French Revolution

The French Revolution is treated less as a bounded eighteenth-century event than as a reusable political weapon. The book explains its significance through the claim that the working class and the middle class joined together against the elite; when that alliance forms, the ruling order becomes vulnerable, whereas division allows the elite to remain in power. The Revolution therefore supplies both a historical example and a warning about the consequences of class fragmentation.

Causes and Class Alliance

The book identifies the decisive cause of the French Revolution as cooperation between the working class and the middle class. This interpretation reduces the event to a sharply legible conflict between popular forces and an elite whose survival depends on preventing those forces from uniting. The same framework is applied to the present: modern right-wing supporters are described as class traitors because they obstruct solidarity between workers and the middle class, thereby preserving elite rule.

This reading is set against the book’s account of early capitalism. Under the predatory capitalism associated with the British Empire, workers are said to have hated the Ownership Class, creating the social conditions in which Karl Marx preached communism and violent insurrection. The French Revolution functions within this broader history as the exemplary moment when subordinate classes overcame their separation and turned collective resentment into revolutionary power.

The Jacobins and Revolutionary Violence

The Jacobins are presented as the necessary agents of social transformation. The book states that they executed thousands of right-wing leaders and waged merciless war against reactionary and counter-revolutionary priests and peasants, with the Roman Catholic Church described as encouraging peasant insurrection. In this account, revolutionary violence is not an incidental excess but the means by which entrenched reaction is physically broken.

The Jacobins are consequently called tribunes of the people and the inheritors of the sacred flame of the martyred Gracchi, slain by the rich elite. Their role is elevated from a historical faction to a political archetype: they represent organized popular force acting against wealth-based domination. The book’s language openly seeks to reactivate that archetype, arguing that society cannot be changed until the right wing is broken.

Memory, Motto, and Political Reversal

The French Revolution also supplies the phrase “Live free or die,” which the book identifies as the motto of the ultra-left-wing Jacobins. The expression is contrasted with its later association with American political philosophy: it became the official motto of New Hampshire in 1945, while a related toast had been written by General John Stark in 1809 for the anniversary of the Battle of Bennington. The book notes that Stark may not have originated the phrase, since “Vivre Libre ou Mourir” was a popular motto of the French Revolution and had been engraved on buttons by Antoine Barnave.

This history produces one of the book’s characteristic ironies. “Live free or die” is widely read as a declaration of American independence and resistance to government, yet the book insists that its revolutionary origin places it on the opposite side of the political spectrum from American right-wing conservatism. The motto is thus used to expose what the author sees as a reversal in collective memory: a Jacobin slogan has been absorbed into a political culture that the book portrays as defending hierarchy, private power, and the legacy of the Confederacy.

Comparison with the American Civil War

The French Revolution is repeatedly placed beside the American Civil War as a model of decisive conflict between popular government and entrenched reaction. The book argues that the physical Civil War defeated the Confederacy but did not eliminate the ideology associated with it. Contemporary American right-wing politics is therefore described as a New Confederacy, while the political insurgency associated with Donald Trump is called “The Confederacy: The Sequel.”

Against this alleged continuation of Confederate ideology, the book calls for Jacobins who will carry the revolutionary struggle into the present. Abraham Lincoln is presented as the American president most identified with positive liberty because he used state power to end slavery and pursued the total defeat of the Confederacy. The French revolutionary model supplies the militant counterpart to Lincoln’s state action: both are invoked as examples of political authority refusing to leave oppressive arrangements untouched in the name of minimal government or private property.

Contemporary Reuse and Significance

The French Revolution becomes, in the book, a template for a new assault on elite rule. Its lesson is that popular unity can defeat the rich, that reactionary forces may have to be forcibly dismantled, and that political freedom cannot be secured merely by limiting the state. The book’s proposed Jacobinism is linked to meritocracy, the General Will, and a rationalist social order, and “Live Free or Die” is explicitly recast as its motto.

This use of the Revolution is deliberately selective and confrontational. It turns a complex historical process into a moral drama of alliance, betrayal, repression, and victory, then transfers that drama to modern America. The result is not a neutral history of the French Revolution but an act of historical appropriation: the Revolution is remembered chiefly for the power of class coalition and the Jacobins’ willingness to destroy reaction, because those are the features the book wants to make available as instruments against the modern Ownership Class and the American right wing.