9 ms·

Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre

81 points by benbreen 5y ago

mongol 5y ago
Seems interesting. > ‘Only by getting “up close” and drilling down into the “infinitely small” details of the revolutionary process’, its author insists, can the day’s course and outcome be understood. Sometimes history is inevitable, and small details do not matter. Sometimes the small details make all the difference. The assasination of archduke Ferdinand may or may not be such a detail. The fall of Robespierre seems like it could be another, from what I gather from the article. What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge?
- McRask 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Station
- ghaff 5y ago
  There were a number of points during the Cold War (that we know of) including but not limited to the Cuban Missile Crisis when things could have escalated.
- dudul 5y ago
  Maybe how Louis XVI got caught while trying to flee France. He bought a drink with a coin and got recognized because his face was on it. Had he not been executed and been able to rally a friendly monarchy, I dont know if the revolution would have taken the same route.
- Igelau 5y ago
  Petrov saves the day by doing nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    There also Vasily Arkhipov. He was deputy commander of K-19. And then submarine B-59 during the Cuban missile crisis. Where he cast the only vote not to fire a nuclear armed torpedo at the US ships dropping depth charges on them.
- eschulz 5y ago
  Gaius Octavius (later known as Augustus) at age of approximately 17 was able to convince his mother to let him join his great uncle Julius in Hispania. He impressed Julius so much that upon return to Rome Julius updated his will to make Octavius his primary beneficiary. Julius' murder two years later on 15 March 44BC resulted in Octavian traveling to Rome to claim his inheritance, winning the loyalty of much of the army in the ensuing chaos, defeating and executing a number of heavy hitters including Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesarion (Julius' son with Cleopatra), and eventually becoming the first Roman Emperor.
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    This assumes he wouldn't impress Cesar later on a different occasion or that it was the first time he was trying to convince his mother to let him go.
    - eschulz 5y ago
      Yes, I agree. However, life is short, and you have to take advantage of every opportunity you can to impress someone like Julius Caesar. There's no guarantee that you'll have another opportunity to spend time with such a busy and powerful man, even if he is your great uncle.
      - SPascareli13 5y ago
        I just want to go in a small tangent here, but I imagine that if Cesar knew he was going to die and had to adopt someone to continue his rule, he probably wouldn't pick his sickly nephew with no experience, no matter how bright he might be. So I think it's very likely that Cesar put him in his will since he is a blood relative and didn't really expected to die soon anyways, but didn't mean to have him as his sole heir forever.
        eschulz 5y ago
        That's a good point. Did Julius not have a mental disorder which caused him to lack fear? It's a good for Octavian that he got close to his great uncle while he could.
- TrevorJ 5y ago
  > What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge? I suspect that almost all of history does balance on a knife's edge. How far back in history that edge exists, relative to the event is the real question. There is probably a point in every civilization where it's rise would be anything but inevitable. You don't need very many of these events in ancient history before the chain of causality for everything that came after it would be seriously altered.
  - mongol 5y ago
    I think differently. For example, if Newton would have perished as a child due to an unfortunate accident, the physics he discovered would have been discovered by someone else. It was just a matter of time. But geopolitical events can turn out very differently due to random flukes, such as the outcome of a battle.
    - chasil 5y ago
      Perhaps you mean Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? We have to admit that the dy/dx notation has proven more useful than f'(x), as we all saw in our first semester of calculus.
      - mongol 5y ago
        Yes, for example.
    - TrevorJ 5y ago
      I would say that individual 'inflection points' might be incredibly rare. IE: maybe only 1 notable event out of 10,000 is like this. But something like this would only have to play out once or twice far back in history before the world we see today would be very different.
      - maverick-iceman 5y ago
        Humans were down to 10,000 units at some time. Maybe some leader consolidated power and convinced the tribe to embark in a journey to move somewhere else where water was more plentiful and food too, we can only imagine that ...had his attempt at convincing the tribe been unsuccesful we would not be here today! Or maybe the opposite, which is also true...somebody level headed convinced the tribe not to embark in such a journey...to stay, because with so few units it was not the time to make experiments or gambles
- fsagx 5y ago
  IIRC, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Spanish armada. Some nice weather or good health of the originally slated commander might have possibly prevented the British Empire.
  - nradov 5y ago
    A few years later Napoleon almost broke the Allied line at Waterloo. According to the Duke of Wellington it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." If Napoleon had succeeded we would be living in a very different world.
    - jeffdn 5y ago
      Or if Ney had sent forward some light cavalry to reconnoiter the crossroads at Quatre Bras at some point in the morning, he'd have seen that Wellington was not waiting there on the reverse slope. Had he seized the crossroads, he could've totally changed the circumstances that led to the battle at Waterloo.
  - fourtrees 5y ago
    Yeah talk about misfortune. I once read an account of a Ragusan merchant ship that was pressed into the Armada. Imagine being a run-of-the-mill Ragusan sailor one day, then, several hellish months later, trying desperately to navigate the Irish coast on a leaky galley just to survive and get home.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  > Sometimes the small details make all the difference. That being said, "revolution devouring its own children" is a pretty much hard rule with very few exceptions.
  - mongol 5y ago
    It may be so, but the difference can be if the leaders remain in charge or not. Compare Robespierre with Stalin. I think they are similar in many ways, but while the French revolution "ate" Robespierre, Stalin got away and could continue the terror for decades.
    - qwytw 5y ago
      One might argue that Stalin was the one doing the eating. His role in the revolution and it's immediate aftermath was relatively limited however after taking power by the late 1930's he had purged pretty all influential bolsheviks who joined the party prior to 1917.
      - mongol 5y ago
        Good point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  The decision of Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Provisional Government to repeatedly delay the Russian Constituency Elections seems to have provided critical time for the Bolsheviks to consolidate support especially under the worsening domestic situation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Ass...
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  If Georg Elser (or someone else), would have succeeded in assassinating Hitler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser
  - iso1631 5y ago
    Maybe, but the underlying reasons for WW2 still existed (and indeed it had started by that time). Would Goering or Himmler have taken over and done things differently? Perhaps the allies would have sued for peace, perhaps the invasion of France would wait until the smoke cleared and a new leader is in place, with the same army and increased internal pressures. Would that new leader invade the Soviet union before pacifying the UK. Would a delay in invading France have led to FDR not standing in 1940? There's all sorts of posibilities, but it doesn't feel as major a change as some other fateful decisions - the broad strokes wouldn't have changed.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      An intriguing possibility is that the execution backfires because the Nazi leadership had a war to inspire the public so they didn't really need Hitler, and could make much smarter decisions in his absence, and so the Nazis actually win the war (or at least achieve a settlement in a much smaller war which leaves them still in power). But I guess it's also possible the leading Nazis fight each other like rats in a sack over who takes over, who was to blame for the assassination, what military action to pursue next and why were they going to war alongside the hated communists against everyone else in Europe in the first place, and the whole thing falls apart very quickly.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        "Nazi leadership had a war to inspire the public so they didn't really need Hitler, and could make much smarter decisions in his absence, and so the Nazis actually win the war " Since fanatism and not smartness were the desired traits in the Nazis, I doubt they would have made more smart decisions - rather infighting with the national conservative part of the Wehrmacht and society taking over. (thanking the nazis for the plain power base they build them and getting rid of democracy and then kicking them out, like they planned from the beginning and reinstall a king)
- SEJeff 5y ago
  Democracy as an idea and form of government was almost extinguished from history by the Persians. When Emperor Xerxes II invaded Greece to avenge the Greeks beating his father Darius it looked really bad. After the Persians put a pretty bad hurting on the allied Greek navy, the Athenian Admiral Themistocles lured the huge, but slow Persian navy into a bloodbath where Greek Triremes dominated their Persian enemies at the Battle of Salamis. Meanwhile, a small contingent of infantry led by the famous King Leonidas and 300 volunteer Spartans (along with roughly 10,000 Thebans and Thespians) held off the brunt of the Persian infantry and cavalry. After these two battles, the majority of the Persians left Greece and thus ended the Greco-Persian war. Democracy lived because of valor and cunning of a small group of very brave men.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    The type of democracy practised in Athens was pretty widespread amongst various city-states (including non Greek ones like Rome, which arguable had a form of "democracy" much closer to the modern one because in Athens most public officials were chosen by lot) it's just due to a variety of reasons very few written records from cities other than Athens survived. Also you mixed up the battles, Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae (the one in which the 300 Spartans fought) pretty decisively as a result the Persians invaded Attica and sacked and razed Athens to the ground (most of the population was evacuated to nearby islands). The decisive battle after which the Persian were mostly expelled from mainland Greece was Plataea (during which at least 70 thousand Greeks (including 10 000 hoplites from Sparta) faced a Persian army similar in size. Besides Sparta itself was anything but a Democracy so I can't imagine they were fight to protect it. And the also defeated Athens and their allies in the Peloponnesian War a few decades later (in large part due to Persian financial support). Also the two ancient Greek philosophers who had the most influence on the development of western political philosophy were of Plato & Aristotle (who both were very critical of democracy).
    - SEJeff 5y ago
