December 15, 2025

A historian weighs in on the similarity between the U.S. today and France just before the Revolution.

An excerpt from "The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV" by Michael Hirschorn in the NYT. 
The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789,” his brilliant 2023 account of the decades leading up to the French Revolution. The preconditions were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms. OK, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not quite Voltaire. But there was a pedophilia scandal involving Louis XV: Public obsession with the king’s many mistresses helped give rise to so-called libelles, cheaply printed, semi-factual pamphlets that speculated on, among other matters, the king’s supposed never-ending supply of teenage girls. It would have fit right in on TikTok. Reverence turned to mockery; mockery begot contempt; and then. …

Libelles ≈ social media. 

91 comments:

boatbuilder said...

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Give me a break. Numerology is more soundly based than this nonsense.

rhhardin said...

Marx on the revolution, last line is a zinger often used against Reagan and now Trump (2nd preface to the 18th Brumaire)

Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo's Napoleon le Petit and Proudhon's Coup d'Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d'etat. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d'etat as the result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however, his historical construction of the coup d'etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part.

tcrosse said...

An example of the Trahison des Clercs, just to keep it French.

Leland said...

Malicious Observance

RCOCEAN II said...

"weaponized religious bigotry"

Which doesn't exist today and didn't exist then. Don't know why that's thrown in, but i guess its so vague it mean anything.

mccullough said...

It’s going to be the Spanish Civil War. The Traditionalists v The Communists.

RCOCEAN II said...

funny how the NYT's and MSM suddenly got upset about Billionaires in politics at the same time Musk bought twitter. Gee, I wonder why.

Enigma said...

French Revolution:

1. Overspending by the French King to support the USA's war of independence. Then, the winning USA still did business with the English.
2. The French aristocracy refused to pay taxes/support the government budget. The Austrian queen Marie Antionette also had terrible public relations in France.
3. The democracy and science ideals of the USA and general European Enlightenment went against monarchies and tradition.
4. The aristocracy miscalculated and the radicals took over (Robespierre's Reign of Terror) and there were lots of executions.
5. France's ideological vision wandered about for generations with Napolean and others.

RCOCEAN II said...

We do have a financial elite that has a stranglehold on the Media and Politics. Addelson can throw millions in a race and destroy anyone she doesn't like. The Jewish Billionaires were upset at anti-Israel activity on college campuses and basically got half-dozen college presidents fired.

And the Senate Republicans are all controlled by Big Business Billionaires who want cheap labor and tax cuts. And nothing else.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"The preconditions were all there"

He's clearly not a commodities investor, cause he missed one: “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value. Zero.” – Voltaire (1736)

RCOCEAN II said...

The Russian and French Revolutions followed the same pattern in this way. The Monarchy was overthrown by liberals pushing for Liberty and Democracy. And then, in turn, were overthrown by leftwing crazies who instituted a reign of terror.

You can throw in the Spanish Republic, which was eleced to be a democratic worker friendly government and then in a few months was allowing leftists to murder priests and burn down churches. Followed by Communists controlling the GOvernment by the spring of 37.

You can never trust the liberals. They only want to fight the right. And will cave and let the totalitarian left take power.

john mosby said...

Doesn't the article describe the situation leading up to the overthrow of the Left by MAGA (three times)?

The real libelles/samizdat aren't corporate comedians making fun of Trump - they're righties on social media blaspheming the Left's deeply held pieties. CC, JSM

Peachy said...

Billionaires like soros and Pritzker will fund the leftists and their rage. "I must be allowed to fuck furries in peace, & all will be forced to celebrate!' - the left whined!

narciso said...

Good grief they are off the mark, in a paper supported by a mecican oligarch

Smilin' Jack said...

“The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment blah blah blah…”

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

deepelemblues said...

These people sure do enjoy speculation about their political foes being murdered.

John henry said...

suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms.

Gee, sounds like the 1880s. Or the 1920s, or the 1960s or the 1990s or...

In other words, pretty much the rule rather than the exception over the past century or 2 in the US.

Sounds like more bullshit.

John Henry

gilbar said...

so now we're at the point, that the NYTs just puts random words together, and says it's an article?

boatbuilder said...

let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, ... mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms.

I'm guessing that this sort of thing is what really set him off.

gilbar said...

..weaponized religious bigotry..
i assume they're talking about Islamic jihadiis there?

J Severs said...

So the peasants are ready to revolt against the upper crust, but didn't the peasants reject the upper crust's candidate?

boatbuilder said...

