cancelled in social media. Some of those folks have lost their jobs for speaking their minds. While the result is not as terminal as the guillotine, the threat of cancellation has the effect of chilling public discourse.
Censorship, in the name of ending “disinformation,” also limits public discussion when the disinformation is that which disagrees with the “official” narrative. This is especially frustrating when the original “disinformation” turns out to be true and the official narrative is not.
I believe that a large portion of Americans are disturbed by all of this. Our own Thermidorian Reaction may come soon. Of course, ours will be totally different from France’s and it’ll be named something else. But the end result may be very similar.
What do you think?