That’s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the supreme court and not everyone was happy.
And the French Revolution was only the beginning of the sort of revolutions that culminated in communism. So it’s historically significant for that reason also.
There’s only one revolution in history that worked to the better: The American Revolution.
It comes down to Locke or Rousseau. Locke held a view of the importance of individual rights and Rousseau believe in the general will which subsumed individuals. On top of that Rousseau had a view of society as corrupt that made the noble savage into the bourgeois and Locke basically believed in the benefits of society — society is better than the state of nature as proposed by Hobbes. Locke inspired the American Revolution and all the freedom and rights derived from it and Rousseau inspired the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that derived from it.
Rousseau will always be seen a a corrective to bourgeois society which later inspired communism. The ideal is to live in harmony with nature but bourgeois man can’t live in harmony because he is torn between his natural self (nature) and the morals of society that constrain him. This is why artists also hate the bourgeois and they would rather live by their natural impulses and urges. “Epater la bourgeois” was one of their favorite expressions. That’s like saying “kill the middle class” and today’s leftist elites and academic intellectuals are STILL all for it. They are part of a long tradition...
We only had to defeat the Brits and make them leave, then we could be free in our own land. We did not have to eradicate the British monarchy and it’s widespread aristocracy in order to achieve liberty. The French fight was going to be bitter, bloody, vengeful, brutal and merciless, and very personal from day one.
It would be like us trying to overthrow the establishment in America today. A revolution is very a different critter than a separatist revolt.
Don’t get me going on the overrated French Revolution. Disgusting how often it is treated as some great moment in history instead of the horrid travesty it was.
And Frenchmen Jefferson. He had his good points, but he too is overrated.
The American Revolution led to liberty. The French Revolution led to tyranny.
Many here dont care but there is a massive difference between revolution and rebellion.
Revolution is uprising against genuinely unjust treatment/laws.
Rebellion is unjustly attempting to overthrow/usurp just and right powers that be.
The American revolution was based on the English tradition of having orderly reason and rational to it after exhausting all legal means and appealing to higher ideas of justice and fairness found in established legal documents. It’s almost weird how compartmentalized and “by the book” it was.
The French revolution was the result of centuries of built-up resentment between the peasants that had to live under the chaotic rule of the aristocracy, the tone deaf monarch and his court, and the church. All three were in it for themselves and just used the peasants as cannon fodder against one faction or another.
It was basically rage againt the machine, and then burn the whole thing to the ground with no framework or tradition as to what to do next.
That anarchy had some appeal in America back then. Cooler heads were running the nation thankfully.
It was Creator-endowed unalienable rights versus State-endowed libertine license.
It was, on some basic level, Christianity versus Atheism.
There is a reason Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn of Austria included the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution in his treatise:
Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse.