When has that ever helped?

The French Revolution is generally regarded as a good move. It did get rid of a lot of rich people.

ThrowawayR2 a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rsynnott 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I mean, clearly it wasn't an _ideal_ outcome, and at least in theory it could have skipped the Reign of Terror and Napoleon. But also, clearly, after those (and, really, even during Napoleon) it left the average French person in a far, far better place than they would have been under the near-feudalism of the old system.

Very few countries get out from under totalitarianism without significant bloodshed. The US had its revolution and civil war. The UK had a bunch of civil wars. Germany had _both World War 1 and World War 2_ (it didn't take the first time). You could call the Reign of Terror actually comparatively mild; it only killed about 25,000 people, so far fewer than the comparables.

I do wonder if the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is the big glaring _exception to the rule_, revolution-wise, and also the most recent large-scale example, has misled the younger generations on this.

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vdupras a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I stated this as a matter of course (as in, we'd see broad support for absolute monarchy in France if that wasn't the case), I have no insider information, I'm not even French. It seems I need to clarify "good move".

If your question is "was the Terror awful?", I'm sure you'll have a near totality of french people agreeing with you. If you ask "in retrospect, was the Terror awful enough so that the French nation would have been better off without its Revolution?", then I don't think you'll get many agreement.

The deaths associated with the Terror were plentiful, that's true, but this period was also carefully framed by the bourgeois class who took power afterwards. In terms of deaths, it's around 40k people. The american civil war was 700k deaths. Before Trumpism, would any american say out loud that abolishing slavery wasn't worth it?

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AnimalMuppet 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The revolution/terror only killed 40,000 people? Great. Now do Napoleon, who was a direct and immediate follow-on. That was a million people.

	▲	vdupras 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that the way I framed the comparison of the american civil war and the french revolution might appear disingenuous because of the omission of the napoleonic wars. It crossed my mind to include it, but because the parent comment was specifically about the Terror and because it doesn't change the core or outcome of the argument, I left it out to avoid the fluff. I would also be tempted to begin arguing that it might be reasonable to leave out the napoleonic casualties out of the "what good has ever come from getting rid of rich people as a society?" question and I think I could make a case that stands, but I prefer to yield right now :)

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ThrowawayR2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you for the explanation.

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everfrustrated a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And yet there have been 5 French Republics since then.

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CamperBob2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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vdupras a day ago | parent [-]

Do you know of a french person who wants to return to the Bourbon rule? me neither. They like that they live within a republic. A revolution was necessary to achieve this. Hence my parent comment.

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AnimalMuppet 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But the revolution didn't achieve this. The revolution achieved the Terror, and then Napoleon, and then back to the Bourbon monarchy! (I mean, I guess they did at least get constitutional limitations on the monarchy...)

	▲	vdupras 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		... and then the second republic, and then the second empire, and then a republic again. All part of the same movement.

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CamperBob2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

And naturally, you expect to come out on the winning side of this "revolution," right?

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throwaway894345 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Seems to be working pretty well in the Scandinavian countries.

	▲	rsynnott 19 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.)
	▲	spwa4 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	FirmwareBurner a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.