Is The US In Its French Revolution Era?

Suggested Further Resources

Revolutions [PODCAST] by Mike Duncan (Season 3), https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolutions/id703889772

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, https://bookshop.org/a/83711/9780198804932

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, https://bookshop.org/a/83711/9780385092609

Sources

French Revolution, HISTORY, https://www.history.com/articles/french-revolution

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Exploring the French Revolution, https://revolution.chnm.org/ 

French Revolution, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution

Zachary Basu, Trump's five-alarm economy, Axios, May 13, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2026/05/13/trump-inflation-economy-polls-biden

Transcript

Hi it’s Wednesday, May 13, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. Yesterday I mentioned the French Revolution and y’all made it clear you do, in fact, want an ADHD deep dive on the French Revolution and I love that you guys are on board with my antics. But the thing is I’m not the first person to say hey wait are things feeling a little like the lead up to the French Revolution right now or am I crazy??? This era has also been compared to the Gilded Age in America at the turn of the 20th century. One ended in a bloody, headless massacre, the other in significant legislative reform. Two very different potential outcomes. So today I’m talking French Revolution, later this week we’re talking Gilded Age, and then you can decide for yourself where our future might be headed. Of course, history is not a means of foreseeing the future, we love to look at the past and say well this, this, and this happened, so the same will happen here, when that’s not how things really work. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it definitely does rhyme, but usually in unexpected and hard to predict ways. And what’s cool is that we are writing history every single day, so just because something went one way in the past, we aren’t doomed to let history repeat itself, we can do what we can to work against it. I just wanted to preface this whole thing with that lest ye think I’m telling you by the end of this we’ll have brought back the guillotine. This is just a fun historical thought exercise. This is also not a treatise on the French Revolution obviously this is a 20 minute video on the internet. Tomes have been written for the last 250 years about the French Revolution, the ADHD fueled deep dive you could do is truly endless, and to this day historians debate about the true cause of the revolution and how to interpret it. A few sources you might peruse are season 3 of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, The Oxford History of the French Revolution by William Doyle, or you can try an older classic book The Ancien Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville. Okay those are all my disclaimers lets get into it and take it way way back to the 1780s…

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Okay so its 1780s France. The King is Louis the XVI, his wife is Marie Antoinette. The Kings predecessors, Louis the 15th and Louis the 14th had seen a decline in the legitimacy of the aristocracy so that by the time Louis the 16th had the crown, the people were pretty fed up with the whole feudal system ordained by god thing. For a long time, France was ruled by the king as an absolute monarch, but his power was checked by a social hierarchy known as the ancien regime, which was made up of three estates–the first and highest estate was the clergy, the second estate was the nobles, and the third estate was literally everyone else. So like 98% of France’s population was in the third estate. For a long time it was virtually impossible to move between the estates. However, by the 1700s, increased trade and manufacturing meant that a number of members of the third estate had increased their economic standing and entered the new bourgeoisie class, and peasants aspired to throw off the last vestiges of the feudal system, own their land outright, and all of them aspired to greater political power and influence. Part of this is also because of increased literacy and education and a lot of exposure to enlightenment philosophers like Descartes, John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Rousseau proved to be one of the more influential figures, and his ideas about equality, freedom, and the sovereignty of the people put a looooot of pesky little ideas in the heads of the third estate. At the same time, economic uncertainty starting in the 1770s, spurred on especially by various factors in the new world–the French support of the American Revolution cost France a LOT of money, plus they had the Seven Years’ War and the French and Indian War before that. France was the most populated country in Europe at the time so all of these issues compounded when, in 1788, much of the country experienced catastrophic crop failures at a time when the system was under greater stress from the massive population. France was home to about 20 million people, the vast majority of whom lived in the countryside. Most lived at or below subsistence levels, experiencing daily poverty and just barely able to feed their families and exchange work for a place to live and food to eat. This is how it was for most of the middle ages, the difference in the 1700s was that increased trade meant that capitalism had begun infiltrating into the lives even of peasants. Cities were even worse, where work was hard to come by and disease meant shorter lifespans for inhabitants. Due to this widespread poverty–historians estimate about 90% of the peasant class lived at or below subsistence level–the main staple in most peoples’ diets was bread. Claaaassic peasant food, bread dependency meant that fluctuation in grain prices due to crop failures had cataclysmic consequences across the country.

