Explanation: “We should bring back the guillotine” or similar is a common internet quip in response to billionaires doing billionaire things, when in reality the guillotine was invented to provide equal and humane deaths to people of all classes, and from there it was always a tool of the state rather than the people. Not the best euphemism for “we should depose the bourgeoisie.” In fact plenty of Revolutionary justice folks were themselves offed by the guillotine during the Terror.
Yeah that’s the popular characterization, but it doesn’t really track. The spark of the French Revolution was the French treasury going bankrupt, then the aristocracy “revolted” against Louis XVI in the form of throwing the book at him and telling him to call the Estates General, which he did when he went from bankrupt to really bankrupt. Then we reach the “revolution” of capital, which starts with the calling of the Estates General and ends with the founding of the National Assembly less than two months later. That’s it, now feudalism is out, bourgeoisie democracy is in; from that point on France was governed by an all-powerful unicameral legislature (with the method of election to the benefit of capital) all the way until the inauguration of the Directory.
I wrote my comment through a rudimentary lens of historical materialism: looking at the material basis and class dynamics from a macro perspective; it describes general trends instead of specifics.
I mean, if we’re talking historical materialism then the transfer of political power from the aristocracy and clergy to the bourgeoisie definitely happened; my point is that this transfer ended so fast and faced so little resistance that it can hardly be used to characterize the French Revolution as a whole. Most of the French Revolution was what happened in the aftermath of this transfer, is what I’m trying to say.
Ah, good point! My tired brain took a while getting it…
Could the French revolution be characterised as the final “finish” of said transfer, then?
Also I’m not that deep into the matter TBH, my current approach to (modern (that’s where my interest really begins)) history is more of a “I know the most relevant things from the POV of my rudimentary understanding of historical materialism (and from a more “generic” one) from broad chunks of approximate timeperiods”.
I don’t really have the mental capacity or rather head space for proper study unfortunately :/
Not quite. While some transfer of power had taken place through venal office and purchase of noble titles, it was still aristocrats running things both in form and function by the time of the Revolution. The thing about the Ancien Regime was that everyone could agree it was broken but nobody could agree on what to do about it, so there wasn’t a strong enough force of reaction to prevent the calling of the Estates General, which marks the start of the Revolution. After the Estates General was called the bourgeois and liberal noble elements ended up with most of the power because that’s what you get with representative democracy. Imagine if a modern bourgeois state createed hyperlocal workers’ councils to make some decision that the state can’t make on its own, and if these workers’ councils then seized state power. That’s the French Revolution.