this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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If we look at the previous time gullotines were used, there was something called Reigh of Terror which, after enormous, egregious amount of indiscriminate murder, ended with pretty brutal dictatorship who immediately started a world war (and obviously lost).
Nothing of that sounds fun.
Messy as it was, it probably beats living with the divine right of kings forever.
Perhaps there's a more polite way to completely overhaul government, but it did work.
They lived under the divine right of an Emperor after, the whole point that it didn't work! And then they had another one, which resulted, you guessed it, in another monarchy.
For those who survived all of that, by some divine miracle, absolutely nothing changed. There was transition of power, sure, from one dynasty to another, but is that what we really can call a positive outcome of all the countless beheadings?
But it did work.
France after the revolution, even when they backslid into having kings, had more rights for the people and less power for the king and church. The pre-revolution king had absolute power – the kings after the revolution had to contend with political parties and worry about not looking like he was trying to grab full power again. Napoleon might have been an emperor but he also set up a solid legal system that wasn't the arbitrary will of the king.
Around in europe, the revolution influenced the rise in liberal philosophy and democratic ideals. The french revolution wasn't the sole trigger of this of course, but it's commonly seen as a strong factor. It took a few hundred years but other countries either adapted over time or ended up with their own revolution like russia.
It wasn't a one clean blodless step from feudalism to modern democracy, but it was a step. They backslid, but they didn't backslide all the way back to the divine right of kings.