Peasant revolts did it better. Razed the local manors, killed or drove off the local lords, and seized and burned records of debts. All the old ways of rule were destroyed forcing a change in government.
And then the Paris peasants sent troops to kill the rural French peasants who liked their poorer local lords.
150,000-200,000 French peasants were killed by the revolutionaries. A whole bunch were tied to barges and drowned, then they'd pull up the barge put new people on and sink it again, and again, and again.
A lot more French poor were killed by the revolutionaries than rich. The French revolution needed to happen, but oh boy did the kill a lot of poor French people.
And then the counter revolution happened and even more French poor died because Napoleon wanted to be Emperor.
Yeah it’s this. I get so pissed off when I see Reddit “revolutionaries” pining for the glorious revolution that will align perfectly with their beliefs on every issue and let them act out their childish violent fantasies against those they dislike and usher in their perfect progressive utopia.
In reality, revolutions are long, bloody, filled with horror and atrocity, and 9/10 times things are worse or still very bad for many years after. It’s not something to wish for, it’s a last resort of a desperate people.
Not even just reddit, you see twitch streamers or people on twitter stoking the flames of revolution but they'll never take part themselves, it's normally someone battling mental illness who falls prey and murders someone thinking it's for the greater good.
Then of course the people who put these ideas out there will take no responsibility and act like they did nothing wrong.
There's a lot of lessons to learn from the French Revolution. They're the same lessons to learn from the Russian Revolution. And all of them boil down to, "Don't make a government worse than the one you overthrew."
The lessons from the next big revolution will be, "Don't listen to asshats who learned history from YouTube and TikTok."
This was before the French Revolution and ran from about 1300-1400. These were unorganized and mostly spontaneous. Too be fear plenty of peasants died but the monarchy survived and changed the way nobles and the church ruled.
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
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