The Mistakes of the Revolution of 1789
The revolution badly done in 1789 and its mistakes not corrected since, such as that of the elimination of common property.
Fable 1: Forgetting the complementarity between individual, common and collective property.
A revolution always has a cultural dimension that, if properly addressed, can transform a society by changing lifestyles, rules and norms, and values. Usually a revolution occurs when two conflicting lifestyles collide because a majority of the social group can no longer bear it when a minority crushes it. This was the case at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789
1789 the revolution badly made
Without returning here to all the causes that explain the revolution of 1789 in France, we can find an illustration of these lifestyles that clash in the events of April 1789 in Paris. Two worlds are starting to clash: the world of workers and craftsmen which remains organized on the guilds inherited from the Middle Ages and the old network organization on the one hand and on the other hand the new industrialists who use the new technologies to enrich themselves quickly.
The origins of the French Revolution of 1789
Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and his Folie-Titon
Jean-Baptiste Réveillon is a paper manufacturer employing 300 workers at La Folie-Titon. At the crossroads of Rue Montreuil and Faubourg, opposite the Ice Manufacture, Le Sieur Réveillon had built La Folie-Titon, a magnificent residence.
In the middle of 40,000 workers in poor condition, he gave lavish parties and on 19 Oct. 1783 even raised a hot air balloon from his friend from Annonay. With unemployment and poverty rising, the residents of the neighborhood have their heads near the cap and they foment unrest throughout the suburb.
In April 1789, New Year’s Eve proposed an increase in a tax that would mainly affect workers and the poorest people. On 27 April clashes took place between workers and bourgeois during the writing of notebooks in the factory. The third state calls for the death of Réveillon. Her effigy is carried to the Place de Grève where she is executed. Throughout the night rioters shout in the city.
On April 28 the powder magazine ignited. With the help of the workers of the Manufacture des Glaces de Saint Gobain, the inhabitants ransacked and looted the home of the wallpaper manufacturer and, supreme horror, stole the medal awarded to him by the King for services rendered to the art of stationery. On April 28, the crowd threw stones at the troops, as well as tiles and furniture from the roofs of the houses. Troops are shooting. On the side of soldiers, 12 killed and 80 wounded; of the people, 200 killed and 300 wounded. Workers carry the bodies of civilians killed in the streets.
A few days later, between 500 and 600 men, after meeting in Villejuif, tried to force Bicêtre prison. The revolts of the people of Paris will also be fueled by the lack of wheat and supplies following a particularly harsh winter which has led to poor harvests.
The Roots of Social Conflict
But the root of the social conflict is economic: the mechanization of work, the progress of machinery and the birth of the first industries enable a part of the bourgeoisie to foresee rapid possibilities of enrichment, provided that the old economy is broken, and especially the organizations of workers and craftsmen in the economic function of production, as well as the organization of agricultural fairs and trade fairs in distribution.
Alongside these economic concerns and this new source of enrichment for the bourgeois, the political and social economic thought, especially that of the physiocrats, is entirely turned towards the need to remove the carcases of the old regime to create spaces of freedom beyond the former privileges of the nobility and the monarchy.
Ignorance of history and the medieval period
In the utter ignorance of history and in particular of the flourishing civilizations once organized in networks because of the prohibitions laid down for centuries by the church and the popes, in the ignorance strongly maintained by the royal power on the ancient example of the organization in networks of the order of the Temple and the time of the cathedrals as well as on the contemporary example of the confederation of Iroquois nations described from 1730 onwards by the future fathers of the Constitution of the United States of America, the philosophers and the physiocrats base their thinking on the example of nature in an attempt to demonstrate that human beings must conform to human beings laws of nature far more harmonious than the human laws defended by the rulers of power systems.
But these often incongruous and spurious theories lack the intellectual, much less spiritual, strength of an alternative to royal absolutism.
Three social groups must negotiate the conduct of the Revolution
Three social groups will thus have to negotiate to manage the first revolutionary events.
The people of Paris will continue their riots
to ensure its survival and denounce privileges. Gradually it was joined by a part of the garrison of Paris who refused to fire on the crowd. The major event will be the capture of the Bastille on July 14. To avoid repression of the nobles, the National Assembly will vote on the night of August 4 to remove the privileges so that the lords no longer have any right to organize a counter-revolution and to quell the unrest throughout the country.
Once this first wave of events had passed, starting in 1790, the true face of the revolution’s leadership team was revealed. The political, economic and social conflict triggered by the clash of lifestyles between that of the new wealthy bourgeois of industry and that of the people of Paris, has thus been carried out in terms of political rules and norms.
The physiocrats bring their notion of freedom.
To prevent repression, the abolition of the privileges of nobles represents an immediate and effective logical step. In hindsight, this abolition of privileges is also the first step in implementing the ideas of the physiocrats to develop the notion of freedom.
This much-demanded freedom is the expression of a revolt against royal absolutism and the domination of the privileged classes. It is a philosophical concept that does not correspond to any legal basis and is not based on any knowledge of organization management.
It is a moral concept which cannot be brought into the legal realm because the law has no interest in morality.
The desire to eliminate royal absolutism and the domination of the nobility cannot be enough to change the course of events, because revolutionaries are unable to propose a choice of society and a change of political regime other than the domination of one class by another in the same system of power.
