Is it just me or do the French elites have a short memory?
The French Revolution, kicking off in 1789, was a seismic upheaval that flipped the script on France’s social and political order, and no group felt the sting more than the elites—nobles, clergy, and the monarchy itself. It started with a financial crisis—decades of extravagant spending by kings like Louis XVI, coupled with costly wars and a tax system that let the aristocracy skate by while peasants got crushed, left the crown bankrupt. When the Third Estate (the commoners) demanded reform and got locked out of negotiations, they said "screw it," declared themselves the National Assembly, and sparked a revolution. For the elites, this was the beginning of the end: their cushy, privileged world was about to get torched.
The revolution hit the elites hard and fast. By 1791, the monarchy was gutted—Louis XVI went from divine ruler to a guy under house arrest, and the feudal system that propped up the nobles got dismantled. Titles and privileges? Gone. Land? Confiscated or redistributed. The clergy, who’d been raking in tithes and living large, got slammed too—church property was seized, and priests were forced to swear loyalty to the state or face exile. Then came the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), where the guillotine became the great equalizer. Nobles who didn’t flee—émigrés who did were already losing estates—were dragged to the scaffold. Estimates peg around 16,000 executions, with elites disproportionately targeted; Marie Antoinette’s beheading in 1793 was just the glitziest example. The message was clear: old status wouldn’t save you.
The fallout didnぜt stop there. Even after the Terror eased, the elites who survived—whether by hiding, fleeing, or swearing allegiance to the new order—found a France that didn’t need them. The Napoleonic era kept some noble trappings alive, but the revolution’s ideals of equality (at least on paper) and meritocracy gutted their automatic dominance. Wealth and influence shifted toward the bourgeoisie and military upstarts. For the aristocracy, it was a brutal demotion: from untouchable to hunted, then irrelevant. The revolution didn’t just kill people—it killed a way of life they’d banked on for centuries. Want me to zoom in on any specific elite faction or event?
