alternatehistory.com

I'm listening to an actual audio recording by Teddy Roosevelt here, and he mentions some dude with a girl's name in his speech-

All the woes of France for a century and a quarter have been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot, and backed them up, all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot; and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform, at the cost of the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alternations of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went through misery toward a shattered goal.
Upon skimming the article, it seems as if Turgot was one of those Burkean? Lockean? classical liberal types of the era. Anyways, what if TR had his way, and the moderate liberal reformers had been the prominent once in France?
Top