Comment by JumpCrisscross

12 hours ago

> One final resolution is the guillotine

Did you miss the lesson from the actual guillotine? It’s just another escalation in the cycle. The parties switch from raiding to guillotining each other. The guillotine doesn’t solve the problem, it just raises the stakes.

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JumpCrisscross

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shermantanktop  11 hours ago

Sure. Final resolution for that leader, in any case. But in the cycles of history, those events are almost always inflection points where something new happens. For the Terror, that lasted a while, but then we got Napoleon, which was definitely a new chapter.

  • JumpCrisscross  9 hours ago

    > in the cycles of history, those events are almost always inflection points where something new happens

    Guillotines have historically been a time for the elites to consolidate wealth and power (with some shuffling among them). The poor and middle class eat shit.

    (The only exceptions to the first part to my knowledge being the o.g., and only the o.g., communist revolutions in Russia and China. Still shit for the poor and middle class. But the elites fully rotated.)

    > For the Terror, that lasted a while, but then we got Napoleon, which was definitely a new chapter

    Sure. One which involved shuffling between Bourbons and an imperial Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna brought peace to Europe until WWI. But to the extent the French Revolution benefited ordinary people, it was in Britain and America.

    Being temporally proximate to a guillotining is precedentedly fine. Being physically proximate to it is pretty much shit unless you're already powerful (or lucky enough to land a seat in the new oligarchy).

    • DiscourseFan  9 hours ago

      Human society is prone to convulsions, though. Just like the often body requires a shock to become stronger, healthier, societies need to be a push to avoid stagnation and decay. Though its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far.

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skrebbel  12 hours ago

Just to add to this, it still blows my mind how quickly this happened. The French went from overthrowing the royals to guillotining their neighbours within 5 years, and in the same short timespan Robespierre went madder than any Sun King had ever been. "La Terreur" was total madness.

  • pavlov  11 hours ago

    On top of that he was a tremendous speaker. Tyrants don’t usually bother to justify their actions much beyond “because I can and I want to.” (Cf. current US administration’s discourse over Greenland.)

    But Robespierre was a believer in capital-R Reason, and he had to face the National Assembly all the time. So his speeches are a fascinating gradual slippery slope from “it would be good if Jews and actors would get to vote too” to “only Terror will purify the world.”

    I’ve got a little book of them, aptly titled “Les plus beaux discours de Robespierre” — his most beautiful speeches. It would be an odd adjective to use about almost any other political monster’s output (excepting Antiquity and the distance we have to them).

  • TitaRusell  7 hours ago

    My country went from 1000 years of Christian hegemony to atheist in a span of approximately 20 years. Don't underestimate the capacity for humans to change.

  • JumpCrisscross  11 hours ago

    > French went from overthrowing the royals to guillotining their neighbours

    The irony being the elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].

    [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023