I meant this sort of thing:
https://people.com/politics/barack-obama-60-birthday-party-covid-19-marthas-vineyard/

Rabel said...

XV, XVI, whatever.

Steve Austin Showed Up For Work. said...

Confirmation bias is a bitch.
The real similarity is the national debt. Otherwise, the differences fall apart. We don't have a monarchy. We have choices between not only different parties but different personalities. Does anyone want to make the case that a President Harris would have made the same decisions as President Trump?

Whenever historians do this stuff it comes off as crankish. Yeah, it's important to see similarities but you must also see what's different. Revolutions happen when there is no other way to make necessary change. If you think elections don't matter in America... where have you been living the last 10 years?

tim maguire said...

Did he mention Bidenflation?

The excerpt shown here is stuff and nonsense. The biggest issue leading to the French revolution was an empty treasury due to deficit spending that prevented the government from alleviating hunger after bad weather led to crop failures that caused the price of bread to double.

narciso said...

Why not facts in the way of a narrative

Michael said...


Just finished rereading William Shirer's The collapse of the Third Republic. 1918 France was at the height of it's military, economic, cultural power. P!ssed it all away in a mere 22 years to become a vassal state of the Nazis.

Thirty four years ago this month the Soviet Union was tossed in the dumpster of history with the USA at the height of its military, economic and cultural power. Now look at the focking mess this country has become.

Reading Shirer's words about 1930s France, one cannot help but see similarities to 2020s America.

tim maguire said...

Smilin' Jack said...The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

I am continually amazed at what a poor job historians do of taking the lessons of history and applying them to today's world. They don't even grasp what future historians are likely to care about.

Richard Dolan said...

"OK, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not quite Voltaire."

That the author felt that his essay would be improved by that sentence was a clue, which the clueless author evidently didn't quite get, that he needed to rethink whether his point was worth making.

narciso said...

As far as anything applies elon is voltaire

wildswan said...

This era resembles the time just before the English Civil War or just before the American Revolution, more than it resembles the pre-Revolutionary France or Russia. In England liberties and rights which the English people had retained when the rest of Europe went in for absolutism came under attack. Charles I wanted absolute power like his brother monarchs. It was in that time 1625-1688 that all the rights we presently enjoy were established as rights of Englishmen, i.e., freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, limited government power, habeus corpus, no taxation without representation, the right of the people to present their grievances to the government. The American Revolution simply extended those rights to Americans, except for the slaves, and the Civil War, which many regarded as the completion of the American Revolution, extended those rights to the slaves. Now, once again, an elite, the Euro-American richie-trash, have observed what fun absolute leaders have and many of them want in on it. And they have their flunkies and minions in the Dem left. So we are essentially in the same position as the leaders of the American Revolution in that we have our "Tories," (the top-trash and their minions in the NGO-Dem archipelago), supporting an attempt to take from us "the rights of Americans." They've brought in aliens, gang members and Muslims, who don't hesitate to murder us as the English brought in Hessians. We aren't going to let that stand. But what will the struggle be like? We have recently been free which makes us quite different from the French and Russian peasants, and so our struggle probably won't resemble theirs as much as it will resemble the American Revolution and/or the English Civil War which preceded it. History grows from history.
There will be no bottom-up insurgency; there will be attacks on all holidays, all sacred places, all Jews, all Christian leaders. These attacks will come from imports from Islamic countries, mainly, and from losers from the hinterlands. "The pure products of America go crazy," said one of our poets. He meant the lost, adrift on the culture, anchorless in a storm. Even so, it isn't a majority or even a minority that's shit-stirring; it's a very few magnified by their elite masters' megaphone.
We have a leader, we have a glorious history, we have a cause which everyone can rally round, namely, universal rights rather than tribal, caste or class privilege. We can win, meaning by that: keep our culture, our institutions, our humanity.
John Paul II lived through the Nazis and the Communists, Step One, he said, was: Be not afraid.

bagoh20 said...

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Rusty said...

RCOCEAN II said...
funny how the NYT's and MSM suddenly got upset about Billionaires in politics at the same time Musk bought twitter. Gee, I wonder why.

12/15/25, 12:09 PM

Just ask RJW. He speaks billionaire.

rehajm said...

Yah this is the fantasy wheeled out like the box of Christmas decorations every time left isn’t getting its way. If we’re keeping score the billionaires are the ones organizing the ngos and hiring the peasants. The mere millionaires are the government actors helping to funnel the money, too. French Revolution that aint…

Shouting Thomas said...