On top of that, a lot of nobles in the second estate were broke as fuck and so they started intermarrying with the bourgeoisie of the third estate because they were the ones who actually had an income, creating grayer lines between the formerly firmly established societal order. In order to try to rebalance the economy and settle France’s debts, the king’s finance minister called an assembly of the nobles and a few representatives of the bourgeoisie to propose a tax on the privileged classes, classes which historically had been exempt from taxes. When that didn’t work, they decided to call an Estates General, a meeting of all three estates, something that hadn’t been attempted since 1614. They met in Versailles in 1789. Immediately they were divided over whether to vote by population or by hierarchy, because of course the Third Estate would have far more power if just population numbers were counted, whereas the smaller first and second estate were accustomed to having ultimate say in matters of ruling. When they reached an impasse, the third estate broke off and created its own national assembly. Royal officials locked them out of the meeting rooms and so the third estate went to the king’s indoor tennis court and swore the tennis court oath, promising to write France a new constitution. When the King found out, he decided to tell the clergy and the nobles to join in the assembly so they had a role in the writing of the new constitution, but also he didn’t actually want any of that to happen, so he started gathering the troops in order to break up the national assembly. But, like, everyone knew about the drama unfolding in Versailles because of the pesky press freedom that the king had opened up a few months earlier. People had been revolting because of the economic crises for a year at this point, and when they found out the king, who lived lavishly and spent irresponsibly while they starved, was attempting to overthrow the representatives of the third estate, that was the final straw in a mounting list of failures and grievances. On July 14th, 1789, just over 2 months after the Estates General had convened in Versailles to try to peaceably find a solution to the debts and to write a new constitution, a crowd of peasants in Paris stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress on Paris’ east side that was used, among other things, as a prison for political dissidents and seen as a symbol of monarchical tyranny. And in the countryside, peasants began organizing and rising up against the lords who owned their land and collected taxes from them. By August, the National Constituent Assembly had abolished the feudal system and published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a sweeping and, at the time, radical document, proclaiming the rights to liberty, equality, property ownership, and the right to resist oppression. Their orders made more than half the adult male population in France eligible to vote whereas before the power was concentrated in the hands of the 2-5% of the population that were clergy or nobles. The lands of the Roman Catholic Church were nationalized in order to pay off the public debt and redistribute property to the bourgeoisie and peasant landowners. This was also an attempt to “de-christianize” France, one that backfired pretty catastrophically especially among Christian peasants whose whole way of life kinda revolved around church.

An attempt was made to create a political system where the legislative and executive roles were shared between the King and the National Assembly, but King Louis the 16th was unwilling to compromise on his power. In June, 1791, he attempted to flee France but was caught and forcibly brought back to Paris. Many others did successfully flee, and these counter-revolutionaries, those opposed to the French Revolution and in favor of the nobles and ruling classes, formed their own groups and armed militias on the borders of France and in neighboring countries. This led to wars between the countries of Europe that would last for years. France declared war against Austria in 1792 and Prussia joined the war a few months later. Marie Antionette, born in Austria, encouraged her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold the second to invade France to stop the revolution. When the revolutionaries in Paris discovered the royal betrayal, they imprisoned the royal family, massacred the imprisoned noble and clergy members, and the new assembly, the National Convention, abolished the monarchy and declared the establishment of the French Republic in September, 1792.

The National Convention had divisions of its own, with one group arguing in favor of setting up a bourgeois republic and the other, led by Maximilen Robespierre, pushed for increasing the political and economic power of the lower classes, of the working man, who called themselves sans-culottes because they wore real pants. Robespierre proved to be the more convincing leader. The convention judged the royal family guilty of treason and by January 1793, King Louis the 16th was beheaded by the guillotine, a french favorite, and Marie Antoinette met the same fate 9 months later. The increasing outside threat from pro-monarchy military forces across Europe led to greater popularity for the more radical, Robespierre-led faction of the National Convention in France. His faction drove the pro-bourgeiousie faction from the National Convention in 1793, and imposed truly radical changes to the political, social, and economic landscape of France. They imposed government price controls, taxed the rich, created nationalized assistance programs for poor and disabled communities, called for free, compulsory education, and confiscated and sold the land of the French nobles who fled before the war. They even set up an entirely new calendar system.

