I would genuinely love to hear more of an explanation from French people about why the French Revolution was considered a success. As best I understand it, the French Revolution of 1789 did succeed in removing the monarchy but devolved into le règne de la terreur where the leaders were guillotining each other and various political enemies for about ten years(?) before Napoleon became the new monarch. Perhaps it can be viewed as a stepping stone in the decades long process to modern France but the short term outcome of the French Revolution seems pretty objectively terrible to me.

And yet there have been 5 French Republics since then.

Wow. What in the world are they teaching kids in school these days?

Interestingly, while Denmark has very low wealth inequality, Norway's is only middling, and Sweden's is the highest in Europe, in the same range as the US, Brazil and Russia. The Scandinavian countries have very low _income_ inequality (post-transfers).

Income equality is probably more important than wealth equality in terms of quality of life, but wealth inequality isn't nothing.

(Also you have to be a bit careful with wealth inequality figures, as they can be distorted by local practices; for instance in some countries where defined benefit pensions are standard, such a pension, even though clearly valuable, may not be assessed as wealth, and in some countries it may be common to have a long-term/effectively life right to a fixed-cost rental, which again, is wealth-like, but probably not assessed as wealth.)

You mean the ones who are selling so much oil they put a lot of it in a sovereign wealth fund? Sure.

I think the real question is how to make it work without oil money coming in. Without the constant extra help from foreign countries that money buys. France has some, but not much. Certainly not enough to cover all state expenses and have left over.

They have A LOT of rich people.

The thing is people don't care about how many rich people there are out there, as long as they can get a good life out of their labor (good job, good house, etc) but since capitalism has optimized these out of the reach for most people nowadays, then they start to blame rich people for everything, with the definition of the word 'rich' here being very fluid, ending up to mean just about everyone who has more than they do, and not just your Bezos, Musk and Saudi kings, so any taxes on the "rich" ends up only on the hard working middle class again.

It's not about wealthy people alone. You need staff to clean retirees sh!t (literally) in a country where the median age is 42.3 and rising.

France overspent in the 2000s and 2010s due to populist politics, and now the chickens have come to roost. Something needs to give in France, otherwise it'll become an Italy 2.0.

> Do we think this is why French government added so many immigrants in recent times?

It's part of the official discourse.

Downvoters: You're proving my point by refusing to engage with logic.

Who do you propose to sell all that stuff to?

...for 10 years. After that, you're back in the hole that you were in before, but without anything to draw on. They're currently taking in the equivalent of $500 billion but spending $1.8 trillion, with a GDP of $3 trillion.

Understand that the non-wealthy wouldn't get anything new, it would just be a continuance of their current services and benefits. They've have 10 years to increase their GDP by 50% to get the tax revenue to get to a balanced budget. That's simply not happening without obscene inflation, with the corresponding increase in government spending on goods and services, keeping them out of whack.

What happens on year 11?