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I'm not defending a depraved mob and conquest-hungry military dictatorship Cannoli Send a noteboard - 25/07/2016 02:58:13 PM


Considering that both Tom and yourself take such a view of it, I'm going to assume that you're genuinely not aware of how very differently Europeans view the French Revolution, and not merely being flippant.

And that makes them right? There are many Europeans who believe otherwise. The difference is that Tom & I are more likely to have read their articles or books as well as the advocates'.


Also, 'arbitrarily prejudiced against monarchy' is pretty hilarious from the mouth of an American patriot.
I defy you to find someone on this site who has defended monarchy more than I. I prefer other systems, but I don't hold any one system to be inherently wrong, aside from the more extreme forms of totalitarianism. In the case of France, the track record of the monarchy is far superior to that of the Republic.
What good came out of it? Oh, I don't know, democracy,
Tell that to Athens.
the notion of universal human rights,

The French invented a notion on which the American colonies had been writing extensively for nearly a generation? Benjamin Franklin was a celebrity among the French aristocracy, so it's not like these ideas disappeared into a hole in international waters. Not to mention, there was an immediate precedent for how to obtain a constitutional republic based on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, WITHOUT murdering half a million of your fellow citizens.


a solid corpus of laws which in many cases remain in existence to this day,

And there was no way to get those without the guillotine? America and the lesser Anglophonic peoples acquired similar bodies of law in a civilized manner.


the beginning of the end of global slavery,

Yes... the French Revolution was what drove the UK & the US armed forces, who did the actual legwork on that...

I suppose all the religious-motivated emancipation movements were also inspired by the homicidal excess of a pack of atheistic psychopaths. What government did Toussaint L'Overture spend most of his time fighting again?


and I could go on for a while. Certainly, all those things probably could have happened in a more gradual way without the Reign of Terror, the slaughter in the Vendee and the Napoleonic wars, but if you're going to focus on the longer-term consequences, I see more good ones than bad.

Some nebulous anecdotal gains, which the Anglosphere demonstrated we are quite capable of gaining without any of that, versus popping Western Europe's state-sponsored atrocity & totalitarianism cherries.

And I think you'll find that aside from the British - or even there, among those who can look beyond the shallow obsession with Wellington and Waterloo that I mentioned - many West-Europeans have a fairly positive view of Napoleon.

Just because the cult of celebrity has elevated him once he was safely dead doesn't make him good or right. The opinions of quite a few people in Europe who actually had to live with the man were otherwise, which explains how he was constantly at war. Only some sort of operating assumption of his right to rule Europe can justify the wars he fought.
By 'sane world' I take it you mean the monarchs of Europe, and by 'destabilization of order in Europe' you mean that those pesky peasants got uppity and started clamouring for their rights? Of course things got out of hand, but your argument, in essence, seems to boil down to 'the French and European people should have just sit back and waited until their rulers were ready to give them their rights and constitutions gradually'. Which, once again, is pretty hilarious coming from an American patriot.
Napoleon crowned himself emperor, yes, but singling him out for being a dictator seems rather silly considering that all of his foreign opponents and allies were hereditary monarchs as well,

And there is significant difference between the two. I didn't say the peasant should have waited their time, I said that no one was inclined to listen to reasonable requests after Napoleon & the Revolution tainted those ideas of rights by appropriating the terms and concepts the American fight for independence made respectable. Your conflating American patriotism and our process to a sovereign Constitutional republic is the obverse of the provincialism on which you implicitly blamed Tom's & my opinions. Americans had a self-governing nation, before George III tried to impose a rule unsuited to what had developed, and American objections to British rule were based on traditional practices and British law, with a not-insignificant faction of the British governing class in agreement. The Declaration of Independence made specific references to the principles and rights on which the cause was based, and enumerated the grievances and offenses committed by crown. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, on the other hand, reads like petulant freshman poli-sci manifesto, a list of demands "Because we say so!"

