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> Have folks these days really forgotten why she was so hated? She clearly was unable to perform in the role of arguing for the french people. She was utterly divorced from their problems due to wealth disparity.

She was one of the people who was arguing for the reform of the French taxation system under the idea that maybe, just maybe, the clergy and the aristocrats ought to pay some taxes instead of levying it all on the peasantry. Truly a more despotic individual has never walked the Earth.

Pre-Revolution, a lot of the ire directed at her was driven by the fact that she was a woman who was actively engaging in politics as opposed to being a dandy who just looked pretty, hosted parties, and made babies. She was also criticized for being too extravagant with the public purse, though, so she might well have been complained about even if she did the proper societal role befitting a queen. Post-Revolution, the criticism shifts to the fact that she sided with foreign countries against Republicanism. In large part, she was made the solitary scapegoat of the failures of the ancien régime to help bolster support for the abolition of the monarchy, as she was already unpopular before the Revolution.

She was also foreigner.

It's important to remember that revolutions do not produce justice - they produce change.

As Edmund Burke put it, "Those who attempt to level, never equalize."

> She was one of the people who was arguing for the reform of the French taxation system under the idea that maybe

Sources?

This is what I read in wikipedia: "Her role was decisive in urging the king to remain firm and not concede to popular demands for reforms. In addition, she showed her determination to use force to crush the forthcoming revolution".

Not the glamourous sympathetic little girl from the Coppola movie...

Ice cream isn't really posh, classy, or out of reach.

technically true, but she was showing off her 2 industrial fridges with probably $200 worth of ice cream. quite garish, really, at a time when the working and middle classes were thrown into chaos due to the pandemic and lockdowns

The richest person in America has more wealth than the median household will accumulate in a million years of labor (literally). Are you sure that two fridges and a lot of ice cream should be the focus here?

i didn't bring it up, was just commenting on it

All revolutions happen because of mass unemployment of the middle class. Not the aristocracy, working class, or decrepit poor. The middle class is the group of people of artisanal or union class. They are secured in either a specialized role or high paying job for a somewhat general labor role. If they lose their job en masse, finding a job becomes very hard. So now not only do they have time to kill, but they have influence in swaths. Aristocrats likely end up backing groups that begin to rise up. Which helps fan the flames of discontent.

We've seen it happen France in the 1700s, Germany in the 1800s and 1900s, Russia pre WWI, China in WW2, and Spain during WW2.

Imo, the US is far from this happening. The only people who often complain about radical income disparity live in one of the major cities. Granted it has merit, but there is a sizable amount of people that live outside of those HCOL areas. City people forget that there is a very wealthy, affluent, and secure America outside of cities.

Slave revolts have been common throughout history, and while largely unsuccessful they disagree with your assessment. Revolutions start at every level of society from the aristocracy, poor, military, or intellectuals. What sustains revolutions behind the initial conflict is often propaganda.

> Slave revolts have been common throughout history, and while largely unsuccessful they disagree with your assessment.

Here is a complete list of all historically attested successful slave revolts: Haiti, 1791

That’s it. Revolutions require leadership. Overwhelming that’s going to be the educated or otherwise reasonably comfortable, or those who were recently so and want it back. Peasant revolts fail without leaders, who are either going to be nobles or bourgeois. Those who can’t organize can’t win and a bureaucracy requires literate men, who are very unlikely to be poor. Revolutions win. Slave revolts not so much.

Slaves actually called slaves where relatively uncommon in history. Include peasant uprisings and several more become relevant. However, the important bit for US isn’t the long term results it’s the chaos involved in these civil wars.

The Third Servile War for example grew from 70 slave-gladiators to ~120,000 men in 2 years and won several significant battles vs the Roman Army. You really don’t want to see the modern version of that kind of fighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Servile_War

> Slaves actually called slaves where relatively uncommon in history.

I really don’t think this is true. Human property varied in how common it was but the institution existed in every agricultural society I’m aware of up until at least three 1600s when serfdom died out in England. That’s probably the first society in which humans were not held as property. Western Europe was also likely the first agricultural society not to have chattel slavery but I’m less confident. Certainly slavery was practiced in the Moslem world into the 1900s and well attested all over Asia and in most of Africa and the Americas.

when serfdom died out in England You’re equating serfdom with slavery when my point is separating slavery by name excludes such classes. India and China for example where very stratified societies, but slavery was effectively a separate and less common institution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India

Anyway, by relatively uncommon I mean compared to the US concept of slavery where they made up a huge chunk of the southern workforce and could be sold between individuals.

The third servile war was hardly successful. They all ended up literally crucified.

I'll wait for your list of slave revolts that actually cause a revolution in the ruling class. I know it won't take you long.

Revolutions need leaders, like the other person who commented. There isn't enough wealth aristocrats that can lead, so they stem from the middle class. The middle class tend to have lower class friends. They can very easily sway them to their cause. Now multiply that by tens of millions of middle class that suddenly became unemployed.

Unemployed artists can make propaganda, programmers can make websites and portray this information at the forefront everywhere (think the whole black lives matter flags everywhere), business people assemble and manage large groups of people, scientists devote their time to studies on working class struggles and less on scientific endeavors, etc. The lower class can't do any of that stuff. They don't know how and never had the time to figure out.

This is the very reason why Hitler rose to power through the NSDAP. He did this stuff and appealed to the right aristocrats. The NSDAP grew and unemployed middle class members peacefully revolted by joining them because they wanted their old pre-WWI lives back. They hated hyperinflation owed due to the Treaty of Versaille basically imposed on their government an impossible to pay burden which cause currency debasement galore in order to pay it back. This in turn create hyperinflation that essentially decimated the working class. The money they had no longer could buy the things they wanted. Now they have nothing but an education and time.

I would be hard pressed to describe rural America as affluent, wealthy, or secure. It's being ravaged by a drug crisis, underemployment, and much of it is at truly shocking levels of poverty for a first world nation.

What I can describe it as, is helpless. Instead of seizing it's political power to improve their lot, most of the people at the bottom of it are either apathetic to politics, or are politically distracted by a culture war.

That sounds like certain rural areas. I think GP was trying to talk about small town to small city America and their suburbs of which there are some reasonable middle class lifestyles going on.

In regards to your second paragraph, power in America is heavily concentrated towards rural Americans in sparsely populated states, especially at the national level, because of institutions such as the Senate and the electoral college making it rather difficult to get large legislation passed.

I wouldn’t call it helpless, there’s been a fair amount of political energy in America since its beginning.

Those small towns and small cities--more the small towns than the small cities, but often those too--have those "reasonable middle class lifestyles" largely due to wealth transfers from bigger economic centers.

As a large city dweller for my entire adult life that does not bother me, but it isn't a sustainable process without those economic engines external to them.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. What wealth exactly is exported from urban centers to small towns and rural communities? Tax revenue? Ya likely that.

Otherwise I'd argue the reverse. Banking, media, software etc. seem to export wealth from smaller communities back to urban centers. In this regard large urban centers can be regarded something as absentee landlords receiving grapes and oil and Amish furniture and exporting spreadsheets and compliance audits.

Absentee landlords were issues, because they had actual ruling power over the land. Urban centers dont have decision power over rural areas.

>receiving

Or rather purchasing?

Banking, media, and software extracts wealth just as efficiently from city-dwellers.

The difference is that city-dwellers are more economically productive (For various reasons, some of which are systemic), and, after paying for all those things, are left with a surplus at the end of the year.

Not to mention that the cost of supplying more mundane, necessary-for-life goods to rural areas is higher, due to higher distances, and the inefficiencies of serving low-density markets. This is another thing that keeps rural areas poor.

I am almost positive that the GP is referring to the suburbs of large economic centers. Generalizing rural America based on the life experience of someone living in Irvine, CA is completely off-the-mark.

In my second paragraph, I'm not even speaking about federal political power. The observation holds for municipal, county, and state-level political power - none of which have anything to do with the electoral college.

There are lots of farm communities in the states with unbelievably wealthy people. Like not billionaires, but fragmented millionaires.

Correction: The revolution happened due to starvation.

Employment and salaries are recent concepts, they have no relevance. A few hundreds years ago the largest single concern by far was to have food on the table. There was no functional markets and no long distance transportation, you couldn't buy food if there was a bad harvest or calamity, there was no food to sale and/or the price doubled overnight.

In a way you can consider that a "salary." Whether it's an edible currency or not is irrelevant.

Starvation might have been a factor in determining the course of the revolution, and might have helped it gain momentum, but I don't think it's right to say that the revolution happened "due to starvation". The triggering event was the declaration of bankruptcy of the French state, and apart from poverty and starvation, there were a lot of other factors that also helped move revolutionary ideas along.

This seems to me a reflex of the times. Billionaires are celebrated as if they're making some great benefit the world, instead of pushing their monopolies around to make as much money as possible without regard for the law, as in the late 19th century. See how people seem to oppose the break up of Google, which would be a benefit for everyone.

It's been many years since I read my Kropotkin but I seem to recall him being a gentler soul than this.