Red pill me on the French Revolution, please

>Climate change fucks crops for a good deal of France leading to a massive food shortage problem
>King and court have mismanaged the kingdom's finances for decades leaving them balls deep in debt, and due to some poor investments and bad luck it only gets worse
>The nobles use their wealth to buy positions in the government and skew the system to their favor and kill any kind of reform, while they're exempt from paying taxes
>Meanwhile the average frog is getting crushed with higher taxes, no food, and price gouging up the ass

Revolution was almost inevitable. Who the fuck thought this was sustainable?

whatever anyone in this thread says, ignore it and listen to these words: robespierre did nothing wrong

repeat it five times backward and foward and you've laid the foundations for a true understaning of the revolution

Damn I just remembered I took an entire course on the French Revolution, but I really can't tell you shit without re-reading papers

>Britain became undisputed superpower for many decades
Britain never was anything more than a paper tiger.At their peak they couldn't do jack shit against Russia without France.That is why Bismark was never worried about Britain in his diplomatic schemes

The first step towards degeneracy and cultural marxism. Fuck it

You do realise that's because the British practiced "Splendid Isolation" and were more concerned about controlling all the ocean and its colonies rather than European affairs?

literally the best thing ever

Read Thomas Carlyle's "The French Revolution"

I'll start by pointing out that the picture you posted has nothing to do with it

An all around entertaining time period for all parties involved

This.

However you try to justify it, Britain couldn't beat any of the Great Powers on the continent on their own, that's why they needed systematic alliances to counter any nation that threatened them.

Turns out he was wrong in the long run.

Idiots slaughtered catholic clergy and destroyed catholic property despite the fact that the Church was reponsible for the only good that was ever done in the peasants lives, all the while leaving alone the rich fucks who perpetually screwed them over

There was a "church of reason" where people worshiped some women who was all dressed up.
Also the motto of the revolution is the same as that of freemasonry.

Because it was a bourgeois revolution, only Robespierre actually cared about the smallfolk and his goverment only lasted about 2 years

Despite claims, Marie Antoinette was kind of a bitch who genuinely believed with all her heart that the Revolution was illegitimate and needed to be crushed so that the monarchy could go back to its rightful absolutist state. She was the main instigator of the Flight to Varennes and the main person to prod Louis into going along with it so she could escape to her beloved Austria and put together an army to put the Revolution down. Marie Antoinette is directly responsible for not only her fate but the fate of her husband and the inhumane suffering of her children.

Of course the Revolutionaries (especially once the more moderate ones like Lafayette get pushed aside) were little better too.

Louis truly was a good boy who dindu nuffin (which was a probably; he dindu when he shuddadu).

This. The french revolution was not about peasants and human rights. Unless human rights are only for the intellectual elite... Wait that sounds similar to how it is today.

I'm reading Pursuit of Glory and Blanning brings up a point I hadn't considered before: population may have played a part. Basically populations exploded all across Europe in the 18th century. This led to migration either from rural to city, to different regions of a state, to different states entirely or to the New World. However the French never really emigrated to Canada the way the British did to North America or the Spanish did to Central and South America; the French immigrant population of Canada was only 27,000 by 1730 which was after extensive efforts to encourage immigration. But increasing populations in the latter part of the century could've pushed more French towards going to Canada as they start feeling squeezed out of France, however the loss of Canada during the Seven Years War killed that possibility which possibly helped to destabilize French politics even more. To quote Blanning:

>The typical emigrant was young, male and, by definition alienated from conditions in the old country. [...] So it might be speculated that the British exported their dissidents and so suffered their revolution three thousand miles away from home in the shape of the American War of Independence. The Spanish did the same in the shape of the liberation movements in Latin America in the 1820s. But the French Revolution was a revolution in France.

>"After us, the deluge"

What does Veeky Forums think about the french Ron Paul

GOAT revolution.

Did he really get smallpox from raping a girl?

>Marie Antoinette

I hated that movie

Louis XIV had set up a system where one of the key privaliges that distinguished nobles from plebs was tax breaks, which eventually resulted in an absurd situation where the dirt poor paid the most into the system. This eventually led to terrible finances for the kingdom.

When ministers tried to fix things, nobles who were either ignorant of how desperately bad the situation was or just stubborn constantly resisted and invoked "muh liberty, muh rights" etc. Louis XVI didn't have the balls to force needed reforms through, so his finances continually got worse.

Eventually, they called the Estates General, and radicals from the third estate (plebs, but really just lawyers not rich enough to buy into the nobility) radicalized and were successful in part due to help from liberal nobles.

Mobs from Paris basically forced the whole lot of these people to relocate to Paris and continually forced their radical bullshit on the estates general, until things eventually blew up entirely.

