French Revolution, Rise of science, flattening of the world! (y57aAu9nTUg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=y57aAu9nTUg

variables a little bit, because people were kind of losing an understanding of why, for instance, you would even have a parliament in Brittany, that can, that they’ll have their own laws, they can do what they want, you know, and what we care about is, look, please give us your taxes. Right. Right. Well, that’s the that’s the shift, the shift from from being a country where the regions agree to trade and agree to worship the same hat. Yeah. Right. And then so the previous tradition up until this point, if you have a king, that king has a title, that title is relative to your land. Yeah, the king doesn’t have one title, the king has like 50. And some correct. So we looked at this once the Holy Roman Empire and all the titles of the Holy Roman Emperor. And it’s like, wow, and see, that’s gonna be important later, right. But I think that the main problem is that, ironically, England and the United States, or what would become the United States never lost the understanding of the difference between the divine power, and power from below. And I don’t think the Enlightenment people made that mistake either, although I could be wrong about that. But I don’t think I they were, they were religious, like they were. All right, well, I am back with Adam. And today, we’re going to talk about sort of the French Revolution, and Napoleon, and the misapprehension of the Enlightenment. And basically, this stemmed from a conversation, I was trying to figure something out one day, and I went on BOM, and Adam was there. And I’m like, Oh, Adam knows a bunch of this type of history that I don’t, that I don’t know. And the original conversation is a bunch of people in the in the Bridges of Meaning discord at the time. And I seemed like they enjoyed the show, because most of them stayed for the duration. And we sort of went through these threads, and we did in a very haphazard fashion, right. But it worked out, it worked out well. But I figured like, oh, because it came up again, the other day on Bridges of Meaning, I figured, look, well, let’s do this again, because we can make a more coherent story out of it now that we’re not sort of just we’re out of discovery phase to some extent, because all the all the theses have been have been expanded upon once, and we’ll probably discover new things. But as is another sort of amateur historian different perspective, kind of a podcast. So what do you want to say as as way of introduction, Adam? Just that, you know, we’re going to be probably starting off with the with the American Revolution and going from there, the sort of basis of America and then England kind of, and how that begins with a sort of divide between that and the French Revolution. We’ll see, we’ll see where that goes. Because that that’s a big divide that nobody really tends to look at nowadays. Right, right. In the context of the larger war, right? Everybody everybody in the US goes, ooh, the revolution is like as a tiny skirmish in this huge battle that’s going on, that’s been going on, right? So, yeah, all right. You want to you want to you want to start us off? Sure, yeah. So, so where do we begin? Well, I guess I guess big wars, what’s going on, of course, at the time of the just before the American Revolution is the Seven Years War, which is quite a it’s quite a big conflict. I think if you look at it, and Churchill talks about that being almost the First World War, and just because the amount of powers that are involved, and and the scale of the armies is increasing, which is something that you’ll be seeing sort of throughout this time period is, you know, they’re kind of the arms, you know, people are tooling up, trying to trying to beat their their rivals. And you see as well at this time, there’s also sort of a string of alliances. And but the point being is that they’re that you’re getting armies of maybe 30,000 40,000, whereas maybe 100 years or even 200 years prior, you had maybe half that. And they’re still actually rather small, like you aren’t I mean, to put it in the context of our last conversation that the Rome the Romans could field armies of about 40,000. So we’re kind of getting back to sort of Roman period numbers of people fighting on the battlefield. And and so, yeah, I mean, France is France is it France is central to this, obviously, because we’re talking about the French Revolution, but it is a it is a storied power in in Europe at the time. And they’re getting involved in a war. Now, the seven years war is basically England and Georgia versus France. And I think Austria, Austria is on their side, I think, at that point as well. And but that that large war is basically a prelude and the and the French during the course that war, bankrupt themselves, because they are trying to grapple with main their main enemy being Great Britain. And that that causes some problems that causes instability within the French government. And there’s a sort of decline from if you know, the Louis, Louis the 14th, the Sun King, right, that’s the sort of peak of French power, the peak of the French monarchy, and it kind of goes down from there. And that’s what is occurring at that time, like you’re seeing that turnover. Right, right. And there’s also there’s a space that’s been opened up by the success of the Americans, because a lot of people don’t understand there’s a huge difference between the way that Europe thinks about power and control and government, and how they think about it in England. And that’s kind of a stepping stone to how we think about it in the United States. And the thing that opens up is you’ve got spies in England, and you’ve got spies in France for years, decades writing letters. Any day now, this is going to collapse, and you’ll be able to move your forces, both sides are saying this at the same time. Any day, any day, any and any day is not coming. It’s not coming. It’s not happening. Yeah. And and and and they don’t know why, right? Because by the rules of continental style philosophy, that’s a dumb experiment that count has no hope. There’s no hope over there for those idiots. And that happens like after the American Revolutionary War, or you know, that that’s how it’s for the American Revolution, basically, the American splitting from the Commonwealth from from the United Kingdom. And that that occurs as a result of Yeah, a lot of the deaths incurred. Actually, that’s, you know, the story is, where do they get the taxes from? Why are the taxes being levied in the first place? Well, it’s it’s this idea that the crown was, you know, wasn’t just the crown, it was the parliament, really, and basically saying, well, we had to fight, you know, the French in the Americas, we had to put up the money and the men and the supplies. And so it’s only fair that the colonies pay. And then there’s a bit of a disagreement there. But largely, the disagreement in that in that context as well. And because the difference that I see from the from the American Revolution, or let’s say the American and the finding of independence, because revolution is a tentative framing. The Americans, it strikes me, especially the Continental Congress are not trying to overturn things. They are essentially, many of them, even with spoken with English accents, they would have seen themselves as actually our English aristocracy. And when they were when they presented their petition to the king, they were making it as English subjects, and as as the rights that they had under under the king. And they were saying the needs to respect these for well, or else, you know, and it’s quite it’s quite reasonable as well, because it’s all escalation on the crown side in terms of trying to push them. And, you know, well, it’s a sort of local elite saying, look, you need to respect who we are, we aren’t we don’t have representation in Westminster, which is a pretty important thing in the English tradition, at least post 1689, post the Glorious Revolution, because that’s where you have parliament essentially, this is kind of like the final victory of Cromwell, you have the parliament, and basically telling the king what what’s going to happen. And so the king can’t exactly, the idea is the king should be able to intercede for subjects. But in principle, what happens is you have this sort of parliamentary promise of parliamentary prominence. And so, yeah, I mean, and think about as well what’s happening in the in the American Revolution at that time, who is the king, it is one of the Georges is one of the Hanoverian imports. And the one thing that you realize, if you look at the history of that period is that basically, those guys were being told what to do by the parliament, by parliament, because these men were, these were kings, who, in some sense, are usurpers, because how did they become kings, they become kings by the parliament changing the law, and saying only Protestants can inherit. And so they skip over 40 nearest relatives of the of the old Stuart Kings. That’s kind of background. But the point being is that there is a fundamental shift, and you have this parliament, which is which is kind of cut off from the colonies, and the colony say, well, this is this isn’t the what we agreed, you know, this is where’s where’s the how can we redress our grievances? And of course, petitioning the king will only get you so far, you have to pass things through parliament to actually get anything done. So and they’re not represented. And yeah, I think I think yeah, it’s really good framing, actually. And think of it that way. So there’s a political vacuum, right? The political power that should be located in the colonies is not there as a result of this change in England. And so you noticed is it changing in England, and that’s that’s gonna play into France, right? And then at the same time, I think you’re right, like, I didn’t think about this, the American revolution is not a revolution, in any sense of the word, it just isn’t right. It started out that way, maybe, but it didn’t, it didn’t end that way. So you’ve got an elite over here, that is unable to be properly represented, because they assume they’d be represented by their king. That’s, yes, how it always worked before. Right, right. And then and then it’s like, wait, that’s not working. Like, what’s going on? And then the king is not. And that’s why they go after the king, right? unfair. Yes, for sure. unfairly for sure. But that’s because he was the target because he was the guy who was supposed to represent them. And he failed to do so from their perspective. But also, there’s another lesser known thing. So this, this tax thing is, it’s just a tax to pay for the war. But there’s actually an economic factor there that a lot of people don’t understand. So I forget the name book, and I have a book on this. It’s absolutely brilliant. It talks about the roads in the United States and where they came from. So it was illegal, illegal to build a road, a public road in the colonies was illegal. I could not do that. Right. And there was a reason for that. The reason why was because England had to control all the trade. That was the deal. You have to chip something to another colony, you have to use a ship. You can’t own the ship as a colonist. You cannot own ships. You are not owning ships. That’s right. All the ships are owned by British merchants. And so the Stamp Act affects all trade in the colonies, that’s not over badly rutted private roads. So the first little known fact, the first