The French Revolution and its dangerous descendants

"Celebrating Bastille Day Is Ridiculous".

The French Revolution should be a case study in a class on how good intentions can lead to disastrous results.

Instead, it is widely celebrated--a national holiday in France--and the French Revolution became the model for leftist politics. Not every subsequent political disaster can be traced to the malign influence of the Jacobin experiment in utopianism, but a good fraction of them can be.

It was largely an urban revolution; tens of thousands of Catholic peasants in the rural regions of Normandie, Brittany and, most notably, the Vendée rose up against the revolutionaries, and actually scored a number of military victories before finally being put down. 

And for a historical example of "disinformation", you can hardly beat the attack on the Bastille. Far from holding hundreds of political prisoners as they had been informed, the angry mob was surprised to find that the old fortress only confined a handful of genuine criminals, and a couple of fellows who were being detained for observation on the grounds of sexual perversion. This didn't stop them from butchering the commander and marching around with his head on a pike.

But, then, the French, for all their boasting of being a thoughtful, rational people, are, in reality, hopeless drama queens.