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The Calm Before the Storm
In 1793, a French revolutionary judge declared, “The Republic has no need of scientists.” At the time, he was expressing more than just revolutionary fervor he was naming a pattern that would repeat throughout history. These are the moments when society transitions from a long valuing of cold, hard logic to swinging hard and fast in the opposite direction.
In the same month, Olympe de Gouges, who had sensed the hypocrisy of a revolution that spoke of universal rights while excluding women, was silenced by the guillotine. The poet André Chénier, who had supported the revolution until he noticed its descent into chaos, met the same fate. Even Jacques-Louis David, the revolution’s celebrated artist, would eventually be imprisoned. His crime? He could no longer paint the party line with conviction, seeing too clearly what the revolution had become.
These pattern seers had something in common beyond their tragic ends. In their final writings, letters, and diaries, each described seeing the approaching terror long before it arrived. They sensed it in small changes in how people spoke to each other, in subtle shifts in crowd behavior, in the gradual transformation of revolutionary fervor into something darker. Their sensitivity, which when harnessed made them leaders in their fields, was now a liability.
