Strategy of Protest and Revolution 2: The French Revolution, 1789 

In recent or even current events, it reminded me of the difference between Hafez and his son Bashar in Syria.

The difference was that of the Seven Years' War ("French and Indian War" in the USA) and the extreme public debt that France incurred as result. Overall Louis XV set the stage of the French Revolution... but he died before it happened, so his son got the poisoned gift.

Can't speak for HK but IMO Egypt's 'revolution' was made up of such a small small portion of an very populous and dense country that it should not have in any way been a threat to the Mubarak regime or the state in general. The fact that the military kinda just 'let' everything happen, eventually ended up on top after the chaos, and had an interest in seeing Mubarak and his family go really lends credence to the 'revolution' being better classified as a coup d'etat. There's a lot more to it, but Egypt under Mubarak wasn't just a dictatorship of one man, it was a system in which the EAF acted as a "state within a state" and Mubarak and his extended family began to threaten that by thinking they were bigger than it.

I believe Strategy Stuff is a Hong Konger so it would probably be best if he stayed away from that

@@mrniceguy7168 he is?

I'm not planning to do contemporary protests - or very recent history in general - both because a) you don't have the long-term or macro research that I draw from for these videos and b) it's recent enough that you can't help but inject your opinions into it. The idea is to do deep dives on better-researched historical movements, and let viewers draw the connections between those and modern-day movements. I believe lot of what is 'innovative' is usually about deploying a new tool anyway, rather than a fundamental change in the organizational basis of these revolutions. The Hong Kong protests, for example, follow very much a 'Spontaneous Uprising' template and they have the benefits and drawbacks of an SU template. The HK Govt seems to be following in the direction of Louis XV rather than XVI. As for other videos, it will be: American, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Civil Rights, probably anti-Apartheid. Maybe anti-slavery (18thC), suffragette, US gay rights, Iranian revolution. I'll probably insert another video series in between this list.

@XoferWalken Yes. So I have at least observed this stuff haha

The workers + radicals took over the movement by taking leadership positions in the National Guard and the Paris Commune. They then used their position to denounce enemies of the Revolution, and to outflank them, national leaders such as Robespierre had to take ever-more extreme positions. As for the Duke of Orleans... Versailles didn’t stop him because he was Frances leading aristocrat, pretty much. He did get briefly expelled from Paris in Nov 1787 but it didn’t have much effect.

@@StrategyStuff Thanks!

@@StrategyStuff This seems to be an example of lukewarm policy. The King was unwilling to compromise with the revolution enough to stop their growing power and placate them, and yet wasn't willing to take the extreme action of eliminating the Duke of Orleans for his treason. Thus, he put himself into an inflexible predicament, where the rebels had the leadership, resources, and manpower to eventually overthrow him.

I could, but a) who knows how long before I get around to it and b) definitely will have to be split into multiple segments. I have been reading a book on the Nisibis war tho and yes, the strategies/planning involved are definitely interesting

Did you even watch the video? He mentioned the debt crisis multiple times and made it very clear that bad harvests motivated the workers to anti establishment positions.

Extreme (not necessarily just brutal, but also extensive) force right at the beginning, when the revolutionaries were least able to match it

If I do so it will probably be within a larger video series of the Ottomans in the 19thC.

@@StrategyStuff Yes bring Ottomans in. Their system was much more absolutist than France so im curious how no one managed to put out the fire from this regard.

@Garren - A privilege is something that nobody deserves but some have. A right is something that everybody deserves. The revolution was not "the Parisian Revolution" but "the French Revolution", the slogans were not about "the city" but about "the nation".

@@LuisAldamizseems like youtube deleted my comment for whatever reasons. Okay let me correct your definitions from your marxist bias, "privilege" is something you dont work for yourself yet you get for free without the consent of the people that ACTUALLY worked harder to give you that privelege. A "right" is the natural law that lets you do anything as far as you are capable of without the interference of others. Your narrative filled ideology/ religion has no place in defining real history when your kind confused even these kinds of basic terms, that's why nowadays there's way more younger generations demanding free stuff and privileges without considering the consequences outside their own community. About this 'peasant' margnialization bs, you might want to explore the socio-political condition of France in that timespan before making any idealistic and modern-biased view. While the liberals and sans-culottes in Paris are taking turn decapitating each other on guillotine, guess what did the peasants do in other region, especially in the region with their own 'parlements'? Yes, they revolted to SUPPORT the monarchy. Who cares about social equalities and stuff when you are starving and your only hope is God because you lack any education and you actually dont think it's the nobles' fault therefore blaming jews and protestants instead🤣it is the military genius of the revolutionary government ALONE that enables France to avoid breaking into several states had the nobility decided to secede from France, and enabled the revolutionaries to implement their new unpopular beliefs universally throughout the country.

and then he disappears...

@@charlesstuart3703 He just posted on facebook, thankfully he will apparently upload a video about the American Revolution tomorrow.

@Joshua Mills Oooh look at you being all cool on the internet, starting a fight with a year old comment. You sure showed me bro, I hope you posted your great victory on Twitter or FB so all your 7 followers can bask in the glory with you

@Joshua Mills Well then you might want to work on expressing your bother in ways that don't make you come off like a smug asshole. :P

@Joshua Mills You came off as very unnecessarily rude and insulting, is what I meant by that.

So cool that you're subscribed to this channel too! Love your stuff

Just be Bismarck.

It was always my intention to release both at about the same time, so viewers can see how the elements I mentioned in Video 1 actually worked in reality.

@@StrategyStuff Love your work. It's actually a superb idea releasing related content together so that the audience won't forget what was talked about in the previous part Thank you man for making these vids. Also do you have patreon or other stuff like that?

Strategy Stuff 7 days or less the golden rule on youtube

@@StrategyStuff Glad you did that, the first video by itself was a little too abstract to be overly interesting in my opinion.

@@StrategyStuff I was hoping for a quick rollout; we live in fast times.

That's the cynic approach. There are real *issues* (or rather demands, even lives) at the stake. It's not any game.

@Joshua Mills - My goals are irrelevant, we are nothing but constituent cells of Humankind. Our lives are too short to matter.

So far, I think massive escalation is a lesson that is best applied to the specific circumstance of a Spontaneous Uprising, because an SU doesn't have the organizational 'staying power' to stick around if it is outmatched. That might not be the case for the more organized grand strategies which tend to be able to 'go underground' in the event of escalation.

@@StrategyStuff Though it doesn't appear in this case, I would imagine infiltrating a SU and creating division from within would be an effective method? You might also publicly reach out to one of the parties and suggest you might fulfill THEIR specific demands, in words that do not suit the others.

Yes, creating dissension from within is definitely a solution. But as I mentioned in another reply, the whole strategic thrust of an SU is aimed precisely at solving this problem of dissension - by finding a 'baseline' issue that can motivate everybody. A movement that executes an SU competently will, by design, have few such 'dissenting' weaknesses for you to exploit. Whereas if you target the SU's lack of organizational power, you're fighting on a dimension that SU was simply not designed for. To use a military analogy, it's like using WWI tactics against the Maginot Line - sure you can win if the defender is bad, but the chances of success seem more likely if you come at the problem in a way that the solution was simply not designed for.

@@StrategyStuff I think the main weakness of a SU is that its constituents are, for lack of a better word, kind of dumb? You just need to play with the emotions of the crowd in the correct way, and the movement falls apart, since it has no structure. This could be intimidating them, via rapid escalation, it could be finding a point of dissension you can create among their ranks, or it could be disrupting their morale in one of a few ways. Morale can be disrupted by simply waiting, most people don't have patience or money to protest for an extended period, and that was the strategy that was taken with the French Revolution. But another method to attack morale is to make some minor concessions, enough to satisfy a portion of the crowd so many go home, and this is turn impacts their morale when they see their crowd thinning. The best way to attack an SU, of course, is if you can convince its leaders to become your agents. Another popular strategy is to organize counter-protesters, as this can confuse the public as to where they should stand, and allows you to use some more physical tactics without direct involvement. These can be messy and cause riots, of course.

Your solution can be a valid one in practice, but I think you've mixed 2 things up analytically: 1) the inherent strength and weakness of SU template; and 2) the level of competence in executing said SU template. Think of it like this: the key problem for SU is: "How do I, without any organization, get diverse groups to move in X direction?" The solution is: "I need to find some baseline issue that unites all the groups and points them in the direction of X." So unlike what you say, the weakness of SU is NOT the lack of unity - 'unity' is actually the metric by which the execution of the SU template is judged. A competently-executed SU will have groups marching in lockstep, a poorly-executed SU will quickly fall apart. Instead, the true weakness of SU is in organization - the loose and bottom-up nature of SUs denies them 'economies of scale' and so they will always be weaker than establishments in a head-to-head contest and have to find new areas of competition where they have a first-mover advantage. So why am I pointing all of this out? It's because when you talk about the 'best strategy' to quell SUs is via divide and conquer, you are assuming that there WILL be some area where you can meaningfully split up the various groups within the SU. BUT the whole point of an SU is to prevent that from happening, so a 'divide and conquer' strategy against an SU is essentially a bet that the movement will not be competent enough to stop the establishment. By contrast, an establishment strategy that forces an SUs into highly unfavorable head-to-head matchups (like Louis XV) strikes at the inherent weakness of SUs, and even the most competent execution of an SU template will have no real answer for that.

