08/13/2026
Two revolutions. Two countries. Almost the same moment in history.
The American Revolution began in 1776. The French Revolution began in 1789. Both were influenced by the Enlightenment. Both talked about liberty. Both talked about equality. Both challenged inherited authority.
But watch what they actually became.
The American Revolution was fundamentally a revolution for self-government.
The argument was brutally simple: government exists to protect rights that people already possess. Its legitimate power comes from the consent of the governed. When government becomes destructive of those purposes, people have the right to change it. That is the philosophy written directly into the Declaration of Independence.
The goal wasn't to create a government powerful enough to engineer a perfect society. It was to create a government that couldn't easily become tyrannical. That difference matters.
The French started with an equally remarkable declaration. In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression as natural rights. It declared people equal before the law and insisted that sovereignty came from the nation.
So where did it go wrong?
France was dealing with something America wasn't dealing with on anything like the same scale: mass poverty, hunger, soaring bread prices, entrenched aristocratic privilege, a bankrupt state and a society whose entire political and economic structure was coming apart.
And the revolution increasingly stopped asking only, "How do we make people free?" It started asking, "How do we make society equal?"
That sounds like a small distinction. It isn't.
Once government becomes responsible for making society equal, someone has to decide what equality means. Someone has to decide who is standing in its way. Someone has to decide who is an enemy of the revolution.
And eventually, someone has to enforce it.
The guillotine became the horrifying symbol of where that logic could lead. Louis XVI went beneath the blade in January 1793. Marie Antoinette followed. Then came the political purges. Then the revolutionary tribunals. Then Danton. Then thousands upon thousands of ordinary people labeled enemies of the Revolution.
During the Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety effectively became the revolutionary government. Tens of thousands died through executions, prison deaths and massacres. More than 17,000 were officially executed, many by guillotine.
And here is the astonishing part.
The revolution had begun by proclaiming the rights of man. It ended up executing people in the name of protecting those rights. The machine that was supposed to liberate France became an instrument for deciding who was sufficiently revolutionary to deserve to live.
And eventually even the revolutionaries discovered the obvious problem with that system. Robespierre, one of the principal architects of the Terror, went to the guillotine himself in July 1794. The revolution began consuming its own children.
Then, within a few years, the country that had overthrown a king ended up under an emperor. Napoleon.
That isn't just an interesting historical irony. It is a warning. Because there are two very different ways of thinking about freedom.
One says: "You are free. You have rights. You have a voice. Now take responsibility for what you do with that freedom."
The other increasingly says: "You are suffering. Society is unjust. Someone must fix it."
The first philosophy puts a boundary around political power. The second gives political power a mission. And there is almost no natural limit to a mission like that.
If government must eliminate poverty, then it needs more power. If it must eliminate inequality, more power. If it must protect the revolution from its enemies, more power. If some people resist the new order, more power still. And eventually the question isn't whether the government has too much power. The question becomes whether you are a good enough citizen to be trusted with freedom.
That's the trap.
The American experiment, for all its enormous contradictions and failures, was built around a different instinct: distrust concentrated power and give ordinary people room to govern themselves.
The Founders didn't believe government could make human beings virtuous. They worried about what would happen when imperfect human beings acquired too much political power.
That's why the American system divided power, separated institutions, protected speech and property, and made government answerable to the people. It wasn't a promise of equality of outcome. It was a framework for equality before the law and the freedom to pursue your own life.
And yes, America profoundly failed to live up to its own principles. Slavery alone makes that undeniable. But those principles became the standard by which America could eventually be challenged, condemned and changed.
That is the remarkable thing about the American idea. It doesn't say government will give you a good life. It says government should leave you free to build one.
And that comes with something modern politics increasingly tries to avoid talking about: Responsibility. Freedom without responsibility is just another form of dependency.
If someone else is responsible for your happiness, your security, your success and your circumstances, then someone else eventually needs enough power to control those things.
And once you hand over that much responsibility, you shouldn't be surprised when you discover that you've also handed over a great deal of freedom.
That's the lesson of these two revolutions side by side.
The American question was: "How do we keep government from ruling us?"
The French question increasingly became: "How do we use government to remake society?"
One is a philosophy of self-government. The other can become a philosophy of government over everything.
And somewhere between the Declaration of Independence and the blade of the guillotine is one of the great political lessons of history:
Be very careful when you give government the power to create paradise. People have been willing to build hell to get there.
