Remembering Bastile Day with Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

On this, the 223rd anniversary of the beginning of the end of sanity and decency, the anti-Christian holocaust known as the French Revolution, it may be profitable to reflect on the great man, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. He was a friend of Lew Rockwell, of Mises, an adviser to Otto von Habsburg. And he was one of the greatest intellectuals of the past century. His excellent article Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre & the French Revolution would be appropriate to re-read or even read for the first time today.

From his great piece:

“The French Revolution…didn’t come like a bolt out of the blue. Charles I had been executed 140 years before in Whitehall by religio-political fanatics, and as Jean Lacroix has convincingly argued, the Republic rests on “the death of the Father.” Fraternity and Equality can apparently only be realized through parricide. The impetus for change in France came not only from Switzerland, rather It came from French Anglophiles and a completely false understanding of what had just happened in America. It was, in a way, the first great Euro-American misunderstanding. On the other hand, Governor Morris, the American envoy to Paris, told the conceited Lafayette at the beginning of the revolution: ‘I am against your democracy, Monsieur de Lafayette, because I am for freedom.’ In 1815 he began a speech with the words, ‘The Bourbons are back on the throne; Europe is once again free’ -something which today hardly an American would understand after so many years of school-inculcated fatuity.”

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2:08 pm on July 14, 2012