For many in France, however, these changes were too much and too fast. Uprisings across the country against the radical National Convention led to harsh governmental crackdown against dissidents, known as the Reign of Terror, the 10 months from September 1793 to July 1794 during which 300 THOUSAND people were arrested, 17,000 of them were executed, and innumerable more died in squalor in their prison cells or were killed without trial. By the end of the Reign of Terror, opposition was so strong to this radical, violent government that Robespierre was overthrown in July 1794 and he himself was sent to the guillotine. The National Convention quickly reversed course, getting rid of government price controls, and abandoning the social laws and efforts towards economic equality. ANOTHER new constitution was written which divided executive power from legislative power, putting the executive in the hands of a directory of 5 members and the legislative powers into two chambers. But ongoing war with Europe and continued unrest within France weakened the power of this central government, leading to numerous coups, most notably by a little guy named Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, who abolished the directory and became the leader of France, ending the French Revolution era and beginning the Napoleonic era during which time Napoleon attempted to bring the revolution to the rest of Europe with varying degrees of success.

Okay that’s the basics, now what does all of that have to do with today. With this modern era. Where are the similarities. Let’s discuss, shall we? So in 1780s France you have great economic instability due to issues with trade, issues with crops and agriculture, and significant cultural unrest because of the growth of the middle class, of manufacturing, and the expansion of capitalism into more peoples’ everyday lives. You also have increased exposure to new Enlightenment ways of thinking, but no one could really afford anything while the wealthiest people had all the power. You also had numerous wars across the globe leading to significant national debt. That’s a lot of similarities. Today we have 50 years of the neoliberal experiment, of fucking around, coming to a head, entering its finding out era, with extreme wealth inequality and large numbers of people barely scraping by while the power, political influence, and money all rises to the top 1%. You have extreme economic turmoil spurred on not only from 50 years of neoliberalism and monopolization but also the COVID pandemic and a 30% cost of living increase that incomes never caught up with. Couple that with the revolutionary advancement in AI in an extremely short period of time leading to a panic of people thinking that it’s going to take their jobs or even worse completely decimate the planet, either through the coming AGI or, more likely, through the environmental destruction that AI will cause. Add on to that the creation of social media, especially TikTok and the short form content model which means more people are exposed to more information more easily leading to the creation of factions but also the greater dissemination of more and more radical information but also greater dissemination of different political modes, different ways of living, different ways of forming a government. At the same time there is a dramatic breakdown of trust in institutions, we no longer believe that the Supreme Court can make logical and unbiased decisions. Media has conglomerated to the point that it's exclusively owned by evil maniacal Lex Luther types. The DOJ is exclusively going after enemies of the president while letting actual insurrectionists go. Congress has completely abdicated all of its power in the name of allowing the executive branch to walk all over it, and the executive branch is dominated by unelected fringe lunatics who don’t represent the will of anyone.

That being said, there are many important ways in which 1780s France is very different from 2026 United States, obviously. The key areas where I think this is true is in our form of government and our economy. While yes I think more and more people are being exposed to the ideas of communism and socialism and especially democratic socialism, none of these ideas are as revolutionary as the Enlightenment was in Europe, because they’ve been around for a while, we’ve known about them for a while, democratic socialism is an accepted style of government in numerous countries in Europe. The French Revolution was inspired in part by the revolution in The United States, and both created or attempted to create constitutional democracies that had never existed before, they were completely new experiments, inspired by this revolutionary new thought brought about in Enlightenment thinking. I don’t think we have something that new or different or radical that I’m seeing being proposed by the people who want to see change happen in this country. Socialism, communism, everyone disappearing into the woods to live in communes off the land in harmony with one another, it’s all been attempted before in some form or another, none of this is a new invention of the 21st century. Odds are that even if there was some sort of “revolution” in the United States that the fundamental form of government wouldn’t change as drastically as France did from a monarchy to a republic so quickly.