The new ruling class of the bourgeoisie
In 1789, most were content to limit the king’s powers in a constitutional monarchy, and it was the king’s mistakes that led to the obligation to establish the republic.
Therefore, a logic of domination develops in favor of the new ruling class: the bourgeoisie, which opens up great opportunities for enrichment through the new industrial tool. The obstacle of the privileges of the nobility being eliminated, it remains the obstacle of the guilds and of the workers’ and craft organizations.
At the end of the old regime, all social organizations were frozen in conservatism that protected against abuse and excesses for the benefit of a small ruling minority. The same is true of corporations. They have nothing to do with the time of cathedrals and network organization.
To favor artisans, only the children of artisans can open a business. The best worker’s companions, if they are not sons of craftsmen, will never be allowed to set up their own businesses. There are many other such excesses. It is then a question of eliminating its excesses in order to regain the fundamental basis of the organization of corporations: the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity to develop professions and thus contribute to the development of society. But the political will of the new industrialists from the bourgeoisie will decide otherwise.
The elimination of the intermediate bodies of the Ancien Régime
The decree of Allarde of 2 and 17 March 1791 and then the Law Le Chapelier, promulgated in France on 14 June 1791, are laws proscribing workers’ organizations, in particular the guilds of the trades, but also the gatherings of peasants and workers as well as the journeying.
Known as the lawyer in the Parliament of Brittany, then patriot deputy at the Estates General Isaac Le Chapelier, this law outlaws the general system of collective exercise of the trades workers (corporations), with all the special social regulations, and consequently the system of derogation of privileged manufactures and generally all the peasant markets.
Rejecting the intermediate bodies dear to Montesquieu, in the spirit of the night of 4 August 1789 and the abolition of privileges, its preamble states that “no one is allowed to inspire citizens with an intermediate interest, to separate them from the public thing by a spirit of cooperation”.
In line with the principles of physiocracy, this law aims to promote free enterprise, which is conceived as a means of ensuring the enrichment of the nation and progress.
Le Chapelier Act
By abolishing all communities of collective practice, the Chapelier Act had the effect of destroying guilds, corporations and special interests, thereby destroying the customs and practices of these bodies. In 1800, it led to the formation of private defense leagues, called trade unions, among carpenter workers, and to strikes, which it allowed to repress for almost the entire nineteenth century.
Although they are also prohibited, the law fails to prevent the formation of true employers’ unions. Similarly, the law cannot prevent the organization of companies. Moreover, workers’ cooperatives, developed from 1834 onwards, were considered, except for a short period under the Second Republic, in 1848, as coalitions until the Act of 24 July 1867 on companies, which granted them legal status, including a chapter called “Societies with Personnel and Capital Variables”.
The Chapelier Act was repealed in two stages on 25 May 1864 by the Ollivier Act, which abolished the offense of coalition, and on 21 March 1884 by the Waldeck-Rousseau Act, which legalized unions. ( source wikipedia, see also books on this issue ).
This desire to eliminate all pressure groups stemming from royal absolutism and the intellectual domination of the Roman Catholic Church remains a political reflex to overcome despotism, but this desire is hollow, even intellectually and culturally empty, because it is based on no source of proven knowledge.
Forgetting in 1789 to change the right of ownership
So this desire for freedom does not address the question of the form of property: by banning corporations, revolutionary decision-makers do not notice that they forbid a form of common property unless blinded by their supposed desire for freedom, taking advantage of the philosophical theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they understood that they had the opportunity by sacralizing the freedom of individual property to open the doors to maximizing their personal profit as the new owner of the means of production.
Since Turgot, entrepreneurs have been looking for ways to acquire the powers necessary for their economic development. The Hatter’s Law has thus responded exactly to their concerns.
As early as 1790, we have a set of contradictory legal rules to ensure the supremacy of the new industrial bourgeoisie: the economic rules that ensure the supremacy of the new ruling class are camouflaged behind philosophical ideas that represent an ideal and a utopia that are not only philanthropic but also contrary to economic realities and this prodigious opportunity for enrichment for the new ruling class.
The Betrayal of the Revolutionary Leaders of 1790 to the French People
This is more than a lie, a betrayal of the people of this country by the new leaders. We have made this clear in our chapter Power Systems and Networks of Life by clarifying the relations between Authority-Power-Command.
Here we resume the conflict between a representative state and the democracy exercised by the people for the people.
The Roman Catholic Church would use Rousseau’s thought to organize the French Revolution of 1789 along these lines.
The Convention lacks the intellectual benchmarks to legitimize its takeover. Former members of the clergy, Abbé Sieyès and Prince-Bishop Talleyrand, both trained at the seminary of Saint Sulpice in Paris founded by a Jesuit from Lyon, will influence the work of the Convention on this question of the new republican power.
Abbé Sieyès will discard the literal interpretation of Rousseau’s thought that leads to participatory local direct democracy when the people govern themselves at the local level.