So, is Trump Louis XIV or Hitler? If Louis XIV, is that an upgrade?

RideSpaceMountain said...

"If we’re keeping score the billionaires are the ones organizing the ngos and hiring the peasants. The mere millionaires are the government actors helping to funnel the money, too."

"You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half" works just as well when the target is the middle class.

J Scott said...

Another problem with the thesis is that the revolution was largely a Parisian thing, which was the cultural, governance, monetary center of the state. There's no way the decentralized nature of the United States could support the kind of top down revolution that France experienced. And if the people in DC wanna start killing each other, I don't think the rest of the country is gonna care.

RideSpaceMountain said...

@J Scott, as someone on the net once stated, a countervalue nuclear exchange (one that targets population centers) would literally turn the USA ethnically and politically conservative overnight. The more DC works to actively thwart the will of those that don't live or work there, the more attractive a 15 megaton airbust over K Street seems to the turnips they're squeezing.

Some might even prefer a surface burst to thwart efforts at rebuilding.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Danno said...

Ride Space Mountain, just turning off the electricity and water to these big cities would do the trick.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV

Really? Maybe Soros or everybody's least favorite Junior Billionaire Mark Cuban, but it seems to me like most of the other billionaires are providing jobs for people. It's the millionaires like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren who've got Louis XV.

MadTownGuy said...

Meanwhile, in Southern California...

Far-left extremists who allegedly planned LA New Year’s Eve terror attack also wanted to ‘take out’ ICE agents (New York Post)

"A group of far-left extremists allegedly planned to kill ICE agents after carrying out their New Year’s Eve terror plot against American businesses.

Four bizarrely nicknamed members of a group known as the “Order of the Black Lotus” — a splinter group of the “anti-capitalist” Turtle Island Liberation Front — planned to plant pipe bombs at two US companies in Los Angeles, according to a federal prosecutors.

Afterward, the group planned to attack federal immigration agents and their vehicles with pipe bombs beginning in January or February 2026 — in the hopes the blasts “would take some of them out and scare the rest of them,” according to the criminal complaint."

Enigma said...

Beyond Soros, Bloomberg is the most evil US billionaire: His stock trading system imposes a de facto tax on stock transactions. He rakes in $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ monthly, and he...owns media, funds "science research," NY politicians...and post-2020, he manipulates lots of local elections too.

Per Biden's policy agenda, Bloomberg was a key Biden puppetmaster.

Goldenpause said...

Does anyone outside of the Acela Corridor and academia take the NYT seriously? Asking for a friend.

RideSpaceMountain said...

Danno said, "just turning off the electricity and water to these big cities would do the trick."

I wish that'd be enough. "Guess who's coming to dinner" if transport infrastructure remains intact. If Californians are any example, locusts care not for the damage they do.

narciso said...

Those are some power shrooms in the Times newsroom

Beasts of England said...

’…just turning off the electricity and water to these big cities would do the trick.’

Heck, just embargo their garbage trucks and barges. lol

narciso said...

They might be too soy for cannibalism though

chuck said...

Did he mention debt? France was broke, and we are getting there.

narciso said...

We're so far past broke, its not even funny

RideSpaceMountain said...

@chuck
@narciso

The Volcker parachute that backstopped the entire Ponzi for 50 years is gone. Congress spent it. We are now in the Lloyd Christmas "those are just as good as money, those are IOUs!" phase of kick-the-can insolvency.

Enigma said...

The USA is broke, but so is the rest of the world. We can get out either through deflation (Japan 1990s style) or inflation. Given Biden's rampant spending and Trump's tax cutting generousity...deflation is not in the cards...the Greece and Turkiye economic model is in the cards...

IMO this is why the stock market and gold are performing "so well" -- those with assets are riding the inflation wave. They are not getting richer, just maintining their relative status in the hierarchy.

narciso said...

Nothing makes sense but the Times takes the Gold medal in misunderstanding (at both ends of the ocean)

Narr said...

The quote is Hirschorn the journalist's, not Darnton the historian's, I think. Attribution matters.

Let me know if I'm wrong.

Kirk Parker said...

J Scott,

If the denizens of DC want to start shooting each other, the rest of us will take up a collection to send them ammo, pop a bunch of popcorn, and sit back and wait.

MadTownGuy,

Is that for real, or is that another FBI/ATF inspired viper militia/Whitmer abduction plot?

Quayle said...

The intellectual plague of our era: We have a multitude of experts, who can tell the historical corollary, but precisely zero experts who actually lead us to the better place.

Skeptical Voter said...

Well it is true that the United States deserves a better ruling class than it has. And I don't count Trump and his supporters as part of that ruling class.

Mary Beth said...

mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms.

I'm assuming this is really a dig at Trump and his desire for a ballroom by someone who prefers us hosting dignitaries in tents and having them use portable toilets. "Mansions" makes it sound like it's the newest fad among the very rich. I look forward to the Kardashian-branded waltz and foxtrot classes.

chuck said...

Debt, taxes, and bureaucracy brought on the French Revolution. It was not a revolution of the downtrodden, it was a revolution of the middle and professional classes. And of course the peasants of the Vendée revolted. Leftists hate peasants, agriculture, and religion.

traditionalguy said...

So do we start calling Trump Napoleon next?

buwaya said...

Spanish Civil War. See Anthony Beevor's take at the beginning of his book. It was just a pile-up of tribal hatred that had been breaking out for years, and the war was just the outcome of the last outbreak. Half of Spain deeply and sincerely hated the other half, and vice versa. This all went way back btw, ideological warfare was the national sport since 1814.
The final explosion was helped along (on both sides) by a new and very popular technology, radio.
American tribal hatred seems to be getting to a similar level. Political assassination seems to be turning into a national sport. And of course the new technology is the internet.

wildswan said...

Seebohn Rowntree interviewed every poor person in the city of York, England in the 1880's and he found they divided into five groups. 1. Those who had several children under the age of twelve. These would stop being poor as soon as their children could work. 2. Grandparents raising their grandchildren because the parents were dead or missing. Their provision for old-age was inadequate to cover the children. 3. Families whose breadwinner was injured at work, trying to exist on a small pension 4. Alcoholics, addicts 5. Criminals.

The first three classes could be helped with money, the fourth class and fifth classes could not. And it's just the same now in terms of the reasons for poverty - i.e., temporary family problem (such as being an immigrant); permanent family problem (such as loss of parents or spouse); loss of health; addiction; life of crime. But now we pretend that addicts and criminals can be helped with money because our theories say they are the same as the people in the first three classes.

Howard said...

If wishes were horses beggars would ride

Think I'm going down to the well tonight
And I'm gonna drink 'til I get my fill
And I hope when I get old, I don't sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back
Trying to recapture a little of the glory of
Well, the time slips away
Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of
Glory days
Yeah, they'll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl's eye, glory days
Glory days

buwaya said...

My kids and wife are already there at waltz and foxtrot. I can still stumble through a waltz, maybe.
There is a CA techbro subculture that does ballroom and swing and stuff btw.

chuck said...

Apropos the Spanish Civil War, it also had the look of cities vs the countryside. I mention that because there is a similar divide in the US.

MadTownGuy said...

Kirk Parker said...
[J Scott,

If the denizens of DC want to start shooting each other, the rest of us will take up a collection to send them ammo, pop a bunch of popcorn, and sit back and wait.]

"MadTownGuy,

Is that for real, or is that another FBI/ATF inspired viper militia/Whitmer abduction plot?"

The Post article mentioned a connection or affinity with Palestinian causes, so it's possible that it's the real deal even if they're part of a splinter group. Here's more from AP:

4 charged with plotting New Year’s Eve attacks in Southern California, prosecutors say

"Federal authorities said Monday that they foiled a plot to bomb multiple sites of two U.S. companies on New Year’s Eve in Southern California after arresting members of an extremist anti-capitalist and anti-government group.

The four suspects were arrested Friday in the Mojave Desert east of Los Angeles as they were rehearsing their plot, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said during a news conference. Officials showed reporters surveillance aerial footage of the suspects moving a large black object in the desert to a table. Officials said they were able to make the arrests before the suspects assembled a functional explosive device.

In the criminal complaint, the four suspects named are Audrey Illeene Carroll, 30; Zachary Aaron Page, 32; Dante Gaffield, 24; and Tina Lai, 41. They are all from the Los Angeles area, Essayli said.

Officials did not describe a motive but said they are members of an offshoot of a group dubbed the Turtle Island Liberation Front. The group calls for decolonization, tribal sovereignty and “the working class to rise up and fight back against capitalism,” according to the criminal complaint.

