In pursuit of this ideology, all monarchies were by definition treated as enemies; because they would not give up power without resisting, the Revolution, to prevail, had to turn itself into a crusading international movement to achieve world peace by imposing its principles. In order to propel the new dispensation across Europe, France’s entire adult male population was made subject to conscription. The Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries
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