Thoughts on the 250th Anniversary of America: Why the French Revolution’s Goddess of Liberty Needed a Guillotine (And America’s God Didn’t)

Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, identified a telling difference between sound political order and revolutionary excess. Radicals, he observed, pledge their primary loyalty to grand abstractions (liberty, equality, fraternity, the “rights of man”) treated as self-evident metaphysical principles to be imposed regardless of circumstance, history, or human frailty. Conservatives (or prudent reformers), by contrast, maintain loyalty to concrete persons, inherited institutions, local communities (“the little platoon”), and the accumulated wisdom of tradition.

The American Founding and the French Revolution offer a striking historical test of Burke’s diagnosis made clear when one considers the classical symbols each revolution employed to convey intent. America, for example, drew deeply on the Roman poet Vergil’s vision of pious founding and ordered renewal under divine providence, rootng these ideals firmly in the Christian faith and ethos. France chased abstract roman and greek humanistic ideals with revolutionary fervor and often paid the price in blood and instability.

The Vergilian Character of the American Founding

The men who crafted the Great Seal of the United States were classically educated and consciously Vergilian. Charles Thomson, the Latin scholar who finalized the design in 1782, adapted three of its central mottoes directly from Virgil:

• Annuit Coeptis (“He has favored our undertakings”) echoes Aeneid 9.625, where Ascanius prays, “Jupiter almighty, favor my bold undertakings.” It also appears in the Georgics. Thomson changed the imperative to the indicative, transforming a prayer into a statement of providential favor.

• Novus Ordo Seclorum (“A new order of the ages”) comes from Eclogue 4.5: “a great order of the ages is born anew.” This “Messianic Eclogue,” long read as anticipating a golden age, supplied the hopeful note beneath the unfinished pyramid.

• E Pluribus Unum (“Out of many, one”) draws from the Moretum, where ingredients are pounded into a single unified mixture…“the color is one out of many.”

The eagle clutching an olive branch (peace) and arrows (defense) likewise recalls Aeneid 8, where Aeneas arrives at the future site of Rome holding an olive branch as a sign of peaceful alliance for a new settlement.

These are not abstract slogans. They are concrete adaptations of a founding epic. The Aeneid tells of a pious hero who honors his ancestors, and founds a new city under divine destiny without erasing the past wholesale. The American designers saw parallels: a people preserving English liberties and Christian inheritance while establishing a new constitutional order under the True God who is the Creator who endows rights. The result was federalism (loyalty to actual states and localities), common-law continuity, and a republic that reformed rather than razed its foundations.

Burke himself largely supported the American cause precisely because it appealed to inherited rights and concrete grievances rather than metaphysical blueprints. The Revolution conserved and extended an existing tradition of ordered liberty.

The Radical Abstraction of the French Revolution

The French Revolution, by contrast, elevated abstractions to the status of idols. Its most famous slogan: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ”names three pure concepts detached from any particular people, history, God, or inherited duty. Marianne, the allegorical figure of the Republic (see painting above), often appears as an abstract personification of Liberty herself, frequently armed with a pike and wearing the Phrygian cap (originally the mark of a freed Roman slave). The revolutionaries even attempted to replace the Christian calendar with a new “Year I” and substitute a Cult of Reason or Supreme Being for the historic Christian faith.

Burke saw this as the fatal error. The French radicals, he wrote, refused to consider “circumstances” that give every political principle its real color and effect. They began with “first principles” stripped of relation to actual human beings and to God himself and tried to reconstruct society from a theoretical and thoroughly humanistic blueprint.

The result was the Terror, in which real French men and women were sacrificed to the demands of abstract equality and virtue. Burke warned that loyalty to such abstractions divorced of the objective reality of God tends to treat concrete persons as expendable material for ideological construction rather than image bearers of God.

Where the American symbols pointed to divine favor on concrete undertakings and unity under divine law forged from existing states, the French symbols pointed to an abstract Liberty that could justify the guillotine when actual people failed to conform.

Burke’s Distinction in Practice

Burke’s “little platoon” (the small, concrete circles of family, neighborhood, church, and local association) is the natural seedbed of genuine public affection. Loyalty here is personal and particular. Abstractions such as “humanity” or “equality” in the abstract can easily become instruments for overriding those small loyalties in the name of a higher, purer ideal enforced by whoever is the most radical and violent.

The American Founding, for all its flaws and compromises, operated more within this Burkean register. It appealed to the Creator God who endows rights to actual persons, to preserved state and local institutions, and to classical/biblical models of ordered founding rather than tabula rasa rationalism. The French experiment, driven by Enlightenment metaphysics and Rousseauian notions of the general will, repeatedly subordinated real persons and historic institutions to the demands of the abstractions.

History bears out the difference in outcomes.

The American order, though tested, endured and expanded with remarkable stability. The French Revolution cycled through terror, directory, consulate, empire, restoration, and further revolutions within a single lifetime.

Why This Matters Now

We live in an age saturated with new abstractions on the woke left such as “equity,” “inclusion,” “sustainability,” “global community” and on the woke right terms like “heritage,” “integralism,” “natural order,” “hierarchy” twhich are often promoted with the same revolutionary impatience that Burke diagnosed. The temptation is perennial: to love the idea more than the neighbor, the program more than the person, the future utopia more than the inheritance we have received.

A Christian, Vergilian, and Burkean alternative begins with gratitude for what has been handed down: Scripture, the church, the family, the local community, the constitutional inheritance and seeks renewal rather than demolition. It plants concrete institutions (classical Christian schools, faithful congregations, strong households, responsible local governance) rather than chasing disembodied ideals.

It remembers that Aeneas carried his father on his shoulders and held the hand of his small son all under divine guidance; he did not start from nothing.

The American Founding, read through the liberty given to man by the Christ of the Bible, offers a model of ordered liberty rooted in persons and providence. The French Revolution stands as a cautionary tale of what happens when loyalty shifts decisively to abstractions. The difference is not merely historical. It remains a live choice for anyone who would build or renew a culture worth handing on.

Which revolution will you participate in today?