corporation in the New World is the Massachusetts Turnpike. And it’s a collection of people who get together and incorporate to have their private lands with little turnpikes and tolls, so that people can get from the eastern part of Massachusetts to the western part of Massachusetts roughly. So and I don’t remember how far back it went. But the turnpike now goes all the way across, like it’s going, it goes all the way across east to west. Right. So that you’ve got the wealthy John Hancock, who’s the wealthiest man in the colonies, right. And he’s backing the revolution. Why? Because the glass ceiling, he can’t make any more money, because he can’t control any trade. Right. So there’s all this, there’s a political component, there’s an economic component. And then there’s this freedom component where the freedom is being constrained by the Stamp Act, because now people can’t get the goods that they need, because it can’t afford them. Because the Stamp Act has made things too expensive, roughly speaking. And so that’s like, that’s a huge problem. And and people fail to see all this stuff going on. And again, at the same time, something changed in England, we’re not sure what. So something changes in England. And that change in England causes a change in the colonies, where they’re not so much revolting, but they’re reforming a government from scratch effectively. Yeah. But it is the elites that are doing it too. It’s not that it’s being done by a bunch of rabble farmers in the farmland. To your point, they saw themselves as part of the aristocracy, because well, they were part of the aristocracy, or at least they were supposed to be well represented by the aristocracy. And they had lost representation due to this change, this mysterious, I would say change in England that was unexpected, right? It was out of the blue. No one saw any of this coming at a time. Well, I think you could see it in the beheading of the king. They beheaded King Charles I in 1649. And that was the mistake that kicks off this idea of importing a king and all of that. There is a sort of intermittent episode there. But the long and short of it is, and you could see how that would affect it, though, beheading the king, basically getting into their own revolution. For a period of time, England is a republic that has no king. And so this, of course, knocks out, the founding fathers of America are living in that post-glorious revolution world, post-English Civil War world. And so they’re looking at it through that lens. But I think what you see with the American Revolution is that there are local problems that need to be dealt with. And the people who are supposed to deal with them in the parliament do not have the eyes to see what’s actually happening there and can’t address them directly. And so naturally, then you have essentially a redress of rights that they already that many of the colonists knew they already had because being subjects of the king, that is that there was an agreement made and it wasn’t being kept to. See, where this changes in somewhere like France, of course, is, of course, one thing you know about the American Revolution is somebody like the Marquis de Lafayette is a French aristocrat. And he goes and helps out the revolutionaries. And of course, much of the American, the American, let’s say, rebellion, for lack of a better term, because revolution really is, let’s say revolution, but much of the American Revolution is funded by France. Right. Right. That starts tax problem number two. Yes, this tax problem in England that causes America while England’s changing, then this tax problem number two in the tax money going to the right that causes the cost. Basically, all that happens in France, the cost of bread goes up so high that no one can afford bread anymore, literally. And that’s just staple food. And it’s like, Whoa, was this staple food? Interestingly, back to Roman times, I don’t know if you know about the the four wheeled, multi aged, yeah, bread factory that they found that that the Romans put in France. So France had, yeah, it was a huge factory to mill grain, huge in France. And it’s the only one they know of, of that size. So France, perfect for it though, with its land. Yes, with the land and with the water, it just had this perfect. So there’s this like four stage water wheel thing that was way earlier than anybody expected. Right. And so they’ve got this history of grain production and over grain overproduction, really, right? Grain over producing bread. So bread is their staple food, much like rice is the staple food in China, right? It’s the same sort of thing. And so the taxes play an issue in all of this, right? And because taxes are oppression, and taxes are part of the economic ceiling problem, and right, they’re all they’re all tied together. Back then, we have no concept of this now, because tax rates are so much lower. Actually, right, we’re much more free by economically free by taxes than we ever were. That’s why the Europeans tend to complain less even though their tax rates are exorbitant to us in the US. Yeah. And but one thing one thing to look at with, with the with the French scenario is we’ve we’ve we’ve gone over two instances of massively incurring debt. It’s the Seven Years War, right, which the French largely do like that they I believe they sort of lose the overall goals that they’re looking for. So they they put they sink loads of money into that. So they lose one war and then mere a decade or two later, they’re sinking the loads more into funding this, this, you know, strange thing happening in the English colonies. And you know, that they’d like to profit off of, right, which goes back to the idea of the spies, right? And that this was sort of a kind of a proxy war to keep the English busy. Well, they’re still fighting. They’re still fighting. They still want that property, right? The first way they tried to get the property was by ginning up the Native Americans against the colonists. And that was a proxy. So they’re using the Indians. A lot of people don’t understand they use the Native Americans in Canada and in the United States to attack England. And they did that either by having the Indians directly attack the colonists because they were English like at the time, right, or by or by getting a war going to distract England so they’d have to send in troops. And again, that goes back to the attack, they have to send in troops for the Indian Wars, they have to do it. And so now they now they want they want that money back, even though it was a long spent and they were, you know, they were citizens, they didn’t get like, No, no, no, we we’re serving in the army for you. We’re serving in the Navy for you over here in the colonies. You know, why are you treating us differently from the people who live across the pond? Right. And that was really, you know, and that came up again in the War of 1812, which is a different mess. But yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. That’s the conservation of the of the Anglo American split, let’s say. But yeah, I think there’s something to be said as well as what’s going on in the sort of circles of thought, both in France and in England at the time, because this idea of an English Republic, which we touched on happened, this is under the time of Cromwell, that is to give perspective, that’s in the mid 1600s, about 1650. And for about, I think, almost 10 years, eight years is that English Republic. And a lot of that, a lot of that has has roots in, in, let’s say, the Reformation, and the impact that that had on the British Isles. But more importantly, is you have this sort of gathering tide of, of, of the Enlightenment. So you have Hume, Hume is David Hume is in the basically throughout the all the early 1700s up until about 1760, I think 1770. So he’s just before he I think he dies, probably roughly around that time anyways. And then you have a new sort of class of thinker occurring on the continent in France. And because of the because of the sort of fall of the power of France, let’s say, right, its ability to project its power to or not not project its power, but to gain territory and to show that it can. It’s a it’s a it’s a country that’s not to be trifled with. And loses its force. Yeah, lose on the globe. Yeah. And, and, and as a result, you have these sorts of strange ideas coming in from people like Voltaire and, and Rousseau. Now Voltaire is actually he gets a lot of his no, it’s not Voltaire. It was Montesquieu. That’s Montesquieu. So in America, you have this idea of separation of powers. And that comes from Montesquieu’s attempt to understand the English system, basically. And but he is primarily a philosopher in France. And he’s around the time of Louis the 14th. And so around 17, let’s say we’re in 1780, which is around the time of the revolution, right? Rousseau has had a massive impact because he has this idea of a social contract and all of this sort of thing. And it’s quite, it’s quite strange. And for the time, but a lot of the nobility in France are taking are taken by it. Because they’ve only recently many of them are absentee, they don’t they don’t stick to their lands. It’s only the rather poor nobility that actually are living among their own people. And this happened. And 50 years prior is that you have this Louis the 14th bringing all of the nobility and this you have the idea of the court life for psi all of that, right. And but but those sorts of those sorts of ideas are gaining sway. And you see that this sort of this kind of a political slowing down of the political machine in France. Now at this time, it should be said that France is still it’s you know, you have a direct line from from Louis the 16th, who’s the last French King before he loses his head. And you have a direct line from this this this man all the way back to roughly speaking Charlemagne. And it’s not a direct it’s not a direct line to patcher linearly, but it’s close enough, right. And you have different dynasties coming through. And so you have this sort of continuous idea of France being one of the major kingdoms of Europe. In fact, and there, the Pope would have given titles to each of the major kings of Western Europe. So, so the Spanish King is called his most Catholic Majesty. I think the English King was called Oh, I can’t remember, but it would have been his most ex Majesty. And, and then the France and I can’t remember quite, I’ll have to look it up. But the point being is that France is sort of playing a part in this in this great sort of, let’s say, Western European dance of monarchs. What’s happening here is that it’s lost a lot of its momentum and now the nobility who have, I mean, France is quite unique and standing out there at the rest of Europe at this time as well, because you have this weird court life, we have all the nobility, the dukes counts, who can afford to get there, come to Paris, just in Versailles, which is just outside Paris and sort of wait upon the king. And but with this loss, you have sort of people are searching, and they’re listening to these philosophers, many of these philosophers are the same, the same nobles, and they’re saying, well, we’re hearing these things about the colonies, right? They’re, they’re sort of removing the head, they’re getting rid of the king, right? Why shouldn’t we do the same thing? And they’re also, and many of them as well, as I was saying with Montesquieu are looking to England as well, and seeing what’s happening there. Of course, you know, people look at the French Revolution, they go the French