WI: The French Revolution failed
- Thread starter Maximilien.
- Start date
Define fail and, for that matter, define French Revolution. After all, depending on how you slice it, by 1799, 1804, 1814 or 1815, the Revolution had pretty badly failed at the whole regime-overturning deal and yet if you look at the world in 1948, or Europe in 1990, you can definitely see there are matters more important where its death could not prevent it from having its ideals propagated.
Is it that the nobles and the clergy manage to effectively muzzle the Tiers État in the États Généraux and convince the king to do the barest of reforms while working with them? That's still going to leave a massive amount of financial problems behind and the anger simmering.
Is it that the députés from the Tiers État don't take their oath to give the country a Constitution or that the Parisians fail to either rise up or to take the Bastille? In a way, the Rubicon has already been crossed and movements all around France's towns and countrysides are happening.
Is it that the Great Fear doesn't happen and the abolition of the privileges and maybe the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen don't get proclaimed in August 1789? If the Revolution radicalises at some point or other, something like them is going to occur.
Is it that the Constituante can't agree on a text? the First Coalition faces no significant opposition and waltzes into Paris? Those are unlikely and bring their own sets of problems.
Etc, etc.
The Revolution is an immensely volatile period, with lots of actors and extremely butterfly-prone because of such massive interactions but because of that, you need to be specific.
This could be one of those simple a monarch is restored and things go on at a slow pace before probably collapsing again.
Or it just completely collapses and we have a reemergence of feudalism in France...
Or anything really. The failure of the French Revolution would be a simply massive event, but it would be a case of when and how to determine the end point.
Or it just completely collapses and we have a reemergence of feudalism in France...
Or anything really. The failure of the French Revolution would be a simply massive event, but it would be a case of when and how to determine the end point.
Define success.Arguably,the French Revolution did fail consider the clusterfuck that happened.
From the vary narrow goal of overthrowing the absolute monarchy, it succeeded, even if the results were not pretty.
Except that wasn't the goal.The goal of the French Revolution was to create a constitutional monarch governed by liberty and the rule of law.
It did arguably succeed, considering the sheer extent that Jacobin ideals and the Rights of Man have permeated society throughout the world.
Yeah, their ideals permeated allright, it's thanks to those ***holes that it's impossible to win a libel suit nowadays and anyone can smear your name with lies and the courts are on the side of the deframers.
I would say that while the First Republic ultimately failed, the Revolution succeeded, in that many of its ideas became accepted by the majority and future régimes had to embrace them or be overthrown.
That was the goal of Lafayette and the Constitutionalists' revolution but not necessarily the goal of the Jacobins' revolution
Point being, both factions had the goal of getting rid of the absolute monarchy, it worked for that goal
That literally has nothing to do with the French Revolution. You may as well blame the Jacobins for your toast getting burned.