this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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The third estate had effectively politically overthrown the old regime by like day five of the estates general. There would still be a king, but the clergy-nobility-commons divide was gone and there would be representative government. Not enough, obviously, but a step in the right direction.
Denton decided the people he didn’t like needed to die and that sent things spinning out toward murderville for everyone, including eventually himself. Basically everyone who would have built upon those small steps fled the country or were murdered. Many of them were shitheads, yes. But I think France would have been better off without the head-choppy parts of the revolution.
That doesn't seem compatible with the summaries I've found. I'm not an expert by any means, but it looks like the constitutional monarchy you mentioned was repeatedly sabotaged by Louis XVI until he was violently deposed. You can argue against his beheading the following January all you like, but deposing him was not a change from within, it was a violent revolution. They stormed the palace and threw him in jail.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-great-french-revolution-1789-1793#toc27
Yeah, Louis XVI was not going along with the program willingly. But on occasion he felt the need to at least pretend to, and made some concessions, and told his asshole brother to stop making such a fuss in exile.
I guess the whole thing just contrasts with what was happening across the channel in the same time period. England / the UK did not have a violent revolution in 1848 like the French, Austrians, Prussians, and Italians did. A bunch of smaller German states avoided it too. Because their leaders saw the writing on the wall and made small concessions. It’s not like the late 1800s were a great time in those places, but they ended up in similar spots as the more violent revolutionary -> reactionary -> liberalizing places did but without all the suffering that came with (admittedly cathartic) chucking bricks and chopping heads.