The term “Turtle Island” is used by some Indigenous peoples to describe North America in a way that reflects its existence outside of the colonial boundaries put in place by the U.S. and Canada. It comes from Indigenous creation stories where the continent was formed on the back of a giant turtle.

Officials also found “Free Palestine” flyers at the desert campsite where the suspects were working with the bomb-making materials.

The charges against each suspect include conspiracy and possession of a destructive device. Essayli said additional charges were expected in coming weeks.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the suspects had attorneys, and The Associated Press was unable to reach family members. AP also sent Turtle Island Liberation Front’s social media accounts messages asking for comment but did not get a response."

Saint Croix said...

I think our current crop of leftists have a lot of things in common with the Reign of Terror. The urge to murder their opponents. The hatred of religion. The "Cult of Reason." Criticize the government and you'd be executed by the state. The French Revolution was Marxist before Karl Marx was born.

It's ridiculous to compare American right-wingers with the aristocracy of Europe. We have almost nothing in common. But I see a lot of similarities between the rise of socialism in the USA and what happened in France. Certainly we are seeing young people on the left cheering murder, which was unthinkable for most of my life.

Rocco said...

Shouting Thomas said...
So, is Trump Louis XIV or Hitler? If Louis XIV, is that an upgrade?

Louis XIV, aka the Sun King:
- Had the longest reign of any monarch in history, over 72 years. That means Trump will be around for a long time.
- Fundamentally transformed the Palace of Versailles into what we see today. East wing ballroom? And I’m old enough to remember the Obama era when “fundamentally transforming” was seen as a good thing.
- Ended the 30 years war. The Peace of Westphalia defined European politics for centuries. Sounds like the Trump reshaping foreign policy to match 21st century realities.

buwaya said...

The Spanish Right in 1936 was:
- the Catholic petit-bourgeoisie, mostly from provincial towns
- the rural yeomanry of the Spanish North, especially those of Navarre and Old Castile. Most of these were Carlists.
- the aristocracy, which in Spain is numerous and rarely wealthy
- a few political obsessive Falangists (Fascists). A tiny number before the war.
- subsets of the military, mainly those deployed in the colonial empire (Morocco) and those deployed in Navarre and Castile
- most of the rural/provincial gendarmerie (Guardia Civil)

I see a lot of overlap with the modern US right.

Narr said...

Rocco, Louis XIV was only ten years old when others worked out the Treaty of Westphalia. He had nothing to do with it, and during his reign he was what Churchill called the great pest of Europe. Of course, Westphalia only took away some old antagonisms and grounds for warfare, but it didn't stop European wars.

Napoleon was not the first belligerent French monarch to attempt European domination.

I second buwaya's endorsement of Beevor's book about the SCW.

Robooh said...

Whatever else this era is, its not the dying days of the Ancien Regime. The Ancien Regime was a stultifying autocracy where most of the wealth was from inherited passive income. Our leaders are elected, and most of the super rich made their money creating new industries.

buwaya said...

Where the political mix differs between the modern US and Spain 1936 -
- industrial workers - mostly on the right in the US today, almost exclusively left and anarchist in Spain 1936
- no ethnic/racial subsets in Spain 1936 (or even, arguably, today). No Chicanos and Puerto Ricans and blacks and Somalis, and etc.
- The US doesnt have ethnic national separatists like the Basques and Catalans.

Dave Begley said...

The French peasants didn’t have cell phones and 401k’s.

Gospace said...

I have read that the richest families in France today are direct descendants of the richest families in France before the French revolution.

Rags to riches and back to rags in 3-5 generations doesn't seem to be a thing in France.

buwaya said...

I am dubious about the persistence of French fortunes. One would have to track them. So I checked on the Arnaults, the richest. Bernard is the son of Jean, who succeeded his father-in-law (Jean married the bosses daughter) at the engineering contractor Ferret-Savinol. Which wasnt much at the time. Jean and Bernard made much more of it, and Bernard crucially diversified, and, well, got extremely rich.

Lazarus said...

If you have a title (or can successfully pretend to have a title) you can marry your way into a fortune, and if you had money during one of the monarchical periods in the 19th century you could buy a title. Along the way your family could accumulate some very impressive noble ancestors, but I don't think as many of the old landed fortunes are intact in France as in Britain.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Historians are always finding uncanny parallels between some despised era and the Americans they don't like. Dog bites man.

Kirk Parker said...

