More historical date

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I can understand why Americans would say their revolution, but really, the more important one was the French. It's not even a contest.

Modern democratic politics itself is a legacy of the French Revolution.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I can understand why Americans would say their revolution, but really, the more important one was the French. It's not even a contest.

Modern democratic politics itself is a legacy of the French Revolution.

To say that modern democratic politics is a legacy of the French Revolution is not just an overstatement, but it is flat out wrong. At best, one can say that it served as a catalyst that caused a number of trends in European politics to proceed explosively but those trends had been evident well before the Revolution and considering the counterrevolutionary trends that happened in reaction, in the long term, it's doubtful the French Revolution had any long term impact save one, the Code Napoléon, and that more because it became the primary example of codified civil law rather than it being the inspiration for it.

Please read a book about modern European history before making these posts.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

That's a caricatural view of the French Revolution.

Look, as I said above: the idea that the people should rule found its first political expression in the French Revolution. I don't think you grasp how important that paradigm shift was for humanity. Suddenly, the lowest people had an interest in politics. Every single politician: Trump, Merkel, Putin, Corbyn, Abe, Modi, Xi all have to pay lip service to liberté égalité fraternité in their own way. Yes, Ernest might say "but the Enlightenment came up with the idea", but 1) this is an apples-to-oranges comparison of an a intellectual movement with a political event, 2) its implementation in actual politics is different by an order of magnitude, and 3) one can just as easily say the same thing about the American Revolution, the ideas of which were all developed in the Enlightenment too.

As to examples of its impact, the French Revolution was the catalyst for the emergence of party politics, including a popular party, in America itself, against the express wishes of the framers of the US constitution; and I could go into the French Revolution in Haiti and the impact that had on slaveholders in the American South, leading to civil war. In Britain it created the radical reform movement that roiled British politics for decades, threatening revolution several times (including an actual one in Ireland) before eventually winning in 1832. British politics, the "British system", would be unimaginable without the French revolution; there would be no Thomas Paine's Rights of Man for God's sake. Would Latin America have won its independence? Would we have German or Italian nationalism? Would we even have had the Romantic movement in the arts? Imagine how different western culture would be without Romanticism...

Yes, it's quite possible that all of the things above would have happened without the French Revolution, but form they would have taken would be completely different.

For a taste of the shock the revolution had across Europe and the Americas, Robert Burns says something of it:

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That was the impact of the French Revolution.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I mean, there's a reason why 1789 is considered by historians to be the start date of modern European history, and it's not because of the Napoleonic Code.