      > The type of democracy practised in Athens was pretty widespread amongst various city-states (including non Greek ones like Rome, which arguable had a form of "democracy" much closer to the modern one because in Athens most public officials were chosen by lot) it's just due to a variety of reasons very few written records from cities other than Athens survived. From wikipedia: "The concepts (and name) of democracy and constitution as a form of government originated in ancient Athens circa 508 B.C." Rome was a representative republic starting in 509 B.C. their ideas absolutely helped democracy become a thing, but it was ultimately invented by Athens. > Also you mixed up the battles, Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae (the one in which the 300 Spartans fought) pretty decisively as a result the Persians invaded Attica and sacked and razed Athens to the ground (most of the population was evacuated to nearby islands). The decisive battle after which the Persian were mostly expelled from mainland Greece was Plataea (during which at least 70 thousand Greeks (including 10 000 hoplites from Sparta) faced a Persian army similar in size. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I said they held off the brunt of the Persian infantry and cavalry, which they absolutely and historically did do, for three days with a fraction of the men. You are correct that they decisively lost the battle, but I also said that the majority of the Persians left Greece after this. Again, historically, after the spanking the Persian navy took at the Battle of Salamis, and three days of heavy fighting and casualties at the battle of Thermoplaye, Emperor Xerxes retreated to Asia with much of his army, leaving Mardonius to complete the conquest of Greece. It was almost a year later that the battle of Plataea happened, but the majority of the Persian forces left with Xerxes. Mardonius tried to convince Xerxes to continue after the defeat at Salamis, but his heart was no longer in it. > Besides Sparta itself was anything but a Democracy so I can't imagine they were fight to protect it. And the also defeated Athens and their allies in the Peloponnesian War a few decades later (in large part due to Persian financial support). Yes, I'm aware. Sparta forced the tyrant Hippias out of Athens, who ultimately fled to Persia. Realizing that a democracy was bad for Sparta, they attempted to recall him and reinstate him back as the tyrant of Athens. I believe it was the Corinthians and some of their allies who forced Hippias back into exile. Having tasted democracy, they were not keen on going back to a tyranny. Athens even told Persia no, they would not accept Hippias and that was what ultimately lead to the Ionian revolt and Darius's first Persian campaign into greece, whee. I might be a bit off here as I've not read Landmark Thucydides since the beginning of covid (I have a hardcopy). What did I get wrong? Besides Athens inventing democracy, I think we're mostly in agreement.
- mongol 5y ago
  I will reply to myself. The cold winter of 1658 froze the Great Belt, and allowed Swedish troups to march over the ice from Jutland to Zealand. This led to Swedish victory over Denmark and the Treaty of Roskilde. This ceded significant territory to Sweden, much of which is Swedish to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Across_the_Belts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Across_the_Belts
  - gerikson 5y ago
    Hardly world-changing, in the grand scheme of things (and I say that as a Swede).
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  One of my favorites is Alexander at the Battle of Granicus Here is the relevant passage from Plutarch: Many rushed upon Alexander, for he was conspicuous by his buckler and by his helmet's crest, on either side of which was fixed a plume of wonderful size and p267 whiteness. But although a javelin pierced the joint of his breastplate, he was not wounded; 6738 and when Rhoesaces and Spithridates, two Persian commanders, made at him together, he avoided the one, and smote Rhoesaces, who wore a breastplate, with his spear; and when this weapon snapped in two with the blow, he took to his sword. 9 Then, while he was thus engaged with Rhoesaces, Spithridates rode up from one side, raised himself up on his horse, and with all his might came down with a barbarian battle-axe upon Alexander's head. 10 Alexander's crest was broken off, together with one of its plumes, and his helmet could barely and with difficulty resist the blow, so that the edge of the battle-axe touched the topmost hair of his head. 11 But while Spithridates was raising his arm again for another stroke, Cleitus, "Black Cleitus," got the start of him and ran him through the body with his spear. At the same time Rhoesaces also fell, smitten by Alexander's sword. Alexander almost was killed by a battle axe. This was at the Battle of Granicus when he was facing a provincial Persian army. If Alexander had died that day, he would not have conquered the Persian Empire. Greek culture would not have spread nearly as wide as it did. It would have profoundly affected both the development of the East and West.
  - meowface 5y ago
    How reliable is this narrative, though? Alexander was highly revered by many, so these kinds of heroic stories would naturally be attributed to him. And Plutarch isn't always known to be super reliable. (That said, I don't necessarily fully doubt the story, either. He certainly seemed to like putting himself in dangerous positions.)
- zaarn 5y ago
