Herbert Butterfield on French Revolution

“I do not know who could deny that the French Revolution brought tragedy for the generation upon which it fell—tragedy for France and for Europe not unlike that which resulted from the Nazi Revolution of 1933.”

“After 1789 the very state of emergency—as well as the foreign war which resulted from the Revolution—withered the flower of the liberalism and diverted the course to one of "post-democratic tyranny". If the French Revolution produced anything original it was a state organized by the Jacobins for war in a way never dreamed of before in Christian times, a state demanding the full collaboration, the entire absorption, of its citizens; culminating in the Bonapartist Consulate, the dictatorship based on the plebiscite.”