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by vianneychevalie
1062 days ago
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I think you’re mistaken, at least about the French revolution. It was carried out by rich people, looking for more power, making use of a common and regular occurence of popular uprising (Jacqueries, in political science, is the name of those quite common « revolutions »). Royalty does not necessarily cause misery, Sweden, Spain, the UK are all monarchies. Colbert and Louis XIV built a lot of foundations that you know France for today; even later non-democratic regimes such as the Second Empire (Napoleon III and Haussman) structured the Paris that brings tourists the world over… The French revolution - that I know of - led to the invention of restaurants because rich people from remote cities came to Paris and wanted to live the fastuous life they envied from nobles. Social cleansing? Nothing of the sort, social exploitation as always, from where money and power came as always. |
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It is always thus; one must belong in order to revolt. In fact that was successfully exploited by the Swedish King in the mid 16th century by wiping out a significant chunk of disaffected aristocrats to form a moat between the monarchy and the classes that couldn't afford to revolt. A similar strategy was taken by Louis XIV by forcing the aristos to move to Versailles away from their intrinsic power bases. Of course in bot cases this just delayed things and the middle classes formed alliances with aristos and overthrow those regimes too.
You see this also in both competing sides of the Chinese civil war, Viet Nam's and India's independence movements, the Bolsheviks, US revolution and its civil war, etc. The hagiographic retellings always emphasize of the popular underpinnings in order to try to establish or maintain legitimacy, but it is never the case.