@@StrategyStuff thanks for your reply - I think it helps me understand the subject better. It's quite easy to be caught up in the French Revolution and think it's a baseline, rather than an example, of SU model. However, it also raises some more questions for me: 1. while it may create more political/social tension in the future, is "overwhelming force" an "effective" solution to quell all types of revolution? the rebel will have less resource (the sum of manpower, money, infrastructure/organization, time, prestige,...); and then they have to maintain some level of secrecy and security (to protect the vulnerable key points of the movement) - which should force them to allocate their resource for "non-essential" tasks (for the goal), and also hamper their efficiency (clear information flow is critical for organization). As such, would the revolution always be vulnerable again these "overwhelming force" solutions? 2. would SU be vulnerable to counter-revolution once it achieves its original issue? It's near impossible for all these different groups to agree on an in-depth solution, and SU run the big risk of running out of issues (and more likely, solutions) to bind the movement together once the "surface" solution is achieved. Again, I may focus too much on the French Revolution, but that motif is quite common in history, and "I need to find another solution that unites all the groups" is not very scalable or repeatable of a solution.

1) The effectiveness of 'overwhelming force' has to be analyzed NOT just in terms of 'win', BUT also in terms of cost-benefit. An establishment that constantly has to maintain 'overwhelming force' has few resources available to fund the other things that also ensure its survival. A movement that forces the establishment into such a position (i.e. spending way more on suppressing the movement, than what the movement is actually able to inflict in terms of costs) is arguably 'winning' by attrition. The organizational weakness of SUs makes them poorly-suited for this sort of strategy, BUT an organization-focused strategy is well-suited to achieving this. 2) I would say political bickering during- and post-revolution is an inevitable result of SUs, and if one group really feels that it's been duped by the movement, I suppose it could try and bring the old regime back in a counter-revolution.

@@StrategyStuff I expect there are always linchpins you can exploit between groups, when dealing with an SU. Even when Paul was on trial before the High Priest in Israel, and everyone was quite determined he should die, he was able to start a riot between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, by referencing the afterlife. SUs are emotional by their nature, the extensive crowd is generally not educated or disciplined, only able to ignore rivalries by being caught in the fervor of the moment. Create enough of a divide between even two small groups within the SU, and those will likely factionalize for safety within the movement, and then begin to splinter as they ideologically isolate themselves. With luck, this should be able to have a domino effect, and greatly weaken the SU as its own members create friction. This was the basis of Divide et Impera. You remove centralized leadership, and intentionally maintain tensions between the groups, making forming a movement against you far more difficult. Of course, the Gauls and Goths and other warring tribes did form movements, armies, against Rome numerous times, so a good enough reason to form an SU cannot so readily be trumped. Even then though, these Gaulish SUs were fragile, and some people defected to Caesar and warned him, and the tribal councils bickered on what to do, so you attempt to apply pressure between the groups and play them against each other, just to put pressure on them?

@@StrategyStuff What exactly do you mean by an 'unfavourable head to head matchup'? Why is it not overwhelming force? Can you give some examples?

No, I wouldn’t say “equality” necessarily. More like a quid pro quo aka Social Contract: citizens have duties to the state, the state has duties to citizens. The idea was to give ordinary citizens a “stake” in their society; didn’t have to be an equal one.

And maybe Chinese revolution later on... Strategy Stuff has impeccable chinese pronunciation.

@@boshengjones1778 I think he is a Hong konger

Yeet

Da

Hey, I'll reply to your 3 comments here: 1) The focus of the video is on the French Revolution in Paris, because that was where the anti-absolutist movement needed to succeed in order to impose its change. Seizing the military/political institutions of Paris + Versailles gave the movement power over France; by contrast, without Paris, any movement success would simply have been crushed by orders from Paris (as the Vendee uprising later showed). So yes, the vast majority of France was ignored in this narrative, but it wasn't that different elsewhere (Grenoble's Day of the Tiles was fairly similar) 2) The guild privileges of the workers (wage levels etc) were still special rights given to a group. I don't mean to pass any value judgment by using that term. 3) Unfortunately, the narrative of what happened after the storming of the Bastille is beyond the scope of this series. I'm only concerned with how the anti-absolutists gained power over establishment opposition; what they did with that power is a story for another time. 4) My assessment that the Bastille was mainly bourgeois came out of my reading of George Rude's "The Crowd in the French Revolution", where he asserts in Cap XII and the Appendices that 'At the Bastille... wage earners... appear to have been in a distinct minority'. I suppose the merchants could still have been earning low-wages, but even then, the proportion of 'wage-earners' (i.e. workers) in the Bastille action (c.25%) was definitely much lower than in the various Corn Riots, Reveillon Riots, and later Champ de Mars action (c.50%+), which indicates that the Bastille storming was still of a different character than those other ones.