Abbé Sieyès, who distrusts the people and his illiterate, uneducated intellectual level, will defend the use of representatives of the people through the operation of two chambers. For the abbot, the naturally good human being must be able to perform the function that God has entrusted to him: to govern the Earth. Not all citizens necessarily have that ability. The electoral system must therefore be censual: only the wealthiest have the right to vote. Here we find an illustration of the Christian ideology of the Roman papacy still present: on the one hand, the fishermen who do not yet know God and his message and on the other hand, the good ones who behave according to the precepts of the church seeking to convert those who live in sin and ignorance of the divine precepts.
“ Citizens who nominate representatives give up and must give up making the law themselves; they have no particular will to impose. If they dictated, France would no longer be that representative state; it would be a democratic one. The people, I repeat, in a country that is not a democracy (and France cannot be), the people can only speak, can only act through their representatives,” Sieyès, founding father of representative government in France, 1789 speech to the National Constituent Assembly.
Some revolutionaries, such as Robespierre, will oppose this conception supported by Sieyès in an attempt to establish a direct and clearly less representative democracy. It’ll be the Jacobins. These quarrels weakened the Revolution and Sieyès allied with Napoleon Bonaparte to establish the Empire.
From the inevitable conflicts that would arise, it was not until around 1860 that the republican pact was created that a political enterprise to appease this always possible civil war was finally set up. The revolution of 1789 was thus an unfinished revolution, before it was soon a misguided revolution that betrayed citizens’ interests.
It only served to replace a ruling class with a new one that by 1790 had had legal rules at its service. Under the pretext of individual republican freedom, this ruling minority managed to eliminate all the intermediary bodies that could serve as a counter-power and curb its expansion. The general framework for Republican inequality was established in 1790, and has never been eliminated. Among the provisions of the 1789 Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights, two articles are fundamental to ensuring the predominance of individual property and prohibiting the return of common property.
The sacralization of private property in 1789, its political consequences.
Article 2 of the 1789 Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights recognizes that property is a natural and imprescriptible human right, such as freedom, security and resistance to oppression.
As we have seen before, the problem is that the word property does not mean anything until we have specified the form of property we retain. It is certain that in 1789, in the spirit of Rousseau, it was individual property.
This article was used for two purposes.
First interest: the development of private property for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, which replaced the former aristocracy from 1789.
Second interest: resistance to oppression was used as part of the military power that confiscated it for the benefit of the leaders: apart from submission to the group of leaders, the right to resistance is not recognized by these leaders.
In the Old Regime, there was a provision that allowed the people to intervene to force the monarchy to listen and negotiate. When the coffers of the kingdom were empty, the king had an obligation to assemble the States General. This was the case for the meeting of the States General in 1789, but this possibility no longer exists in the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights of 1789.
Resistance to oppression means nothing until the oppressor is named. Insurgents demanding new states general are now oppressors of government leaders.
Thus, since 1789, all the Republican Constitutions are said to be “closed” because they do not foresee the cases where their modification at the request of the citizens, are possible. For the citizens, all that remains is to go through the streets and the insurrection. Indeed, every constitutional change since 1790 has taken place following military or civil wars, civil unrest, and the 1958 Constitution does not escape this Republican custom with the events in Algiers.
Private property and the sale of national property to finance war
The French Revolution simply took over the functioning of the centralized administration of the monarchy to add idealistic values of equality and fraternity and above all the pragmatic right of individual property in article 17 of the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights.
From the outset, there was a mistake, an oversight, a questionable choice that would be the cause of the failure of this revolution of 1789 and that would precipitate the revolution in the years of Terror, Terror that would assassinate poets and assassinate Lavoisier in order to seize his wealth that he had been able to gain as a general farmer in the service of the king…
Revolutionary leaders already needed money to finance wars against foreign kings, a clear sign that they had no valid ideas for convincing foreign peoples to change their political regimes as well in order to develop democratic movements.
This need for money to finance the revolution and the war against kings will justify the sale of national property after the confiscation of the property of the clergy and nobility.
The lawyer who knows property management teaches that this is about moving from collective property managed by the monarchy to individual private property managed by the owners. The revolutionary leaders did not know that these national properties, before being usurped by the king, were managed as common property during the communal assemblies of the medieval period, the last flourishing period in Europe.
The abbeys will be sold and their buildings will be used to develop barns, small industries, their ruins will be used as a stone quarry. This will be the end of the last vestiges of the common property.
All this after that during the night of August 1789, the libraries, the administrative papers will have been burned with all the archives of the time of the cathedrals and the organization in network on the soil of France, destruction committed by bands of uneducated insurgents who could not understand that they were burning the last vestiges of the solution that could radically transform their fate and set up this humanist civilization to which they aspired.
The purchasers of these national properties are the entrepreneurs of the new business bourgeoisie. They will resolutely oppose any initiative that would restore common ownership in the functioning of republican institutions and nothing has changed since.
Citizens still do not know what common property is, and since Marx and Engels, the Communists have defended the collective property of the Communist, Soviet, Chinese or other party, firmly believing that it is common property, as they do not know how to manage directly themselves the production and distribution of the wealth produced by their labor.
In our part 1 of this essay we showed how to restore the complementarity between private, common and collective property with everything that goes with it, full currency and social rights, subsidiarity, etc.
The right to resist oppression serves only to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie
Recognition of the right to resistance against oppression provided citizens with a legal framework to oppose and eliminate the monarchy’s supporters and the armies of kings and emperors who fought the French Revolution.
