French Revolution

“TO the liberal idealists—men like Lafayette….and the orators of the Gironde—the Revolution meant the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment, liberty and toleration, the rights of man and the religion of humanity. They did not see that they were on the edge of a precipice and that the world they knew was about to be swallowed up in a tempest of change which would destroy both them and their ideals. “Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord! It is darkness and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, …”; they were a doomed generation, fated to perish at first by ones and twos, and then by scores and hundreds and thousands, on the scaffold, in the streets and on the battlefield.”

~Christopher Dawson: “The Gods of Revolution.”

Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789.