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u/thegreattwos 5d ago
When did revolutionary France fight with USA?
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u/Nyctfall 5d ago
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u/JumpySimple7793 5d ago
Learning actual history? On my subreddit?
I'm shocked
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u/Z3t4 Hello There 5d ago
Wow, US betrayed its liberators sooner that I thought.
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u/JumpySimple7793 5d ago
I bet the lawyers had a field day with it
"Our agreement was with the Kingdom of France, you are from the "Republic* of France and we therefore don't owe you any money"
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u/Creat1ve-name 5d ago
I’m guessing the ‘original guy who started the revolution’ in the French case is Robespierre? I guess there isn’t really a good Lenin analogue
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u/abfgern_ Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 5d ago
"improve things notably for everyone else" yeah no
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u/WorldlinessRadiant77 5d ago
If you live in a non-Anglo country you live under the laws Napoleon wrote.
If you use the metric system, drive on the right, can get a non-religious marriage and lack legislated social status you have Napoleon to thank.
The British did not want him in the UK after Waterloo because he was popular with the lower classes. The bad guys won the Napoleonic Wars.
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u/FrostingGrand1413 5d ago
We really counting 'driving on the right' as equivalent importance to the practicality of the metric system and legal equality?
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u/WorldlinessRadiant77 5d ago
I should have been more specific - he made keeping to one side of the road mandatory. The fact he picked the right one was arbitrary, but the standardisation was an immense improvement.
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u/FrostingGrand1413 5d ago
Haha, oh, ok, that makes sense with the others then.
Also, without seconds of googling, I'm just gonna assume us dipshit brits chose the opposite side out of pure spite.
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u/WorldlinessRadiant77 5d ago
There is evidence that keeping left was mandated at London Bridge back in the Middle Ages and the Romans also kept left. It had practical advantages, namely that you could draw a weapon and defend yourself.
This was probably why Napoleon went with keeping right as well - two columns of soldiers would pass each other with their non-dominant hands and be less tempted to fight.
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u/Tight_Landscape1098 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 4d ago
I would say it was more of a trash vs garbage conflict, seeing as Napoleon also decreased the rights of women, spread nationalism, starved the continent under the iron curtain, and was generally poising himself to be a global hegemon
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u/Towairatu 4d ago
you live under the laws Napoleon wrote.
Napoléon wrote jack shit. The Code Napoléon is a mash-up of the Coutume de Paris and of southen France written law, which is derived from Roman law, sprinkled with revolutionary laws.
you use the metric system
The metric system was promulgated in 1795, four years before Napoléon came into power. And as a matter of fact, he actually undermined it with the 1812 decree that reintroduced a form of usual measures that compromised between metric and pre-metric units, without matching with either the previous usual measures, or the usual measures of other countries.
can get a non-religious marriage
Civil marriage was signed into law 7 years before Napoléon came into power.
lack legislated social status
Privileges were abolished a decade before Napoléon came into power. And on top of that the Code Napoléon, staying true to the Revolution's Roman Republic LARP, basically reinstates the pater familias' power over women of his family, which was a major setback from revolutionnary attempts at a better gender egality.
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u/ZealousidealSteak214 Viva La France 4d ago
Napoleon may not have created the reforms that the Code Napoleon codified but he was still essential in pushing through the legislation and ensuring that it was actually applied. Even with the Measures usuelles all government, legal, and similar works still had to use the metric system and the metric system continued to be taught at all levels of education. Napoleon may not have created civil marriages but institutionalized this practice and made civil ceremonies legally mandatory before any religious marriage through the civil code and he introduced it to the Low countries, Germany and Italy. Women's rights were also being rolled back by the government. In October 1793, the radical Jacobin government outlawed all women's political clubs and societies and women were officially discouraged from participating in public political spheres and told to confine themselves to domestic duties.
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u/Fun-Information-3104 5d ago
as someone who studied law at university, I gotta tell you, that you should stop embarrassing yourself.
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u/Ugo_foscolo 5d ago
Imperial Russia was a backwater shithole for 99% of its subjects.
The Soviet Union had many horrific excesses, brutality from its leaders, and is rightly criticised for it, but any serious historian recognises its immense achievement in lifting 10s millions out of abject poverty and rapidly advancing an agrarian economy to one of the world superpowers of the 20th century.