@@StrategyStuff - Thanks for replying. (1) I mentioned that because I was recently watching this interview/debate with "Marxian" (sic) historian Joan Tafalla (in Spanish but autotranslate subtitles available), when he emphasized that the French Revolution was largely, even primarily, a Peasant Revolution, much like the Russian and Chinese revolutions were later on and that, in his opinion, the bourgeoisie actually acted mostly as a counter-revolutionary force (Directory, Thermidor): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UmEVgnVfe_4.html (2) You however claim that the bourgeoisie demanded abolition of privileges, not recognizing that property and labor exploitation is a privilege. This to me suggests that you have a strong liberal bias. In any case my point stands: what is good for the majority is not a privilege, it is a right (if you consider it ethically correct) or whatever but can't be a privilege. Privilege is having what the majority can't have, for example too much land. There's a tendency to abuse the word "privilege" these days: the free is not privileged just because he or she is not a slave, the slave is discriminated against, while the slave owner is indeed privileged. Being free is of course a right, arguably the most fundamental human right. Or, in the context of my objection, having democratic power in your workplace and in the general economy, is also a human right and not any privilege. (3) Fair enough. However the revolution was not over until Thermidor (or if you align with the Girondines, until the fall of Napoleon even). One thing is kickstarting a revolution and another one bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion. (4) Fair enough again. But when you say "merchants" people (at least I) will think in affluent traders with a significant type of business, not random shopkeepers. This is a discussion that always arises when discussing class: it's clear that shopkeepers are not bourgeois... unless they have several or many employees, your common shopkeeper who is "chained" to his or her shop for a living is actually much closer to a salaried worker (and sometimes worse off) than to a "merchant" (bourgeois). They don't even reach the level of petty bourgeois (i.e. someone whose income is significantly more dependent on the work of his employees than on his/her own work).

@@LuisAldamiz 1) Obviously Marxian historians have a strong reason to portray the French Revolution as a "peasant uprising" because it furthers the myth of the Revolution, that's not supported by non marxian academia 2) you mention his liberal bias but you are the one with a strong marxian bias, "property and labor exploitation" is a concept that only makes sense in the very minoritarian Marxian view. No matter how you spin it, being part of a guild is a privilege, because it allows you to regulate who, when and where can practice your trade, which gives you an unfair advantage towards newcommers. 4) of course the definition of class is always a source of debate, Marxian definitions of class are not coherent or based in logic but subservient to Marxian propaganda and political aims. A fishmonger, being a non salaried worker, is a burgeois. The fact that this makes Marxists uneasy because it makes burgeois too human and thus hard to execute or imprison is frankly irrelevant

@@thedripkingofangmar6778 - Marxist historians are the only kind of historians worth considering (or almost so), Conservative historians are utterly shallow and Liberal historians barely look under the surface anyhow. History is precisely the scientific field where Marxism has been most influential, allowing the shallow the {great (wo-)men + almost random or divinely influenced events} extremely basic approach to be overcome by a much more holistic understanding based on socio-economics instead. A bit of respect for Marxist historians, please, history finally became a serious science thanks to them. Peasant or proletarian or both, what is clear with all bourgeois revolutions is that the bourgeois element is ony at the helm, not at the rowing banks of the revolutionary process. The real difference between the French Revolution and the Russian one is that the former was manned by workers but led by exploiters, while the latter was manned by workers as well (all revolutions are it seems to me) but led by philosophers with good intentions and maybe not so good results (although there were many good results, most social advances not just in Russia but across the world stem from that revolution and the parallel Mexican one). What's wrong with a "marxian bias"? Seriously... Marx is back, even if he's also somewhat outdated and deserves a criticism (but I leave that for more serious debates, you wouldn't even care). Property is robbery and you don't need to be Marxist to realize that, especially when considering the issue of the land. If the land of the USA would be equally divided among all its citizens, then each would own 3 Ha (not sure how much it is in acres), in Spain it'd be 1 Ha, I haven't estimated that for other countries or the World as a whole, but what is clear is that everyone should have a decent piece of land as birthright and that's not how it is. That's extreme injustice and must be solved (for good this time, no more Yeltsins). How do you define class in terms objective? That's what socialists and not just Marx do: owners and non-owners, bourgeois and proles.