taking the head of their king, the English did it first. The English took the head of their own king first. And that was what the French were looking to, you know? Yes, yeah. Yeah. Well, and that’s it’s probably worth interjecting here just quickly. This is super important. Like there is a replacement of the head, symbolically, and literally, in this case, there’s a replacement of the head. And there’s an attempt to understand how England survived that. And then there’s this attempt to understand how the colonies, right, because there’s a lot of sympathy. Because I think that there’s a lot of sympathy in France for the plight of the colonists on the basis that they’re elite. The elite are right. And so it’s not just like the common people go, oh, there’s common people, they’re poor, like, that’s not happening at all. Like, nobody knows, nobody cares, right? What’s but what is happening is the elite are going, hey, you know, and they’re a rising power throughout Europe. But but now you have to bring in the continental idea of continental philosophy and the break that happened, because that’s that’s like continental philosophy to this day, still, you talk to Europeans, you talk to people in the United States, like people in England, you’re going to get three different takes on on how the world works. And the continental take is power is bestowed from above, your rights are given to you from the divine through the divine right of kingship. That’s how it works. And so your rights are enumerated for you by the king, roughly speaking. Now, Parliament’s there to help implement sure, right. And that’s the original conception. But now all that is broken, right? England goes, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, no, no, no, the people just living their lives just by virtue of having been born on the you know, on the aisle, right in in the grand England, they they have rights, like they’re already 30, they’re 30 bestowed upon them by virtue of their birth. This is a totally different way to think. It’s radical. It’s completely radical. And it’s so radical, actually, that to this day, I mean, this literally the continentals do not understand this. They do not. They continentals who spent years in the United States, totally blown away by how our core systems work, they don’t understand it. They have no idea how it functions, literally. And and I’ve tried to many of those just fast. I’m like, how this is the easiest thing in the world. How come you don’t get it right. But and even I forget where I where I was where I was hearing this. So the difference between you know, the change in law, right, because there’s common law and there’s civil law. And there’s a lot of people Oh, I know it was a Jordan Peterson talk with the with the woman from from Africa. And she basically goes to she goes to the African governments and says, Hey, have you heard of common law? And they go what? No, there’s only civil law. It’s like, yeah, no, no, there’s this whole tradition of common law. It’s hundreds of years old at this point. And they’re like clueless. So there are people in the world who don’t understand civil law and common law are different. You can mix and match maybe but if you don’t have a sense for common law, you’re you’re missing a now you know, storied and history way of executing law. And you know, I mean, if if even one country on the African continent and seem to be many from the discussion I heard has that has that problem that they’re not aware that there’s another way there’s another way of implementing law, that’s kind of a big deal. So you have that same problem in in the continent, right, where the when they really don’t understand England, Europe doesn’t understand England. And this is early days. So now nobody understands it just because there’s been a change and everyone’s struggling to understand it. So I think part of the enlightenment is struggling to understand how top down power from above, roughly speaking, broke, like what, how is this working? Because we beheaded the king, and yet, we’re still a country and everything still works. And we thought we knew how that worked. And now we need new theories, right? And new new ways of understanding. And then of course, the change in England, there’s a bigger change, right? We take one more step in the colonies, right? The United States actually fulfills sort of the ideal postulated by the Enlightenment thinkers, I think is the best way to think about it. I think it should be said, though, that that what’s happening. So this idea of continental philosophy really only congeals around the French Revolution, I would say, actually, it’s kind of a it’s kind of a focusing point or a narrowing point, because, of course, even in France, at this time, you have local parliaments. And now, of course, you could say, well, they don’t function in exactly the way that the English parliament would at the same time. But the English parliament only functions as it does because of this idea of beheading the king and sort of this this whole episode, right? So so but before then, you know, the parliament, the English parliament and the French part, the French parliaments, right? And they all worked in the same way, which was that they were there to help the king to govern, right? And, and I think what happens and of course, in France, as you would see in Spain and Portugal, and as you would have these local parliaments or councils, basically, which are there to so so in France, you’ll have and France is very, very different, you have very different people, right? You have the Bretons, and you have the Parisians, sort of those that sort of section of the people who speak Occitan. And so the ones close to the Mediterranean, you’ve, you’ve sort of, you know, the Basques and the very far south, and you’ve very, very different people groups kind of in, in France. And so you need to have that sort of representation, or you need to have that sort of resolution in your government, or in your government of France, same for, you know, all of Europe, the difference comes is, of course, by the other, by the time you get to the other side of the French Revolution, all of that has gone. And, of course, what happens then is that that spreads. It’s, it’s because you have this idea, of course, around the enlightenment of this, of this rationality. And so you need to rationalize the government, right? You can’t have, why should we have this sort of Breton Parliament that’s full of these, these, these, you know, provincial type people? And, you know, if we can’t sort of use the same system for the entirety of the country, even though these are ancient institutions, many of them, the parliament in Paris is as old as 1200. It was set up by King St. Louis the ninth, he was a crusader, right? And, and so, but you, and many of them even, you know, if you look at the English Parliament, you could say that that has a, has, you know, what, at this point, a thousand year old tradition, right? And, and so, you know, it’s the same for, same for all these regional parliaments, what happens is that they’re squashed, because, well, there’s a, there’s a sort of coalescing around, well, we can just make it more efficient, we can just make government more efficient. And we can kind of play with the variables a little bit. And because people were kind of losing an understanding of why, for instance, you would even have a parliament in Brittany, that can, that they’ll have their own laws, they can do what they want, you know, and what we care about is, look, please give us your taxes. Right, right. Well, that’s the, that’s the shift, the shift from, from being a country where the regions agree to trade and agree to worship the same hat. Yeah, right. And then so the previous tradition up until this point, if you have a king, that king has a title, that title is relative to your land. Yeah, the king doesn’t have one title, the king has like 50, in some case, right? So we looked at this once, the Holy Roman Empire and all the titles of the Holy Roman Emperor. And it’s like, wow, and see, that’s gonna be important later, right? But that I think that the main problem is that, ironically, England and the United States, or what would become the United States never lost the understanding of the difference between the divine power and power from below. And I don’t think the Enlightenment people made that mistake either, although I could be wrong about that. But I don’t think I they were, they were religious, like they were, they were totally embedded in religion. And so when they talk about their stuff, they’re talking about it embedded in religion, right? They’re not, they’re not, they’re not Emmanuel, oh, do away with all that religion stuff, right? Well, we’ll push the boundaries, we’ll make philosophy come more, more, more this way. It’s like, they weren’t like that. They were like, no, no, we have this, this is good. We’re not going to change it. But we are going to add self determination. But self determination means something very, very different when you’re embedded in a religious tradition, right, say, from the Bible, as they were, right, when a Christian tradition versus when that’s not there to constrain you, right? Now, self determination means why to do whatever I want, whatever I want, wherever I want, because it doesn’t matter. But there’s nothing constraining me. So it doesn’t make any difference, right? And that’s obviously that’s going to become relevant, relevant later. But the here is of that, of that problem. So the Enlightenment thinkers didn’t have this problem because they were embedded in the religion. Yes, they hadn’t unyoked, right? That was later. That was Emmanuel Kant, and a bunch, well, Rousseau and a bunch of other people started that. So on the continent, they did. So even though they were more Catholic in France in particular, right, they were they were more, you know, there was a lot of people attending church, right, they were more embedded, they adopted these ideas as part of this efficiency claim, right, and precision, that’s going to come up later, right. And and and tried to flatten things and make things not just about the taxes anymore, right, but make something larger and more universal, say within the boundaries of their country, which, you know, I what how many republics are we on, according to you, five, five, one, one, Republic number five, I think Empire number two, I don’t know if we’re gonna get a third, you know. So that’s since the French Revolution. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that’s, that’s all important context, like that there is a way in which there’s a misreading of what the enlightened folks were talking about, because it’s taken out of the context of the embedded religion. And that’s what ironically causes it’s, it’s kind of like, they start pointing upward, and then the head vanishes. Yes, it just vanishes, right? Whereas in the United States, they never pointed upward. That never happened. We just kind of like, oh, we’re all Protestants here, it’s all good. And, and none of the Protestants talked about it. They just kind of religious freedom. And that’s it. They never went any further than that, because it partly because they didn’t have a unified version of Christianity. So they just they never talked about it. It just wasn’t discussed. Well, as far as I’m aware, what happened in the early stages of the American Republic was that each state could basically have its own established religion. So the Puritans can have their Puritan colony, and the Catholics can have their colony, which I believe was Maryland. Maryland. Yeah. Yeah. And so you had all of that. So it wasn’t, it was kind of like you could gather, you could gather these, these, these people who are all pointing up, you know, to their to their, you know, let’s say denomination, and they could all gather around and say, well, we’re gonna, you know, we’ll defend each other or something like that, right? Right, right. Well, and it didn’t start like that, because Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, the state of Rhode Island, which is a tiny state, you get kicked out of Massachusetts. And they let him in, like, yeah, we know you’re, you know, you have a different, different way of viewing the world, but we’ll let you in. And then he was like, oh, screw that, I’m going to go for my own colony, basically. And that’s right, actually became a state, right. So it’s not like it was designed that way from we’ll say day one. But yeah, there is very much and and the founding fathers said this, like this, explicitly, this experiment doesn’t work without God, they said that, it’s really important to realize that we never lost that sense, like, or at least the, you know, in the beginning, we never lost that sense that we’re embedded in in these principles coming from a book. And it’s roughly the same book, there’s a little bit of difference in translation, there’s a lot of difference in interpretation, right, state by state, as it turned out. But, you know, basically, you know, you get the gist and the gist is roughly the same for everybody. Yeah, that is that that is something that, you know, I didn’t come to my mind immediately. But that’s right, is the the Sam Adams, you know, one of the founding fathers basically said this whole thing can only work, you know, for people who are who are brought up, you know, according to proper morality, which biblical morality, right. And that and that can govern themselves, let’s say, because because they were coming from the view from a more natural view of freedom, which is that a man has as many masters as he has vices. And so if you want to have everyone go, you know, governing the whole country, you need to have people who are actually willing to govern themselves and what their behavior and what they do. And that’s right. And the thing is with what happens in French Revolution, by the end of it. So so by the end of it, you have along with flipping everything over on its head, you have this abandonment of God, you have this abandonment of the God of Abraham and Isaac, you know, you have, I mean, I think it would probably be good to look at that religious upheaval, because what happens when the French Revolution starts off? Well, the way it starts off initially is just nobles coming or coming along and, and the king summoning the states general and roughly speaking, they’re they’re kind of on the track of England up until up until a point, right, which is constitutional monarchy, the monarch will be sitting sort of kind of aside, and the parliament will be kind of deciding it. The problem is, of course, is that a lot of the people who are going in for this, and parliament this this this council, this National Assembly, I believe it was called. And they were so sort of caught up in the revolutionary fervor, because a lot of things, all of a sudden, they were allowed to change a lot of things, which previously were only within the remit of the king. And, and so, you know, what do they do with that is, is they say, well, none of us can stand for the next election. Right? So, so all the original people who, you know, and at this point, you had a sort of divide between the people who are for the rights of the king and people who wanted to sort of Lafayette, I believe, was more on the side of the people who wanted to sort of push things, let’s let’s try and get a constitution going or something like that. Right. And, you know, but then then they say, you know, what, no, none of us are allowed to stand for the next election. And so what happens is essentially, they allow, like, radicals in that, you know, they all say, No, we’re so good, we’re not we’re not going to stand for the next one. So they they sort of abdicate leadership, and the king can’t do anything, because he’s not in a position to lead exactly. He’s trying to get out of there most of the time, to, you know, his cousins or his, or his monarchial relations elsewhere. And so that’s, that’s kind of where it kind of breaks off, and it just gets more radical and more radical. That’s how you get to the guillotines. And that’s how you eventually end up beheading the king is, is that, well, you have the way this ends up once once these guys sort of basically select themselves out once they take their hands off the wheel, these nobles and aristocrats, and some of them from the from the merchant classes as well, to be sure. And they they end up erecting a temple to the goddess reason in the middle of Paris, and over an old cathedral and as well what’s happening as well at this time. And once you get past this sort of initial stage of moderate let’s let’s basically follow this track that England’s gone, they kind of run off the beaten track. And you have like cathedrals and and and churches being sort of burned in Paris. Now this is all happening in Paris as well. It should be it should be noted this is a very local phenomenon in Paris. Why because the king has brought all the nobility into Paris. And so you have all of this crazy stuff happening in Paris. And it should be noted that much of the early stages, right, even I even I believe to the point of where they, you know, when they had the king, if you’re out in the countryside in France, it’s nothing much has changed. No idea. What’s happening? No, no. And communication is slow. Right. And look, I mean, all of this is a misread of the quote revolution in the United States, right? Because they were trying to copy the Americans, right? Right. They’re trying to copy the Americans. They’re not right, because they, you know, and they’re casting it very much as well, look at these reasonable people who, you know, sort of were given power, you know, or took power on their own as the merchant class, which, you know, somewhat of a true story, but they weren’t entirely merchant class, because they came from the aristocracy to begin with. So it’s not like those families didn’t have a history. It’s not like they weren’t trained elites, they were well read, right? This is happening with one of the many revivals of the Greek and Latin texts where that’s been rediscovered, right? And so all the founding fathers read that stuff, right? And at the same time, to your point, you know, Hume’s coming along and you know, all this other stuff. And there’s a philosophical battle between the Russos and Voltaires of the world, right? And what’s going on in roughly in Scotland, not really England. But we’ll just set that aside because England’s so, right. So yeah, you know, there’s this philosophical switch going on. And then they’re casting this not as, you know, an elite rising up to take their proper role, which is very much one interesting way to view the American Revolution. But they’re casting this as a whole new way of governing, you know, from below instead of from above. It’s like, well, look, they did it over there. And but the problem is, you have drivers like Robespierre was snubbed by the king when he was young, or at least he felt so right, he had to give up, he won a contest, and he got to give the king a speech. And I think the king wasn’t feeling well. So he shows up in this, you know, whatever it is that they pull along with people just right, and he and he’s looking from that, right, he’s looking from a carriage basically, and then he moves on and Robespierre has no time with him and he feels snubbed by that. And so there’s some psychological stuff going on in the background. And I don’t think he’s the only noble that had that experience with with an indifferent king, and feeling like that was unjust, even though they were part of the, the sort of the tradition of, of the elite, right? It’s not like these were nobody’s peasants, they were already sort of in the middle of the hierarchy. And they’re just pissed off that they’re not, you know, being given the proper due from the head, in this case, the king. And so that’s, that’s, you know, for me, that’s also sort of interesting, interesting framing to think about, because there is this streak. And then it’s like, well, we’re the elite, we’re too good to rule, right? We don’t, you know, when in fact, they just didn’t want the mass, they were like, well, we could give ourselves these powers, but then we’d have to do a lot of work. And, you know, we’re the French elite, we’re really not used to that at the end of the day. So what did that mean? No, I want to, I want to frolic around and do what I’ve been doing. And, you know, slough it off all under the king. But then if we take the king out of the picture, then we have to do work. And there’s all kinds of, you know, little little factors coming in. But there’s that misreading and the misuse of the Enlightenment, to your point, like, oh, no, we’re gonna worship God anymore, like they do in those silly colonies, we’re gonna worship reason, like right in the center of Paris. And yeah, nobody in the country knows what’s going on, except the people directly involved in Paris. Yeah. And the worst part about it is it spills out from Paris, eventually you have the guillotine that they cut off the head of the king. And it’s and it’s a rather sad scene. What happens, of course, is because, I mean, Louis basically, before he dies, says, I am, I, you know, I’m sorry for all the all the bad I did, even though I die innocent, like he says, I’m innocent, right? But I’m sorry for all the turmoil I may have caused, you know, I forgive everyone who’s offended against me. And that’s pretty much it. The priest that he had with him was like, when they were trying to restrain him before the putting him on the gallows. And he was resisting and the priest, his confessor he had there, and said to him, remember that our that that our Savior died without, you know, resisting being bound. And then that was just that was that and then he was taken off, head chopped off. And that was that. And of course, at that point, at that point is really the turnover into, you know, the reign of terror, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people on the suspicion they are counter revolutionaries. It should be noted as well that something happens here in the spillout from Paris. And the Vendée was a region in the south near Nantes, so on the on the west coast, France, and that’s a sort of rather poor region. So a lot of the nobility, a lot of the aristocrats still live there. And, you know, among their people, they were the local lords. And so they would, you know, they’d live among them or whatever. And when they when when a lot of this news reaches reaches them from Paris, well, you know, people kind of go on about their daily business. But there comes a point where one thing happens, which is which is quite significant. And when you get into this sort of sliding to getting from extreme to extreme, and you’re implementing all of these crazy ideas, is this idea of the Levee en masse, which is taking soldiers, right? And basically, conscription in the earliest sense, right? Not, not not like impressment, not like, oh, here’s a guy who seems particularly strong, let’s bag him and take us with him with us. It’s more like here’s your