h this, teachers that were paid by the state began to teach a uniform language. Curriculum was controlled totally by the central government. Summing up this program, Saint just said, "Children belong to the State," and advocated taking boys from their families at the age of five. So much of modern statism, with all of its horror and disregard for individualism, began with the French Revolution. The "purge," the "commune," the color red as a symbol of statism, even the political terms Left, Right, and Center came to us from this period. The only thing that ended the carnage, inside France, at least, was "a man on horseback," Napoleon Bonaparte. The French Revolution had brought forth first anarchy, then statism, and finally, dictatorship. Had it not been for the unyielding spirit of the average Frenchman and France's position as the largest country in Europe, France might never have recovered. Now contrast all of this with the American Revolution, more correctly called the War for Independence. The American Revolution was different because, as Irving Kristol has pointed out, it was "a mild and relatively bloodless revolution. A war was fought to be sure, and soldiers died in that war. But . . . there was none of the butchery which we have come to accept as a natural concomitant of revolutionary warfare. . . . There was no 'revolutionary justice'; there was no reign of terror; there were no bloodthirsty proclamations by the Continental Congress. The American Revolution was essentially a "conservative" movement, fought to conserve the freedoms America had painstakingly developed since the 1620s during the period of British "salutary neglect", in reality, a period of laissez faire government as far as the colonies were concerned. A sense of restraint pervades this whole period. In the Boston Tea Party, no one was hurt and no property was damaged except for the tea. One Patriot even returned the next day to replace a lock on a s...
