The Revolution That Never Ended
History is rarely written by liars.
But it is almost always written by winners. And winners, even when they tell the truth, tell it selectively. Over time, their version hardens into moral common sense. Certain events become untouchable. Certain judgments feel settled. One of those events is the French Revolution.
Ask almost anyone today and the reflex is automatic: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Progress. Emancipation. The birth of modern democracy. The Revolution is remembered not merely as a historical rupture, but as a moral awakening. Its excesses are acknowledged politely, framed as unfortunate side effects of an otherwise necessary transformation. The Terror becomes an accident. The old order was rotten, and it had to go.
Watching from Britain, Edmund Burke refused to share the enthusiasm. What makes him uncomfortable even now is not that he defended monarchy or aristocracy as such, but that he challenged something more dangerous: the belief that society can be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch using abstract principles, without paying a severe human price.
Burke did not deny that the ancien régime was unjust. He did not argue that corruption deserves protection simply because it is old. What he rejected was the idea that reason, severed from tradition, habit, and inherited social forms, could redesign a living society. Society, for Burke, was not a machine. It was an organism. And organisms do not survive radical dissection performed in the name of improvement.
What horrified him was not only the bloodshed, but the mentality behind it. The belief that history could be reset to zero. That customs, hierarchies, religious meaning, and inherited obligations were nothing more than arbitrary constraints imposed on otherwise free individuals. That once these were swept away, a rational and egalitarian order would naturally emerge.
Burke saw what followed.
When tradition is abolished wholesale, individuals are not liberated into reason. They are exposed to power. When long-standing institutions are dissolved, freedom does not appear by default. A vacuum appears instead. And vacuums are always filled. In France, it was filled first by revolutionary tribunals, then by mass terror, and finally by Napoleon. The Revolution devoured its children not because it betrayed its ideals, but because it applied them without restraint.
This raises an uncomfortable question: was the French Revolution truly the unambiguous triumph we are taught to celebrate? Or did it inaugurate a way of thinking that still shapes our blind spots today?
The Revolution did more than remove a monarchy. It shattered what earlier thinkers called the great chain of being, the idea that society is an interlinked order stretching across generations, roles, and obligations. In its place emerged the sovereign individual, abstracted from history, tradition, and place. Equal in theory. Unmoored in practice.
To be clear, this rupture was not meaningless destruction. Birth-based hierarchies were rigid, humiliating, and often cruel. Tradition did not only transmit wisdom; it also transmitted exclusion. Something real was gained: legal equality, civil rights, the possibility of a life not fully determined by origin. The error was not emancipation itself, but the belief that emancipation resolves power.
Equality before the law did not abolish inequality in practice. It made it less visible.
This forces a harsher question. Did the Revolution abolish inequality, or did it simply professionalize it?
One of the core grievances that fueled the Revolution was fiscal injustice. The clergy and aristocracy enjoyed extensive tax exemptions, while the burden of financing the state fell on everyone else. This inequality was not symbolic. It was material. And it was intolerable.
Now look around: Today we live, once again, in societies where powerful actors operate outside the ordinary tax framework. Large NGOs, foundations, and supranational institutions enjoy exemptions justified by moral purpose. At the other end, extreme concentrations of private wealth are shielded through legal complexity, mobility, and influence. Wealthy individuals, like aristocrats before them, often contribute far less proportionally than those beneath them.
In other words, we have not escaped privilege. We have refined it.
It no longer wears robes or titles. It wears compliance departments, moral narratives, legal sophistication, and global reach. And because it speaks the language of virtue and progress, it is harder to challenge than the old, openly hierarchical order ever was.
Here Burke’s warning cuts deepest. Inequality does not vanish because the system housing it is redesigned. Power migrates. It adapts. And when societies convince themselves that their institutions are morally superior by design, they become blind to the ways old hierarchies quietly reassert themselves.
Today, distrust is not directed at institutions because they are corrupt, but because they appear immaculate. Their mission statements are flawless. Their values are impeccable. Their language is beyond reproach. And because they look right, they are assumed to function justly.
But decay no longer announces itself openly. Institutions can be rhetorically virtuous while practically hollow. The revolutionary fantasy persists in a new form: not that everything must be torn down again, but that once the correct framework exists, injustice has been solved.
Burke would never have believed this. Reform, for him, was always necessary and never final. No institution, however well designed, was immune to corruption. No moral vocabulary, however elevated, guaranteed moral substance.
The French Revolution promised paradise through rupture. Our age promises fairness through structure. Both share the same mistake: the belief that history can be outsmarted.
Perhaps the real lesson of the French Revolution is not that tradition must always be preserved, but that power and inequality cannot be abolished by theory alone. No construct, however well designed, remains just if it is implemented and then left alone. Every system demands constant scrutiny, correction, and resistance to its own drift toward corruption.