The resistance movements between 1939 and 1945, as well as the insurgents of the commune of 1871 were not allowed to use this article 2 to legitimize their resistance to oppression: the resistance to the ruling power was achieved through military and civil fighting and it was the fate of the weapons that decided victory or defeat.
While citizens throughout the twentieth century had to endure wars throughout the world between the communist, fascist and Nazi systems of power and the systems of power of Western democracies, now that only the capitalist and liberal system of power remains, article 2 posed a problem.
By listing these four fundamental rights placed on the same hierarchical level, we find here the shortcomings and errors of the revolutionaries of 1789. They have not seen that there is no equality between these four fundamental rights and that the poorly defined property right very quickly becomes the source of all the contradictions in the functioning of such a system of republican power.
Rousseau’s social contract is monumental intellectual nonsense
Rousseau’s ideas are flawed politically, economically, and socially.
Citizens who become owners, seeking to develop their heritage do not contribute to the development of the general interest. This is a socially irrelevant fable, and the economic theories that support it are equally wrong, because the results always contradict these idealized rational models.
The equality of the rights granted to each legal personality remains a utopia if not a legal fiction incapable of achieving equality of rights in the political and economic, social functioning of the republican system of power.
The judicial institution will enforce the laws put in place by the leaders of the system, it will not have independence to seek other solutions derived mainly from the consideration of a network organization, as well as for the institution of national education.
As we will see later, to correct these errors of 1789 and redefine this right of property, we will use the right to resistance to oppression to legitimize the establishment of our network organizations.
The French Revolution of 1789 needs much better remaking
Involving citizens in the management of human activity
In 1789, the French Revolution chose individual ownership. This is the great achievement of the revolution enshrined in Article 17 of the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights. It was not until 1864 that the right to strike was recognized and 1884 that trade unions were authorized. In 1901, the authorization of associations was added to this system. And since then nothing significant.
Trade unions and associations are the only intermediate organizations recognized by the Republic to enable citizens to organize. These social organizations do not have the right to freely develop common properties.
The Limits of French Unions
The French trade unions do not have sufficient funding to influence the social plan.
We would point out that in Germany, trade unions manage social housing and the proper management of social housing enables them to obtain a reserve fund to pay employees who strike at the request of their trade unions, which also explains a high degree of unionization and the real practice of solidarity in the relationship between social housing rents and payment of strike compensation by trade unions.
We will return to the very bad social relations in France and the very important weakness of the trade unions in terms of their representativeness among employees. For the time being, we would like to emphasize here that these intermediary bodies of citizens do not have the right of access to common property, as can the management of social housing for employees in Germany.
Trade union funding can only come from voluntary individual contributions. This can be understood especially when it comes to ensuring the independence of a union. Paternalism, the dominant management style in French companies, essentially family-type, since 1790, has always hunted for trade unionists to prevent the multiplication of memberships.
The Republican pact after 1860 spared the trade unions by ensuring the implicit assumption of the training and remuneration of trade union leaders through public service jobs, especially after 1945 when the Social Security administrations became real training centers for the ruling trade union elites.
The current situation remains distressing through detachment, separation, the break that exists between confederal unions and their lack of basis. This situation exists in France thanks to real financing of trade unions via public institutions or companies and not by their members.
Reforming trade unions to give them access to financial means through the management of a common property is absolutely not foreseen or demanded by the political class and by the trade unions that stand within the strict framework of our system of power and are either blind or do not want to admit that it is possible to leave our systems of power to develop once again successful networked organizations.
To strengthen the unions would be to take up the spirit of the Charter of Amiens of 1906. To finance someone who does not have the means of his autonomy is always to control him in some way, why then deprive himself of this lever of action?
The limited political influence of associations
The same could also be said of the majority of the associative world in general, which does not have access to the management of common property.
The associations are generally very poor and in order to develop, they have only the solution of the declaration of public utility which allows them to receive subsidies from administrations to become on the social field, auxiliaries of central or regional administrations.
The financing of political parties and unions houses
They are at the mercy of changes in government. Political parties were then a special category of associations whose funding had long been peppered with scandals and offenses, some of which had eventually been punished by the criminal courts. The solution of their financing through taxation is questionable because it amounts to creating in fact a new category of civil servants: politicians by trade.
The possibility of creating a micro-political party to finance its election campaigns without using its party’s coffers illustrates this entrepreneurial politician spirit. Hidden subsidies and checks, banknotes in the famous envelopes of the hand of the richest families, and politicians ready to defend the cause of the richest are also part of this collection of illegal measures designed to safeguard the personal interests of the minority who run the system of power.
The same applies to the financing of the “house” unions and the official unions by the employers’ union. These practices also ensure the conservatism of the parties and the vilest maneuvers to tamper with the electoral code in order to ensure the election at all costs of the candidates of the ruling party.
Eliminating Inequality in the French Republic
There are many other disadvantages to the prohibition and the elimination of common ownership, which we shall return to.
The sacralization of individual property in 1789 remains at the root of the rise in inequality in the French Republic and we are one of the most unequal developed countries in the world, where the concentration of wealth of wealth reaches an exceptional level: 5% of the population holds 45% of the value of the national heritage and the 5% following 10% of this value; So 10 percent of the population owns 55 percent of the value of the wealth, and 90 percent of the population owns 45 percent.
