Against Ideological Absurdity And Tyranny

Counter-Revolution from the Vendée to Trump.

Lars Møller | September 29, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Episode from the War in the Vendée (Constantin Meunier, unknown date)

The concept of “counter-revolution” has always carried an ambiguous charge. It denotes, at its core, organized resistance to the acceleration of utopian ideology inasmuch as this menace begins to devour the concrete order of ordinary life. Unlike nostalgia for a golden age, counter-revolution is the recognition that certain political experiments, once they pass a threshold of abstract purity, become engines of tyranny.

The French 1790s offer the paradigmatic case. The Federalist revolts of 1793 and the far more ferocious War in the Vendée reveal two distinct modes of resistance to Jacobin radicalism. One was republican and decentralizing; the other was Catholic, royalist, and rural. Both were crushed. Their suppression paved the way for the height of the Terror.

In our own time, Victor Davis Hanson has applied the same conceptual vocabulary to Donald J. Trump’s political movement, presenting it as a contemporary counter-revolution against a progressive administrative and cultural regime that has grown indifferent to the interests and beliefs of large parts of the American populace. The comparison is illuminating precisely because it forces us to confront the recurring pattern: ideological absurdity, if institutionalized, invites its own negation, yet the cost of that negation is almost invariably high, and the outcome rarely clean.

The Federalist revolts of 1793 began as a provincial reaction to the Jacobin seizure of the National Convention. Moderate republicans, many of them aligned with the Girondins, watched the radical Montagnards in Paris purge their opponents, intensify the use of political violence, and centralize power under the banner of revolutionary virtue.

The immediate trigger was the Parisian coup of 31 May–2 June 1793 that expelled the Girondin deputies. Cities such as Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Caen, and Toulon rose in protest. Their stated aim was not the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy or the Ancien Régime. They sought to preserve the First French Republic by resisting what they regarded as the illegitimate domination of the capital over the departments. The rebels insisted on the democratic integrity of the national assembly and on a more decentralized administration. Their enemies branded them “fédérés,” a term of abuse that suggested secessionist designs. In reality, the latter were republicans who refused to accept that the Revolution’s legitimacy resided solely in the Parisian sections........

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