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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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France: the French revolution was poor people rioting. We are starting to accept that it was rich people killing each other to replace monarchy, and using poor people as a side-effect, kind of like... what we have right now, what a coincidence!
It was "self-made" rich people (bourgeoisie) vs "birthright" rich people (nobility). We still got some cool side-effects though. Some of those bourgeois legitimately kick started what we call left and progressive politics today (Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat).
A lot of the early (1789) revolutionaries were from the nobility and even the clergy. Many of the reactionaries were up and coming bourgeois who were about to make their way into the nobility. Sorry Marx, you got a few things right, but that one was an oversimplification.
The vast majority of the victims of the reign of terror were commoners. The nobility were underrepresented at the guillotine, besides a few obvious high-profile cases.
It appears as though Robespierre legitimately lost his mind at some point. He attempted to introduce a “cult of the supreme being” with himself as high priest that focused on adhering to his own idea of virtue. Anyone not virtuous enough, which was effectively literally everyone else, was liable to be executed.
Early in the revolutionary wars, the revolutionaries had arrested so many people that the Paris jails were super overcrowded. Some people didn’t want the armies to leave Paris for the front lines because maybe all those jailed people would break out and cause trouble. So Marat proposed that they reduce the incarcerated population… by killing them all. September 1789 was a bad month to have been a petty thief in Paris.
So many of the popular notions about the revolution are distorted or just ass-backwards.
Yes, Marquis de Lafayette was a famous example of a noble going against the privilege system and in favor of democracy.
I think Robespierre is one of the pioneer of both left ideology, and left extremism leading to autoritarism and its crimes as we later saw in communist Russia and China.
Give someone the power of life and death and they’ll start to equate attacks on them with attacks on the state which deserves death
People seem to forget that it almost immediately led to a military dictatorship
It did definitely did, the Terror and then Napoleon empires were dictatorships. It took a century for a a democratic republic to stabilize with improvements for the common people happening progressively (under early republics but also under the empires).
I think that's still an oversimplification.
The revolution started after the king called the Estates General in hopes of solving the debt crisis that had come in a large part from funding the American Revolution. The Estates General was a body made up of representatives of the three estates, the aristocrats, the clergy, and everyone else. The representatives of the third estate we're primarily new money bourgeoisie, but they were elected, unlike the other two, and could therefore claim to represent the people. After failing to come to an agreement, the representatives of the third estate broke away and formed the National Assembly.
How much the National Assembly actually represented the people is debateable, but they did have some claim to that, unlike the other groups. There were also several mass actions like the storming of the Bastille that indicated support for what the representatives were doing, at least in the early years of the revolution.