The structure of France’s economy remains dominated by the 250 families that came to power mostly more than a century ago. The boards of directors of the CAC 40 French companies are led by a closed circle of a hundred members who co-opt each other to get scandalous salaries and pensions. With inequality having risen sharply since the 2000’s, the movement to enrich the minority that governs the economy has grown even larger.
In Part 1 of the Our Networks of Life essay, we explain how to build political, economic, social and cultural institutions that will eliminate these income and wealth inequalities. Our reader after reading this part 1 has the current answers on this question. But in 1789, could revolutionaries use an example of a successful revolution? The answer is yes, even though French education excludes this subject from school and university curricula.
Disdain for the US Constitution by French intellectuals in 1789
Why the example of the Constitution of the United States of America was not used in 1790.
Could it have been otherwise in 1789? The answer is yes, given the information that was available at the time, at least to intellectuals, writers, and scientists.
The French literary and patriotic legend sometimes strongly insists on the direct filiation between the Enlightenment and the revolution of 1789. This maneuver seeks to legitimize and glorify the events of 1789 to claim that this revolution was a success that should not be called into question.
Our reader understood this: the choices made in 1789 do not call into question the centralized system of institutions: the hierarchical source changes: the royal authority was replaced by that of the republican nation after July 1790; there was no question of a choice between a system of power and a network organization.
Inside the system of power, the system of religious power is eliminated and prohibited to keep only a system of civil power led by the very young bourgeoisie and which will moreover find it very difficult to survive because the wars against the enemies of the republic will finally give power to military personnel and a brilliant military mathematician skilled in the use of artillery and skillfully calculated rapid maneuvers.
Victor Hugo, later, on the occasion of another revolution also wasted and lost, will put in Gavroche’s mouth, at the foot of the barricade, this famous song: Voltaire is to blame, Rousseau is to blame.
Unquestionably, these two writers, like those of the Enlightenment, have not succeeded in rediscovering the time of the cathedrals, the organization of the federated free cities in the network of the Order of the Temple, the examples of the cities of Greece and ancient Egypt, the example of the republic cities of northern Italy which, after the demise of the Order of the Temple in France, carried the torch of this way of organizing the life of the city in a rebirth of the time of the cathedrals.
However, if the archives and memories of the Knights of the Temple and of the Benedictine monks who used the knowledge saved from Greece, and especially from Egypt, Alexandria and Denderrah, were lost or were not yet found in 1789, this solution had been found intact as early as the 1720s by scholars on the other side of the Atlantic who had understood all the interest of the Confederation of Iroquois Nations and the Great Law that binds them.
The teaching of Iroquois chiefs passed on to the founding fathers of American independence.
The Iroquois chiefs taught how to establish the new confederation of the United States of America, which was to serve as a model and test for establishing in France and then in Europe a new network organization. It was not, the story tells us why, because of what mistakes. That is why we must now resume 1789 to correct also these harmful errors.
Voltaire snobe Benjamin Franklin present in Paris for ten years!
The French Enlightenment failed to influence the beginning of the 1789 Revolution. Salon discussions, though challenging the royal authority and dogmas of the Catholic Church, had little bearing on the education of the population. It is also likely that military interests in the war against England obscured the opportunities represented at that time by the development of New France in Canada and the birth of the United States through its new federal constitution. This is not a matter of remaking history. But we can still ask this troubling question: why is it that the federal constitution of the Iroquois nations, the great law that binds us, was not passed by Benjamin Franklin to Voltaire, Diderot and others?
Benjamin Franklin, the diplomat responsible for proposing the thirteen colonies as a federation, was primarily interested in the Indians, and more particularly, from 1744, in the Iroquois.
His friend, Cadwallader Colden, in 1727, published the first systematic study of Iroquois society: History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America. In this book, Colden asserts that in political and social organization, the Iroquois “surpassed the Romans.”
Benjamin Franklin was a printer, and in 1744 he published a treatise that the colonies of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland signed in Lancaster with the chiefs of the Six Nations confederation. And this advice from the Monondaga chief, Canasatego, to envoys from the three colonies does not fall on deaf ears:
“We are a powerful confederation and by observing methods similar to those developed by our wise ancestors, you will gain a lot of strength and power”.
The Declaration of Independence of the American Colonies
When in 1776 Thomas Jefferson, aided by John Adams and in the shadow of the great Benjamin Franklin, set about writing the Declaration of Independence, the Iroquois example guided his pen.
In 1787, Jefferson stated:
“I am convinced that Indian societies without governments enjoy a higher overall degree of happiness than those living under European regimes.”
Jefferson
So why wasn’t this political solution passed on to Voltaire and the Enlightenment thinkers?
Franklin, ambassador to Paris of the new confederation of the United States of America, sought the support of the royal troops to counter the British army. For France, it is also an opportunity for revenge after the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) which saw the loss of American colonies and especially of Canada (“a few acres of frozen land” said Voltaire fielly…).