  The Second Defenestration in Prague, May 23, 1618. Three people of the catholic church were thrown out a window and dropped 17 meters below on a pile of manure, all the survived, one with head trauma. What followed was the 30 Year War, a topic that I know is sadly a but underdeveloped in US/UK history class, since the US didn't exist then and the UK didn't really do anything on account of it's own internal problems at the time. The 30 Year War was pivotal for religious rights in Europe as well as one of the most devastating wars in history (up to 40% of the population perished either in war, famine or plagues). Another big point was that as a result of this war, german cities and the rest of europe experienced a big uplift in trade. Especially France, Spain, Netherland and England got a huge boost to their ship trade, which I would argue at minimum indirectly lead to financing the expeditions that discovered the Americas. Sadly it is a rather complex topic that many historians still fight over, since in most cases if you open history books about it, you see a map of the HRE + Europe with about 2 million arrows labelled "attacks" or "leads to" or "defends" or "defeats".
AlbertCory 5y ago
There was a thread on Twitter a few months ago about "history balancing on a knife's edge." All the examples (many of which also appear here) are fascinating. My own favorite (no disrespect to the others) is C. Wade McClusky, the hero of the Battle of Midway in WW II. He just happened to find the Japanese carriers, where no one else would have thought to look, and sink them. Had the US lost, it might have lost Hawaii as well. Then what would have happened? I can't say and neither can anyone else.
- vkou 5y ago
  > Then what would have happened? All that would have happened was that the war in the pacific would have been extended by another six to twelve months. Japan had constant oil shortages[0], had over a million men tied up in a land war in China, and its naval capacity was outproduced five-to-one by the United States. [1] The outcome of the War in the Pacific was inevitable, as of December 8th, 1941. [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Naval_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    It's so easy to pronounce the final outcome "inevitable" isn't it? There's no one to prove you wrong. The great imponderable of war is the population's willingness to keep waging it. I don't know what would have happened and neither does Wikipedia.
    - kaesar14 5y ago
      Such comments totally ignore the human element of warfare, totally agreed with you.
    - labster 5y ago
      It’s hard to imagine a world where the US in 1941 would not use its industrial power to assert hegemony over the Pacific after being attacked. The Japanese strategy was to neutralize the US fast enough to reduce morale for waging a losing war. But US morale remained high throughout, so it too is hard to imagine a world where the strategy would succeed even if the attack on Pearl was executed flawlessly. The anime Zipang brings up a more interesting point: had oil been discovered ten years earlier in Manchuria, would Japan have attacked the US and Dutch at all? Possibly yes: the question of “how do we defeat America?” eclipsed the more important “should we defeat America?” in Imperial Japan.
kaycebasques 5y ago
A special life moment for me was being in Paris for the first time, reading a book about the revolution. It seems like this book would be even better for that experience. I.e. visiting places mentioned in the book as you read through it.
maverick-iceman 5y ago
Bush v. Gore 2000 down in Florida comes to mind. Would 9/11 have happened with Gore at the helm? And if yes, what he'd have done differently? Maybe Al Gore would have been impeached for incompetence and treason had he refused to get carried by the moment and declare war. If he declared war solely against Al Quaeda, then what would have happened to Saddam? We could have an Iraq with Saddam still at the helm? Or maybe he'd have gone down in the Arab Spring? Would we be enjoying fracking had we not lost so many lives in the Middle East in an era of shifting societal values in the early 2000s?
- darawk 5y ago
  > Bush v. Gore 2000 down in Florida comes to mind. I think about this one frequently. I think this was actually pretty impactful, and in an interesting way. I suspect that Gore would have put all of his energy into climate change work, and he might have actually made a dent in it, because it was still possible to do so relatively cheaply then. I think the consequences of that would likely have been that the problem got mitigated to a degree, and everyone would remember it as that ridiculous fake crisis that Gore made up and wasted a bunch of money trying to prevent.
pugworthy 5y ago
For a more down to earth view of the French Revolution, I'd recommend reading "Journal of My Life" by Jacques-Louis Ménétra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_My_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_My_Life
Animats 5y ago
After Robespierre was taken out, the Convention was supposedly in charge. But they botched their win so badly that they ended up with the end of the Republic and Napoleon as Emperor. That period, from 1792 to 1799, is worth more attention. Because it covers the death of what had been, briefly, a democracy. Compare with Russia after the breakup of the USSR.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
At least he was not murdered in a bathtub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat If you look at what marat published, one can recognize the paper-civil-war-rage-culture, that is alive and hell on twitter.
- meowface 5y ago
  Not taking a side, but just to add some context: >Responsibility for the September massacres has been attributed to [Marat], given his position of authority at the time and an alleged paper trail of decisions leading up to the massacre >Charlotte Corday was guillotined on 17 July 1793 for the murder. During her four-day trial, she testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000."
- fourtrees 5y ago
  For anyone interested, another more sympathetic figure to contrast with Marat and the like is Camille Desmoulins. A lawyer before the revolution, he engaged in the same 'rage-culture' diatribes as Marat -- until he realized he had gone much too far and began to speak against the Terror. Of course, he lost his head. Just his Wikipedia page is quite an emotional ride. Thermidor can't come soon enough.

