The Age of Revolution (1789-1830)

442 Pages·2020·23.423 MB·English

by  Vladimir Moss

THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
(1789-1830)

Volume V
of
AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View

Vladimir Moss

© Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2020. All rights reserved
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Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free… Most assuredly I say to you,
whoever commits sin is a slave of sin…. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be
free indeed.
John 8.32, 34, 36.

Governments have no rights.
Percy Bysshe Shelley.

God also has rights.
Pope Pius VI.

The French monarchy must decline into despotism or become a democracy - two opposite
kinds of revolution, but both calamitous.
The Princes of the Blood to King Louis XVI.

The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.
Maximilien Robespierre (1794).

Thou art a man, God is no more:
Thy own humanity learn to adore.
William Blake.

[Napoleon] was beaten in his conflict with Russia. For she was his true
enemy. The struggle between them was the struggle between the lawful
Empire and the crowned Revolution.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tiuchev (1849).

I am the new Prometheus, chained to the rock to be gnawed by vultures. Yes,
I have stolen the fire of Heaven, and made a gift of it to France. The fire has
returned to its source, and I am here.
Napoleon Bonaparte on St. Helena (1821).

These philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do
mice in an air pump.
Edmund Burke, To a Noble Lord (1796).

Out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast,
tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which
ever yet overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man.
Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797).

In a democratic state, one must be continually on guard against the desire for popularity.
It leads to aping the behaviour of the worst. And soon people come to think that it is of no
use – indeed, it is dangerous – to show too plain a superiority over the multitude which
one wants to win over.
Madame Germaine de Stael, On Literature and Society (1800).

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Absolute government found huge scope for its rebirth [in] that man [Napoleon] who was
to be both the consummator and the nemesis of the Revolution.
Alexis De Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856).

I hate rebels, I hate traitors, I hate tyranny come from where it will. I have seen much of
the world, and I have learnt from experience to hate and detest republics. There is
nothing but tyranny & oppression, I have never known a good act done by a Republican,
it is contrary to his character. Under the mask of Liberty, he is a tyrant, a many headed
monster that devours your happiness and property. Nothing is free from this monster’s
grasp. A republic has no affection for its subjects. A King may be ill advised and act
wrong, a Republic never acts right, for a knot of villains support each other, and together
they do what no single person dare attempt.
Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.

God is love, but God is not equality.
St. Nikolai Velimirović.

He who serves the revolution ploughs the sea…
Simon Bolivar.

Germany needs a war of her own to feel her power: she needs a feud with
Frenchdom to develop her national life in all its fullness. This occasion will
not fail to come.
Ludwig Jahn.

Nationality exists in the minds of men… its only conceivable habitat… Outside men’s
minds there can be no nationality, because nationality is a manner of looking at oneself
not as an entity an sich. Common sense is able to detect it, and the only human discipline
that can describe and analyse it is psychology… This awareness, this sense of
nationality, this national sentiment, is more than a characteristic of a nation. It is
nationhood itself.
G.J. Renier.

Man seeks ecstasy and transcendence, and if he cannot find them in church, he will look
for them elsewhere.
Adam Zamoyski (1999).

Without religion, political science can create only despotism or anarchy.
Giuseppe Mazzini.

The cry “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death!” was much in vogue during
the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, Equality – by
multiplying titles and decorations, and Fraternity – by dividing us. Death
alone prevailed.
Louis de Bonald (1817).