You can sneer all you like at these ideas coming from an American, but what was our equivalent of the storming of the Bastille? The closest thing we got to mob violence was the Boston Tea Party, with zero loss of life, and collection raised afterwards by supporters of independence, to make restitution of the tea destroyed to make their point. The Bastille massacre hardly cracks the Revolution's top ten list, and it over a century for America to devolve into an imperialistic power that imposed their political theories on foreign countries. Russia celebrates the defeat of Napoleon's invasion (and the 1812 Overture samples the Marsellaise, showing by way of example how the Revolution & Napoleon were linked in so many minds), but few sane people in Europe would celebrate the defeat of the US's most recent invasion of their continent. The only massacre associated with the cause of US independence was the Boston Massacre, in which the British soldiers who fired on the great-uncle of the crowds who would storm the Bastille & the Tulleries, were defended in court by a man who would later serve as the first president of the US Senate, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, and fought an undeclared war against Revolutionary France. We were the anti-massacre "revolution" while the French didn't have any other cards in their hand.



Fair enough, but if you're so insistent that all the good would've happened anyway and with less bloodshed, I don't know why you're so sure that such military innovations and total war would not have happened without the Revolution.
Because that stuff is directly competitive. Escalations and responses. There is a reason why we've been using the same basic tank design for more than 30 years, when during World War 2 the major powers went through three or four iterations over the course of a five & half year conflict - absent necessity, militaries are not going to change. The Prussian military had basically stagnated until the Napoleonic times, and I can't imagine why anyone in Europe would think waking them up and teaching them new tricks was a good thing.

I assume you're familiar with the Constitution of Cadiz. In Spain like elsewhere, it took the upheaval of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasion before the citizens could take a stand against their absolute monarchs and write a constitution.

They don't get credit for the actions of their opponents! Why not give Hitler credit for anti-genocide campaigns, while you're at it?
Which was then promptly squashed again by the reactionaries after Napoleon was defeated.
Because Napoleon gave anything superficially resembling his propaganda, and that of his Revolutionary predecessors, a bad name!
Certainly the French Revolution involved a lot of violence, but it inspired democratization all over Europe - and the rest of the world. Being itself inspired by the American revolution, of course.

Or maybe, the American cause of independence (I actually don't like the term "revolution" since it was not aimed at overturning the existing social or political order, and was not revolutionary in the recent historical sense of the term, being founded on a reversion to traditional rights) inspired democracy, which the French ruined with their homicidal binges and rapid translation to totalitarianism. The process of democracy's inevitable evolution into autocracy was long known to classically educated people, but they had never seen an example as swift as in France.


'Period of national evil' is ridiculous except for the actual Reign of Terror, which, as nasty as it was, lasted for less than a year. I'm not even going to comment on the Holocaust comparison.

No, the atrocities started well before the Reign of Terror. Such as the storming of the Bastille, and the mod violence. I started this discussion by specifically condemning the mob violence, and you are trying to pretend it was limited a period of government oppression. Nor did said oppression end with the Terror, as the Vendee could attest (there's your popular peasant uprising in demand of their natural rights - only it was AGAINST the Revolutionary government! ). The behavior of the Revolutionary mobs and politicians alike was appalling and depraved, including not just spontaneous demonstrations that got carried away and got some people hurt, as one might most charitably characterize a modern riot in the civilized world, but tearing people limb from limb, cannibalism, gang rape, systematic abuse of children, abuse of prisoners and the complete absence of anything resembling a rule by law or system of impartial criminal punishment. It was Lenin and Stalin without radios or automatic weapons.

Cannoli
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
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I'm not defending a depraved mob and conquest-hungry military dictatorship - 25/07/2016 02:58:13 PM 629 Views
The American revolution did virtually all of that first and without the Reign of Terror. *NM* - 25/07/2016 06:40:09 PM 437 Views
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