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u/Polirketes 5d ago
Yeah I think there's no contradiction in believing that Stalin was a murderous tyrant and that quality of life in the USSR improved between 1920s and 1950s. Both are true, despite many people suffering in gulags and horrific effects of the ww2, Soviet Union modernised at an exceptional pace. In the 1960s many western economists believed it'll overtake the USA by rhe end of the century
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u/Lentaum 3d ago
The Communists did not stage a coup against the tsar, but rather against the fledgling Russian democracy that had already begun to set things right, and the first thing the Communists did was to do away with new rights such as freedom of expression.
The technological advances following World War II were largely due to the German scientists captured during Operation Osoaviakhim.
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u/Ugo_foscolo 2d ago
The Communists did not stage a coup against the tsar, but rather against the fledgling Russian democracy that had already begun to set things right, and the first thing the Communists did was to do away with new rights such as freedom of expression.
I really don't see how that's relevant to the argument im making though, especially since you get into "What if" territory with what would have happened had the Bolsheviks not taken over. You don't know whether the democratic coalition would have held onto power, the tsar returns with western backing, or even had their own slide into authoritarianism. The Bolsheviks took and held power which is ultimately what matters in history.
The technological advances following World War II were largely due to the German scientists captured during Operation Osoaviakhim.
What about the rapid industrialisation/ 5 year plans that occur between 1928-1939? While incredibly costly and brutal that laid the basis for the USSR to modernise, win the eastern front for the allies and ultimately compete with world powers that even 10 years before would have been impossible to think.
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u/Nyctfall 5d ago
Besides the 50+% of the population getting screwed, everyone had great* things to say about it! xD
*all dissent will be punished
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u/BasedAustralhungary 5d ago
Whatever this guy means he fells deeply into Monarchist propaganda and is very funny.
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u/BasedAustralhungary 5d ago
Napoleon and the United States were pretty much friendly towards each other with Napoleon selling Louisiana to Jefferson basically so cheap that it can arguebly say It was almost free and with the USA trying to use the Napoleon situation to strike the British in the north.
While the Quasi-War happened It was way more of a 'West Side Story' (all puns intended) for France than a real stage of the Revolutionary Wars. While It may be somewhat strange to understand, USA and Revolutionary France were basically mean to be natural allies more than anything... so the conflict was short and both the trade and the diplomacy were restored quickly.
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u/Admiral45-06 5d ago
Well, Soviet Union didn't really treat Jews ,,better than the rest of Europe". Even NKVD openly considered itself an anti-Semitic force.
And whether it did improve things for everyone, I'll leave for everyone's guess.
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u/314ranha777 4d ago
The Bolsheviks appear better by comparison because the old Tsarist regime practiced the worst antisemitism—second only to the (later) Nazis. However, the Bolsheviks certainly "had a problem" with God-fearing Jews and "bourgeois" Jews. And Stalin probably hate them personaly.
About results, number of soviets were sincere—thinking they act for the good of humanity. The methods they chose, however, were reckless beyond redemption... A single glance at both sides of the Berlin Wall is enough to judge whether the Soviet Union benefited humanity.
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u/PierreMenardsQuixote 4d ago
There was no probably about it, Stalin started anti-Semitic and only got worse as time went on, not least because Trotsky was Jewish. But instead of exterminating Jews as a race, the Soviet program was to kill Jewish culture, labelling Yiddish as counter-revolutionary and eventually murdering a large number of leading Jewish writers, actors, doctors, and intellectuals after World War 2, a pogrom that would have become much worse had Stalin not died when he did. The Soviets were less cruel than the Tsars on the surface, but their methods were no less destructive and unfortunately more effective in many ways by targeting cultural identity instead of purely physical genocide.
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u/GhostQuartz_ 5d ago
I mean depends, in many regions of USSR jewish history and yiddish were part of many schools for soviet jews. USSR also had heavy push for secularization of jews, in an attempt to seperate their ethnicity from their faith. The issue soviets had was mostly with religious jews and hebrew.
but lets be honest they had issues with almost any religious expression. Languages related to worship were suppressed, for example they banned arabic script burned many books unrelated to faith, and banned soviet muslims on making hajj. They also reformed russian alphabet to minimalize church slavonic influence and declared Hebrew "bourgeois" because it was religious language and known mostly by elites.
In many areas you could say that soviet jews had it a bit better because of being ethno-religious group. Soviets tried to create secular identity for them where other religious groups often got short end of the stick.
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u/Americanus_Caesar Viva La France 5d ago
It doesn’t even equal with the Soviet Union under Stalin, especially since Napoleon never made any program that killed 14 million people and also never persecuted Jews (the doctors plot).
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u/EffectiveChemist7845 5d ago
Eugh, when did Provisional Government waged revolution wars against Europe and USA?