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Revolutions and ‘people power’

Until the 18th century, the word revolution meant the conclusion of a circular movement, a return to the point of origin, the restoration of a primordial order. The Latin term revolutio, in normal times, was applied both to space to especially describe the periodic orbital paths of celestial bodies, and to time to indicate the renewal of chronological situations, from the alternation of night and day to the precession of the equinoxes. The elimination of the traditional mentality has profoundly changed and even reversed its original meaning. In modern times, revolution is understood as the violent overthrow of the established order by the mercantile and servile components of society in order to establish a new political, social and economic system for the implementation of a given ideology1. For instance, it became customary to define revolutions that of Cromwell, as well as, the American one, although the former was more properly a civil war and the latter a war of independence.

Also before that time, mutinies, insurrections, revolts and uprisings2 had occurred, but almost all of them were eventually suppressed by the legitimate power. If they succeeded, they did not affect the mentality of an entire continent, remaining a temporary, limited and local phenomenon3. Therefore, without hesitation we can define as revolutions those episodes that overthrew the traditional legitimate power, and were historically imposed by consecrating their illegitimacy as a new self-proclaimed ‘rule of law’4.

It must be added, however, that by the end of the Middle Ages the traditional feudal order had degenerated into absolutism, particularly in the Kingdom of France. The nobles were prompted to abandon their castles and move to Versailles, transformed into bumbling courtiers. Those who refused to live as parasites at the royal court were effectively excluded from the halls of power, their castles were turned into defenceless villas (the French chateaux) and the walls of their towns and villages were dismantled. These aristocrats, downgraded to ‘aristocratics’, began to harbour a muted hostility to absolute monarchy and this explains (but does not justify) the participation of some of them in the revolution.

The term ‘revolution’, therefore, is properly suited to the French revolution that decreed the end of the ancien régime5. In fact since the French revolution the term was used6 (also retrospectively) to define any epochal change that was antagonistic to the previous order: Christian revolution in an anti-Roman imperial sense, scientific revolution in an anti-Tolemaic sense, industrial revolution against artisan production, cultural revolution against all wisdom of the past, sexual revolution against the common sense of decency.

Applied in this translational sense, revolution simply means the overthrow of anything conforms to the natural order recognised by all men of sound mind. In the historical-political sense, however, it means the extermination of a dominant social class and its replacement by a subordinate one. From this perspective, the Puritan revolution led by Cromwell in England and the American revolution are not really revolutions, since the former, despite the beheading of the sovereign7, saw an alliance between a part of the nobility and the upper middle class united by Calvinism; the latter, on the other hand, represented the struggle of a petty-bourgeois colony against a power now considered as foreign, England. There was no real substitution of social classes in the government of public affairs, it was mainly a matter of nationality.

On the contrary, the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions can be considered as such for aiming to a partial or total extermination of the upper classes. The French revolution attempted the extermination of the aristocracy and the high clergy, and it almost achieved this by replacing them with the bourgeoisie at the head of the State. The Bolshevik revolution targeted the bourgeoisie in particular, effectively wiping it out of Russia, along with the clergy and nobility. Another notable difference is that the Anglo-Saxon revolutions were real wars8, whereas the French and Communist revolutions were coups perpetrated by demagogues skilled in fomenting discontent and social agitators. The Fascist revolution in Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany belonged to this same category.

Before going any further, however, it is necessary to point out that all revolutions, from the puritanical English one to the present day ones, have been inspired and led by bourgeoisie, skilful manipulators of the emotions of the people9, i.e. ‘useful idiots’10. This is the continuous common thread linking liberalism, democracy, socialism and totalitarian regimes, all inspired by the middle class11. In reality, the common people are unable to elaborate or allow themselves to become involved in ideologies due to a lack of education and culture. The servile classes, too busy with daily survival, are alien to deformations and vicious cerebral lucubrations; they are, however, easily incited by ‘committed’ demagogues to envy and class hatred. Once wrath has died down, the common people return to submit to their new masters with servile obedience.

Like the American Revolution, the French one began as a protest against the excessive taxation used by the crowns of England and France to balance their public finances12. Undoubtedly these rebellions gave rise to the delinquent democratic and popular political systems now predominant throughout the world, that, instead of the infamous medieval tithes, can take up to fifty per cent of a citizen’s income from direct taxation alone.

The French Revolution claimed more than six hundred thousand victims among its own citizens, slain for their loyalty to the monarchy or to the Catholic Church13. Thisis yet another ruthless legacy inherited by the bloody popular regimes of the 20th century, that it is always shamefully praised by liberal democrats and socialists. In fact, this aberration still goes on in the French republican regime, that even nowadays provides asylum and protection to guerrillas and terrorists of other nationalities14.

Many revolutionaries were Freemasons. In reality, the majority of Freemasons remained loyal to the monarchy, precisely because they were involved in high “knightly” ranks that harked back to a medieval type of loyalty. Certainly the agnostic and atheistic Enlightenment was a fundamental source of the French Revolution15: the cult of the “Goddess of Reason” with its farcical rituals was merely an insult to the Catholic and monarchical tradition of France.

In fact, the secular, anti-religious16 mentality came from the circles of so called Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, alchemists and Christian Qabbalists already described in the previous chapters. Their hidden influence made even French ecclesiastical circles sceptical, and from 1740 onwards these stopped prosecuting e the crimes of magicians and sorceresses. As a result of this laxity, there was a spread of magic at all levels: country witchcraft, collective possessions, and, at salon and lodge level, animal magnetism17 and somnambulism18. The Enlightenment in this manner confirmed its scepticism, atheism and anti-religionism, but it was at the same time imbued of experiments based on the most frightening psychism, the indisputable heir of Renaissance occultism. The climate of Terror, the unleashed madness of popular rituals addressed to the Goddess Reason and the Tree of Liberty, the spread of country witchcraft and ceremonial magic in the drawing rooms, could only end in a dictatorship with which Napoleon Buonaparte19 tried to institute some bourgeois order20. In reality, his intervention in history completely unhinged the equilibrium in the rest of Europe. In fact, even after his fall, the continent was never able to return to normal and the restoration of the status quo ante was a complete failure.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi


  1. Ideology refers to a set of beliefs imposed in place of a traditional or religious structure. The absence of an established basic organic doctrine, in harmony with cosmic and divine laws, prompts the propagandists of the ideology to adopt an imposing, fanatical and persecutory attitude. Over time this has become more and more patent, as proved by the ideologies contrary to any natural evidence and rational argumention that States, international organisations, NGOs, multinational corporations, the media and other power-holding devilry are making compulsory in this beginning of the 21st century.[]
  2. In opposition to the contemporary historical criticism, flattened by a prejudice that falsely considers these phenomena of rebellion exclusively of popular origin, it is necessary to distinguish those insurgencies caused by feudal diatribes (uprisings of knights) from the truly subversive bourgeois or pauperistic uprisings.[]
  3. An example is the case of the communes of the late Middle Ages which, however, forged the secular and hedonistic mentality that soon after gave birth to humanism.[]
  4. In the 1776 document that founded the state entity of the United States, the delegates enacted the collective right to revolution and the individual’s particular right to self-defence. These two pseudo-principles were formalised in the Declaration of Independence from the Kingdom of England. Since the Constitution of 1787 did not clearly specify what those two rights consisted of, a Charter was added in 1791, setting out ten amendments to limit the powers of the US federal government in order to protect individuals. The Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech and religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and freedom of assembly and petition.[]
  5. This led to the definitive abolition of feudalism. In the rest of Europe, with the transformation of constitutional monarchies into bourgeois regimes, feudalism slowly disappeared. But not immediately: for example the liberalisation of the last fief in the Austro-Hungarian Empire took place in 1900, as the writer of these lines well knows. Contemporary Constitutional monarchies, characterised by continuous marriages with people from the entertainment and business world, actively co-operated in the dismantling the last social functions of the noble class.[]
  6. This happened with the enactment of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which proclaimed the equality of all citizens. Of course, the only inequality recognised was that of census, thus protecting the privileges of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie. In addition, the separation of religion from the state was included among the rights (?): the State was thus overwhelmingly occupied by atheistic and anti-religious secularism. Today, revolutionary brainwashed Christians proudly proclaim themselves to be secular and religious at the same time: the devil and the holy water together.[]
  7. In itself it was a very serious act that challenged the concept of the divine right of sovereigns. King Charles II Stuart had appealed to the Emperor as his superior or, in his behalf, to a college of three European kings as his peers. Instead, he was condemned to death by an assembly of his inferiors bourgeois, members of the Parliament.[]
  8. We can add to these also the communist seizure of power in China in 1949, after a long and cruel civil war.[]
  9. Revolutionary fanatics, who regard such historical events as commendable examples of civilisation, deny on grounds of ideological faith that fascisms were revolutionary movements, in fact these are their direct political rivals and as such to beirrevocably condemned, on principle only, as reactionary and retrogressive. In reality, whether right-wing or left-wing, the revolutions of the 20th century all had a socialist matrix. However, the French and Bolshevik revolutions were carried out in an underhand manner by means of coups d’état, without the heroic deeds so often boasted by the rhetoric of their admirers. Certainly there was violence, but this was unleashed post quem by the revolutionaries against their rivals as soon as they took power.[]
  10. Formula used by Lenin to define pro-Soviet activists citizens of non-communist countries.[]
  11. The dictators of right-wing and left-wing regimes, all of them bourgeois, are not so morally different from many ‘democratically’ elected presidents. The promoters of so-called ‘scientific’ exterminations are no worse than those who coldly ordered the use of the atomic bomb at the end of a already won war. These and many other examples have been before our eyes in the last few decades. On the other hand, the first example of genocide of an entire population is the one perpetrated against the Vendeans, a mass-crime rightfully imputed to the French Revolution. Gracchus Babeuf, La Guerre de la Vendée et le système de dépopulation, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2008.[]
  12. Few people know that the French Revolution was carefully prepared by the British Intelligence Sevice to avenge the stinging naval defeat at Chesapeake. The ingenious British propaganda have always been able to erase British fleet’s defeats from memory. In May 1781, the French fleet, under the orders of Admiral François Joseph Paul, Count de Grasse, routed the British squadron, preventing the landing of reinforcements for the besieged contingent at Yorktown. As a result, Lord Cornwallis had to surrender to the insurgents and England was forced to recognise the independence of its American colonies. The British Prime Minister William Pitt wasted no time in avenging the bitter defeat by undermining the stability of the French kingdom. He identified the public debt and the system of exorbitant taxation as the weak point in France’s social system, which was already worn down by decades of continuous warfare. He recruited Swiss financiers and bankers to exasperate the situation and recruited political agitators and journalists to provoke tempers, among them Étienne Clavière, François Louis Jean-Joseph de Laborde, Jean-Paul Marat, Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont and the renegade Count Honoré Gabriel Riquetti de Mirabeau. Pierre Douat, Tout ce que vous auriez voulu savoir sur la France et qu’on vous a toujours caché, Rémire Montjoly. Éd. Marsan, 2016, pp. 11-20; Albert Mathiez, “Quelques affaires de commerce et d’intelligences avec l’ennemi sous la Terreur. Le banquier Boyd et ses amis”, Annales révolutionnaires, T. 12, No. 3 (Mai-Juin 1920), pp. 218-231. The fact that renegades join ranks with their natural enemies is a phenomenon that has continued and worsened over time. Nowadays, the opulent sons of the capitalist bourgeoisie display extreme left-wing ideas and sentiments, pledging the solidarity of the wretched scum in the attempt to save their economic empires from possible proletarian expropriation.[]
  13. Adolph Thiers, Storia della Rivoluzione Francese, Brindisi, Edizioni Trabant, 2018-2021, 10 voll. Obviously, although the aristocrats and the high clergy were the preferred victims, such a high number of victims makes it clear that it was mainly a massacre of the bourgeoisie and the common people who had not bowed to the imposition of the new ‘freedoms’.[]
  14. The Terror also inaugurated the political use of justice that is so widespread today. This brings with it an anomalous benevolence towards criminals and often inflexibility towards honest citizens. What characterises any democratic or popular government, however, is that it allows the rise of the worst elements of the petty-bourgeois and working-classes, who find in the political careers the easiest means of enrichment for themselves and their descendants.[]
  15. René Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-Maçonnerie allemande, Genève, Slatkine-Megariotis, 1974, pp. 557-566; 658-663.[]
  16. Thomas de Cauzons, La Magie et la sorcellerie en France, Paris, Dorbon Ainé, s.d., III vol. pp. 360-547.[]
  17. We are referring here to the parascientific experiments of Franz Anton Mesmer.[]
  18. Namely, the use of sleepwalkers, ‘doves’ and mediums for clairvoyant purposes, in use by charlatans such as Cagliostro and Fabre d’Olivet.[]
  19. Indeed, the Buonaparte was a family of ancient nobility. One such knight, Napoleon Buonaparte, took part in the First Crusade with the contingent sent to the Holy Land by the Marquis of Treviso. However, his omonimous descendant had fully embraced the ideas of the revolution.[]
  20. Even if it was a caricaturesque image of the Empire, it was still a bourgeois dictatorship. However, the imperial-revolutionary regime was the design to replace what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, it was the very Napoleon who imposed the end of that ancient and venerable institution when Francis II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was forced to become Francis I, Emperor of Austria.[]