81 points by benbreen 5y ago

Seems interesting. > ‘Only by getting “up close” and drilling down into the “infinitely small” details of the revolutionary process’, its author insists, can the day’s course and outcome be understood. Sometimes history is inevitable, and small details do not matter. Sometimes the small details make all the difference. The assasination of archduke Ferdinand may or may not be such a detail. The fall of Robespierre seems like it could be another, from what I gather from the article. What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge?

McRask 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Station
ghaff 5y ago
There were a number of points during the Cold War (that we know of) including but not limited to the Cuban Missile Crisis when things could have escalated.
dudul 5y ago
Maybe how Louis XVI got caught while trying to flee France. He bought a drink with a coin and got recognized because his face was on it. Had he not been executed and been able to rally a friendly monarchy, I dont know if the revolution would have taken the same route.
Igelau 5y ago
Petrov saves the day by doing nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  There also Vasily Arkhipov. He was deputy commander of K-19. And then submarine B-59 during the Cuban missile crisis. Where he cast the only vote not to fire a nuclear armed torpedo at the US ships dropping depth charges on them.
eschulz 5y ago
Gaius Octavius (later known as Augustus) at age of approximately 17 was able to convince his mother to let him join his great uncle Julius in Hispania. He impressed Julius so much that upon return to Rome Julius updated his will to make Octavius his primary beneficiary. Julius' murder two years later on 15 March 44BC resulted in Octavian traveling to Rome to claim his inheritance, winning the loyalty of much of the army in the ensuing chaos, defeating and executing a number of heavy hitters including Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesarion (Julius' son with Cleopatra), and eventually becoming the first Roman Emperor.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  This assumes he wouldn't impress Cesar later on a different occasion or that it was the first time he was trying to convince his mother to let him go.
  - eschulz 5y ago
    Yes, I agree. However, life is short, and you have to take advantage of every opportunity you can to impress someone like Julius Caesar. There's no guarantee that you'll have another opportunity to spend time with such a busy and powerful man, even if he is your great uncle.
    - SPascareli13 5y ago
      I just want to go in a small tangent here, but I imagine that if Cesar knew he was going to die and had to adopt someone to continue his rule, he probably wouldn't pick his sickly nephew with no experience, no matter how bright he might be. So I think it's very likely that Cesar put him in his will since he is a blood relative and didn't really expected to die soon anyways, but didn't mean to have him as his sole heir forever.
      - eschulz 5y ago
        That's a good point. Did Julius not have a mental disorder which caused him to lack fear? It's a good for Octavian that he got close to his great uncle while he could.
TrevorJ 5y ago
> What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge? I suspect that almost all of history does balance on a knife's edge. How far back in history that edge exists, relative to the event is the real question. There is probably a point in every civilization where it's rise would be anything but inevitable. You don't need very many of these events in ancient history before the chain of causality for everything that came after it would be seriously altered.
- mongol 5y ago
  I think differently. For example, if Newton would have perished as a child due to an unfortunate accident, the physics he discovered would have been discovered by someone else. It was just a matter of time. But geopolitical events can turn out very differently due to random flukes, such as the outcome of a battle.
  - chasil 5y ago
    Perhaps you mean Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? We have to admit that the dy/dx notation has proven more useful than f'(x), as we all saw in our first semester of calculus.
    - mongol 5y ago
      Yes, for example.
  - TrevorJ 5y ago
    I would say that individual 'inflection points' might be incredibly rare. IE: maybe only 1 notable event out of 10,000 is like this. But something like this would only have to play out once or twice far back in history before the world we see today would be very different.
    - maverick-iceman 5y ago
      Humans were down to 10,000 units at some time. Maybe some leader consolidated power and convinced the tribe to embark in a journey to move somewhere else where water was more plentiful and food too, we can only imagine that ...had his attempt at convincing the tribe been unsuccesful we would not be here today! Or maybe the opposite, which is also true...somebody level headed convinced the tribe not to embark in such a journey...to stay, because with so few units it was not the time to make experiments or gambles
fsagx 5y ago
IIRC, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Spanish armada. Some nice weather or good health of the originally slated commander might have possibly prevented the British Empire.
- nradov 5y ago
  A few years later Napoleon almost broke the Allied line at Waterloo. According to the Duke of Wellington it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." If Napoleon had succeeded we would be living in a very different world.
  - jeffdn 5y ago
    Or if Ney had sent forward some light cavalry to reconnoiter the crossroads at Quatre Bras at some point in the morning, he'd have seen that Wellington was not waiting there on the reverse slope. Had he seized the crossroads, he could've totally changed the circumstances that led to the battle at Waterloo.
- fourtrees 5y ago
  Yeah talk about misfortune. I once read an account of a Ragusan merchant ship that was pressed into the Armada. Imagine being a run-of-the-mill Ragusan sailor one day, then, several hellish months later, trying desperately to navigate the Irish coast on a leaky galley just to survive and get home.