The King reigns, but does not rule.
Adolphe Thiers, Prime Minister of France.
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INTRODUCTION 7
I. THE WEST: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 10
1. THE NATURE OF THE REVOLUTION 11
2. FREEMASONRY AND ILLUMINISM 19
3. THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN 32
4. THE BRITISH AND THE REVOLUTION 40
5. THE JACOBIN TERROR 53
6. THE REVOLUTION AND RELIGION 62
7. THE MARQUIS DE SADE 72
8. THE DIRECTORY AND BABEUF 75
9. NAPOLEON COMES TO POWER 81
10. NAPOLEON AND RELIGION 89
11. NAPOLEON THE MAN-GOD 95
12. FROM SALAMANCA TO WATERLOO 104
13. THE GEOPOLITICS OF ABOLITIONISM 110
II. THE EAST: THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION 117
14. TSAR PAUL I 118
15. THE ANNEXATION OF GEORGIA 128
16. THE YEDINOVERIE 135
17. THE MURDER OF TSAR PAUL 140
18. TSAR ALEXANDER I AND THE LIBERAL DREAM 146
19. TILSIT: SUMMIT OF THE EMPERORS 151
20. ALEXANDER, NAPOLEON AND SPERANSKY 161
21. 1812: NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA 169
22. TSAR ALEXANDER IN PARIS 182
23. THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA 189
24. THE CONGRESS SYSTEM 195
25. THE MONARCHICAL PRINCIPLE 200
III. THE WEST: INDUSTRIALISM, NATIONALISM AND ROMANTICISM 205
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26. THE ROTHSCHILD CENTURY 206
27. THE DARK SATANIC MILLS 213
28. THE BRITISH EMPIRE 223
29. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM 228
30. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (1) FRANCE 236
31. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (2) ITALY 247
32. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (3) ISRAEL 255
33. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (4) LATIN AMERICA 269
34. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (5) GERMANY 274
35. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (6) BRITAIN AND IRELAND 288
36. NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONS: (7) THE UNITED STATES 294
37. CLASSICAL ROMANTICISM: GOETHE AND BEETHOVEN 306
38. REVOLUTIONARY ROMANTICISM 319
39. HISTORY, HISTORICISM AND HEGEL 328
IV. THE EAST: PATRIOTISM AND MASONRY 348
40. THE CHILDREN OF 1812 349
41. THE POLISH QUESTION 357
42. THE JEWISH QUESTION 361
43. THE REACTION AGAINST MASONRY 368
44. THE RUSSIAN BIBLE PROJECT 377
45. THE GREEK REVOLUTION (1) 382
46. THE GREEK REVOLUTION (2) 393
47. THE GREEKS AFTER THE REVOLUTION 404
48. THE DECEMBRIST REBELLION 410
49. ST. SERAPHIM OF SAROV 418
50. RUSSIAN HEGELIANISM 425
CONCLUSION. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 432

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INTRODUCTION

This book represents the fifth volume in my series, An Essay in
Universal History. It is called The Age of Revolution because it follows the
theme of the French revolution, beginning with the storming of the
Bastille in 1789, through the Jacobin terror and the Napoleonic wars to
the Second French revolution of 1830, when the victory of the
bourgeoisie and of the revolution over the short period of reaction
(1815-30) was consolidated. Of course, the revolution neither began nor
ended in this period. But it may be called the revolutionary age par
excellence insofar as it presented all the main ideas of the revolution in
their classical French expression, the revolutions of 1789 and 1830, and
provided the major themes and symbolism of the later, and still greater
Russian revolution.

Even today, many believe that the Illuminati of the second, Jacobin
stage of the French revolution are at the root of the contemporary
(twenty-first century) Masters of the Universe.

As in the previous volumes in this series, this book is divided into
alternating sections on the East and the West. In the first section, we
see the first French revolution, its continuation and
internationalization under the despotism of Napoleon I until the
Congress of Vienna in 1815. In the second section we study Orthodox
Russia’s victory over Napoleon. The third section looks more closely at
the intellectual currents of the time, especially liberalism, nationalism,
romanticism and historicism. In the fourth, Tsar Alexander’s struggle
against Masonry is studied, together with the Decembrist rebellion in
Russia and the Greek revolution.

