A revolution that gets rid of murderous aristocrats and supports slave revolutions is apparently less "creepy" than a "revolution" that was based on prolonging slavery and slaughtering millions of Indigenous people.

“Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.”

Despite the fact that the American and French Revolutions overlapped, and despite the fact that historians have attempted to draw parallels (particularly since Thomas Paine visited France at the height of its revolution), there is a significant theoretical distance between these two events. The way this distance is charted by historians and popular culture is often quite telling in that it tends to reveal one's political commitments.Just as a European historian's identity as a progressive or a reactionary is revealed in how they talk about the French Revolution (those who deride the Terrors and speak of it as "madness" are, like Burke, consummate reactionaries), so too does the way in which one privileges one revolution over another. That is, there is a normative liberal discourse in which the French Revolution is derided and the American Revolution: the latter is treated, ahistorically, as some great moment of liberation; the former, due to the Terrors, is dismissed as a violent aberration. An entire establishment narrative is built upon this comparative evaluation that finds its expression in novels, comics, popular histories, "common sense" understandings of reality, and even videogames.Take, for example, the way in which the comparison of these revolutions is treated in Neil Gaiman's seminalcomics where, in the issue entitled "Thermidor", there is a depiction of the French Revolution that presents Robespierre as a vicious autocrat and Thomas Paine, jailed by the Jacobins, as a progressive voice of reason who claims the French have "perverted the spirit of revolution." Or Kate Beaton's popular webcomic,, where an American revolutionary tells a French revolutionary t hat the French revolution is "super creepy." Or the popular videogame series,, that places the forces of historical progress on the side of the American Revolution but, in another game in the series, these same forces of historical progress against the French Revolution.Now I've argued elsewhere , way back, that the French Revolution was progressive insofar as it was a world historical revolution, and all attempts to dismiss it as nothing more than a violent orgy was out of step with what the most progressive elements of Europe would have thought at the time, or what later revolutionaries understood when they reflected on this event. Even Victor Hugo's, most recently repopularized as a film, celebrated the French Revolution and defended the Terrors in its opening passages––something that failed to make it into the film. Most committed progressives (that is, not the liberals who think they are progressive without much reflection) understand the significance of the French Revolution and its Terrors as well, as Sophie Wahnich demonstrated in 2012 with her book. But for liberals, and anyone whose political commitment is illiberal in a reactionary sense, the French Revolution is a horrendous event whereas the American Revolution is the height of liberty and emancipation.Let's state some facts that anyone who is even marginally progressive past the liberal point of common sense normativity must recognize: i) the American "Revolution", though it began first, was not a world historical event but a dismal war of colonial secession––it provided no important historical truths, theoretical revelations, and did nothing really "new" aside from permit a novel situation in which a settler society delinked from its motherland so as to remain in the historical past; ii) the French Revolution was indeed a world historical revolution insofar as it produced a truth process that spilled beyond its initial boundaries, and the Terrors were part of this truth process; iii) anyone who privileges the American Revolution over the French Revolution is engaged, intentionally or unintentionally, in supporting colonial-capitalist ideology.First of all the American War of Independence was essentially a counter-revolution. Indeed, as Gerald Horne points out in, this event was driven by the US slaveocracy's fear of slave uprisings and the fact that the British Empire was abolishing slavery. Since a major pillar of the US economy at the time was it reliance on slave labour, that whole "taxation without representation" thing was overdetermined by the desire of the US ruling class to keep the right to oppress its enslaved African population. Hence, it was driven by a reactionary impulse to remain in the past, to resist even bourgeoisification when bourgeoisification was slightly progressive compared to a slave-based economy, and create a democracy of slave-owning oligarchs. It was not at all a bourgeois revolution, as the French Revolution was, since its only resistance to feudalism was that the British Empire was taxing its ruling class, threatening its slave economy, and limiting its ability to push westward and annihilate those Indigenous nations whose boundaries were recognized by Britain. As Samir Amin has argued at multiple points, the American "Revolution" was simply an event where a ruling class wanted to the write to colonize and exploit for itself. The values it produced were values of secession and home rule, a settler-colonialism that wanted to remain colonial but without a distant motherland. It produced nothing historically interesting, particularly since it was attempting to sustain slavery and colonialism in opposition to the changing Empire it was seceding from. A racist and colonial revolution is indeed a counter-revolution; to celebrate July 4th means the celebration of these values and nothing more, regardless of the bullshit myths that have been connected to it after the fact.The French Revolution, however, terrified the establishment regime throughout Europe. This is partly because, unlike the American "Revolution", it attempted to annihilate its ruling class and secure a hegemony that would change the class contradiction of the mode of production––hell, it did more politically for even the development of capitalism than the US revolution could do, and the US ruling class would eventually have to take, though in a more puritan/conservative sense, note of this transformation in its own understanding of bourgeois rule. But the French Revolution was world historical not only because it attempted to liquidate the ruling aristocratic class and, in doing so, unleashed the power of the popular classes so that they temporarily pushed beyond the boundaries established by the French bourgeoisie, but because of how it was influenced by slave revolutions. We need to understand that the French Revolution was not simply limited to Europe but that a significant aspect of its status as a world revolution was because the first ever slave revolution (which was indeed world historical) in Haiti forced it to radicalize. InCLR James conceptualizes the Slave Revolution under Toussaint Louverture as entering into the French Revolution and being a significant part of its history: the radical wing of the Jacobins were forced to recognize that the values they proclaimed applied to the slaves in revolt, the French Revolution recognized abolition, the popular masses in Paris came out in support of the revolting slaves in the colony of Saint-Domingue. Apparently this world historical endorsement of slave revolution, if we are to believe the pop cultural narrative, "perverted the spirit of revolution" and was "super creepy." The fact that American "Revolution", that was driven by the impulse toslavery, was seen as more progressive because it didn't possess the spectacle of the Terrors is quite ludicrous. Only the violence visited on the ruling class is recognized; the everyday terror of a slave state is not perverse or creepy at all!Hence, anyone who celebrates the American Counter-Revolution at the expense of the French Revolution, or just celebrates the former by itself, and uses the term "revolution" to talk about backwards colonial war of secession is celebrating conservative values. There is nothing useful to be gained in the values that were trumpeted in the American Revolution because these values paled in comparison to even the bourgeois values of the French Revolution and were the values of a slave-owning class. America's founding fathers would have been on friendly terms with today's white supremacists, and it is something of a joke that US "progressives" complain when US conservatives invoke the founding fathers as if this invocation is being done in bad faith. It's not: the progressive attempt to claim these values is what is in actual bad faith. Compared to this event, the French Revolution looms large: its Terrors of a class that deserved the guillotine (as Victor Hugo and even the American Mark Twain argued) is nothing compared to the Terrors post-"revolutionary" America unleashed upon its enslaved population and the Indigenous nations as it pushed westward––ruling class, historically backwards Terrors that are not "creepy" insofar as they didn't bother the ruling classes of America's former motherland.The French Revolution, limited by its time and its class dimensions, still mobilized a sentiment that is entirely modern, entirely anti-systemic. As Jean-Paul Marat (an intellectual representative of the popular masses whose memory was defiled by David's celebration of his assassination––and we should not forget that David was a Thermidorian, a Napoleonic propagandist) wrote, proving that the French Revolution unleashed sentiments that reach into the contemporary era: