[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]

July hosts two revolutions that changed the world.

On the fourth of the month, the Declaration of Independence pledged “lives”, “fortunes” and “sacred honor” under the “protection of divine Providence” to fight for the belief that government derives its consent from the governed. On the fourteenth of the month, French radical mobs stormed the Bastille prison leading to over 100 deaths in an event likely triggered by the antics of the infamous monster the Marquis de Sade. None of the 7 prisoners inside were worth liberating, but the assault on the Bastille made brutal mob violence the symbol of the revolution.

Three days earlier, a proposed French version of the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Lafayette with some input from Thomas Jefferson, languished. By the time the tangled mess of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its emphasis on enforced equality was approved next month, the fundamental distinctions between the two revolutions were set.

Abbe Sieyes, the former clergyman who ended up writing much of the Declaration, would turn heretic to survive during the Reign of Terror, and was instrumental in bringing Napoleon to power, while the Count of Mirabeau, the other ‘editor’ of the Declaration, had been a secret agent of the monarchy. Two years later, Lafayette was on the run from the leftist radicals running France. While the Constitution ruled in America, the Rights of Man were in shambles in France.

The sharp contrast between the Founding Fathers of the two republics is more than a matter of history. The American and French revolutions are still playing out all this time later.

When the French Revolution arrived with its promise of mandatory equality, it was highly seductive to Americans who were losing touch with their own revolution. A whole generation had come of age who had been children during the days of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge.

What they wanted was not the old American Revolution, but an exciting new French one.

In my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, I describe the struggle for the soul of the nation that ensued between George Washington and the radicals.

Citizen Genet, an emissary of the French Revolution, had helped set up ‘Democratic Societies’ dedicated to promoting a radical revolution in America. The name would later influence the new Democratic-Republican Party which would eventually shed the Republican part of the name to become today’s Democratic Party.

“These societies were instituted by the artful & designing members (many of their body I have no doubt mean well, but know little of the real plan),” Washington wrote, “instituted by their father, Genet,” and behind them, “under popular and fascinating guises, the most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government.”

The “popular and fascinating guises” were what we today call equality rather than equality.

Where the American Revolution had emphasized the independence of the individual from the state, the French Revolution focused on building up the state as the guarantor of freedom.

It was this distinction that confined most of the ugliness between key figures in the American Founding to nasty letters while the streets of Paris ran with the blood of political opponents. The new regime was so busy enforcing equality against everyone accused of aristocratic and reactionary tendencies that no one had any rights left against state or mob violence.

The new French radical regime promised to solve all the nation’s problems, but could not manage the economy, the food supply or much of anything else. All it could do was kill.

Increasingly radical factions mobilized mobs and blamed the failures of the past government on being insufficiently extreme. The problem was never their poor understanding of market economics and agriculture, but the inequality that could only be purged through mass murder.

During the Reign of Terror, Robespierre assured fellow radicals that it would all be worth it for, “by sealing our work with our blood, we may witness at least the dawn of universal happiness.”

There was plenty of blood, but no happiness. And yet American radicals wanted all of that here.

“We must have a revolution,” George Logan, a prominent Democratic Republican figure—who gave his name to the Logan Act after he attempted to privately negotiate an end to the Quasi-War between America and France—declared. “That alone can save us: but would you believe it, our people do not want to hear talk of it. They are already corrupted. Ah! If I were now in France, if I might see all that goes on there, how I would rejoice.”

In the streets of Philadelphia and New York, a new generation of radicals were calling for George Washington and some of the Founding Fathers to face the guillotine.

Washington understood that this could not be allowed to happen in the United States.

In ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, I describe how as the violence intensified in both France and America, George Washington became the only sitting president to command troops in the field against the radicals, calling the insurrection, “the

first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies; brought forth I believe too prematurely for their own views, which may contribute to the annihilation of them.” Here he was too optimistic.

The struggle between the French and American revolutions nearly led to civil war in this country. Long before Antifa and BLM, or Bill Ayers and The Weathermen or even anarchists detonating bombs on Wall Street, our Founding Fathers were fighting the start of the 200-year war with the Left. And they understood that what was at stake was the very definition of freedom.

“If the progress of Jacobinism is to be arrested at all, it is by fighting it,” a letter from Abigail Adams quoted. ”And if there be a Nation on Earth capable of going the necessary lengths, and making the proper Sacrifices to stop its course,—it must be one that is already possesed of substantial Liberty, that knows how to appreciate it, & how to distinguish between it, and that Sort of Liberty which France is trying to propogate throughout the World. To every other Nation & people, the french liberty is perhaps equal, if not superiour to their own.”

The leftist cause spread like a virus across Europe and much of the world because they had no defense against it. But thanks to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we did.

The war of ideas between the two revolutions and republics was always going to end here.

America was the only alternative to the Left. And the Declaration of Independence was the wellspring of our sort of liberty. The Fourth of July is the celebration of that liberty, not only from one particular mad king, but from the entire idea of the supremacy of the state.

What initially began as a revolution against a monarchy became a revolution against the Left.

When we watch fireworks burst into the sky above our cities, towns, rivers, lakes and oceans, what makes that display different from those of so many other nations is that our revolution was meant to make us free, not just as a nation, but as individuals pursuing our own destinies.

We did not fight a revolution to build a system that would make us equal by leveling everyone else. This was not a revolution of equity, but of liberty, not a scheme to control others through the state, but to liberate all of us from the state. That unfulfilled revolution is at the heart of the slow civil war in which America finds itself on the 248th anniversary of our fight for freedom.

248 years later the fight goes on.

In ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, I tell the story of that fight, not against the British crown, but against the radical tyranny that the Left calls ‘liberation’.

The legacies of the two revolutions are still at war in our government and our society. As we celebrate the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us do all that we can so that it is the American Revolution, and not the French Reign of Terror, that prevails here.