piece of it’s more like the what we’re familiar with in the sort of World Wars, which is here’s your piece of paper, and you have been chosen, and we’re going to take you whether you like it or not. And we’re that’s, you know, there’s, if you resist, we will kill you. And and that’s what that’s what happened. And of course, the peasant, the peasantry of the of this poor region in the Vendee don’t want to send their sons off to die in these far off wars, which are happening at the time, of course, because once news of this reaches the other surrounding kingdoms, it’s like, something’s going on here. Let’s, you know, let’s, let’s get in, get in on it, right? A lot of them were fighting for the king, because they realized many of them realize what was going on. In Paris was not something that anyone wanted to, you know, leak out. But these peasants in the Vendee went up to their local lords in their manners, right? And was demanded that they that the lords lead them right as a levy, you know, to against these, against these revolutionaries from Paris. And what happens is the revolutionary government sends out these what were called the infernal columns, right, who are the columns of hell. And what they did is they essentially went around and for a while these these armies led by the lords, the local lords did all right. But eventually you have, you know, these these well armed men, probably armed from the and the foundries that are near Paris, they can pump out arms like nobody’s business, everyone, you know, just, here’s a musket, here’s some, here’s some gunpowder, and here’s some shot. And so eventually they they lose. But what happens is, I mean, massacres that you would only really see that sound like they come from the 20th century, right? So you have the drowning of pregnant women in the in the in the river that Nantes on I can’t remember the Loire River, I believe. And but you’re drowning of all of these peasants who just were either bystanders, or they were part of the army. And, and, and that’s kind of how the, the revolutionaries kind of strong armed those who would resist and most of these peasants, by the way, in contrast to the many of the revolutionaries who are busy worshipping the goddess reason in Paris, these are, these are staunch Catholics, they in fact, their emblem is first and for the flag they they wave is the king’s banner. And then they call themselves the Royal Army, and they have on their on their breast, and the Sacred Heart of Christ, so the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and that’s their, that’s their sort of, and it’s something like, I don’t remember the exact phrase, it’s something like for God, King and country, you know, more, more, more like for God and for the king. And, and, you know, they get rightly slaughtered, and by the, by the Parisians, basically, who come in and just wipe the floor with them. But that was always a problem region. So it is important to frame that because what’s happening in Paris isn’t reflective of the rest of France as such, and in terms of those those local regions. And what it is, it is indicative that the armies are getting bigger, right? You have these crazy new ideas that are that are coming out. What’s also funny is, is, you know, they erect a temple to the gods in Paris to the goddess reason, they also change the structure. This is where we get the idea of year zero, right? It’s the, it’s the 10 day week. That’s so they, so they even change the calendar, right? Actually, it’s funny, because because of this revolutionary government, you have the reorganization of the ancient regions of France. So now, now if you look at a map of France, you have the departments, right, is what they’re called. But they are not historical regions. They’re named after historical regions, but they purposefully went out of their way to draw outside like to just clump bits together to make it I guess, more rational, right? And so you have this large scale upturning of the previous order that’s happening. And it’s it is it’s frightening most of Europe, really, quite frankly, especially with the fact that when you implement the levy on mass, the French army doubles in size within a year. Wow. And you know, this is where you’re sort of getting into the territory of hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield, which you’d see in the Napoleonic wars. Yeah, yeah. And it’s also worth pointing out. And I know, you turn me on to Dan Carlin hardcore history episode on painful attainment, which is very good, although very hard to listen to. So there’s a huge change in the utility and the purpose of these mass killings. But first of all, there weren’t mass killings. There were hangings and the bodies would stay up for days, if not longer. And there weren’t just hangings, there was breaking on the wheel, and there were stocks and there were all kinds of methods of public punishment. That were designed to keep people in line, and also to keep people aimed at the highest. And there was this whole sense he went into in cooperation. And then you have that replaced by the guillotine. And it’s like, the problem with the guillotine is that it’s efficient. And that’s actually a problem. Right? Because now you first of all, you can kill hundreds or thousands of people in a very short amount of time, whereas before, you got to build the, the gallows, you know, tie that rope, and you’re gonna have a procession to go get the person. And you got to bring them. And yeah, there’s all this crazy stuff that you had to do. There was a ritual involved in, in these things. And you had to have a priest and there was a confession. Right. And so you have bits of that in some of this, but by and large, it becomes a machine, a literal machine. Yeah. And then, you know, if you want to get into Egregor, or the spirit of the time, right, there’s something moving all of this. And is that the resentment of Robespierre? Is that a resentment of the nobles in general? Is that their willingness to overturn the order, you know, the natural established order over over, you know, hundreds of years, without wanting to take the responsibility for actually managing it and running it? Like, there’s lots of, there’s lots of, you know, likely candidates and probably pieces of all of them involved in that. But you can see the idea of efficiency, the idea of precision and accuracy, like, oh, we’re gonna kill them quickly. We’re not gonna, you know, and Dan Carlin does a brilliant job in that pain for tainment episode of going into why that’s a significant change and what what this capital punishment meant back in the day and the fact that it did change and that the change is really important and significant, and that it changes the society, or represents a change in the society, one of the two. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, right, the guillotine was made by physicians at the time, exactly because it was to be efficient with the killing, right. So it’s just you’re going to separate the head from the body from the body. And that will be that. And I mean, there is a bit of symbolism happening there as well, of course, right? Yeah. And I, it should be noted. Yeah, I think I think the terror of Robespierre is really kind of linked to the guillotine as as a form of, of, of killing. It was yeah, it wasn’t like hanging, right? Because hanging takes space. And you need multiple people on the gallows and you need to measure out the rope to make sure that they die. You know, it can be quite messy. But the guillotine is, you know, we know that once you once we put you under here and we pull that that rope or whatever the switch might have been, you know, you’re dead on the other side. And to the point of this efficiency and accuracy, and that permeated pretty much everything and was kind of, you know, in relation to this sort of losing of a head in all of this chaos, you have one figure sort of emerging over it all. And eventually, which is Napoleon. And Napoleon is a minor noble from Corsica. And so he’s not exactly French. He’s not French. Yeah, France, France took over Corsica when like right before he was born or right after he was born. Yes, he’s born into Corsican nobility. Yes, his father’s name is Carlo Buonaparte. Right. Well, and and it’s important to know, like, his family lost their prestige and their fortune when France took over, even though they kept him, I think, as a diplomat or something for a while, they kept his father as a diplomat. Right. And then he was forced in Corsica in the Corsican schools to learn French. Yes. And so there’s something going on there too. And so it’s worth Yeah, it’s worth noting that. Yeah. And Napoleon comes from this lowly kind of dispossessed family slightly dispossessed. I mean, he’s still nobility, so gets a good education. But right, he has to learn French in school. And he moves to, you know, during all of this, he moves to Paris. He joins the army, actually, and joins. It’s interesting to know what he joins as he joins as an artillery officer. And now, now, just to the point, and artillery, we think of this, especially the Napoleonic Wars are sort of defined by artillery, all of a sudden, and or rather, cannons feature prominently around this time. But cannons haven’t really featured as heavily up until this point. And the reason why is largely metallurgical and sort of, you know, it takes a lot of it costs a lot of resources to cast a cannon and you need foundries. And of course, what’s happening at this time is the Industrial Revolution. So you’re having this increased capacity to mold steel and to make it higher quality as well. So in 1700, you still had you had cannons, but there are very few and far between and they weren’t very accurate as well. The only time you’d really be using cannons is in the siege. Right. There’s siege, there’s siege engines, right? Yeah, nothing to do with normal battle, right? Yeah. To this point. Yeah. And it’s very rare. I don’t know of any account bar one in Alexander’s case, but Alexander is sort of the edge case, because he just does everything next, you know, to the next level. And what the idea of using siege engines as sort of field artillery, right, the idea that we can somehow accurately hit the enemy, right, which I tell you, while Alexander wasn’t hitting anyone accurately, he was just like, just throw it up and shoot it at them. Right. And, you know, that just wasn’t the case, even with muskets, it should be noted as well, even, you know, in the 16 and early 1700s, muskets were not very accurate. That’s why they have this volley fire tactic. But you know, you know, on their own, they really aren’t a great weapon to shoot with. It would only come later on that you sort of get this higher accuracy. And so when you’re on the battlefield, it was reasonably, you had a reasonable chance of surviving, especially in the 1600s. In fact, even in the mid to late 1600s, you had, sorry, pardon me, the early to mid, you had men still in full plate armor. Even in the English Civil War, you had men with breastplates, and they’d be thicker, right? And they’d be shaped in such a way to make the bullets bounce off. But you still had this sort of idea of like, for instance, the musket kind of replacing the bow and the bow, you know, again, you can be accurate with the bow, but it is mostly volley fire, you want to hit an area kind of broadly and say, yeah, roughly there. And cannons were the same sort of thing, actually. Well, if they were going to use them at all, it would be using like that. And they wouldn’t be very good because