For Albert Camus, the French Revolution initiated thenmodern age, killing God in the person of His representativenon earth, the monarch. After which “Utopia replacesnGod by the future,” as Camus nicely phrases it in L’HommenRevoke. God’s anointed could no longer justify arbitrarynaction in this world by divine transcendence, and man (readn”the people” today) became deified, with what results wenknow. The firing squad replaces the altar, even in Iran; andnwe no longer need a figure from the shadows like thenAyatollah to remind us that God has become the people.nAt this point in the amputation of noumenal values thenrebel turns into the terrorist, and abandons existence; asnCamus puts it, “To be nothing — that is the cry of the mindnexhausted by its own rebellion.” Having watched twonattempts at revolution in ex-British colonies (Malaya andnGrenada), both abortive, I realize Camus is right; there isnalways a Robespierre waiting to be born. But surely he isnwrong in completely ignoring the British revolution ofn1642-1649, perhaps because he knew little about it. In thisncase, not only was the king by divine right beheaded, but hisnprincipal cleric. Archbishop Laud, went under the axe fournyears before him. Since then no prelate has held politicalnofiRce in England, though that gaitered buffoon (and Laud’snsuccessor), the Red Dean of Canterbury, made an ineffectualntry.nGeoffrey Wagner’s book Red Calypso, on Cubannadventurism in the Caribbean and the Grenadiannrevolution, was reviewed in the April issue.n26/CHRONlCLESnThe Caribbeannby GeofFrey WagnernnnPerhaps also the fact that the monarchy was solidlynrestored in England upset Camus’ theory; after all, thenBourbon restoration of 1816 in France soon came to an endnwith Louis-Philippe accepting the Lieutenant-Generalshipnof the kingdom in 1830. “Kings were put to death longnbefore January 21, 1793,” Camus concedes, but he makesnno mention of Charles I, and brushes aside regicides likenRavaillac and Damiens as seeking reform rather thannrevolution. “They wanted another king and that was all. Itnnever occurred to them that the throne could remain emptynforever.” It did to John Milton. Camus’ lacuna or blind spotnas regards England is made good in a copious compilation ofncontemporary sources. The Good Old Cause, edited by twonOxford Marxist dons, Christopher Hill and Edmund Dell.n(That book was reviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper under thenheading “Up Hill and Down Dell.”)nIn 1979 I watched a handful of West Indians, mostlyntrained in London and assisted by Cubans, topple andefenseless parliamentary government in Grenada, then asnnow an independent Windward Island in the Caribbean.nThey were led by a handsome rabble-rouser called MauricenBishop who was to end up playing a mixture of Kerenskynand Trotsky (not to mention Barnum) to his assistantnBernard Coard’s Lenin in an almost pedantic impersonationnof the Russian revolution.nBishop’s “coop de tat” began ostensibly as a reform, butnsoon lost itself in the mire of a Marxism that could meannanything since it meant nothing — to the average canecutternor nutmeg-grower on the island. In fact, since then