*

Early modern Europe had undergone four major religio-political
revolutions since the fifteenth century: the Renaissance under the
leadership of the Italians, the Reformation under the leadership of the
Germans, Republicanism under the leadership of the English, and the
Enlightenment under the leadership first of the British and then of the
French. All of these were potentially universal revolutions – that is,
their leading ideas could be exported throughout the Christian world
and the Christian nations, undermining Christianity in each and all of
them. However, at the beginning of our period, Christian ideas still
held sway over the masses of the European population, in particular:
belief in Christ as the God-Man and Saviour, in heaven and hell, in the
Church, in the normality of monarchical political rule, in a hierarchy of
classes, rights and obligations. And the normal pattern of social and
economic life remained feudalism. The devil needed a fresh impulse of
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ideas and energy in order decisively to destroy the stubbornly
persistent medieval Christian mind-set of Europe.

That impulse was supplied by the French revolution of 1789, which
marks the fifth major turning-point in Western life and thought. It as it
were gathered together and concentrated all the apostatic trends of
previous European history and then spewed it out into the rest of the
world. It was the decisive event that swept away the restraints imposed
on public and private life by Christianity and feudalism. In England
and America, some of the less radical ideas of the Enlightenment and
the French revolution had already been put into effect, at least
partially, well before 1789; while in other countries - Russia and China,
for example - they did not achieve dominance until the twentieth
century. Eventually, however, the French revolutionary ideals,
combined with an essentially secularist and utilitarian attitude to
religion, became the dominant ideology, not only of Europe and North
America, but of the whole world. For, as Eric Hobsbawm writes, "alone
of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its
armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so.”1

The French Revolution not only swept away the old religion of
Christianity from the forefront of European consciousness: to fill the
void thus created, it coopted the new sensibility emphasizing emotion
over reason that we call romanticism, and introduced three new,
closely related secular and political religions: liberalism, nationalism,
and socialism. All three religions preached liberty as the ultimate value
– individual liberty (liberalism), national liberty (nationalism) and
proletarian liberty (socialism). These three religions often contradict
and war against each other; but they all come from the same root in the
Enlightenment, and in the long run they all move towards the same
antichristian end. In the period covered in this book, socialism was still
in the early stages of its development. However, liberalism already
well-established in Britain, was given a decisive impetus, while
nationalism in its modern, French form, became the religion of the age,
creating a whole series of nationalist revolutions in the nineteenth
century, each with its own religious fervor, catechisms and martyrs for
the cause.

“Perhaps the most significant characteristic of the dawning modern world,”
writes Paul Johnson, “… was the tendency to relate everything to politics.2
Therefore traditional religion now becomes less important – except in Russia and
the Orthodox East. Indeed, the period 1789-1830 can be compared, for its
profound impact on the world, only with the period 1914-45. Both periods are
dominated by a national revolution with enormous international ramifications -
the French in the earlier period, the Russian in the later - and by international

1 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1992, p. 75.
2 Johnson, The Birth of the Modern, World Society 1815-1830, London: Phoenix, 1992, p. 662.
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war on a previously unprecedented scale. In both periods the main victors were
an Anglo-Saxon nation (Britain in the earlier period, America in the later), on
the one hand, and Russia (Tsarist Russia in the earlier period, Soviet Russia in
the later), on the other. At the end of each period Russia became the dominant
political power on the continent of Europe, while the Anglo-Saxon nation
became the dominant power outside Europe, going on to dominate the world
economically through its exploitation of important scientific and technological
discoveries...

Both periods, 1789-1830 and 1914-45, represent the triumph of the powers of
darkness, of Satan and his cohorts, against the struggling remnants of the true
faith and piety in the world. They differ only in that the first period, the period
of this book, sees the partial rehabilitation of faith and piety as a result of the
victory of Tsarist Russia, whereas the second sees the almost complete triumph
of antichristianity as a result of the defeat and destruction of Tsarist Russia…

Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our
God, have mercy on us!

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I. THE WEST: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

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