The French were very poor, very mistreated, and very oppressed. Americans had disagreements with King George, but they were often men of property. When America had its revolution, it was led on marvelous principles. Victory could be met with magnanimity. There were a lot of Tories who left America (including, not often mentioned, Ben Franklin’s loyalist son), but no guillotines.
The French, however, had greater anger and arguably greater reason to be angry. They weren’t just paying high tea taxes, they were living under soul-destroying poverty. And every step of the way, the church was telling them it was their duty to be poor, and support the life styles of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who built a minature rural village and played at being poor people for fun.
Imagine being tortured for years, and finally getting the upper hand on your torturer. Odds are you might chop off a few heads, too. Think 9/11 and the anger you felt. Imagine that every year for your whole life, and you finally got the guys who did it in your sights.
But in any case, while people were mad at the church, the Republic continued to pay church salaries. Right up until the early 1900s, all Catholic clergy were paid by tax dollars in France, so the hatred of religion was not universal. In the early 1900s, they voted into being a separation of church and state based in large part on public anger over the Dreyfus affair.
I think you've got your analogy backwards.
To extrapolate what you've written about the French Revolution, the poor and the oppressed in the case of 9/11 would be the stateless Palestinians and the evil overlord would be America which has been oppressing them for years through it's surrogate Israel. Finally, they get the chance to strike back on 9/11 and do so.
You good with that slant on things?
No?
It makes as much sense as your spin on the French Revolution.
“The French, however, had greater anger and arguably greater reason to be angry”
Not very arguable. We revolted largely over taxes, ostensibly raised to fund a war that benefitted mostly us, and we still had the lowest tax burden in the entire civilized world (that is, not counting serfs and slaves). Unless you think principles are a more legitimate cause for anger than substantive policy. But in that case, the principles are the same no matter where you live or what you’re rebelling against, and the French could have fought for them if they were smarter, and did in part.
"The Dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution is a conventional description of the results of a number of separate policies, conducted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801, forming the basis of the later and less radical Laïcité movement. The goal of the campaign was the destruction of Catholic religious practice and of the religion itself."
That's the key.
All cultures have all the types - bad ones have their 'Thomas Jefferson's' in jails as political prisoners - and their 'Hitler's' running the place. Mediocre cultures have shoe salesmen running the country... We have similar distributions of good and evil - what matters is where those groups end up in the culture. Our 'evil' has traditionally been stuck near the bottom - that's changing...
The French chose the leaders of their revolution - well, 'leaders' because they killed off all of them over the course of their revolt. We chose our leaders too - and they lived to ripe old ages...
If Europe has serious financial problems they might default to the 'french' tradition. It appears the Greeks are going down that path. We, in spite of all the liberal wet dreams about insurrection and violence, will deal with our great depression the same way we dealt with the last one.
I'm casually stunned you would defend how the French acted during their 'revolution'. I'm going to assume you don't have an excuse for Stalin...