Astral Codex Ten

French Revolution

6 min read

French Revolution

Article

French Revolution is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 09, 2021 and April 25, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism”; “the French Revolution had a similar effect on European nobility”; “During the French Revolution, wearing dress associated with the royalist Ancien Régime made the wearer a target for the Jacobins”. It most often appears alongside United States, Athens, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Events
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: April 25, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great. This was the vibe I got from Gabriel Over The White House (sorry, subscriber-only post), the movie exhorting FDR to become a fascist dictator. So many obviously good policies had built up behind the veto point that we needed a Great Man to come in, sweep them away, and satisfy the people's cries for justice. Obviously at its worst this thread can lead to authoritarianism.
Inline links: vetocracy, Gabriel Over The White House
Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution, by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (from 2009; h/t Rob B). Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of Europe. They abolished their client states' traditional systems, replacing them with the Napoleonic Code and other "modern" legal systems. Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest. So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
Inline links: The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
Whither Tartaria?
September 23, 2021 · Original source
Paul Fussell says that pre-Great Depression mansions were beautiful giant houses in the center of town, where everyone could see them and marvel at how rich the owner was. During the Depression, it became awkward to flaunt wealth while everyone else was starving, and the super-rich switched to a strategy of having mansions in the countryside behind lots of hedges and trees where nobody could see them. I remember somebody (not a historian) claiming that the French Revolution had a similar effect on European nobility - it stopped being quite as cool to rub how rich you were in peasants' faces, and going to court in silks and gold jewelery became less fashionable. The closer you get to the present, the more rich people start to feel like their position is precarious, and other people might resent them - and to act accordingly.
Inline links: Paul Fussell
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
During the French Revolution, wearing dress associated with the royalist Ancien Régime made the wearer a target for the Jacobins. Working class men of the era, many of whom were revolutionaries, came to be known as sans-culottes because they could not afford silk breeches and wore less expensive pantaloons instead. The term was first used as an insult by French officer Jean-Bernard Gauthier de Murnan but was reclaimed by these men around the time of the Demonstration of 20 June 1792.
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
Infowars does err (as far as I know) in linking this to the Illuminati, an 18th century German society that wanted to rebuild the order of the world upon a foundation of Reason but dissolved before ever doing very much. The article includes a fake history of the Illuminati, so in that sense it is wrong. But Infowars didn’t invent this fake history. For example, the claim that the Illuminati caused the French Revolution didn’t originate with Jones - it was one of the most popular explanations of the Revolution in the late 1700s, before the Revolution was even over! Jones is just citing the authorities of the time! Likewise, here’s a 2011 movie linking Bohemian Grove to the Illuminati - Jones didn’t invent any of this.
Inline links: one of the most popular explanations of the Revolution, 2011 movie linking Bohemian Grove to the Illuminati
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument
April 25, 2024 · Original source
And as some people on Twitter point out, it’s wrong even in the case of coffee! The claimed danger of coffee was that “Kings and queens saw coffee houses as breeding grounds for revolution”. But this absolutely happened - coffeehouse organizing contributed to the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution, among others. So not only is the argument “Fears about coffee were dumb, therefore fears about AI are dumb”, but the fears about coffee weren’t even dumb.
Inline links: Glorious Revolution, French Revolution