France is presented less as a physical setting than as a political-historical counterexample to the United States. Its significance lies in the book’s selective memory of the French Revolution and the Jacobins, which are transformed into a model of decisive action against reactionary elites, right-wing institutions, and entrenched social hierarchy.

France and the French Revolution

France enters the argument through the French Revolution, described as one of the events most hated and feared by the right wing. The book emphasizes the Jacobins’ willingness to use state power against opposition: they executed thousands of right-wing leaders and waged merciless war against reactionary and counter-revolutionary priests and peasants, whose insurrections were said to have been encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church. In this account, the revolution’s importance is not treated as a balanced historical question but as a political precedent for breaking the power of the right.

The Jacobins are therefore positioned as the opposite of the American right wing. The book presents them as an ultra-left force whose willingness to employ coercive state action contrasts with contemporary American hostility toward government intervention. France becomes a repository of revolutionary memory: its past is summoned to authorize the claim that a society cannot be transformed until the institutions and social forces sustaining reaction have been decisively defeated.

Contrast with the Anglo-American Right

The book argues that the French right remains significantly different from the Anglo-American right. Even the far right in France is described as retaining many overtly socialist policies and as expressing hostility toward banking and corporate elites and their global capitalist schemes. This characterization makes France an ideological contrast with the United States, where the book claims that there has never been a genuine left wing and that modern America was founded by Protestant extremists with ultra-right-wing views.

The contrast is structural rather than merely national. France is associated with a political tradition in which opposition to financial and corporate power can coexist with right-wing identity, whereas the American right is portrayed as defending the very elites it claims to oppose. The book thus uses France to sharpen its criticism of American political categories: a movement’s rhetoric about nation, tradition, or order does not by itself determine whether it challenges or protects concentrated wealth.

France and the American Civil War Analogy

France is also part of the book’s larger historical vocabulary for interpreting contemporary American politics. The Jacobins’ suppression of reactionary forces is placed beside the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s defeat of the Confederacy. Lincoln is described as the American president most closely identified with positive liberty because he used decisive state action against slavery and carried that action through to the total defeat of the Confederacy.

From this perspective, the book calls for a comparable defeat of the modern American right wing. The contemporary conflict is described as a mental or cultural continuation of the Civil War, with the Republican Party portrayed as having adopted the Confederate philosophy of negative liberty, minimal government, maximum profit, and resistance to collective regulation. France’s revolutionary example supplies one historical image of how reaction might be broken; Lincoln supplies another, specifically American, image of state power used to destroy an oppressive order.

Revolutionary Memory and Political Use

The treatment of France illustrates the book’s method of turning historical memory into present political weaponry. The French Revolution and Jacobinism are not explored through competing interpretations, internal contradictions, or the complexity of their victims and institutions. Instead, they are selected for their symbolic usefulness in an argument that contemporary right-wing power must be confronted with force rather than persuasion alone.

This selective comparison also reveals the book’s reliance on high-intensity historical analogy. France is made to stand for revolutionary rupture, the Confederacy for reactionary capitalism, and the modern American right for the persistence of that reaction in economic, political, and cultural form. The result is a sharply polarized map of political history: France supplies the memory of Jacobin intervention, while the United States supplies the unresolved conflict that, in the book’s view, still requires a final victory over Confederate ideology.