The French revolution, in all its bloody gore, was ultimately little more than a middle-class coup against the aristocracy. While much of the actual bloodletting might have been done on the streets of Paris by the mob, the new regime that took power was dominated not by the working man and woman of France, but by the educated professional classes.
Robespierre, the bloodthirsty President of the National Convention, for example, was a lawyer. His predecessor, Monsieur de Sechelles, was a judge. His predecessor, Danton, was another lawyer. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, who would eventually have himself declared Emperor, was the son of a relatively obscure middle-class Corsican lawyer. As a British writer of the age observed, the revolution did not succeed because the French working classes felt brutalized, but because the French middle classes did not feel sufficiently loved by their King. Had Marie Antoinette been nicer to the lawyers and the accountants, she might have kept her head.
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