Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski take up the most neuralgic subject in G.K. Chesterton scholarship: his defense of the French Revolution. Working through a 1921 Illustrated London News column, a 1905 Daily News essay setting the French and Russian revolutions side by side, and a 1918 New Witness piece that turns without warning to Prussianism, they trace his distinction between the ideals of a revolution and its working out, and his insistence that what a revolution exists to restore is the rights of man and not the wrongs of man. 

In This Episode:

  • Why G.K. Chesterton distinguished the motivations behind the French Revolution from its working out under Robespierre and the Terror
  • The negative equality G.K. Chesterton faulted the revolutionaries for—abolishing things for everybody instead of extending them to everybody
  • Why reading G.K. Chesterton on this subject without his British and monarchical audience in view produces anachronism, and what he held against Edmund Burke
  • G.K. Chesterton on positive and negative liberalism, and his warning that the modern revolutionist is free to hate anything, liberty itself included
  • The white post from Orthodoxy, radicalism as a return to the roots, and G.K. Chesterton's claim that revolution is the divine part of man

Resources Mentioned:

Chapters:

  • 00:00: Introduction
  • 00:30: Welcome—Revolutions, Independence Day, and Bastille Day
  • 03:55: "The Rightness of the French Revolution" (1921)
  • 05:26: Negative Equality and the Rationalist Epoch
  • 07:40: G.K. Chesterton's Audience and the Danger of Anachronism
  • 10:01: Politically Homeless—Belloc, the Vendée, and Edmund Burke
  • 13:12: Knowing What You Are Talking About
  • 17:11: "Two Revolutions" (1905) and the Songs of the Revolution
  • 23:46: The White Post and the Job of the Conservative
  • 26:27: "The Two Feasts of Freedom" (1918) and the Prussian Paralysis
  • 28:00: Revolution as the Divine Part of Man
  • 35:38: Watt Tyler and Painting the Fence Post

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