By Prof. Silverio Allocca (DIPLOMATICINFO.COM GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST)
History, this unknown, appears more and more, to those who approach and dedicate themselves to its study with passion and constancy, a collection of events whose genetics, development, articulation and final balance sheet present assonances all the more evident as they are usually not dutifully examined in order to avoid retracing the same paths studded with the same dreams and errors animated by the constant stubborn and absurd desire to reach where that path will never lead.
In the end, it comes to say that, rather than a teacher of life, history, badly studied, worse read and even less understood, is that something that reserves for us the sad privilege of having to cyclically relive the same situations involving the same questions and problems of the past, all indiscriminately faced by making the same mistakes each time due to the lack of understanding of what happened previously: more like a tragic tribute paid to human stupidity.
Specifically, the present historical moment, characterized as it is by a whole series of events that are highlighting, more and more each day, both the consequences of the great unresolved criticalities of the bipolar-type World Order (in vogue until the collapse of the Berlin Wall) and the shortcomings of the unipolar one, which followed it up to the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian (actually Russian-U.S.) conflict, is no exception although it is tinged with the colors of a multipolarism whose contours are as difficult to define as they are stroked with renewed, unfortunately only instinctive, confidence.
In order to better understand the meaning of what has just been expressed, it is worth considering everything that has characterized, in various ways, the events that have been the backdrop to the French Revolution: strange, but -as we shall see- true the most striking result of this approach is the emergence of the close link between current events today and the French Revolution: a link that properly dissected becomes a real key to interpreting current events suitable for making us predict the future that awaits us.
I have dealt with this issue with an in-depth study entitled “What do Kissinger, the French Revolution and the war in Ukraine have in common?” recently published by ofcs.report translated into no less than 12 languages, an in-depth study that I am honored to be able to share here on DiplomaticInfo thanks to the availability of the very kind and highly esteemed H E Dr. Elvis Enyioko whom I thank for his hospitality.
The French Revolution was not a popular revolution (no revolution ever was even though all of them have always been passed off as such) but a bourgeois one, and as such it saw the involvement of the people only as a useful mass of maneuver to unhinge and re-found the new state on the same basis as the Ancien Regime, with the only difference of seeing the big business and mercantile bourgeoisie enter the halls of power,
The big bourgeoisie simply configured itself as a Political Dwarf while being an Economic Giant. The right to government was at the time something that was understood as deriving from the will of God and, as such, certified by the clergy.
We were in the presence of a perfect self-referential duopoly in which the religious
power legitimized that of the nobility and the noble power protected and safeguarded the clerical one so that anyone who tried to oppose one or the other would be delegitimized by excommunication and by the administration of civil
penalties that could go as far as life imprisonment and to death.
In such a context, the bourgeoisie could do nothing to change the state of things except develop theories aimed at giving a different reading of society that privileged the use of reason as the primary source of the right to government.
The opportune moment to take action came with the big one economic crisis that afflicted France at the end of the eighteenth century as that was the moment in which material misery, the real hunger for bread and justice that afflicted the entire country made the people available for action.
As always, everything starts from, as we would say today, a real, broad and widespread social unease that is just waiting to be adequately managed to move the squares to action: recent examples of this kind can be found in the so-called Arab Spring, but also in revolts of the Yellow Vests and in the more recent one that has inflamed the squares of many French cities. The modus operandi that leads to move the unaware masses we find infact codified – and made usable to anyone who wants to understand what I’m talking a bout – in the text of the Funeral Eulogy of Julius Caesar pronounced by Mark Antony as it was admirably proposed to us by William Shakespeare in his extraordinary and immortal “Giulio Cesare”: a wonderful example of a combination of rhetoric, ambition and thirst for power.