If we are considering FRA Rev in the context of state competition/development, we should note that the unequal tax system had already caused FRA to partially default several times during the 18thC, which is why the debt on the interest got higher. As such, FRA’s war financing was much higher than Britain’s, which is an underrated factor in why FRA lost out in almost every war with UK. King Louis XVI probably could have saved himself by continuing to default, but in the long run, France would have sunk even further into impotence on the world stage. While the FRA Rev was destructive, its innovations allowed the French state to tap into a larger portion of the national wealth, which at least let it keep pace with the developed parts of Europe.

@@StrategyStuff But did the revolution bring about or hinder the necessary economic reforms? I tend to assume the latter...

I think that on the macro-level, the distinction between what the Revolution 'intended' and what its actual effects were starts to become a bit irrelevant. Sure, French tax/economic efficiency continued to be bad for at least the rest of the Revolutionary + Napoleonic period. BUT the key effect of the Revolution was to greatly weaken the political structures (like Church power, the King-aristocrat nexus) that retarded the state's ability to access and deploy France's wealth, and I think that partially explains why France, despite massive economic disadvantages in the Industrial Revolution, nevertheless managed to remain an influential power, especially in the late 19thC.

To be fair, Revolutions which improve the lives of the people/subjects/citizens are a very rare exemption.

@@StrategyStuff It would've been many times more efficient to just help the king to tax the nobles instead of helping the nobles to not be taxed, though. Instead, the revolution which killed many of their best administrators, caused many of their generals to defect, lead to an age of war and terror that killed millions of their own people, and such an all-out desperate fight that it broke the back of France. France has never had a great victory since Napoleon, and has gone from the foremost power in the world to a minor power that relies on the EU for relevance.

You mean against Charles I or against James II? The war against Charles I is generally not seen as a revolution (at least in terms of how it developed), because Parliament as an entity already had significant powers before ousting the King. As for the Glorious Revolution - I have written a script on it but not sure if will publish. Firstly, it’s a borderline case btwn revolution and coup because the English nobles incited much of the disturbance (esp in rural areas) against King James; and secondly, it’s a script that’s not long enough to justify a full video, yet all the other movements have more than enough material to be a standalone video.

@@StrategyStuff You could do both in a single video. There's a lot of interesting material but they are both more really coups than revolutions; especially the Civil War where no one really went in with the idea of overthrowing the monarchy.

And not be specific regarding what replaces it?

@@taufiqutomo hey I have to be ambiguous about my coalition's goals long enough so that the contradictory aspirations within it don't wreck each other before the establishment is destroyed

Setting aside the stupidity of overthrowing the current system for an inarguably inferior one, you do realize virtually all avenues for that are sealed off, right?

@@Alloftheanwsers I think capitalism cannot be overthrown (at least not sustainably overthrown) in an area as long as the people remain greedy. It's very hard, but technically not impossible.

@@taufiqutomo And by what method will 'greed' (anything other than "from each according to his ability, to each his needs") be eliminated? You can't use the state to achieve it through force, you can't use social pressure to do so (especially when there's free access to information and arguments that contest it as a moral imperative). I'm being serious, how do you/these people expect this to play out for the nth time? To me, there is nothing that indicates that this experiment was anything other than an inferior model that was doomed to failure, while "technically" being feasible.

Probably not as I would consider that a “post-Revolution” phase. But basically, with a) the emergence of a Revolutionary press (Marat etc) and b) the realisation that the bourgeois revolution was doing nothing for the urban poor, the poor managed to organise to such a level that they, through political displacement or intimidation, managed to gain control of the Paris Commune and the National Guard. They used these positions to denounce bourgeois “enemies of the Revolution”, sometimes taking action directly eg Sept Massacres. Due to the importance of Paris in the FRA political system, bourgeois leaders such as Robespierre were obliged to take more radical steps to “outflank” the sans culottes, leading to the Terror - which incidentally also provided a good excuse to also execute those sans culottes leaders.

@@StrategyStuff Thanks for taking the time to explain, I really appreciate.

Hey, thanks for the concern. I’m fine. Working on the US Revolution now

Strategy Stuff Oh wow, it’s 3 AM in the US right now and I can’t sleep and decided to check RU-vid and see you just replied to me. Thanks for the response and I’m happy to see you are doing well. I wish you and the people of HK good luck moving forward. 👍

@@StrategyStuff I miss you :(