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
> Sometimes the small details make all the difference. That being said, "revolution devouring its own children" is a pretty much hard rule with very few exceptions.
- mongol 5y ago
  It may be so, but the difference can be if the leaders remain in charge or not. Compare Robespierre with Stalin. I think they are similar in many ways, but while the French revolution "ate" Robespierre, Stalin got away and could continue the terror for decades.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    One might argue that Stalin was the one doing the eating. His role in the revolution and it's immediate aftermath was relatively limited however after taking power by the late 1930's he had purged pretty all influential bolsheviks who joined the party prior to 1917.
    - mongol 5y ago
      Good point.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DubiousPusher 5y ago
The decision of Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Provisional Government to repeatedly delay the Russian Constituency Elections seems to have provided critical time for the Bolsheviks to consolidate support especially under the worsening domestic situation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Ass...
hutzlibu 5y ago
If Georg Elser (or someone else), would have succeeded in assassinating Hitler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser
- iso1631 5y ago
  Maybe, but the underlying reasons for WW2 still existed (and indeed it had started by that time). Would Goering or Himmler have taken over and done things differently? Perhaps the allies would have sued for peace, perhaps the invasion of France would wait until the smoke cleared and a new leader is in place, with the same army and increased internal pressures. Would that new leader invade the Soviet union before pacifying the UK. Would a delay in invading France have led to FDR not standing in 1940? There's all sorts of posibilities, but it doesn't feel as major a change as some other fateful decisions - the broad strokes wouldn't have changed.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    An intriguing possibility is that the execution backfires because the Nazi leadership had a war to inspire the public so they didn't really need Hitler, and could make much smarter decisions in his absence, and so the Nazis actually win the war (or at least achieve a settlement in a much smaller war which leaves them still in power). But I guess it's also possible the leading Nazis fight each other like rats in a sack over who takes over, who was to blame for the assassination, what military action to pursue next and why were they going to war alongside the hated communists against everyone else in Europe in the first place, and the whole thing falls apart very quickly.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Nazi leadership had a war to inspire the public so they didn't really need Hitler, and could make much smarter decisions in his absence, and so the Nazis actually win the war " Since fanatism and not smartness were the desired traits in the Nazis, I doubt they would have made more smart decisions - rather infighting with the national conservative part of the Wehrmacht and society taking over. (thanking the nazis for the plain power base they build them and getting rid of democracy and then kicking them out, like they planned from the beginning and reinstall a king)
SEJeff 5y ago
Democracy as an idea and form of government was almost extinguished from history by the Persians. When Emperor Xerxes II invaded Greece to avenge the Greeks beating his father Darius it looked really bad. After the Persians put a pretty bad hurting on the allied Greek navy, the Athenian Admiral Themistocles lured the huge, but slow Persian navy into a bloodbath where Greek Triremes dominated their Persian enemies at the Battle of Salamis. Meanwhile, a small contingent of infantry led by the famous King Leonidas and 300 volunteer Spartans (along with roughly 10,000 Thebans and Thespians) held off the brunt of the Persian infantry and cavalry. After these two battles, the majority of the Persians left Greece and thus ended the Greco-Persian war. Democracy lived because of valor and cunning of a small group of very brave men.
- qwytw 5y ago
  The type of democracy practised in Athens was pretty widespread amongst various city-states (including non Greek ones like Rome, which arguable had a form of "democracy" much closer to the modern one because in Athens most public officials were chosen by lot) it's just due to a variety of reasons very few written records from cities other than Athens survived. Also you mixed up the battles, Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae (the one in which the 300 Spartans fought) pretty decisively as a result the Persians invaded Attica and sacked and razed Athens to the ground (most of the population was evacuated to nearby islands). The decisive battle after which the Persian were mostly expelled from mainland Greece was Plataea (during which at least 70 thousand Greeks (including 10 000 hoplites from Sparta) faced a Persian army similar in size. Besides Sparta itself was anything but a Democracy so I can't imagine they were fight to protect it. And the also defeated Athens and their allies in the Peloponnesian War a few decades later (in large part due to Persian financial support). Also the two ancient Greek philosophers who had the most influence on the development of western political philosophy were of Plato & Aristotle (who both were very critical of democracy).
  - SEJeff 5y ago
    > The type of democracy practised in Athens was pretty widespread amongst various city-states (including non Greek ones like Rome, which arguable had a form of "democracy" much closer to the modern one because in Athens most public officials were chosen by lot) it's just due to a variety of reasons very few written records from cities other than Athens survived. From wikipedia: "The concepts (and name) of democracy and constitution as a form of government originated in ancient Athens circa 508 B.C." Rome was a representative republic starting in 509 B.C. their ideas absolutely helped democracy become a thing, but it was ultimately invented by Athens. > Also you mixed up the battles, Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae (the one in which the 300 Spartans fought) pretty decisively as a result the Persians invaded Attica and sacked and razed Athens to the ground (most of the population was evacuated to nearby islands). The decisive battle after which the Persian were mostly expelled from mainland Greece was Plataea (during which at least 70 thousand Greeks (including 10 000 hoplites from Sparta) faced a Persian army similar in size. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I said they held off the brunt of the Persian infantry and cavalry, which they absolutely and historically did do, for three days with a fraction of the men. You are correct that they decisively lost the battle, but I also said that the majority of the Persians left Greece after this. Again, historically, after the spanking the Persian navy took at the Battle of Salamis, and three days of heavy fighting and casualties at the battle of Thermoplaye, Emperor Xerxes retreated to Asia with much of his army, leaving Mardonius to complete the conquest of Greece. It was almost a year later that the battle of Plataea happened, but the majority of the Persian forces left with Xerxes. Mardonius tried to convince Xerxes to continue after the defeat at Salamis, but his heart was no longer in it. > Besides Sparta itself was anything but a Democracy so I can't imagine they were fight to protect it. And the also defeated Athens and their allies in the Peloponnesian War a few decades later (in large part due to Persian financial support). Yes, I'm aware. Sparta forced the tyrant Hippias out of Athens, who ultimately fled to Persia. Realizing that a democracy was bad for Sparta, they attempted to recall him and reinstate him back as the tyrant of Athens. I believe it was the Corinthians and some of their allies who forced Hippias back into exile. Having tasted democracy, they were not keen on going back to a tyranny. Athens even told Persia no, they would not accept Hippias and that was what ultimately lead to the Ionian revolt and Darius's first Persian campaign into greece, whee. I might be a bit off here as I've not read Landmark Thucydides since the beginning of covid (I have a hardcopy). What did I get wrong? Besides Athens inventing democracy, I think we're mostly in agreement.
mongol 5y ago
I will reply to myself. The cold winter of 1658 froze the Great Belt, and allowed Swedish troups to march over the ice from Jutland to Zealand. This led to Swedish victory over Denmark and the Treaty of Roskilde. This ceded significant territory to Sweden, much of which is Swedish to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Across_the_Belts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Across_the_Belts
- gerikson 5y ago
  Hardly world-changing, in the grand scheme of things (and I say that as a Swede).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
One of my favorites is Alexander at the Battle of Granicus Here is the relevant passage from Plutarch: Many rushed upon Alexander, for he was conspicuous by his buckler and by his helmet's crest, on either side of which was fixed a plume of wonderful size and p267 whiteness. But although a javelin pierced the joint of his breastplate, he was not wounded; 6738 and when Rhoesaces and Spithridates, two Persian commanders, made at him together, he avoided the one, and smote Rhoesaces, who wore a breastplate, with his spear; and when this weapon snapped in two with the blow, he took to his sword. 9 Then, while he was thus engaged with Rhoesaces, Spithridates rode up from one side, raised himself up on his horse, and with all his might came down with a barbarian battle-axe upon Alexander's head. 10 Alexander's crest was broken off, together with one of its plumes, and his helmet could barely and with difficulty resist the blow, so that the edge of the battle-axe touched the topmost hair of his head. 11 But while Spithridates was raising his arm again for another stroke, Cleitus, "Black Cleitus," got the start of him and ran him through the body with his spear. At the same time Rhoesaces also fell, smitten by Alexander's sword. Alexander almost was killed by a battle axe. This was at the Battle of Granicus when he was facing a provincial Persian army. If Alexander had died that day, he would not have conquered the Persian Empire. Greek culture would not have spread nearly as wide as it did. It would have profoundly affected both the development of the East and West.
- meowface 5y ago
  How reliable is this narrative, though? Alexander was highly revered by many, so these kinds of heroic stories would naturally be attributed to him. And Plutarch isn't always known to be super reliable. (That said, I don't necessarily fully doubt the story, either. He certainly seemed to like putting himself in dangerous positions.)
zaarn 5y ago
The Second Defenestration in Prague, May 23, 1618. Three people of the catholic church were thrown out a window and dropped 17 meters below on a pile of manure, all the survived, one with head trauma. What followed was the 30 Year War, a topic that I know is sadly a but underdeveloped in US/UK history class, since the US didn't exist then and the UK didn't really do anything on account of it's own internal problems at the time. The 30 Year War was pivotal for religious rights in Europe as well as one of the most devastating wars in history (up to 40% of the population perished either in war, famine or plagues). Another big point was that as a result of this war, german cities and the rest of europe experienced a big uplift in trade. Especially France, Spain, Netherland and England got a huge boost to their ship trade, which I would argue at minimum indirectly lead to financing the expeditions that discovered the Americas. Sadly it is a rather complex topic that many historians still fight over, since in most cases if you open history books about it, you see a map of the HRE + Europe with about 2 million arrows labelled "attacks" or "leads to" or "defends" or "defeats".

AlbertCory 5y ago

There was a thread on Twitter a few months ago about "history balancing on a knife's edge." All the examples (many of which also appear here) are fascinating. My own favorite (no disrespect to the others) is C. Wade McClusky, the hero of the Battle of Midway in WW II. He just happened to find the Japanese carriers, where no one else would have thought to look, and sink them. Had the US lost, it might have lost Hawaii as well. Then what would have happened? I can't say and neither can anyone else.

vkou 5y ago
> Then what would have happened? All that would have happened was that the war in the pacific would have been extended by another six to twelve months. Japan had constant oil shortages[0], had over a million men tied up in a land war in China, and its naval capacity was outproduced five-to-one by the United States. [1] The outcome of the War in the Pacific was inevitable, as of December 8th, 1941. [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Naval_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  It's so easy to pronounce the final outcome "inevitable" isn't it? There's no one to prove you wrong. The great imponderable of war is the population's willingness to keep waging it. I don't know what would have happened and neither does Wikipedia.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    Such comments totally ignore the human element of warfare, totally agreed with you.
  - labster 5y ago
    It’s hard to imagine a world where the US in 1941 would not use its industrial power to assert hegemony over the Pacific after being attacked. The Japanese strategy was to neutralize the US fast enough to reduce morale for waging a losing war. But US morale remained high throughout, so it too is hard to imagine a world where the strategy would succeed even if the attack on Pearl was executed flawlessly. The anime Zipang brings up a more interesting point: had oil been discovered ten years earlier in Manchuria, would Japan have attacked the US and Dutch at all? Possibly yes: the question of “how do we defeat America?” eclipsed the more important “should we defeat America?” in Imperial Japan.

kaycebasques 5y ago

A special life moment for me was being in Paris for the first time, reading a book about the revolution. It seems like this book would be even better for that experience. I.e. visiting places mentioned in the book as you read through it.

maverick-iceman 5y ago

Bush v. Gore 2000 down in Florida comes to mind. Would 9/11 have happened with Gore at the helm? And if yes, what he'd have done differently? Maybe Al Gore would have been impeached for incompetence and treason had he refused to get carried by the moment and declare war. If he declared war solely against Al Quaeda, then what would have happened to Saddam? We could have an Iraq with Saddam still at the helm? Or maybe he'd have gone down in the Arab Spring? Would we be enjoying fracking had we not lost so many lives in the Middle East in an era of shifting societal values in the early 2000s?

darawk 5y ago
> Bush v. Gore 2000 down in Florida comes to mind. I think about this one frequently. I think this was actually pretty impactful, and in an interesting way. I suspect that Gore would have put all of his energy into climate change work, and he might have actually made a dent in it, because it was still possible to do so relatively cheaply then. I think the consequences of that would likely have been that the problem got mitigated to a degree, and everyone would remember it as that ridiculous fake crisis that Gore made up and wasted a bunch of money trying to prevent.

pugworthy 5y ago

For a more down to earth view of the French Revolution, I'd recommend reading "Journal of My Life" by Jacques-Louis Ménétra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_My_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_My_Life

Animats 5y ago

After Robespierre was taken out, the Convention was supposedly in charge. But they botched their win so badly that they ended up with the end of the Republic and Napoleon as Emperor. That period, from 1792 to 1799, is worth more attention. Because it covers the death of what had been, briefly, a democracy. Compare with Russia after the breakup of the USSR.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

At least he was not murdered in a bathtub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat If you look at what marat published, one can recognize the paper-civil-war-rage-culture, that is alive and hell on twitter.

meowface 5y ago
Not taking a side, but just to add some context: >Responsibility for the September massacres has been attributed to [Marat], given his position of authority at the time and an alleged paper trail of decisions leading up to the massacre >Charlotte Corday was guillotined on 17 July 1793 for the murder. During her four-day trial, she testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000."
fourtrees 5y ago
For anyone interested, another more sympathetic figure to contrast with Marat and the like is Camille Desmoulins. A lawyer before the revolution, he engaged in the same 'rage-culture' diatribes as Marat -- until he realized he had gone much too far and began to speak against the Terror. Of course, he lost his head. Just his Wikipedia page is quite an emotional ride. Thermidor can't come soon enough.