[bwestergard]

"which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy"

A more judicious takeaway might be that revolutions often have tragic periods.

The French revolution had its blood-soaked Terror and Thermidor, lead to the Napoleonic wars in which many perished, etc. But it also liberated millions, spread an ideal of democracy and human rights cherished by much of the world today.

The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction were in every sense a revolution against slavery. Who can deny that despite it all, this revolution was necessary, and did not go far enough in achieving its aims?

[pdonis]

Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people from learning the obvious lesson that maybe revolutions just aren't a good idea.

As for the Civil War, the U.S. had to spend a million lives in that war to end slavery. (And, as you appear to recognize, that still didn't really improve the lives of the former slaves all that much--more than a century of Jim Crow was still to come.) The British Empire did it without spending any lives at all, and has never had the kind of Jim Crow issues the U.S. has had. So what is the advantage of revolution, again?

[raxxorrax]

The revolution itself was absolutely brutal, but overall had a positive effect on all kinds of emancipation.

While it ended in Napoleon, this cannot only be attributed to the revolution itself which basically ended serfdom in France and no monarch could bring that back.

Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous and not the other way around, but it was the revolution that popularized that thought.

That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

liberty equality fraternity - yes, the revolution was bound to happen. You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes. And democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

[pdonis]

> Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous

You must be joking. Even ostensibly democratic governments have no problem at all treating the people as subjects instead of as masters.

> That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

There are lots of ways to end a monarchy which, while they are not bloodless, do not involve insane murderers rising to the top. But the fact that insane murderers did rise to the top in the French Revolution was not a "side effect"; it was an obvious consequence of the way that revolution was done, dictated from the top down by a small group of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason".

> You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes.

The totalitarian regimes that killed more than a hundred million people in the 20th century were not "monarchist". They were, as I have said, inspired by the French Revolution, and by the horrible idea that a small group of people can totally restructure society based on "reason". Every time it's been tried it has ended in, to use your phrase, insane murderers rising to the top.

> democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

You do realize that "democracy" is also the term that regimes like the one installed by the French Revolution, and the Soviet Union, and the other totalitarian regimes that arose from small groups of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason", used to describe themselves, right?

[chii]

All revolution does is put a different group of people in charge than previously.

The outcome could be good bad or ugly. Look at the iranian revolution. It has not resulted in a better outcome at all. In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

[vkou]

> In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII.

Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great.

We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also describe those as a 'worse outcome for the citizenry'?

[1] Which could also be described, if not as de-colonization, as an end to Soviet imperialism.

[pdonis]

> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s

And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically nobody in those countries wanted Soviet rule anyway. This has been true for few if any other revolutions in history.

[UncleMeat]

That still sounds like a revolution to me.

If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!

[pdonis]

> That still sounds like a revolution to me.

The term "revolution", while it does not have to imply bloodshed, does imply some kind of struggle involved. My point about what happened in the countries of Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell was that there was no struggle at all, not even a bloodless one. Everyone just said "about time" and went about the business of running their own countries.

[BurningFrog]

A war of independence is a quite different thing than a revolution!

For one thing, when it's won, the losers go back home. After a revolution, they stay around. Which is you often end up killing them.

[widespace_]

>the losers go back home

It should be noted that often when wars of independence happen there are still many people who identify with the side of the "losers" whose homes are on the "winners" side, and vice versa.

For example Greek independence did not magically transmit the Turks living in their borders to Turkey, nor did it transfer the Greeks living in Turkey to Greece. What was needed to resolve that situation was ethnic cleansing via the deportation of the populations to their respective countries, in such that a country where they hadn't lived before can be called "theirs".

[triceratops]

The American Revolution and the American War of Independence are synonymous.

[vkou]

The only reason we no longer live under hereditary monarchies, ruled over by privileged-by-birth nobles who are very explicitly and shamelessly above the law, is because revolutions have done a great job of either killing off those monarchs and nobles, or by scaring the surviving ones into giving up their power.

I don't think you have any appreciation for how the basic rights you take for granted were a direct product of the rivers of blood shed in those struggles.

[pdonis]

I live in the U.S., so the basic rights I take for granted were already in place before the French Revolution. They are the result of the American Revolution, and before that the English one a century earlier. (And before that a long history of England and Britain gradually transferring power from the monarch to Parliament, going all the way back to the Magna Carta.) While neither of those revolutions were bloodless, they were a lot less bloody than the French Revolution, not to mention a lot more stable once they were done. Britain's unwritten constitution has not changed all that much since 1688 (the monarchy has continued to lose power, but it had already lost most of it by then); The U.S. Constitution is still in place; France since its revolution has had a reign of terror, an emperor, another monarchy, another revolution, and five republics.

So if I were to pick a revolution or revolutions that set the pattern for guaranteeing basic rights, it would be the English and American ones, not the French one.

[vkou]

Oddly enough, you're omitting the English Civil Wars, which have killed an order of magnitude more people than the French Revolution.

But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses.

Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many of which immediately backslid during reconstruction, because the Union's policy of appeasement and compromise with the losers

And that's just the English-speaking world. In much of the rest of Europe, it took the industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war to destabilize its monarchies of the early 20th century. Autocrats rarely give up power without violence, or the threat thereof.

[pdonis]

I agree that the English Civil War was much bloodier than the French Revolution. However, that was not what started the pattern of guaranteeing basic human rights in England. The English Civil War was followed by Cromwell, whose regime was anything but a respecter of basic human rights, and then by the restoration of the monarchy, without very much in the way of change. The Revolution of 1688 was the one that really changed things in terms of respect for human rights in the English system.

I mentioned the American Civil War and its death toll in the post of mine that started this subthread. I agree that it did also establish basic human rights for the former slaves, who had not had them recognized before in the U.S.

The backsliding you refer to, however, did not happen during Reconstruction, when the Union's policy was anything but appeasement and compromise: the former Confederate states were basically under martial law. What started the backsliding was the back-room deal that gave Hayes, the Republican candidate in 1876, the Presidency in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to end Reconstruction, after the election went to the House of Representatives. In any case, the backsliding was not a matter of changing the actual legal status of basic human rights; it was simply state and local governments in certain regions deciding to just ignore that actual legal status when they felt like it, and the Federal government being either unwilling or unable to override them. What eventually changed that was the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

[rkk3]

> I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths)

uh Why? Because of the rights of man and the metric system? Think you need to elaborate.

[pdonis]

The French Revolution inspired the Russian one, which created the Soviet Union; and the Russian revolution inspired the Chinese one, which created Communist China. Those in turn inspired further Communist revolutions in various countries, the most salient being Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Those Communist regimes were responsible for more than a hundred million deaths in the 20th century.

[rkk3]

Uhhh...... No the french revolution did not cause Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Just No.