[1] https://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2007/05/last-letter-of-mar...
It was awful and bloody and many revolutionary were awful people uneducated and prompt to bloodbath. But it soon inspired so many nations to move towards democracy that sometimes if not always history shows that awful people can build great things (pirates in New York etc..)
I remember she hated Lafayette for example to put some USA perspective she must have hated Washington too.
Rulers should be judged indeed on victory or defeat this current fashion of looking back at history to say individuals had good or bad personalities is dangerously capable of transforming the worst people into adorable ones.
Her story is the story of the Romanov in Russia or the Shah in Iran. People who loved to party and who had great education would be people You would love to hang out with today for sure.
But they did so while their own people were on the verge of collapsing... I don’t see a parallel with Hillary neither, if Hillary was burning millions of dollars when her husband was in power and partying all the time in the poorest city with people dying in the street then you would have had Marie Antoinette but Hillary acted as a ruler and worked hard to help her country (wether you like her politics or not)
I would argue that in many cases, the French Revolution might have had the opposite effect. Everyone was so scared of another reign of terror and the devastating revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that it directly led to the conservatism of Metternich and supported the conservative crackdowns in 1848. Monarchism in much of Europe - except France - was abolished after WWI, not after the French Revolution.
In the places where democracy was later established - say, Latin America - I think the US were much more of an influence than France.
The revolutionary wars were devastating, but they also demonstrated the power of a republican state - a sort of power that even reactionaries (e.g. Bismark) wanted to harness.
As for after 1848, I don't think that Europe was much more democratic than before 1789 (except for France, and the second republic was kind of DOA anyway). More states did have a constitution (in comparison to 1789, not necessarily to before 1848), so there was maybe a little bit more protection against absolute tyranny, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there was much effective parliamentary participation.
Although I will admit that the idea of liberalism was definitely in the air and maybe it wouldn't have been without the French Revolution, but that's hard to say (as said, the USA were always more of a poster child because their republic actually lasted).
I'm not sure if the revolutionary wars demonstrated the power of republicanism as much as they demonstrated the power of nationalism to someone like Bismarck, and nationalism is definitely something that was heavily influenced by the French Revolution.
It feels to me if you look at the trajectory from the start of the french revolution to the modern european state, even in periods of reaction, the arrow doesn't really turn much. Reactionaries usually see the advantages of nationalism, bourgeois the advantages of liberalism, and workers the advantages of democracy - and all of the three trends get reversed at points, but if you sum them, then it's a pretty steady gain. For instance, while the dissolution of the Frankfurt parliment was a blow against democracy, I think it probably pushed nationlism forward by putting so much power in Prussian hands.
So I'd credit the French Revolution with spawning and intensively testing the triad of political views that have ended up being totally dominant in Europe - you're right that this triad is not identical with democracy, but I think it is identical with what we generally call democracy in Europe today.
That is however not French victors writing history, it is more of foreign Communists writing history.
The revolution is still a founding moment of the french "identity", and apart from a few late-to-the-party 2020's monarchists, we pretty much all believe that we did the right thing by kicking out the nobility.
There was French Revolution and then was the freedom and happiness, basically.
> is there a good aristocracy
I think that feudalism is fundamentally bad. But, I think that answer to this question is yes, there are non-evil aristocrats. Aristocracy is class you get born into, set of duties and privileges. Aristocracy holds power and have interests opposed to those who live under them. The image where all individuals belonging to that group are basically ugly and evil is not correct. It is not like all the the tortured and executed aristocrats deserved that.
And then there is question of huge amount of non-aristocratic victims of revolution which went completely unmentioned in our version of history.
Are they to blame for the holocaust? Well no, but they help to run it.
Aristocracy might not be made up 100% of evil mustache twirling villains, but they benefit from fruits of other's toils.
Lets consider much much milder version of the problem that we can relate.
Nestle was caught buying chocolate from sources using child labor and child slaves. Currently AFAIK only Kitkat is using fair-trade chocolate as a token gesture. Anything else is using chocolate with some fake symbols set up by PR companies funded by nestle et al.
Are you eating their - non kitkat - chocolate product supporting child slavery? Even though you might have done it fully ignorant of the fact. Are you going to buy their stuff knowing that now?
Is it feasible to live in our society and not buy stuff from corporations that do things like that?
Compared to that, not just that aristocracy is hereditary, but they had duties beyond "kill people". They were backbone of army, yes, but still it is not just that.
I think that making comparison between aristocracy and guards in concentration camps is more of political then actual attempt at reasonale historical analysios.
The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.
That is not honest argument, that is absurd accusation.
> The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.
That was not apparent from your comment. But also, I think that you are using straw idea of aristocracy rather then real societal system as it existed in various periods. The whole thread started with my look at real world historical aristocracy. You used made up nazi guard that was "just doing job" to tilt big picture, but it was not fair comparison.
All this is under article about Marie Antionette who specifically I don't really think was evil.
Direct historical example is the aristocracy of Hungary and Poland. Both undermined and exploited their rulers to extracted privileges and wealth of their respective nations. Resulting in weak states that fall pray to their neighbors.
> All this is under article about Marie Antionette who specifically I don't really think was evil.
I am not arguing she was evil, but that she was guilty of the situation and shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were.
I do not believe in guilt based on your birth circumstances. I also think that you are building flippant strawman in "shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were".
You dont want to judge people on their actions, you want to build enemies to make it easy to judge people. I am not interested in that. You dont care about what who believed, actually tried to push for and why the old system malfunctioned or was impossible to reform.
Nither do I.
Its not about birth but the action you take or not take.
> You dont want to judge people on their actions, you want to build enemies to make it easy to judge people. I am not interested in that. You dont care about what who believed, actually tried to push for and why the old system malfunctioned or was impossible to reform.
You completely mischarectarise what I say. You use formulations that put words into my mouth
> You dont care about
> You dont want to
This is the definition of building straw-man argument that YOU accuse me of. So maybe read what I write and critique what I wrote and not what you think that I think.
> I also think that you are building flippant strawman in "shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were".
This is the definition of judging person by their actions. Just because she was polite and smiling and wrote a tearful letters, it does not make her a good person. I dont care if you believe in Jesus and go to church 3 time a week. If you stab someone to death on the street for giving you 'the look' you should rot in prison.
For the record, I think this is not how one should look at history. We have our current values, but to anachronistically apply these values to whole epochs long gone leads astray IMO.
Personal ethics is another matter, things like greed, dishonesty, callousness, betrayal between equals seem to be held in low regard wherever and whenever we choose to look.
There have been attempts to try and superimpose such personal ethics on grand epochs in history, but it requires a painful shoehorning of personal morals into some square holes where it doesn't belong. It doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny.
Also, people are more likely to knee jerkly defend everything for by past important people and see them as unaware victims of circumstances them to judge them. Maybe except Hitler and Stalin.
Sometimes people do superimpose own values inappropriately, but other times those making judgements just know more about actual acts of those people - even including historical context.
Narcissists and sociopaths and what not are not modern phenomenon never heard about before. And their contemporaties for expressed a lot about them.
It is difficult to see these things through modern eyes, especially in the human rights era. But we have to remember that hereditary monarchs tended to do this to each other a lot. Of necessity - most of the European rulers were blood relatives; power struggles inevitably meant disputing an inheritance. Antoinette's brother was the Holy Roman Emperor. When he died her nephew lead the invasion of France by Austria.
And the punishment for disloyalty was death. If somehow the Bourbons had restored their position, they would have had all the revolutionary leaders executed. As with the Romanovs. Or Elizabeth I'd execution of her cousin Mary.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, let's please not fight the French Revolution here.