Bastille Day, Artificial Intelligence, and the New Reign of Terror
The guillotine has gone digital.
Once it fell in public squares to cheers and bloodlust; now it strikes silently, with a click, a post, or a line of code.
The mob no longer needs to gather. Its outrage is algorithmically amplified, its punishment outsourced to invisible moderators and unaccountable systems.
As the 14th of July reminds us of the Bastille's fall, we must ask ourselves a difficult question: are we witnessing a new revolution - not with pitchforks and torches, but hashtags and hard drives?
The People are singing again.
Only this time, their chorus echoes through firewalls and fibre-optic cables.
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
The 14th of July is celebrated each year in France as Bastille Day, commemorating the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 - an event that became the defining symbol of the French Revolution.
History is valuable not because it repeats itself exactly, but because it repeats its patterns.
Who, then, holds the blade today?
In 1789 it belonged to mobs, committees and revolutionaries who claimed to speak for "the people."
Today, the guillotine no longer rolls through cobbled streets. It exists in software, moderation systems, search algorithms and bureaucratic processes capable of erasing a reputation or silencing a voice with remarkable efficiency.
No executioner need raise a hand.
A post is flagged.
An account disappears.
A search result vanishes.
A payment processor closes an account.
Fear does the rest.
The machinery has changed.
Human nature has not.
But before we consider today's digital guillotine, let us return to the first one.
The Bastille was a medieval fortress and prison in Paris that symbolised the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchy. By the late eighteenth century it had become the visible symbol of the absolute authority of King Louis XVI.
On 14 July 1789, amid growing unrest and fears of a military crackdown, an angry crowd stormed the fortress. Ironically, only seven prisoners remained inside, but the number hardly mattered. The Bastille's fall marked the collapse of royal authority in the minds of ordinary Parisians. It was a symbolic victory that became the flashpoint of a revolution which would reshape not only France, but the modern world.
The French Revolution transformed France's political, social and economic structures. It swept away centuries of monarchy, elevated republican ideals and inspired democratic movements across Europe. Yet it also demonstrated how quickly revolutions proclaimed in the name of liberty can descend into repression.
Paris burned.
Crowds filled the streets.
More than 15,000 troops stood ready.
The people were hungry.
The Bastille fell.
Its defenders were murdered, and their severed heads carried through the streets on pikes.
When news reached King Louis XVI at Versailles, he reportedly exclaimed,
"This is revolt!"
His adviser famously replied,
"No, Sire. It is a revolution."
France's economic crisis had become unbearable. Costly wars - including support for the American Revolution - had emptied the treasury.
Debt soared. Taxes crushed the common people while privilege protected the wealthy. Society remained divided into three rigid estates: clergy, nobility and commoners. The Third Estate carried the financial burden while possessing little political influence.
King Louis XVI's indecision and inability to reform the system steadily destroyed confidence in the monarchy.
The French Revolution did not descend into terror overnight.
Confidence in traditional institutions had been eroding for decades. Enlightenment thinkers challenged monarchy, privilege and religious authority - often for understandable reasons - but revolutionary leaders transformed philosophical criticism into political absolutism.
Once compromise became betrayal and disagreement became treason, fear replaced reason.
Revolutionary propaganda magnified every grievance.
Neighbour turned against neighbour.
Class against class.
The institutions that had once held society together became objects of suspicion.
History shows that societies seldom collapse because everyone suddenly becomes evil. More often they collapse because distrust becomes normal and moderation becomes impossible.
In recent decades, influential voices within sections of the media, academia, politics and the broader cultural establishment have increasingly portrayed Western nations primarily through the lens of historical injustice. Colonialism, racism, inequality and past sins have become dominant themes in public discussion.
Confronting history honestly is essential.
Yet when a civilisation is taught to see only its failures and seldom its achievements, it risks losing confidence in the very institutions that made reform possible. A people encouraged only to despise their inheritance become easier to divide than a people encouraged to improve it.
The late historian Otto Scott observed in Robespierre - Inside the French Revolution that many of France's educated classes became ashamed of their own country, history and institutions. He argued that once this loss of confidence took hold, "a great loosening began; the country slowly came apart."
Scott also described a society experiencing profound moral and cultural upheaval, where traditional religious authority weakened, new ideologies flourished, and longstanding social structures rapidly unravelled.
Whether one agrees entirely with Scott or not, his warning deserves consideration. Civilisations are rarely destroyed solely by external enemies. More often they weaken from within when confidence in their own institutions collapses.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, one of the Revolution's principal architects, once declared:
"Most arts have produced miracles, while the art of government has produced nothing but monsters."
The irony is difficult to ignore.
Saint-Just became one of those monsters.
Alongside Maximilien Robespierre, he helped engineer the Reign of Terror, a violent campaign of repression that sent thousands to the guillotine in the name of virtue.
In a speech delivered in February 1794, Robespierre openly justified terror as a necessary instrument of justice:
"If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror..."
To Robespierre, terror was not the opposite of virtue.
It was virtue enforced.
History records what followed.
The lesson is not that every revolution ends in terror.
It is that every society should become cautious whenever disagreement is treated as moral corruption rather than honest disagreement.
Revolutions rarely begin by demanding violence.
They begin by demanding justice.
Equality.
Liberty.
Accountability.
Those aspirations are often sincere.
The danger arises when a movement becomes so convinced of its own righteousness that dissent is no longer merely mistaken - it becomes unforgivable.
Yesterday the punishment was imprisonment, exile or the guillotine.
Today it may be financial exclusion, professional cancellation, algorithmic suppression or digital erasure.
The instruments have changed.
Human nature has not.
The architects of terror always believe they wield justice - until the blade turns.
Robespierre and Saint-Just learned that lesson too late.
Every age convinces itself that extraordinary powers are justified because the enemy is uniquely dangerous.
Every age eventually discovers that extraordinary powers rarely remain confined to their original targets.
The guillotine has not disappeared.
It has evolved.
Steel has given way to silicon.
Public executions have become digital exclusions.
The executioner no longer wears a hood.
Sometimes it wears an algorithm.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the newest gatekeepers of public discourse. Increasingly, algorithms influence what is promoted, what is hidden and what is judged acceptable speech. These systems possess neither wisdom nor conscience; they simply apply rules written by human beings.
When those rules become opaque, excessively rigid or ideologically narrow, technology risks becoming an efficient instrument for suppressing legitimate disagreement without anyone appearing personally responsible.
The truly important question is not merely what artificial intelligence can do.
It is who decides the rules by which it operates.
Those rules are written by people with their own assumptions, values, blind spots and ambitions.
Whether they work for governments, corporations or technology companies, the concentration of such power deserves careful scrutiny in every free society.
Bastille Day reminds us that liberty can be lost in more than one way.
Tyranny is not always imposed by kings.
Sometimes it arrives wrapped in the language of progress.
Sometimes in the name of safety.
Sometimes in the name of virtue.
History's greatest warning is that every generation believes its own methods of silencing are justified.
The guillotine did not disappear.
It simply went digital.
And history suggests that whenever the power to silence becomes easier than the duty to persuade, freedom has already begun to retreat.
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