After the first victories of the American insurgents, the English troops had retreated to Canada. Many of the Iroquois nations would follow the English to Canada because they knew that American settlers would develop an immigration that quickly condemned the Indian peoples on North American soil, and Canada had immense territories close to the Great Lakes without significant settlement where a refuge was possible
Voltaire meets Franklin who will be his master freemason
The transmission of the Iroquois solution has not been transmitted to French intellectuals, it is a fact and a missed opportunity. Franklin did meet Voltaire but late. Benjamin Franklin had already visited France between August and October 1767. In December 1776, he arrived in Paris as a representative of the brand new republic of the United States of America.
The meetings between Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire took place in salons and at the French Academy in 1778.
Their second meeting, at the Academy of Sciences, took place on April 29, 1778 shortly before Voltaire’s death on May 30, 1778, aged 84.
It was the New Sisters’ lodge that introduced Freemason Voltaire to the rank of apprentice on 7 April 1778, a little less than two months before the death of the old philosopher (30 May). Voltaire enters the Temple surrounded by the apron of Helvetius, at Franklin’s arm. The only concession to the great man: he is not blindfolded.
Benjamin Franklin was even the Venerable Master of the Lodge of the Nuns Sisters, between 1779 and 1781. Under his impulse, learned societies were created as the Opollonian Society, future Société Musée de Paris. Above all, he made the Nine Sisters’ Lodge an ardent source of propaganda for the American Revolution. It is the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that are widely developed. This is all the more easy as George Washington, but also La Fayette, Rochambeau, Noailles, Ségur, Beaumarchais, Philippe d’Orléans, Choderlos de Laclos and many others are all Freemasons.
But their exchanges, it seems, have contained empowering forces rather than serious discussions about creating a democratic political system in Europe.
In 1789, Benjamin Franklin returned to the United States shortly before his death.
Benjamin Franklin left Paris in 1788 to attend the first presidential election in the United States on 7 January 1789, which a month later appointed George Washington President of the Union. The American constitution came into force on March 4, 1789, and on April 30, the inauguration ceremony of George Washington, the first president of the United States, was held in New York.
The impossibility of a constitutional monarchy in France
In France, the coarse clumsiness of the king and queen precipitated the parliamentary movement in favor of a constitutional monarchy in the establishment of the republic from the summer of 1790 and this, in the most total unpreparedness.
There is a deep divide between popular anger at royal absolutism, aristocracy, and Enlightenment ideas. The chemist Lavoisier, also a farmer general at the service of the king, regretted this absence of an experienced and reasonable leader able to direct this change in the political regime. Benjamin Franklin has just returned to the United States. It is the absence of the measured, balanced man that is felt in this revolutionary period, as evidenced by this letter from Lavoisier to Franklin:
“We regret your absence from France at this moment,” writes the famous chemist. You would have been our guide and you would have shown us the limits that should not be exceeded.” This letter was written in February 1790, two months before the death of Benjamin Franklin.
The search for Reason and ignorance of the spiritual personal approach
This solution, this example, this alternative was in the organization of the confederation of the 5 Iroquois nations which the settlers of New France knew very well to trade and live with the Iroquois nations, but the authors of the Enlightenment sought progress through reason and the development of the rational source of knowledge which they wanted to impose in order to eliminate the despotic influence of the Roman papacy and the church ruled by the nobility, and this domination of the church was based on knowledge considered irrational.
The first source of knowledge, the spiritual and initiatory source was largely unknown or ignored due to the taboos imposed by the church. Rousseau had given a major role to nature with regard to culture, but the philosopher had been unable to discover behind nature, the first source of knowledge given to every human being, the initiatory source found by the spiritual journey towards the encounter with the mysteries of life. In nature he had only dreamt of solitary walks. He was absolutely not a poet for a penny.
Enlightenment thinkers had anticipated that fundamental knowledge would come from the East, but they had not sought to remove the protective layer of sand from the temples on the banks of the Nile, and the reading of hieroglyphs had not been discovered.
For a long time, the work done in Cluny with Jewish, Celtic, Greek, Arab and Muslim scholars had been condemned and lost, except for the use of Arab figures.
The 18th century philosophers, like their fellow scholars, were not visionaries, they had not used the direct path of the poetic process to discover in themselves and among all others, the first source of knowledge, the personal and initiatory source which would have attracted the wrath of the Church even if the time of the pyres was over.
Technological progress was the only major breakthrough
because he was politically and religiously neutral.
These new technologies were implemented by the new entrepreneurs, so much so as to leave them free to develop their industries and to lift the people out of material and health poverty, food.
We shall see that it will be the use of this technological progress that will definitely seal the republican pact because, in terms of ideas and values, no moral force will emerge from the revolution of 1789 to cement a truly democratic political regime associating the people with the march of the nation. And we’re still there culturally: the republic’s concrete values and those of the republican pact are always based on the belief that materialist progress enriches all citizens, an enrichment that will convince citizens to forget their political and religious quarrels.
Other possible causes for not taking into account the example of the Iroquois Confederation
So why couldn’t the example of the Iroquois confederation that gave birth to the United States of America and the example of the US confederation serve as a model for leading the revolution of 1789?
