by #SethAckerman in #Jacobin:

"The natural response is to look back on the euphoric triumphs of, say, the sans-culottes in the streets of Paris, and despair at our comparative failure to puncture the political status quo. But to do so is to fall victim to one of those retrospective optical illusions with which history is constantly presenting us. For if the present moment feels like a Thermidor, it’s because the original Thermidor — the definitive end of the radical phase of the French Revolution, which was followed by years of repression, popular apathy and de-mobilization, the destruction of the revolutionary Republic itself, and eventually the restoration of the very Bourbon monarchy that the Paris crowds had brought down decades earlier — felt a lot like the present."

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/french-revolution-left-legacy-successes

#history #FrenchRevolution #Paris #Bastille #BastilleDay