The French Revolution was nothing if not bloody. Ideas about liberty descended quickly into violence, war and mass execution. Factions won and lost legislative majorities and access to power. Virtue and terror became two sides of the same coin, and the guillotine emerged as the ultimate public symbol of social justice.

Matters came to a head when leaders of the radical Jacobin Party, led by Maximilien Robespierre, sought to purge their less-radical opponents, the Girondins who believed in sparing the life of King Louis XVI. Historian Ruth Scurr picks up the conflict in her marvelous study, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2007). “Disadvantaged as they were, the Girondins nonetheless fought on. They turned on Marat, the most outspoken and provocative of all the Jacobins, whose newspaper (The Friend of the People) was now emblazoned with the motto ‘Let us tax the rich to subsidize the poor.'”

More than 200 years later, an American congresswoman arrived at the New York Met Gala wearing a provocative new dress. Painted across the back was the “big reveal” in blood-red: TAX THE RICH. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had leveraged the motto of the most radical newspaper of the French Revolution. She put it front and center for all to see.

Marat’s social revolution went off the rails and led to all manner of public horror, sham trials and public executions throughout the country. His personal revolution, however, ended when a young radical from an enemy faction wearing a pretty dress stabbed him to death in his bathtub. His newspaper was over, but the motto lived on.

“Tax the Rich” is not over in America today, not by a longshot, only now we are witness to its hourglass bloody backside.

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