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

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.