Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, the date our written demand for independence from Britain based on “Nature’s God” was released to the world.
The French celebrate Bastille Day, a day when a thousand armed Parisians stormed the Bastille, savagely murdered a half dozen guards, defaced their corpses, stuck heads on pikes — all in order to seize arms and gunpowder for more such tumults. It would be as if this country had a national holiday to celebrate the L.A. riots.
Among the most famous quotes from the American Revolution is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Among the most famous slogans of the French Revolution is that of Jacobin Club “Fraternity or death,” recast by Nicolas-Sébastien de Chamfort, a satirist of the revolution, “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.”
Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, first rung to herald the opening of the new Continental Congress in the wake of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and rung again to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence.
The symbol of the French Revolution is the “national razor” — the guillotine.
Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, all died of natural causes in old age, with the exception of Button Gwinnett of Georgia, who was shot in a duel unrelated to the revolution.
Of all our founding fathers, only one other died of unnatural causes: Alexander Hamilton. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr because as a Christian, Hamilton deemed it a greater sin to kill another man than to be killed. Before the duel, in writing, Hamilton vowed not to shoot Burr.
President after president of the new American republic died peacefully at home for 75 years, right up until Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the French Revolution all died violently, guillotine by guillotine.
The fourth of July also marks the death of two of our greatest founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who died on the same day, exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
We made it for nearly another 200 years, before the Democrats decided to jettison freedom and make us French.
Ann Coulter is an author and political commentator.
