| ▲ | thelastgallon a day ago |
| The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently: 1) Guillotine for the super rich 2) Nuclear to power >70% 3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house 4) TGV 5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine. |
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| ▲ | Lio 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm a big fan of the current range of French Renault electric cars. The 5, 4, Megan and Scenic are just excellent. I think the Scenic is probably the one I'd buy right now based on the range, 380 miles but the 5 and the 4 have so much character they're probably the first really iconic electric car designs IMHO. |
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| ▲ | ttoinou a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Those who don't are not well seen in society, or left the country already. So the best thing I'd see them excelling at in this century, if they can drive their ideology in the right direction, would be producing low-tech solutions solving 90% of problems with 20% of the costs, with open-source like tools / materials / methods everyone can replicate easily. A bit like this article about this old car. |
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| ▲ | jijijijij 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Do you have anything to read up on that? This got me a little excited, but I also doubt it due to the rise of right wing populism everywhere else. Man, if France actually got the rare attitude to get shit done in these times, I may move there and help. | | |
| ▲ | ttoinou 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's just my general sentiment when I see my french peers. It'd be interesting to try to turn this into data for sure, but "right wing" in France has a different meaning / reality than in others countries, not sure the raw stats would explain this difference. If you like those kind of ideas you should def move in France and start building with others there little communist enclaves. Just be ready that in France we do think a lot before deciding to act, we don't have the same "get shit done" attitude like in the anglosphere world |
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| ▲ | eeeficus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| French fries is not a french invention AFAIK but belgian! |
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| ▲ | emtel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Guillotine for the super rich Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing. |
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| ▲ | aweiher a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive. The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value. It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict. | |
| ▲ | weli a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | When did hacker news become so right wing that saying the French revolution was a good societal movement is seen as "glorifying mass executions"? lmao | | |
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| ▲ | spixy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Concorde for businessmen |
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| ▲ | 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | mihaaly a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No. 5) is Belgian. I believe both nation would be offended about the confusion of origins. Americans simply thought they are in France in WWII when they ate it. ; ) |
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| ▲ | alephnerd a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Guillotine for the super rich You know modern France has the exact same problem of billionaire lobbying and media consolidation that the US has right? Arnault (LVMH) [0], Trappier (Dassault) [1], Niel (Illiad) [2], Lagardère (Lagardère SA) [3], Bolloré (Bolloré Group) [4] and a couple others have an inordinate amount of control over French politics. It's also why whenever a country like China, the US, India, or others wants to hold the EU by the balls, they end up tariffing Congac, because Arnault's LVMH has a near monopoly on Congac production in France, so he almost always pressures Macron into acquiesing because otherwise he would threaten to back the RN. Both France and the US are similarly ranked flawed democracies [5] with similar dysfunctions. Also, immediately following the revolution, the guillotiners ended up doing it for the rich [6], as the French Revolution ended up leading to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule with le Directoire, Napoleon, Napoleon III, and others. The only thing you learn from the French Revolution is the same thing you learn from Tahrir Square - the house always wins, which in political science is modeled via Selectorate Theory [7] and Veto Players [8]. Sadly, it's the same reason why despite mass protest after mass protest, the Iranian regime hasn't fallen - the primary political and economic veto players in Iran (Army, IRGC, Basij, Police, Clergy, Business leadership, SoE leadership, Bonyad leadership) haven't defected because they have more to lose than gain if a revolution succeeded. The moment a handful of these interests think they can expand their presence under a new regime is when you would see Khamenei fall, but the leadership would end up being the same ba***rds anyhow, just like how the Islamic Republic ended up co-opting and rehabilitating army officers and business leadership from the Shah's regime during the Iran-Iraq War and after the cultural revolution. [0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/08/07/how-be... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/frances-d... [2] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/07/10/u... [3] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/macron-and-the-moguls-... [4] - https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/dossier/la... [5] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu [6] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023 [7] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092374 [8] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvv7 |
