491
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
491 points (100.0% liked)
Political Memes
11924 readers
2097 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
When was the last time a system remotely this bad was actually redeemed slowly? The Mongols were defeated by disease, storms, and violence; the Nazis were defeated by extreme violence; the Japanese Empire was defeated by extreme violence; the French monarchy and Napoleon were defeated by extreme violence; the Russian monarchy was defeated by extreme violence.
Things get worse before they get better with a revolution, but they can get better. That isn't to say that we should decline to reduce harm inside the current system, but it seems naive to expect the current system to stop being terrible. Harm reduction is a temporary measure.
Let’s go with one of your examples, and I think the quintessential one: France, 1792. The monarchy is crumbling. It’s terrible. Let’s burn it all down. Yay! The monarchy is over!
Wait, what now? War with Austria for no reason? Executing tons of nonviolent and political prisoners? Terror as a form of government (that killed more peasants than aristocrats)? Coups and counter-coups and then Napoleon who plunges Europe into basically the zeroth world war. Millions die. Napoleon is eventually defeated, twice.
What came after? A slightly reformed (1814), and then slightly more reformed (1830), Bourbon monarchy. Boy, I bet the third estate might have preferred to get to that kinda boring reformed era a little faster and without all the dead people. (I guess I don’t blame the third estate, I blame Danton. But still.)
And then they overthrew that monarchy, had a second republic for four years, Napoleon III declared himself emperor, the empire collapsed, and they had a third republic, which was overthrown by the Nazis, and then a fourth republic after the Nazis lost, which only lasted another twelve years before they changed enough laws to call it #5.
Boy, I bet they would have preferred to skip ahead to overthrowing the monarchs indefinitely.
And how the absolute fuck do you propose they could have reformed a monarchy that responded to protests with violence? Even the French don't overthrow their government without giving it a chance to respond to their demands.
It's like suggesting that a union get concessions without striking. Sure, they'd like to, but if the company refuses to negotiate, there's only one (legal) path forward.
The third estate had effectively politically overthrown the old regime by like day five of the estates general. There would still be a king, but the clergy-nobility-commons divide was gone and there would be representative government. Not enough, obviously, but a step in the right direction.
Denton decided the people he didn’t like needed to die and that sent things spinning out toward murderville for everyone, including eventually himself. Basically everyone who would have built upon those small steps fled the country or were murdered. Many of them were shitheads, yes. But I think France would have been better off without the head-choppy parts of the revolution.
That doesn't seem compatible with the summaries I've found. I'm not an expert by any means, but it looks like the constitutional monarchy you mentioned was repeatedly sabotaged by Louis XVI until he was violently deposed. You can argue against his beheading the following January all you like, but deposing him was not a change from within, it was a violent revolution. They stormed the palace and threw him in jail.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-great-french-revolution-1789-1793#toc27
Yeah, Louis XVI was not going along with the program willingly. But on occasion he felt the need to at least pretend to, and made some concessions, and told his asshole brother to stop making such a fuss in exile.
I guess the whole thing just contrasts with what was happening across the channel in the same time period. England / the UK did not have a violent revolution in 1848 like the French, Austrians, Prussians, and Italians did. A bunch of smaller German states avoided it too. Because their leaders saw the writing on the wall and made small concessions. It’s not like the late 1800s were a great time in those places, but they ended up in similar spots as the more violent revolutionary -> reactionary -> liberalizing places did but without all the suffering that came with (admittedly cathartic) chucking bricks and chopping heads.