Larrey

Well, the Napoleonic wars are also the only time a state of war has existed between Sweden and Britian. And I wouldn't be too proud of an ally like king Gustaf IV. His alignment against France was largely due to, like the Tsar of Russia, thinking Napoleon was actually the Antichrist. Not the most balanced of crowned heads. Good thing some clear-sighted officers removed the royal disaster in 1809, and brought in a revolutionary constitutional monarchy, even if it then aligned itself against France.

And of that list at least Austria, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Ottoman Empire, Sardinia, Sweden (to 1809), and Persian Empire were absolute monarchies.

What that also means is they did not represent the nations, the people, but the crowned heads, the dynasties, by the Grace of God. You need a shift to liberal politics to give them popular representativity, since according to liberal precepts, political legitimacy is derived from the people. And that was part of what the absolute monarchies were fighting tooth and nail.

Iolo

Well, everyone dies. The Revolution opened up possibilities: 'Oh change, from age to age/Thou hope of the people!'

avon

Yesterday I asked that we drop discussion of Bloody Sunday and stick to topic.

Mosquito

What should be not overlooked is the fact that every revolution including the French one is a kind of civil war. In such type of war not only the values and stuggle for power plays the role but also personal feelings of many people. And only the civil war is the kind of war during which you can kill the people you know well and hate for long time. Some people simply join one side of such war because their personal enemies are on the other side.

Iolo

Well said. That is what makes such wars so dicey to start, so ferocious in their development and so interminatble in historical memory. Best avoided, in my view.

Corto Maltese

In the long term i have to say yes.

jdghgh

The French Revolution as an event needs to be viewed in a separate context from the vast international political consequences it induced.

It is almost universally regarded as one of the most important events in world history. Moreover, I would agree that it was worth the death toll.

Though the debate over death and it's necessity in a historic context is one that could easily be argued one way or another.

Perhaps, then, it would be best stated that the Revolution was a great event which began and encouraged many important and beneficial changes to civilization.

PM96

But the majority of revolutions do not result in real liberation. How many revolutions have replaced one tyrannical government for another? Too many to count. Of course there are some examples of "good"/successful revolutions, but you get the point...

Anyways, the French Revolution was... it was a good idea, but executed in an excessively bloody manner. Way too many people were executed / mobbed to death then was needed to be. And keep in mind many innocent people - not only royalty/aristocracy but also commoners - were brutally killed.

But of course, modern France is now a democratic, stable country. As some may argue, when we get results like this, how can we dispute the means to get them? This is open to debate.

Earl_of_Rochester

I'd hardly say the Terror was virtuous and it wasn't worth the price of that class inspired genocide, let alone the war.

Boney was singularly responsible for more death and suffering in all of European history until Adolf Hitler.

Iolo

I didn't think we were talking about virtue. Every one of the people killed in the September massacres, the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars would, after all, have been dead long since whether these events had occured or not, and the question is whether the average life now is the better for those events. I can't see anything particularly virtuous about the strutting of kings and aristocrats and the starving of an ignorant peasantry, but I'm a simple soul.