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| ▲ | Arodex a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission). Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell. |
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| ▲ | alephnerd a day ago | parent [-] | | Most guillotined were commoners [0] - not the wealthy nor the intelligentsia. > Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell If France can't fix it [1] after politically powerful billionaires stymied it [2], neither can the US [0] - https://theconversation.com/the-french-revolution-executed-r... [1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/10/31/french-l... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-richest-man-lvmhs-arna... | | |
| ▲ | vdupras a day ago | parent [-] | | The statistics cited in the article you cite talks about the Nobility/Clergy/Other classification. There is no wealth-related statistic. It's entirely possible that a good fraction of the "Others" category were wealthy bourgeois. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd a day ago | parent [-] | | Even in the height of the revolution, the nobility largely retained it's control [0]. And at the end of the day, le Directorate, the Napoleon regime, the Louis Phillips regime, and the Napoleon III regime continued to maintain the power of the bourgeois. If the bourgeois had been completely purged in the French Revolution, then the crackdown of the 1848 Revolution (and the subsequent exodus of French republicans and socialists), 18 Bumaire, the Bourbon Restoration, and other successful power grabs by the bourgeois following the French Revolution wouldn't have happened. Heck, much of the Council of 500 were themselves either mid-level aristocrats or the children of ancien regime enforcers as was seen with Talleyrand, Barras, Duke of Parma, Lebrun, and the Bonaparte family, along with members of the Directorate like Carnot, Barras, and Merlin. There's a reason Marx termed the French Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution", why Max Scheler classes the French Revolution as a revolution driven by ressentiment (the Nietzchean concept that underlies elite overproduction), and how Bourdieu came to his thesis on "cultural capital" (which can also help explain the contemporary rise of left- and right-leaning populism). In essence, who is more elite - an L6 at Google earning $600K TC who graduated from UC Irvine and whose parents were union employees, a Senior Editor at the NYT earning $130K TC who graduated from Yale and whose parents were lawyers, or a Congressional Chief of Staff who graduated from UChicago and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan on an H1B to work at Intel? The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes. It's the same reason why Mao's dad was a rural landlord, why Lenin's dad was a State Councillor, why Ho Chi Minh's father was a Confucian scholar, why Pol Pot's father was a rural landlord with ties to nobility, and Che Guevara's father an Argentine engineer who immigrated from Ireland. [0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023 | | |
| ▲ | vdupras 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're being beside the point. All I'm saying is: don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis. In the context of the French revolution, they're not the same. Of course the bourgeois weren't purged in the revolution. It's them who took power through that revolution. > The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes. no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis Yet it was mid-level aristocrats that were overrepresented in the Directorate and the Council of 500. > no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power Yes. I know, but the initial conversation is based on correcting the a revisionist meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution, when in reality it was just a form of inter-elite fratricide - especially between mid-level aristocrats and the church and a subset of royalists. All the revolution did was cleave the bourgeois from the third estate, and merge them along with the second and first estates. | | |
| ▲ | vdupras 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution It's not a meme. There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power. The "révolution de Février", in 1848 was precisely this: Paris going full collectivist, abolishing property and all, then small land owner from the provinces freaking out and all come to Paris to whoop them. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power And there was a much more powerful core of leaders who were the children of the various types of elites within the ancien regime. Almost the entire history of France the century after the revolution was authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule with the collaboration of intellectual, economic, and religious elites. And this is why Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other flavors of Communists take a dim view of the French Revolution. If a revolution between the cultural elite and the capital elite just led to the pre-eminence of the capital elite and their co-opting of the cultural elite, that means the revolution basically had no positive impact for the overwhelming majority of the French subaltern of the 19th century. And don't get me or my extended family started about French colonialism. | | |
| ▲ | vdupras 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing. Sure, I agree, but please don't say it's a meme. Sure, it didn't take power, sure, the bourgeois were stronger, but they still managed to overthrow the forces of Louis-Phillipe. Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing Yea, I think from the looks of it there's a bit of mutual confusion over terminology being used, but we are largely aligned > Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings I'm using the Rene Girard definition of a "meme" before it got co-opted into internet speak. |
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| ▲ | imbecilidiot a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dead] |
