France is burning again. Over the weekend of October 17–19, 2026, nationwide protests over the cost of living, failing schools, and collapsing public services drew hundreds of thousands into the streets. What began as marches quickly turned into the worst rioting in years, drawing in countless Muslim migrants waving the Palestinian flag, with some of them engaging in the mayhem. Shops were looted in Paris and Marseille. Cars and buildings were set ablaze. In Limoges a 143-year-old city hall was gutted by arson, its roof and spire collapsing. More than 2,000 people were arrested. Hundreds of police officers were injured. Curfews went up in parts of Paris and other cities. President Macron’s government is scrambling, blaming the “ultra-left” (Marxists) and criminals while admitting police lost control in places. Unions are already calling for more strikes. This is not an isolated outbreak. It is the latest episode in a long pattern.
This is what the French Republic looks like when the pressure builds. It is the direct fruit of the principles that defined the Revolution of 1789 and still shape French republicanism.
Those principles were never the same as the ones that shaped the American Republic. The French Revolution broke with the past. It treated inherited institutions (the monarchy, the nobility, the Church) as obstacles to be destroyed. It declared the Rights of Man as an assertion of human will and abstract reason, not as something discovered in the nature of man under God. Sovereignty was located in the nation or the general will, with little room for any higher law that could bind that will. Intermediate bodies were stripped away so the individual stood more directly under the state. Religion was treated as an enemy or a tool to be remade. Notre Dame was turned into the Temple of Reason. Catholic priests were forced to swear loyalty to the civil constitution or face persecution. Many clergy and nuns were executed. The result was the Terror, repeated regime failures, and a recurring habit of absolute popular power that can override rights when the crowd or the assembly decides it must.
The American founding did something different. It did not invent its core principles out of thin air in 1776 or 1787. It inherited and adapted older ones that had been worked out in medieval Catholic thought and practice, then carried forward through English common law, Protestant scholasticism, and the colonial experience.
Natural rights in the Declaration of Independence (“endowed by their Creator,” grounded in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”) are not an Enlightenment novelty. Medieval canonists and scholastics, beginning with Gratian’s Decretum and systematized by St. Thomas Aquinas, taught that there is an objective moral order knowable by reason. Human law draws its force from natural law and is void when it contradicts it. Later scholastics such as St. Robert Bellarmine developed the idea that political authority comes from God but is mediated through the community (people), requires consent, and can be resisted when it becomes tyrannical. Jefferson owned Filmer’s Patriarcha, which attacks Bellarmine at length in favor of absolute monarchy; the parallels in Jefferson’s language are not accidental, clearly siding with Bellarmine. Representation, consent, and the rule of law also matured first in the medieval Church’s corporate structures and councils before they shaped secular parliaments and, eventually, American institutions. Aquinas’s preference for a mixed regime (elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and popular participation ordered to the common good) echoes in the Constitution’s design of a strong executive, a more deliberative Senate, and a popular House, even if the Founders arrived there mainly through classical and English sources. These were educated men. They could not have been ignorant of Aquinas and Bellarmine.
The American order was a conservative revolution. It sought to secure the traditional rights of English colonists against what they saw as novel overreach in Parliament, endorsed by a weak monarch who refused to defend them. It was not to remake society from abstract first principles. It limited government precisely because it retained the older Christian understanding that positive law is subordinate to a higher order and that human nature is fallible. Checks and balances, federalism, and the recognition that a moral and religious people are necessary for self-government all flow from that medieval Christian (Catholic) inheritance. There was no campaign of de-Christianization. Religion was treated as supportive of the virtue the republic requires. The deliberate outreach, by some Founding Fathers, to Catholics in America to secure alliance with the Catholic French Empire (before the French Revolution) is well documented in my previous essay The Long Divorce, Between Two Pines.
The difference shows up in results. The American constitutional framework has endured. The French experience produced the Terror, Napoleon, repeated constitutional resets, and a more centralized, unitary, and anticlerical tradition that still erupts in street violence when the social contract frays. When the general will or the abstract demand for equality meets reality (declining services, high costs, institutional failure) there is little inherited restraint left. Power concentrates, intermediaries are gone, and the street becomes the final arbiter.
America is not immune to the same pressures. We have our own secularizing forces that want to treat the French model as the true path of modernity — rights as pure assertion of will, the past as something to be overcome, religion as a private preference or an obstacle. That path does not lead to ordered liberty. It leads to the scenes we are watching in Paris, Marseille, and Limoges: looting, arson, curfews, and the demand for more of the same.
The American Republic was never a confessional Catholic state, and the Founders were not Catholics. But its durable principles of limited government, natural rights under a higher law, consent within bounds, and mixed rule oriented to the common good are continuous with the medieval Catholic inheritance that shaped the West. That is not nostalgia. It is historical fact. A more detailed account of this can be found in Timothy Gordon’s book Catholic Republic. If we want to keep the ordered liberty that has distinguished us from the French pattern, we have to stop pretending the two revolutions were essentially the same project. They were not. One retained the older Christian framework in a new republican form. The other tried to discard it. The streets of France keep showing what happens when that discard is carried through.
American Catholics and Evangelicals who still believe in a moral order under God have every reason to defend the American difference. I covered strategies for how this can be done in my book Pine Tree Politics. The alternative is not progress. It is the recurring riot.
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Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
