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.