How Could the French Revolution of 1789 Have Permanently Succeeded?
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Actually according to the research one has read royalty and the aristocratic classes numbered very few out of the tens of thousands that were butchered during the French Revolution in particular the Rein of Terror.
IIRC the largest numbers came from the religious (Catholic priests, brothers, sisters, nuns, etc...) second but first were the lower classes who were hauled off to the guillotine, hacked and or beaten to death in fields (or where they stood), and other equally gruesome methods of murder.
My point wasn't one of quantity or background of those being executed. That is irrelevant to my topic of the cause of war.
Ruling royal families used to marry daughters of other rulers to avoid war (something even Napoleon did). Marie Antoinette was a Hapsburg, the daughter of the Ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. A direct relative (sister maybe, I can't remember) of the Ruler of Austria at the time. When another country is chopping off your sister's head, you tend to take it personal.
My point wasn't one of quantity or background of those being executed. That is irrelevant to my topic of the cause of war.
Ruling royal families used to marry daughters of other rulers to avoid war (something even Napoleon did). Marie Antoinette was a Hapsburg, the daughter of the Ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. A direct relative (sister maybe, I can't remember) of the Ruler of Austria at the time. When another country is chopping off your sister's head, you tend to take it personal.
Marie-Louise of Austria was the grand-niece of Marie-Antoinette. While yes her marriage (which she initially refused and cried and begged to get out of) was meant to "heal" relations between Austria and France, Napoleon had other ideas as well.
The little upstart needed an heir and as Josephine was now apparently past her baby making days he got shot of the empress and went wife hunting. Not surprisingly the royal houses of Europe told him to get on his bike when Nappy came a wooing. Once again to cement peace a daughter of Austria was offered up. You'd think they would have learned after the whole Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fiasco.
Marie-Louise of Austria was the grand-niece of Marie-Antoinette. While yes her marriage (which she initially refused and cried and begged to get out of) was meant to "heal" relations between Austria and France, Napoleon had other ideas as well.
The little upstart needed an heir and as Josephine was now apparently past her baby making days he got shot of the empress and went wife hunting. Not surprisingly the royal houses of Europe told him to get on his bike when Nappy came a wooing. Once again to cement peace a daughter of Austria was offered up. You'd think they would have learned after the whole Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fiasco.
Amazing story isn't it? Napoleon was apparently intent in starting his own royalty line along with the Hapburgs and Bourbons.
To correct my own post above, apparently Marie Antoinette was Francis II (ruler of HRE/Austria) aunt, but he was somewhat indifferent to her losing her head because at that point she had become too much of a Francophile.
Amazing story isn't it? Napoleon was apparently intent in starting his own royalty line along with the Hapburgs and Bourbons.
To correct my own post above, apparently Marie Antoinette was Francis II (ruler of HRE/Austria) aunt, but he was somewhat indifferent to her losing her head because at that point she had become too much of a Francophile.
At first Marie-Antoinette's brother Joseph II tried very hard to rescue his sister and her family from France. As the revolution unfolded the Holy Roman Emperor kept a close watch on developments and several schemes were hatched to rescue the French royal family or at least MA. However many of these initial attempts failed because of either MA refusing to leave her children and husband and or Louis XVI's reluctance to become a fugitive king (he was well aware of the example of Charles I of England). The only scheme that worked halfway was the infamous flight to Varennes where everything that could go wrong did (the insistence of MA of using a heavy and huge royal coach along with taking along everything but the royal kitchen sink, loyal troops assuming the slow moving coach was not coming and leaving, etc...).
Once that plot was found out and aborted the Emperor Joseph II along with Austria lost interest in MA's repeated pleas for help. This even though France and Austria were by then at war and MA was feeding the "enemy" side information about military movements and such. This would come back to haunt the Queen when she would be brought to trail as an "enemy of France".
It was the abuses and humiliations heaped upon Louis XVI and MA after their aborted flight to Varennes that stirred the Emperor to action. An appeal was make to the royal courts of Europe " in view of events which "immediately compromised the honour of all sovereigns, and the security of all governments."
What we must remember as a few hundred years later with the Romanovs and George V, the first duty of a monarch is to his country, not always his family. Francis II only met his aunt MA once when he was a very small child before she went off to France. It is always a danger to impose modern familial relations on past eras especially when it involved royalty. Wars then as now were expensive undertakings and cost lives. It was not something that should have been entered into lightly or easily.
I can't remember who said it, but revolutions have a way of eating their own children. After all, once you become used to seizing power at the point of a sword the first time, it becomes easier to do it every other time afterwards.
The French Revolution was actually typical of revolts, where the settling of old scores predominated after the last shot was fired. A good history to read is Citizens by Simon Schama, which really contends that the French Revolution was less about achieving justice than it was about letting a new set of jokers run the show. The Terror pretty much demonstrate that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality was very much a lie told to the useful idiots of the mob. With that in mind, I would argue that Napoleon was the logical consequence of the French Revolution, not an unforeseen one. I mean, the Russian Revolution gave us Stalin, the Chinese Civil War gave us Mao, and even the English Civil War gave us Cromwell.
The American Revolution was interesting in that the people who actually controlled the reins of government were not hell-bent on vengeance or even holding on to power. There were not mass executions of Tories in every village. The country operated on the Articles of Confederation for several years until it was scrapped in favor of the Constitution. The Founding Father were not the perfect people that their hagiographers claim they were, but they were curiously uninterested in gaining personal power on the backs of principle. Washington could have been made king had he wanted it. In fact, I would argue that he set the precedent for supremacy of civil authority over military might when he gave his farewell address to his officers, some of whom were spoiling for a coup. Yet he didnt. 't we had the rather unique phenomenon of leaders voluntarily ceding power after losing elections while people such as Napoleon were busy lighting Europe on fire.
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