Viewpoints
Opinion

The Rise and Fall of a French Royalist Settlement in Upper Canada After the 1789 Revolution

The Rise and Fall of a French Royalist Settlement in Upper Canada After the 1789 Revolution
View of Yonge Street in Richmond Hill, Ont. In the late 1700s, a French Royalist enclave known as Puisaye Town was established in present-day Richmond Hill, but it didn’t last long. JossK/Shutterstock
|Updated:
0:00
Commentary
A great mistake people make about the French Revolution is that it had something to do with liberty. Seen in the proper perspective, its high-flown rhetoric presaged the era of genocide and mass warfare that culminated in the Bolshevik coup of 1917, Hitler’s subsequent rise to power, and Mao Zedong’s takeover of China in 1949, encompassing the century’s most terrible persecutions and wars.
C.P. Champion
C.P. Champion
Author
C.P. Champion, Ph.D., is the author of two books, was a fellow of the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen's University in 2021, and edits The Dorchester Review magazine, which he founded in 2011.