The nobles who were responsible for the fuck up generally got killed or exiled, and eventually when Robespierre got in charge the lying fear mongers who whipped up mobs of poor Parisians to get more power for themselves got eaten by the mob.

Everyone backed off the ledge after killing Robespierre, and eventually Napoleon took over.

To review - Louis XVI did nothing wrong but fail to act decisively, but you can't really fault him for not wanting to embracing being a tyrant to fix things or even save his own skin.

Conservative nobles - Right to advocate for a crackdown on the radicals but caused the whole mess in the first place with their stubborn resistance.

Liberal nobles - good intentions but enabled the radicals who killed them, dug their own grave.

Initial 3rd Estate guys - often consumed by the means they used to force change on the whole country, not terribly sympathetic.

Latter non-noble radicals - dumb, power hungry, paranoid, absolutely the worst.

Danton did nothing wrong. Robespierre was a douchebag.

>it's a "descendent of a serf defends the ancien regime" episode
Love it, now tell us about how WW1 was actually Russia's fault.

Wanting freedom and equality makes you a dump power hungry paranoid scumbag?

Danton was a liberal aka 'freedom and equality but only for me and my rich mates, peasants and urban poors can go fuck themselves', he purposely ruined every reform made by based Robespierre

>depose a monarchy for being tyrannical
>establish an even more tyrannical regime

>end the power of the church in the name of reason
>kill scholars like Lavoisier and burn libraries like Cluny

At least Napoleon gave peasants their land, not that it mattered for those who froze to death in Russia.

Robespierre did nothing wrong

Just for fun -

Russia was stupid to view Germany as their rival and fight them, rather than ally with them. Their bullshit pan-slavism was fake and what Austria-Hungary did to Serbia really was none of their business. If they really wanted to do pan-slavism they should have tried to work with Germany to dismantle AH. (I don't actually blame Russia for WWI)

novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/his242/documents/Durnovo.pdf

This is a good piece by a Russian minister that sort of echoes my thoughts.

I'm talking about guys like Jean-Paul Marat, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Jacques Roux and so on. I don't blame the sans-culottes for wanting to be able to afford to eat, but I despise the rabble-rousers who manipulated them to their own ends but rarely made them better off. They raised paranoid delusions about reactionaries behind every shadow, ruining the lives of many innocent people.

The monarchy was fucking broke from stupid management and everybody was too entrenched in their own interests to do anything. So the neoliberals rebelled and declared war on half of Europe. Then the poor rebelled against the neoliberals and that's when all the headchopping fun happened. Then people calmed the fuck down and Napoleon came in and took over everything.

I can honeslty never tell if Louis XIV should be considered one of the greatest rulers ever or one of the shittiest.

>the more moderate ones like Lafayette

You got it reversed, friendo

It was da best of times it was da worst of times

I don't even remember what book that was from lmfao

The thing with extraordinary individual leaders is that the government becomes shaped around them. Once they're dead, the system he leaves behind has to try to function with a worse individual in its place, and things almost inevitably decline.

Think about Alexander, Bismarck or Charlemagne - the things they worked so hard to build fell apart relatively quickly after they left, because there just wasn't going to be a truly suitable replacement.

Louis XIV isn't really on the level of those guys, it's more the fact that he lived so long that makes him special, but I don't give him to much of the blame for things falling apart down the stretch. His successors could have done just fine if they made financial reforms happen and/or avoided wars.

G-give me Virtue, user.

The eternal merchants of the middle class were unhappy that God had put them into the third estate despite their wealth so they gathered up into their lodges and started scheming, and they rebelled against the first and second estates so they the plebeians could be in charge of the poorer dumber plebeians. Just godless morons who spawned the cancer of liberalism and leftism, they destroyed Europe.

>It was a bourgeois revolution you dingus.

Yes an the bourgeois were the third estate despite their wealth

not who you were replying to, but Lafayette, for a member of the second estate, was extraordinarily left-leaning. By the standards of the jacobite cucks he ended up having to flee to Austria from, he was moderate.

A bunch of fedoras blew up the conservative power structure in order to replace it with something more "rational", this rational something being one of the biggest chimp outs in history.

Old Regime was rapidly going broke due to awful and outdated economic practices (Nobility couldn't invest their wealth into industry like the English, internal tariffs on goods discouraged trade, inefficient professional tax farming system, uneven taxes region to region) and despite several solid attempts at fixing these internal strife and incompetence always got in the way.