you only had a solid projectile. So they’re mostly used in sieges. Well, what happens around the time of Napoleon is you have this massive increase in the strength of the steel that’s being used, or what the material is being used, I don’t know if it was bronze or whatnot, but it would have been steel, I think iron, and you have the strength of the material, and then you have the increased capacity to produce it, right? And if you think about what’s happening as well at the time, you think about the, this is also just after the time of Newton. So you have this sort of classical physics, you have this sort of give me the, give me the variables at this particular point, right? If I’m throwing a ball, right? Give me the variables at this particular point, and I’ll be able to tell you where it lands. Exactly, precisely. And, you know, what you’re seeing at that point is, is, well, a cannon ball is just like a normal ball. Well, why don’t we use this, this crazy new calculus that Newton’s talking about and all that. And that this is the world that Napoleon’s walking into. And so he’s seeing, you get this, you get this massive increase in the accuracy of the cannons, and because of the better metallurgy, and also later on, you’ll get rifling. And you’re getting a lot more of them. He proves himself in the siege of Boulogne. And he and that’s a that’s a siege, but he actually uses the cannons to hit the British Navy in the in the in the Bay. And but that’s how Napoleon proves himself. And it’s a little wonder that Napoleon is the one who actually starts to increase it. It’s Napoleon who starts to increase the use of cannons. So he uses all of these new technologies. And, and really is the first one to use cannons not as field artillery, but as or not not as siege equipment, but as field artillery and accurate field artillery as well. Right. So so the the idea of precision artillery becomes a magic science to win wars. And Napoleon is the one that that makes this happen, right? Because he sees this connection between Oh, I’ve got a lot of these, they’re getting fairly accurate, the range is increased. And I can use this crazy Newton stuff, whoever that guy is, and and and actually use them in new ways that people haven’t thought of to go after ships, right to take down walls more efficiently, and also to knock down troops in a way that no one’s ever seen. And so you know, it’s a bit like, like bringing a an elephant onto the Roman battlefield back in the day, right? Yeah, it’s like, Whoa, what is this thing? We didn’t see this coming. And you gotta remember, battles are still line after line, right? So that’s, you know, they’re still lining up, and just throwing bodies at each other. And but the cannon changes all that, because now you’re lining up and someone’s firing a cannon, when you can’t fire a shot, and then all of a sudden, a bunch of your guys fall, it’s like, Whoa, now you have this imbalance. And this is part of the genius of Napoleon, right? The reason why people follow him, it’s not random. You start at the beginning, it’s like, oh, he’s able to take a very small force of people and just wipe out a much larger force, pretty reliably, by this point, pretty reliable. Yeah, he was mostly that’s the funny thing about the Levee en masse, is that it increased France’s military capacities that you’re dealing with, you know, 50,000 men as sort of standard, but Napoleon was always outnumbered because he or mostly always outnumbered, especially at the beginning. So he, yeah, he would have this idea of defeat in detail. So it would be, you know, you’ve got 5000 men, you split off a few, you know, a group of 1000 and a group of 1000. So you’ve got 3000 left over as a core fist, these guys sort of will hold, you know, 60% of the enemy army in place, and you take your guys here, you smash the smaller part, which you’ll be bigger than. And it is, and just back to the artillery, like this is people look at World War One, and it’s like, Oh, look at all the artillery pieces going off and look at World War Two, and you see the bombardiers, that is all in the same tradition or even the same sort of route at Napoleon. Because, you know, even in the mid 1800s, you had this idea of a gunnery school, a gunnery school, you go to school to be a gunner, IE a gunner, like to command an artillery piece, you had a whole group of people who one would one would be doing the calculations to say we want to hit, let’s say there. And it’s like, okay, well, you know, you’ll have your sort of way to get your elevation and, and you’ll have a rough distance of where that is. And then you just basically you’ll have like a table, and you’ll just read off the table. And it’s like, okay, this is punching the numbers for the cannon here. So it’s, you know, and what’s it tilted back this this many degrees, and, you know, to the side and all of that. And so it becomes like a powder, right? Yeah, use the exactly this with this weight of powder. And it’s all like it’s, it’s, it’s exactly how you do the calculations in Newton, right? Give me all the variables, and I just need to get the right variables. And then I hit that target over there. And that’s fine for one cannon. And if you could do that for one cannon, you can do that for about 500, you know, and imagine that you had all of those 500 lined up. And you’re the one you see Napoleon would have been when he started off, you would have been the one, you know, doing the calculations and or making sure that the what targets are picking which targets are going to be taken and commanding is meant to, you know, load it up and whatnot. But by the time he’s at the head of armies, he’s commanding, you know, hundreds of cannons. And so what Napoleon is ends up being able to do just back to the magical point like this. And this is, this is unique because of the fact that like nobody could do this before, you know, in previous eras, generals would be like, I want you to take down that wall, use the cannon, just you know, do your thing. But now we have these trained, you know, men from gunnery schools who are using all of this, you know, that precision and all of this sort of accurate physics, right? That’s all that’s only come out recently. And they’re able to basically call down thunder and lightning on a particular location. And so Napoleon can, you know, flatten entire cities and has this capability to, has this capability to command more men than any man on the European continent has ever been able to command before. And how is he doing it? And that’s the sort of, that’s the mystery around Napoleon that people are drawn in by and fair enough, like, it’s a massive change that’s happening at the time. Yeah, and it’s those victories that gives him the street cred. And then people want to bask in his glory, and learn his secrets. And how does he do it? Right? And well, you know, but but but you know, the real magic is in the precision. It’s like, how are you using these things? Oh, well, well, I’m deploying them this way on purpose to break the back of the enemy or the spirit of the enemy. Right? It’s not a, well, I’m going to raise the city to the ground sort of thing so much as it’s I’m going to scare the hell out of the people. And I’m going to scare the people. And because that’s what all war really was. I guess you can yell louder, people will run away and then you don’t have a battle. But that’s changed because of the efficiency of killing. So yeah, to your point, the whole World War One, World War Two artillery thing begins with Napoleon, all of it in the same way that trench warfare begins in the revolutionary war in the United States. That was the first trench warfare, right. And so you don’t realize those two things kind of together later for World War One. And then this idea of efficient killing, right, that’s the guillotine, right, that predates Napoleon, it’s just that he has an efficient killing machine in or he learns how to use the precision artillery as an efficient killing machine, because efficient killing is all of a sudden, a thing that you can do. Yeah, right. And, and, and it’s not seen in the same light anymore before killing was this very ritualistic, important, it’s important how it’s conducted, right. And now it’s not, you know, and you have to your point, like, so rifling is new. Well, in the southern US, where they won most of their battles, by the way, with England, during the revolution, they have these rifled barrels. And so they’re picking off officers. And before that, no one ever picked off an officer, that never happened. And the problem because they’re picking off officers, and England still powered from above. Once the officers gone, no one knows what to do. Yeah, they can’t think for themselves. So they’re all done. And Napoleon starts that whole commander’s thing for yourselves things to, he begins all of that, right? He’s like, you just need to make sure this objective happens. And here’s your cannons. And then I’m going to go over here and manage this part. And, you know, that’s right, it’s up his army in a way that hadn’t been divided up. And again, a lot of this is informed by the changes as a result of the American so called revolution, right? Yeah, or the American rebellion. I like that idea better. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And just as just the last thing on that, on the organization of the army, that’s right, he, he delegates command to his marshals, and their characters in and of themselves, because he had to trust them. Whereas before you would have, you would have had a similar command structure, but it’s for fewer people. And so you can have a sort of small core of nobility, to sort of manage that. Whereas in Napoleon’s army, that nobility are taking taking part, but you also have this, this sort of phenomenon of people rising from the ranks, actually, many of Napoleon’s marshals, you know, one of them was the son of a butcher, which again, 50 years prior would have been, you know, crazy talk. Right, right. And that’s and that’s back to Alexander, right? This is more like Alexander, than it is like Rome, right? Then it is like Greece, because they didn’t fight that way. It was Alexander who started that, that fight that the Macedonian, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m being reminded of the of the larping that Napoleon did as Rome. Yeah, that’s, that’s an unfortunate part of that period as well. That’s where we get, you know, funny, non existent countries like Belgium from if you’re, you know, curious, that’s, the word Belgium just comes from Caesar’s, Julius Caesar’s commentary on the Gallic Wars, where, you know, he fights one of the tribes is called the Belgae. And then, okay, so then it’s Belgium. Oh, yeah, the land of the ancient Belgian people. So yeah, that the revolution spreads from the Polio. And that’s, I would say, where you get the this idea of continental philosophy, because if you view Napoleon as as basically, he marches his armies across all of Europe. He goes to Spain, he goes to Spain, and by proxy Portugal, he goes into Germany. Oh, yeah, of course, he breaks up the Holy Roman Empire. Maybe we could do more on that another time. But but he marches all the way to Russia, and everyone talks about Russia. But all of that time, you think, well, yeah, he’s marching, his armies are following him, his men are with him. And these are revolutionary men, you know, many of these men owe their station solely to to what’s what’s what occurred post 17 was 89 or something, the start of the French Revolution, right. And so they have these