We have seen that Benjamin Franklin did not make any particular effort in this direction to form a group of French activists during his 10-year stay in Paris. After the success of the American confederation, the example of the Iroquois confederation certainly became rather secondary and perhaps embarrassing for the fathers of independence: it is never easy to admit that one has copied one’s solution on an example that has been present for several centuries, and especially that this solution comes from the peoples that one is eliminating.
The issue of a private central bank was explosive in the 1780s
Another historical explanation is familiar and far more dangerous. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson opposed a private central bank that would control the US currency, and in doing so they stuck to the teachings of the Iroquois chiefs, and they resisted the bankers’ intervention, especially the bankers who were developing the business of a world government dominated by the elite of the enlightened, Anglo-Saxon Puritans, who had been well known since the Mayflower landed in 1620.
Their destination was Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to establish their colony there. On leaving, the Puritans take the name of “pilgrims fathers” or “pilgrim fathers”. They were the first Anglo-Saxons to settle in North America. On their arrival on 21 November 1620, the “pilgrims fathers” founded the colony of Plymouth. They signed the Mayflower Compact, one of the founding documents that inspired the “Constitution of the United States”. However, they do not know that the land they take already belongs to the tribe of the Indians, the “Wampanoag”.
The history of the United States takes great care to retain this pact of Anglo-Saxon criminals expelled from England for their lethal role in the Second War of the Commons with Cromwell in particular, and it willingly forgets the true role of the Great Law which binds the Iroquois nations. It’s not for nothing.
After the death of Benjamin Franklin in 1790, Rothschild’s agents, the banker at the heart of the illuminati movement, promoted Alexander Hamilton to the post of finance minister. He created the First National Bank of the United States, the first American central bank. It was structured like the Bank of England and controlled by the Illuminati/Rothschild.
The Minister favored large debts to this bank, so that it could become the Federal Reserve Bank and now the US central bank. This period marked the realization of the power of the Freemasons on both sides of the Atlantic, which had nothing to do with the culture of the Templars and Benedictine monks of the time of the cathedrals.
The political conflict between Freemasons and other leaders opposed to Freemasonry
Freemasonry had been reclaimed by the networks of bankers who had gained their power since the destruction of the Order of the Temple, by financing kings and princes, and these bankers now dreamed of directly running a country, a new empire, that of the United States of America. Both these finance leaders and later the leaders of the large industrial enterprises had to pledge allegiance to the Mayflower Pact, i.e. to submit to the will of the Anglo-Saxon Puritans and to their dogma of the predestination of the elites to govern all the peoples on Earth.
The most sensible instrument for controlling the economy and, above all, the creation of money is obviously a private central bank. This issue, which was controversial if not a major political conflict on the east coast of the United States, was known to the leaders of London and Paris and it was no small matter… yesterday as today.
In 1789, Alexander Hamilton became the first Secretary of the Treasury Minister of Finance) of the United States of America. Hamilton was one of the many founding fathers who were Freemasons. He had close relations with the Rothschild family, which owned the Bank of England and was the leader of the European Freemason movement.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Ethan Allen, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Brown, and Roger Sherman were all Freemasons. Roger Livingstone helped Sherman and Franklin write the American declaration of independence. He gave George Washington his vows to take office when he was Grand Master of the Great Masonic Lodge of New York. Washington himself was the grand master of the Virginia Lodge.
The populist founders led by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, none of whom were Freemasons, wanted to cut ties with the British crown completely, but were subjugated by the Masonic faction led by Washington, Hamilton, and the Grand Master of Boston’s St Andrews Lodge, General Joseph Warren.
Here we are at the heart of the historical explanation:
Franklin and Jefferson vs. Hamilton and his private central bank
Franklin was a successful printer, but was taken over early by many other scientific, cultural, political and Freemasons activities. His direct relationship with the Iroquois confederation is first and foremost political and must serve his own interests; it will have little influence in his life, just a lesson he will not forget when he firmly opposes the establishment of a private central bank among the institutions of the Republic of the United States of America.
Jefferson participated directly in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and then he participated with less influence in the drafting of the Constitution. His determination to stand up to Hamilton and the private central bank will not falter.
“i think banking institutions are more dangerous to our freedoms than an enemy army.”
Jefferson
Rothschild Bankers Win US Political Conflict
But the populist founders he represented were democratically defeated by the Freemasons under the Rothschild family of bankers.
What did the wisdom of the Iroquois constitution weigh against the desire of the banking families to take power in the new world without the intermediary of kings and emperors? The weight of a feather of a dove, or even the weight of an eagle feather?
During the Civil War, the Rothschild Bank of London simply financed the states of the North, that of Paris, the states of the South.
Result: The Rothschilds were the only victors in the war and the South and North Americans were defeated and stripped forever of a power they have never regained since!
The Painful Question of Slavery in America
Another explanation for the separation between the Iroquois confederation (which still exists and has its place in the UN) and the new government of the United States of America is that, in order to publish their first constitution, Washington and the founders of Independence, educated by Iroquois chiefs, had to accept the right to slavery of blacks to satisfy the wishes of the majority and mainly of financiers who needed this free labor to exploit the newly conquered lands and develop the cotton industry.