The final solution was to call the Estates General and drag representatives from all of French Society together to put together a plan for reform that nobody would object to. This was actually going to work for sure if it weren't for the Dauphin (Prince) dying. This completely crushed Louis' already flimsy resolve leading to an Estates General where everyone just sat around asking "Where the hell is Louis" until the entire country eventually went completely bankrupt.

Tired of sitting on their hands The non-clergy/nobility representatives along with a few sympathizers from the other groups declared themselves France's true representatives and said they wouldn't disband until recognized. Louis', being probably suicidal, did nothing about this either way.

Eventually word got all around Paris and the dirty bastards thought this was awesome. Eventually things started to look tense and so they panicked and thought that they had to defend their new representatives with pre-emptive force. This feeling culminated in the Storming of the Bastille and the seizure of the weapons inside.

At this point the new assembly was recognized and what started as a movement to share power to upper-class commoners quickly devolved into populism and mob rule as the Parisian crowds hauled the Royal Family into Paris to effectively act as hostages and started imposing their increasingly radical ideas on the rest of France and Europe, culminating in war and paranoid oppression followed by a reaction then Napoleon.

Danton was a fucking Chad piece of shit. Robespierre was a real human bean.

>Red pill me
Kill yourself.

this face begs for guillotine. robespierre did nothing wrong.

One of the greatest operations of British intellegence. And some idiots who belive Brits - like Egalite.

1/2

>who genuinely believed with all her heart that the Revolution was illegitimate and needed to be crushed so that the monarchy could go back to its rightful absolutist state.

Based on her own words and statements, no she didn't. She literally wrote that they should "sacrifice all ideas of counter-revolution." She and her brothers-in-law were on the outs because she, like Louis, supported the reforms; she and Louis also both initially supported the double-representation for the Third Estate, only for the death of their son and the isolation with the ultra-royalists in their family that followed to set them astray. The only reforms that Louis and Antoinette explicitly wanted to roll back were the ones requiring the Civil Oath to be mandatory for clergy and laws which allowed the government to confiscate personal property for political/religious beliefs. Both wanted the country to return to order. At the point of the flight, it had become almost lawless, with people's civil rights being infringed with no recourse.

Now, Elisabeth, the king's sister absolutely believed it should be crushed. She and Antoinette frequently got into arguments because of their difference in political beliefs; Antoinette supported what Louis wanted (to 'keep' the revolution, but ease up on the religious restrictions, laws regarding confiscation, and restore order) rather than what Elisabeth and Louis' brothers wanted (crush it entirely and return to absolute monarchy).

>Bourgeoisie seizes power from the aristocracy and uses it to exploit and deceive working class in increasingly bizarre and unusual ways, as was done in America in the War of Independence but with less success because the colonies were colonies and France was a metropole
>Everywhere the Revolution spreads has ended up under the hegemony of the capitalist class
>Offshoots of Revolution in other locales result in similar seizures of power by agents claiming to be acting on behalf of some class or national interest
>Rarely doing so

>Rarely doing so honestly and successfully but often being either honest or successful
>Counterrevolution happens intermittently but has never managed to totally shut down revolutionary activity on a global scale; in other words, the revolution has never been destroyed
>French politics are more of a clusterfuck than those of most Western countries to this day and show no signs of stopping

>She was the main instigator of the Flight to Varennes and the main person to prod Louis into going along with it so she could escape to her beloved Austria and put together an army to put the Revolution down.

Louis was working on an escape plan as early as winter 1789, with the comte d'Angiviller, who had fled the country after the fall of the Bastille. Then both Mirabeau and Bouille both concocted 'escape' plans which left Louis to consider 2: 1, Mirabeau's project, which involved royalist troops entering Paris and the 2nd which involved fleeing Paris and regrouping there. Mirabeau died before either plan could be implemented. The 2nd was chosen by Louis, who directed the route and point of arrival (Montmedy) with Bouille and Fersen spearheading things. Both her letters and what remains of Louis letters, there was no question of them leaving the country or wanting to leave the country. They weren't trying to flee to Austria, they were fleeing to a royalist stronghold in France. Louis explicitly refused to take the faster route to Montmedy which would have involved crossing the border out of France briefly. Antoinette was told to ask the emperor if troops would be available should anything to wrong, to extract them from the French countryside. Louis decided not to use these troops during the failed flight because of the risk to his people.

Louis and Antoinette repeatedly said in their letters that they did NOT want the European powers or emigre armies to invade the country. Louis threatened his brothers because they were raising armies. Antoinette and Fersen kept clashing because she refused to endorse the use of armed threats. Louis and Antoinette only finally relented on this point in the summer of 1792 when it became clear that troops were necessary to save them.

Shitty estates system and bread prices.

...

Nigga deserved it.

>ywn see Robesippre lead the golorious revolution to its imagined end