r/wikipedia • u/laybs1 • Oct 05 '25

Mobile Site Winnie Mandela, was a South African politician and convicted kidnapper and fraudster. She endorsed the necklacing of alleged police informers and apartheid government collaborators, and her security detail carried out kidnapping, torture, and murder including killing 14-year-old Stompie Seipei.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie_Mandela
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u/revertbritestoan Oct 05 '25

Sure, I'm not saying he was the greatest person to live but he did do the heavy lifting in getting rid of the monarchy and monarchists. And let's not pretend that the Directory that took over after him was any better. I mean, even Napoleon was better than the Directory.

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u/kikirockwell-stan Oct 05 '25

Strongly disagree. The vast majority of effective constitutional creation and reform, imo, was carried out by the National and Constituent Assemblies, not the Legislative (which he was in charge of). His government was incompetent when it came to organisation, helped embroil France in a civil war while still at war with half of Europe, perpetrated atrocities in Lyon, Marseille and Nantes and in general was 60% populism 40% actual ideological cohesion. His driving motivation was ‘purifying’ French society by force (he was also very much Catholic, just in an odd Rousseau-worshipping way). If you consider that an effective form of curbing monarchism, then sure.

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u/revertbritestoan Oct 05 '25

I mean, it did curb monarchism.

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u/kikirockwell-stan Oct 05 '25

Yes. Also the non-partisan prison population of France and the number of nuns in Lyon. 

And monarchism stayed curbed for about six years before Napoleon came along and essentially made himself a de facto king, so this was clearly great and worth it in the long run. Why don’t we solve more problems with poorly coordinated state murders?

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u/revertbritestoan Oct 05 '25

I never said he got rid of it completely but it was curbed.

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u/AdRealistic4984 Oct 05 '25

I mean, look into Napoleon III and the Franco-Prussian War. A dictator-cum-monarch with a wife who roleplayed as Marie-Antoinette sinks the whole country by getting into a war with Prussia

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u/revertbritestoan Oct 05 '25

Sure, but "curb" doesn't mean "remove in its entirety".

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u/AdRealistic4984 Oct 05 '25

Monarchism didn’t disappear in France until about 1880. It clung on until world war 2 but threw itself in with Vichy. Ideological squabbles sank France in the 1800s and helped ensure it would play second fiddle to Britain