strange ideas. And, and when they’re when they’re garrisoned, they’re they’ll talk about it. And the printed materials will come with them as well. And so you have in the wake of this, and, you know, long after Napoleon, actually very soon after Napoleon’s dead, you have these sort of quote, quote, nationalist movements, where you have, you know, all of a sudden, the Italians, right, and become a sort of people and by 1850, you have a unified Italy, there was an 1860 1860 have a unified Italy. And under Giuseppe Garibaldi, and in Spain, you have this sort of tension in the monarchy that, you know, you have these sort of, you sort of see it that the other end of with the Spanish Civil War, right, because you at that point, you got to sort of a republic, and they’re going through their republics now, which previously, again, you know, Spain had no no truck with any of that. They just, you know, it was a normal Western European monarchy. And Germany forms out of this. And let’s say on a more Napoleonic sort of bent rather than the sort of early revolution, but Germany forms from those sorts of ideas. And yeah, so so there’s there’s something to be said for what, what happens post the French Revolution on the European continent. And one wonders whether that is also spread to the US so that there’s a sort of a misapprehension about what the American part in that was. Because the one thing you could sort of summarize the difference between the American and French Revolution is, you know, the Americans saying, we are going to get our God given rights, because it is because it is because it is the just and right thing to do, you know, and we will we will we will we will peaceably ask for redress of grievance, and then escalate from there. Whereas the French are just like, yes, yes, we want to get rid of the king too. And by the way, there is no God, you know, that’s kind of that’s how they end up. So it’s not even get rid of the king is get rid of the head. Yes. Yeah. It doesn’t matter which head all the heads have to go. Right. And of course, everyone’s like, well, none among us want to be ahead to all step back and in Russia, the revolutionary, the true revolutionaries. Yes. Right. And then it’s good to know that the French Revolution doesn’t end until the people who started the killing machines going were killed by the killing machines. Yes, which is weird. But that pattern happens again and again in history, like, well, they’re being fairly successful until they’re not. And then it’s like, oh, maybe that’s not a good idea. They were successful. So making people unsuccessful is a strong signal to the rest of the country, right. And then it’s like, well, what are we going to do now? And then here’s Napoleon. Yeah. Oh, look at this guy who’s, you know, defended France during the revolution, right? Defend and expanded France, expanded French influence finally before French influence was waning to your point, right. Yes. And now it’s not. And, you know, we’re just going to dismantle that Holy Roman Empire thing, because we weren’t using it anyway. We’re France. Right. And then he, you know, he declares himself emperor. Yeah. Right. We’re in the past, you didn’t do that. And there was no emperor. Like, you know, I mentioned this before, but we looked into this, like, the Holy Roman Emperor had a hell of a lot of titles, like a lot. And each region had their own personal relationship to that monarch. Right. And then when they went there, they adopted that title. So they didn’t, they didn’t have a simple title. And then I know you’ve pointed this out before, right, there’s the painting of Napoleon forcing the bishops to watch. So the power is ironically not coming down from above at all. The power is being taken from below stolen. The divinity is being stolen and coerced into cooperating with making him not, you know, Emperor of France and Holy Roman Emperor of this region and that region, right. He’s going in and he’s changing it’s making it precise where precisely is the land of the Belgae. Yeah, where precisely do we put these tribes that the Romans struggled with Caesar in particular? What do we call them? Because we need names for them. Right? What? So but but this region, I’m just emperor, like I’m just emperor over the whole city is flattening the world. The world is very flat. Right. And so you see this pattern playing out. And then yeah, you know, what’s what’s the role when the US kind of sees this? And, and, you know, what’s the anticipation? What’s going on in the mind? But it’s this misapprehension of the enlightenment, like, oh, the enlightenment gives us precision and accuracy, and and a level of understanding that we couldn’t have before, maybe, right. But at the same time, what’s really happening is you’re taking away all of the components that held things together from below. Yes, right. By by by having that emanation, you’re taking away that emanation, and you’re coming from below and saying, No, no, it’s all emergence. I have emerged, I Napoleon have emerged from not France, even. Right from Corsica, to lead your glorious empire. Right. And it’s there’s nothing being bestowed from above, even though the continental philosophy is very much powered from above, which is very weird. It’s a weird, ironic twist, in a sense. It’s like it’s like the Uber Ross, it’s like the snake eating itself almost, it’s it’s quite right. Quite disturbing, actually, especially for the implications that has it has on on the rest of history thereafter. Yeah, and there’s very much that taking power in a scientific way. Yeah, and well known, well ordered, well structured, well controlled by me, Napoleon way, because this is how the world’s going to be divided up. This is how things are going to work. This is the nature of how we rule, right, it’s the beginning of the science of government, which I think is an invalid science to begin with, I don’t think you can science your way to government, or governance, and I think that’s part of the problem is that, you know, we evolve the kingship, and right of rule and all of that stuff, for a very specific reason and purpose, right, it was very hierarchical, it was divided up that way. And it worked for a very long time, worked very well. And not it wasn’t unchanged or anything, but that basic hierarchical structure was there. And now Napoleon comes along and revolution comes along and flattens the world by refusing to take the mantle of the king in essence and letting any old person take it, roughly speaking. And then Napoleon furthers that and says, No, no, no, I’m going to be the new king. I’m just gonna call myself emperor, and then give you all your country’s sovereignty is back. But not really, because your identity is just part of the Empire of France, which is not an individual identity like the Holy Roman Empire, emperor gave each of its sovereign states roughly. Yes. Yeah. Well, and just to look at how that affects it even today. And how does the French language work? Well, it’s regulated by some body, right, and they decide to admit words into the French language. And this is one thing that I found out that you know what they said about the Occitanian language, which is the language that was spoken by Richard the Lionheart, they called it a patois. That’s it. That’s a that’s a non kind of a parochial, not even a parochial, like like a like a not not even a language, you know. And so they started exterminating all these local dialects. And that started from the French Revolution onwards, to the point where very few people at all speak Occitanian. And nowadays, in fact, many of them, I looked it up, there was there was a campaign of shaming people who did. Yes, yes. Wow. And they were told they were all told that it was a patois that it was this that it was this, you know, just a lesser form of French, which of course, French isn’t French. It’s the language that was spoken by the people in the vicinity of Paris. Right, right. And that’s what became standard French. Yeah, it’s Parisian French. There you go. Yeah, Parisian. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s Yeah, it’s interesting, right? Because there’s that universality that flattening of the world’s universality does it makes the world flat. Right? It’s like, well, we can just get everybody on board with this idea. It’s like, yeah, but you can’t. And why would you Are you sure that’s what you want to do? Right? Because now we’re, we’re straying into the territory of well, what is evolution? Evolution is non universality, roughly speaking, right? It’s the denial of universality is a good way to propagate. The propagation has to come through change. And so you can’t have universality and change. They’re mutually exclusive. And and you can see that in the revolution. And you can see that when the revolution devolves into pure chaos, you need a hero and a hero emerges in Napoleon. Yeah. Well, and he’s almost an anti hero with that compared with somebody like Charlemagne, actually, because, because if you compare the two, yeah. Ultimately, right? They’re right. They need a hero, right? But what they really need is not a single individual. So you can see the individualism that comes out of the misapprehension of the Enlightenment, because when you’re not embedded in that framework of the church, right of the Christian tradition, whichever Christian tradition it is, now all the sudden, you can just be out there by yourself, taking over lands, drawing lines on maps and saying, aha, and therefore, declaring yourself emperor without the permission or, you know, or blessing the church consent, right permission, consent or blessing, right, you’re missing all of those. Those are all separate components. And and and, you know, that’s the flattening of the world through the universals, universalization of how things work through the misunderstanding that scientific sort of purely scientific understanding of the world without accounting for the spirit of the locals, the spirit of the locals, they want to speak a certain language, a certain dialect, right, the spirit of the locals, they’re not the Belgae anymore, maybe, right, they’ve either integrated or been usurped or whatever, right? Why are you trying to, you know, and you can see that, right? I mean, Belz is a good example of, well, I’m just going to go back to Roman times and instantiate the old Empire of Rome, my way, and now I’m going to be an emperor Caesar, roughly speaking, right of this region. Very strange. And a lot, a lot flows from that. And this and yet, there’s still this misapprehension of this power, top down power, because now it’s top down power from any individual. Right. And and so the will to power is there, right? It’s always there, right? And somebody picks up on that. Nietzsche, maybe, right? Right. Picks up on seeing that, right? Because Napoleon is the ultimate, ubermensch will to power guy. Oh, yes. Right. He’s the ultimate because he does it. He creates a modern empire through through the use of modern tools and modern science, right, and spreads those ideas everywhere, right? Because that’s always the people people always look at, well, you know, this war didn’t go well. And yeah, but they spread ideas. And those ideas sometimes take hold. Right? Because it’s the spirit that matters, not the material force will say, right? So and you see the attempt to use materiality to wipe out spirit, right? That happens all the way back in ancient Egypt, with Akhenaten and all that crew, right? They become monotheists, they get kicked out of the country. That could be the Jewish story. I don’t know. The timelines are awful close on that one. Yeah. Right. But but, you know, they try to wipe out King Tut. Why? Because he’s the last in that line of monotheists. And the priest class don’t like it. Right. And so they try to use the materiality to wipe out that idea. But of course, that idea doesn’t get wiped out. It actually grows and more or less takes over most of the world now. Right. And certainly all the Western world, to some extent is influenced by that heavily. So you see that continuing the the ideas and embodiment of Napoleon because he actually pulls most of it off. Very negative, very negative consequences for Europe in particular, right? Because that’s that really, oh, look what Napoleon did, we can do that. That’s what World War One is. Yeah, I in a big way, we can just take over other countries and not worry about it. And we can use this precision killing to do it, which is a materialistic way of manipulating the world, right, instead of the idea way we spread ideas, which is, it’s ironic, right? The Enlightenment is all about spreading ideas. The Scots don’t do anything. They’re just up there in their miserable Scottish place, being miserable Scots, right? Coming up with brilliant ideas. Yeah, yeah. They got to do something during the rain, you know. Exactly. Exactly. And the and the relative cold and bleakness of Scotland. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s lovely, beautiful place. Absolutely gorgeous. But yeah, the winters are tough, man. The winters are tough. I mean, they’re not really cold by my standards, because I grew up in New England. But I can see where if you’re not used to you know, if that’s if that’s your coldest, then yeah, it’s pretty miserable for you. Yeah. So what else do you think we’re complete on the little picture here of the influence of the French Revolution and Napoleon and the misapprehension of the Enlightenment or? I think, yeah, so to wrap up, let’s let’s get I guess look at the way that way that sort of contrast with America, then. I don’t know. It’s it’s a America if you think about in the in the ensuing period, after Napoleon, where where does America go versus where does the European continent go? Because that’s probably a good a good a good way to point to the difference as well. And because America generally, I mean, even even by the time of the First World War, doesn’t really want to get involved. In fact, but for a but for a, you know, a particular gentleman setting up a bull moose party that is, you know, Teddy Roosevelt. And America might may not have went into the war if they did, you know, perhaps their course of change. But but the point being is that America kind of for a long time was sort of very much even up until that point was separate, was just we’re going to do our own thing over here. And whereas what happens in the European continent is is essentially what what leads up to World War World War One and that. And you see it throughout, like it is a consistent flattening of regional and regional identities. And until the point where, you know, by the end of it, you have the the death of the last sort of hereditary and Emperor of Austria, Charles Charles, the first, and he is done with like the Austrian Empire, which is the successor to the Holy Roman Empire. And that dies out. And what happens in its place is you have these created nations, you know, the French Revolution, basically, almost attempts to finish off the the basically who was the successor to Charlemagne. Right. And so what do you have if you look in the old if you so it was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the time of World War One. But if you look at all that old territory, you see that it does not fit. And you know, people say, oh, it’s the Balkans, like that’s the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And that’s an empire that that could not to its very core, and was contra to this idea of leveling and very much kind of in, you know, it’s kind of like a, you know, what the Americans preserve is what Austria might, you know, might might want to have wanted to become an Austrian but the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But what you have now is just sort of the the predomination of civil law. So this idea that that that that instead of being judged by by your peers by people who are who are your equals, you are judged by these judges who are just basically experts, you know, and many of which are specialists. And you have this breakdown of any sort of, I suppose, intimate connection with government as such, if that’s even a thing you can have, right, but any sort of personal relationship with with those around you via how everyone should organize, whereas in the US, and England as well to a greater or lesser degree, and probably I mean, in some in some smaller forms and local regions, but largely, you know, the French Revolution did its job. And in America, it seems that there is still this idea of a sort of political participation, let’s say, and an allowance for space for the personal or even the regional. Yeah, and that’s the that’s the big difference that you can see even today as a consequence of this idea of a proper, proper relationship with the head as such. And I think, you know, the the pre you know, it’s not it’s not only America, and it’s not only England, a lot of the it’s unfortunate, actually, I think, in retrospect, that many of the continental states, many of which were as ancient as even more, more so than some of the English institutions were essentially faced, or if they exist now are very, very much reduced. Yeah, yeah. And I think I think, too, you know, one of the one of the things that causes World War One is this strict adherence to contract. Yeah, it’s these treaties. It’s like these treaties are all written up, right. And there’s Woodrow Wilson, right, League of Nations, the early United Nations disaster, right, that he eventually resigns from even though he founded it, right, because it became because of all the bad things that are happening as a result of these contracts. And so you can see the failure of contract law to work like this precision governing idea, the science of government thing fails. And that’s what causes World War One is the failure of this precision governing that Napoleon put in place. And I think that’s, you know, you can argue, well, Europe was always at war. Yeah, but they were minor skirmishes between smaller countries. Yeah, all of a sudden, there are large affairs between, you know, rival factions that aren’t they don’t have the same goal. Like, you know, Germany wants to play the colonization game. And they feel cheated out of that to some extent. And like, fair enough, they weren’t cheated out of that, because they didn’t exist. So, you know, and and and yeah, you know, where did Germany come from? I don’t know. I think Napoleon had a lot to do with that, right? Like, yeah, that’s the thing. Like, this this idea that you can draw lines on a map and say, and therefore, yeah, you’re right, Belgium’s perfect example. How many languages are in that little tiny postage stamp of a place? And how are you really co hearing if you’ve got all these cultures? Merge, it’s split down the middle between the people who speak Dutch or Flemish really, and Walloon, which is a form of dialect to French. Right? That’s it’s split down the middle three languages, though, in this little region. Oh, and German. Right, right. It’s just absolutely nuts. It’s nuts. And how are they supposed to govern themselves? And it turns out that when push comes to shove, they can’t. And it’s like, well, it’s fine. And, and a lot of it is that legacy. Well, the king just takes care of us, and we don’t have to worry about it. And then you can’t, you can’t do that in Europe. Can’t do what you did. You know, in the United States, you can’t you can’t because the United States is you’re involved in your government, you’re responsible for your government, your government, because it emerges from below, within this container, like within this Christian framework. But we’re within these Christian values and virtues, we’re going to make you responsible for your own governance, but you’re responsible for your own governance. So it’s a whole different attitude. And Europe just misreads that, right? And they’re like, Oh, we can just we don’t need a governing governing body anymore. To some extent, a lot of the countries didn’t until they did. And then they really did. But now it’s too late. Yeah, late. And they’re not. They’re not connected to their government. And I think yeah, there’s a way in which they’re not intimate with their government. But also the government isn’t intimate with them to your earlier point. That’s right. French nobles who weren’t in the regions they were supposed to be nobility over. And what does that do when you’re hanging out at Versailles? Because it’s an enormous place. Versailles enormous, like it’s hard to get the scale. I got to get over there one of these days, I’d love to see it. But it’s an enormous place. It’s like they talk about the place that I’m just like, I can’t even imagine how big this place is. It’s huge. And they’re hanging out there the all year. They’re not. They’re like, Oh, that’s the leave this beauty, beauty all the time. Beauty all the time. Yeah. No responsibility, though. Right? No responsibility. Well, a good deal. Versailles, Pleasure Island, you know, that’s that’s, that’s, that’s what it, I guess, turned out to be. Pleasure Island, right. And all the little Pinocchios with their long noses. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. I like it. All right. What do you think, Adam? Is that is that a rap on this? On this French Revolution? And this this whole like different way of seeing or what? I think I think it’s it’s a good place to leave off for now. Because because I think, yeah, I think this is a massive topic. It really is like it’s it’s I hope we did justice for for the conversation. But yeah, I think that’s a good that’s a good place to stop. Yeah, yeah. And maybe if people like it, they can they can comment and let us know. And also, if you want to hear more about this, because we did, we should have touched on it and brushed off of it real quick, because it’s it’s it’s another like two hours, talk about rulership. And the reason you know, the real reason what the difference between the Holy Roman Emperor is, and what Napoleon did like, because there’s a difference there. And to really exemplify that, we’d have to go back into ancient Rome and all the way out and up. Right. And then and then just talk about that European context. But if you want to hear that, you’ll have to comment to let us know that you want us to spend our time on that. Otherwise, who knows what will what will emerge next. And I think, you know, the way to way to use these history videos to think of all the different perspectives that we’re trying to give you, and different ways of seeing the same events, right, because that’s really what this is about is sort of understanding the different layers of analysis, right, the different contexts, in which you can view what happened, because it’s not like Oh, the French Revolution invented the guillotine in there for right, like, yeah, but the guillotine all by itself, right, because of this idea of precision, right, this all plays into this, this whole thing. So yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s great. Thank you, Adam. And let’s let’s plan to do it again sometime soon on the YouTube. Thanks for having me on.