MadTownGuy,

> Officials also found “Free Palestine
>flyers at the desert campsite where
> the suspects were working with the
> bomb-making materials

Yes, I know. But my question remains: did they have one or more FBI/ATF informants helping them (instigating them?) in their efforts? Those other groups I mentioned certainly did; and now that I think of it so did Randy Weaver.

buwaya said...

Louis XVI (the one who got his head removed) was a steady sober fellow without a harem of teenage girls. He was quite devoted to his wife (as Kings went).
Louis XV was the guy with a personal brothel and an entourage (the parc aux cerfs).

Josephbleau said...

European revolutions were about royalty and the surf’s response, which becomes hijacked. The American revolution was like this. The US Civil War was about regional economics. I don't know of a Euro revolution that was about the separation of a country based on differing economic goals. But if there were it was not France. I don’t think even Spain.

A US revolution is going to have half the Billionares on one side, and half on the other. A war of globalism vs home soil.

Bruce Hayden said...

I think that if the Revolution comes, it will be the credentialed class and insiders plus the professional victims/grifters versus the center/right, and because of that structure, the center right will triumph. They have the numbers and the guns. And if worse comes to worse, they have the military and the military trained, and the ability to cut off the urban centers, where their opponents mostly live, from resources. While the urban left may control the government, they don’t provide their own power and good. Cut them off, and the left will likely collapse, because it is built of an unstable coalition of elites and underclass.

As for the really rich billionaires, keep in mind that Elon Musk probably made back the cost of Twitter/X with increased in value of his SpaceX and Tesla businesses. All he needed to do was eliminate the leftist orientation of Twitter/X, and he was seated at the head table with Trump. And magically, the roadblocks the elite class grifters had built for SpaceX disappeared.

Enigma said...

@buwaya: I am dubious about the persistence of French fortunes. One would have to track them.

The persistence of wealthy European Jews...well that led to all sorts of hostility from Shakespeare with The Merchant of Venice to the actions of Germany and France in WW2. See the Rothschild family and its many branches across countries...then see Greta Thunberg's blue octopus toy.

Rusty said...

What you have to remember about pre-revolutionary France, or all of Europe for that matter. Once you were born a peasant a peasant you will stay. For the rest of your life. And your childrens lives as well. You will never own a home or a business you will never rise in society no matter how hard you worked.
The comparison to present day America is hardly apt.

buwaya said...

The second French family fortune is that of the Bettencourt-Meyers (l'Oreal) founded by Eugene Schueller (not a Jew)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Schueller
Schueller started as a university lab assistant.
The family is "interesting".

buwaya said...

"Once you were born a peasant a peasant you will stay. For the rest of your life"

This was never true. Among other things global trade and the industrial revolution turned everything upside down. Indeed, there have been studies showing that Europe has had more social mobility and elite turnover than the US post-WW2.

narciso said...

Yes schueller funded the cagoule the proto vichy militia

I learned about that from michael barr zohar

john mosby said...

Gospace: "Rags to riches and back to rags in 3-5 generations doesn't seem to be a thing in France."

Oddly, they came up with the cliche. Sabots a sabots (clogs to clogs).

My understanding is a lot of the rich families are Huguenots, who would not have been big shots in the ancien regime.

Sort of like how lots of the big English industrial families are Quakers and other Nonconformists. CC, JSM

Narr said...

Speaking of weaponized religious bigotry, a great example is Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes which granted tolerance to the Huguenots.

With a single stroke, he sent tens of thousands of France's most educated and productive inhabitants to places like Britain and Brandenburg--and even though many of France's best soldiers had been Prots.

Bruce Hayden said...

What we found in another thread was that historians tend to be TDS addled libtards. They rated Biden in the top half of all former Presidents, and Trump second worse. How anyone can rate Biden as anything other than abysmal is beyond me. By almost every realistic metric, Trump 45 was a better President than Biden 46.

We are supposed to trust them because they are experts. Sorry, Thats ship has sailed. They are, for the most part, TDS addled libtards, doing leftist politics first, and history a distinct second.

Hassayamper said...

With a single stroke, he sent tens of thousands of France's most educated and productive inhabitants to places like Britain

My dad’s family in England had a Huguenot ancestor who came at that time, and a German ancestor who fled during the revolutions of 1848. Odd to think that I, an educated and productive American of mostly British extraction, might instead be applying my educated productivity to the betterment of France or Germany today, but for the mysterious whims of Fate.

Gospace said...

Just noticed that the italics stay on for the instructions on POST A COMMENT.

Post a Comment

Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.