THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE COLLAPSE INTO POLITICAL VIOLENCE. CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?

Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution's lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into a violence and terror? [] Tackett traces the inexorable emergence of a culture of violence among the Revolution's political elite amid the turbulence of popular uprising, pervasive subversion, and foreign invasion. Violence was neither a preplanned strategy nor an ideological imperative but rather the consequence of multiple factors of the Revolutionary process itself, including an initial breakdown of authority, the impact of the popular class, and a cycle of rumors, denunciations, and panic fed by fear--fear of counterrevolutionary conspiracies, fear of anarchy, fear of oneself becoming the target of vengeance. To comprehend the coming of the Terror, we must understand the contagion of fear that left the revolutionaries themselves terrorized." QUERY: Is not America, post 2016 presidential election and regardless of one's political side, in the early stages of fear, political fear, fear rooted in anger, frustration, economic insecurity, diminished US influence on the global stage, and inept and mediocre political leadership. Can the violence be far off? Can a citizenry living in their bubbles, barely engaged with those holding different political views, and viewing the other as a (existential?) threat, avoid the violence? One can one hope.).