/monarchy/ - Past, Present, and Future

First of all, did democracy really solve the governmental oppression? You know what I'm going to bring up here. The moment 'democracy' took over, you got the Great Terror, and conditions far, far worse than under King Louis. I think this is indicative of something being rotten fundamentally in French society. In other words, the Great Terror is proof that something was culturally rotten in France, not necessarily politically rotten, which I'll get to in a moment.

Next point, say you have a house. The house is shit. The roof is leaky, you can't go up to the second floor because termite have eaten the supports. It looks like things are going to collapse. The house has to be rebuilt. Question:

- Do you rebuild it close to the design it had before, but make a few minor changes that might improve some of the previous problems?

Or

- Do you allow really drastic changes in design?

This argument is actually Burke's, and it's basically the idea of evolution applied to government. The latter was the French Revolution. It was no surprise that it went right back to monarchy, just like the English Civil War before it, and within a decade at that.

So, even if you disagree that there was something else undecidely rotten in French society, there is something to be said about slow gradual changes in government to take account for changes in society, like what Britain and other countries did in taking on constitutional frameworks.

Now, returning back to the original paragraph, what was rotten? Well, one key component of l'Ancien Regime is the clergy, and in order to have a properly functioning religious estate, you need to have religious homogeneity in the society. I don't think it's any surprise that at the same moment the enlightenment began attacking the fundamental religious institutions in Europe, that you saw the rise of constitutional monarchies.

>>838

>that the French people were oppressed by the King and his government

Everyone's oppressed by the government, but the Frenchies didn't have it that bad. There was some inequity in taxation, as the Third Estate had to pay higher taxes while having fewer privileges, but really, nothing so dramatic. And standards of living were perhaps the highest in the world. They didn't even have serfdom in most of the country, that was abolished years earlier.

>that this condition was extreme and intolerable;

What I said above. Not

>that a Revolution of some kind was desirable, even if it was 'taken too far' in this instance.

And here, I can refer you to what the other anon said on the sick French society. Not the entire country was rotten, of course, but enough elements so that a man like de Sade could be widely read and could manage to rouse a mob to attack a fortress. The Revolution went too far precisely because it was sick to begin with. It isn't true that movements just spontaneously become violent, they usually already carried violent elements in them and the question is only whether these elements will become predominant or not.