St. Francis de Sales
Some sects arising from Protestantism transposed their religious tendencies directly to the political field, thus preparing the way for the republican spirit. In the seventeenth century, Saint Francis de Sales warned the Duke of Savoy against these republican tendencies.¹ Other sects went even further, adopting principles that, if not communist in the full sense of the word today, were at least precommunist.
François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797)
Out of the French Revolution came the communist movement of Babeuf. Later, the nineteenth-century schools of utopian communism and the so-called scientific communism of Marx burst forth from the increasingly ardent spirit of the Revolution.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
And what could be more logical? The normal fruit of deism is atheism. Sensuality, revolting against the fragile obstacles of divorce, tends of itself toward free love. Pride, enemy of all superiority, finally had to attack the last inequality, that of wealth.
Drunk with dreams of a one-world republic, of the suppression of all ecclesiastical or civil authority, of the abolition of any Church, and of the abolition of the State itself after a transitional dictatorship of the workers, the revolutionary process now brings us the twentieth-century neobarbarian, its most recent and extreme product.
¹See Sainte-Beuve, Etudes de lundis – XVIIème siècle – Saint François de Sales (Paris: Librairie Garnier, 1928), p. 364.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, PA: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Chapter III, section D, pp. 17-18.
