My good friend Alex is enjoying a quick twit for people who use proper French pronunciation to show how smart they are. “Why are you using a dying language?”
Alex is of course right. French isn’t dead, but it is dying rapidly. The next wave of $100 third world computers with qwerty keyboards will assure that English is linguistically about as dominant as America is dominant economically.
I raise the issue because the French Revolution...
I raise the issue because the French Revolution continues to
reverberate in our lives. The actual revolution had more immediate
effect on the world than the American war of independence because the
French over threw and beheaded a king … the dream of many people in the
world. America was an experiment that wasn’t proven until recently,
hundreds of years later. There have been many terrible failures of
wars of independence starting with the slave revolt in Saint-Dominique
in 1803 a country which became Haiti and is probably worse off today, two
centuries later. The evidence about the United States success was a long time in coming.
The important thing is that America’s two parties were formed out of the American reaction to the French Revolution. The Revolution was wrongly interpreted and still the wrong interpretation abides in our two parties. In France the urban working folk rose up against the aristocratic gentry. The Democratic party in America became the party of agrarian, anti-urban, anti-commerce as best described by Jefferson who loved the anti-government and anti-elitist elements of the French Revolution.
The Federalists of the time, reacted to the Jacobin slaughter of everyone competent
including the French military heroes of the American war of
independence. It was the Jacobin onslaught in the French Revolution
that galvanized the Federalists in support of a strong competent
commercial government.
The level of antagonism in America before the two parties were formed was far greater than it is today. It was that intense antagonism, evident among friends and between families that created the two parties we have today. The antagonism preceeded the formation of the parties. Even if we still had duelling, there wouldn't be near the number of duels that accompanied the founding of our country.