Let’s talk economic system. We are absolutely going through economic shocks right now, people are uncomfortable, the way we do work has dramatically and completely changed over the last 50 years. For example as a lawyer I literally wouldn’t know how to practice law in the 1970s. The internet, COVID and remote work, and now AI has fundamentally changed the nature of people's jobs, some more than others, in ways we’re only beginning to understand but in ways that have laid economic inequality completely bare, whether you’re getting laid off because of AI or you were forced to work through a pandemic as an “essential worker” while making minimum wage, we are feeling these changes in really dramatic ways. I’m not sure, however, that these changes are as dramatic as the changes that occurred between the feudal system and the system of capitalism in France in the 1700s. We are still existing in capitalism the same way we were 100 years ago, we’re just engaging with it differently. We have settled into our roles as consumers above all else in a way that just wasn’t the case in the feudal system. To go from a strict three tiered system in the acien regime to one where there was upward mobility, trade, manufacturing, that fracturing of the societal and economic system was a fundamental shift that I don’t think we’ve seen here in the United States. The shocks here compared to the shocks leading up to the French Revolution, they just don’t compare.

But I do still think there are things we can learn from the French Revolution that can inform how we move forward today. Specifically, my central takeaway from this little comparative exercise is that even the most enlightened forward thinking progressive movements can all go to shit. That’s not to say important things didn’t come from the French Revolution, it established new norms and new ideas that, even if they didn’t come to fruition at the time, like universal education, for example, planted a seed that later became a reality, and the nature of these types of big bold political ideas is that you have to be willing to try and fail and tweak and work on them with the north star of greater freedom and equality for more people guiding that work. But even if you have the best intentions and the most enlightened ideas, the cult of personality, the fervor of revolution, the drama and fear of instability, can lead to um let’s just say heavy handedness. It can lead to violence, violence that is often unnecessary. Revolution, as you can see displayed in many revolutions across time, may start with lofty ideals and theories but can end in tyranny when the inevitable backlash happens when you try to change too much too quickly. The instability that comes from a too much too fast approach can lead to the death of a nation. Many great things came from the French Revolution. It is also a cautionary tale. And when we think about our current moment, I as someone who runs in pretty leftist circles on the internet and in my own comments section often see people calling for revolution, for armed revolution, for a push for dramatic changes as quickly as possible, I see a sense of impatience, which is totally understandable and I feel it, too, And most things feel too little too late, most things feel like “if they wanted to, they would.” But even if they wanted to enact x y or z progressive change that seems like it would make everyone’s lives better, the reality of politics, of running a country, especially one as big as the United States, another difference to France which was largely racially and religiously homogenous and contained within a much smaller land mass than the US, the reality is that there is always a backlash, there is always a ripple effect of largely unintended consequences for every decision, and something that seems obvious or straightforward usually isn’t. It makes me think of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s stance that the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade created a change that was too much, too fast, and it would have been better to push abortion rights through the legislature where it would require a greater will of the majority. And we did see 50 years of backlash after Roe v. Wade that culminated with Dobbs, but continues today in the fight over Mifepristone and the ongoing fights in the states. That’s not to say Roe v. Wade caused this, but it’s hard to know how abortion rights would look in this country if they had been written into law instead of ordered by the Supreme Court. Who knows if we would have ever gotten them. It’s hard to know. But the point is that too much too fast can backfire, and we saw that in the 10 months of terror during the French Revolution when these supposedly enlightened leaders in favor of equality and freedom guillotined literally 17,000 people because they didn’t fall in line.

Okay, so is the United States headed for its own form of the French Revolution? I don’t think so. The shocks to the system today are bad but not like the shocks to the French system in the 1700s. And as a pacifist personally I’m okay with that. Though as my video from earlier this week discussed, that doesn’t mean we won’t see continued political violence. The people are mad and they need an outlet for that anger. But I’m not sure it’s going to rise to the level of a full blown bloody revolution. Tune in later this week for a discussion on the Gilded Age, a period in the United States that might fit more closely with our current experience and which can teach us what might come of the current upheaval.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from earlier this week about why billionaires should be terrified.