The Constitution of the United States of America does use the confederal structure inherited from the great law that binds Iroquois nations, but this filiation ends there: As soon as the US Constitution is adopted, the reality of slavery must be integrated into the US electoral system: one of its provisions allows slave owners to calculate the number of votes from the equation: 1 black = 3/5 of a white. This is totally inappropriate and shocking for a European country.
The Iroquois confederation could not accept this view of human relations based on slavery, and most Iroquois nations decided to reject these English settlers in majority to join the present territories of Canada, or other English settlers rejected them afterwards, because they were obstacles to the development of the thirst for material wealth organized by the financiers who still work to conquer a despotic world government by criminal and warmongering means, whether in the United States or in Canada controlled by the English.
The failure of the Confederal solution in the USA as in France since 1789
Because the leaders of these countries have not been inspired by the principles of the Great Law that binds.
The Romans admired Greek and Egyptian culture, as well as Celtic culture. The English, Scottish, and Irish settlers who left poverty in Europe for a better life in America, apparently did not have this level of culture to admire and respect that of the Iroquois nations.
Lack of knowledge about the history of our countries
because of the leaders of the systems of power who use the ignorance of peoples to better subjugate them to their interests.
Yet the confederal solution existed and represented an example of a network organization capable of replacing the more or less despotic European monarchies. Books had been printed. Who didn’t want to share or didn’t understand?
This question illustrates our point: 1789 is not only an unfinished revolution that has resulted in the replacement of one social class by another in the organization of the system of power: the bourgeoisie replacing the aristocracy and the nobility, but 1789 is also an error for lack of knowledge, forgetfulness or inability to find the network organization of the time of the cathedrals destroyed in 1307, that is to say about five centuries earlier and which had survived in the confederation of the iroquois nations developed around 1350 from the teaching of a knight monk belonging to the temple colonies who came to take refuge on the american continent, in the north as in the center and in the south, we will return to this in our third part in the chapter on the monastic orders and the Templars.
The bankers bear primary responsibility for this policy failure
Those responsible for these failures were the bankers who took power over the kings and princes through the destruction of the Order of the Temple and the network organization of free cities and Temple commanderies, abbeys of the time of cathedrals. These bankers knew that they had to do everything to erase the memory of that period during which only the bank of the Templars at the service of the people had existed in application of the Christian social culture heir to the knowledge of the temples of the banks of the Nile.
The mistake made by Marx and Engels around 1860
The second reason for the lack of interest in the example of the Iroquois nations is also understandable. We know the mistake made by Marx and Engels around 1860 when they discovered the Iroquois example: In the face of the ignorance of the people, the progressive intellectual elites had to seize the opportunity to take power with its centralized structure inherited from the monarchy or the republican state to immediately implement revolutionary ideas and, in the case of Marx, communist ideas.
The apparatus of the state, the structure of power, was to be used as an immediate means to spread the new ideology in the system of power by eliminating the risks of civil conflict, because it was not a question of suppressing the systems of power but of using their structures to circumvent the major difficulty: the ignorance of peoples and the necessary work of education and training in the participatory management of society that would take several generations.
We know that the Benedictine orders took several generations to develop the network organization of the time of the cathedrals with the Knights of the Temple. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that it was recognized that structure, that the choice of structure, was not neutral but largely influenced the functioning of the system of power.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a century before, took up the question of the education of peoples well, even if his example is limited to the named Émile. But to educate an individual to participate in a social contract based on the participation of citizens in democracy by virtue of the sovereignty of the people, was at that time either incomprehensible because it was too far ahead of its time or a gross error because the author confused the system of power and citizen networks of life or rather saw no difference in it.
Marx’s mistake dates back to the 1860s, when he chose to retain the centralized power structure that the state allowed to impose communist doctrine on peoples more quickly. It discards or forgets the solution of participatory local direct democracy and common ownership to produce and distribute the wealth produced by the work of all. Therefore, the exclusive use of collective property by the Communist Party can only feed new tyrannies with their concourses of crimes against humanity.
To conclude on the mistakes made since 1789 in the government of France.
The revolution of 1789 did not take the country out of its main drama: it never closed the wound opened by Philip the Beautiful when the order of the Temple and the time of the cathedrals was destroyed.
Only the re-establishment of a new network organization based on the complementarity between the three forms of ownership is capable of once again opening a flourishing period for French, European and, of course, now global society. We showed this in Part 1 of this essay Our Networks of Life.
Without mastering the past, the revolutionaries of 1789 took power, but they were unable to found a republican culture with other values and standards of life than those borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Enlightenment.
Asserting the individual’s place in the face of royal absolutism was indispensable but insufficient. Yet the necessary knowledge existed.
Medieval culture and templiere standards of living had survived in North America through the Great Law that binds the Iroquois nations.
More distressing still, Benjamin Franklin, who had mastered this knowledge, lived in Paris for 10 years just before 1789, but neither Voltaire nor the authors of the Enlightenment, all enamored of individualism and rationalism, could find this culture of the Iroquois nations and thanks to it, find the medieval culture founded in the year 500 at Mount Cassin from the vestiges of Egyptian and Greek knowledge then later, Celts and Muslims with its contributions from Persia, the Middle East and Asia.
Let us not make this kind of mistake again and let us be able to take from our past what has founded the most flourishing civilizations even if this has been forbidden for centuries by the masters of the liberal economic power system.