Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre
literaryreview.co.uk
literaryreview.co.uk
> ‘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?
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.
What if Octavius never traveled to Hispania? Caesar may well have still adopted his nephew in order to make him his beneficiary. What would have happened if there were no Octavius? Possibly Marcus Antonius would have consolidated power.
Would we have no transistors today if Shockley hadn't worked at Bell Labs?
I guess my viewpoint strongly biases me towards seeing continuity and underlying processes. For every tipping point, there was a pre-existing process; for every process an event you can treat as a "handle".
They were all hyper-ambitious patricians. The conservatives (optimates -- the best) regarded the populares (the faction Caesar aligned himself with) as people willing to threaten the order of the state by pandering to the masses. This is what Catiline did, and Caesar too. This was the basic threat that the Gracchi brothers appeared to present in agitating for land reform and something that underscored Caesar's political agenda (he had to find land for his loyal veterans).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Ass...
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.
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.
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.
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
Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, defeating the Confederate charge at Little Round Top in the battle of Gettysburg is arguably the key turning point of the US Civil War - the entire war and subsequent history could easily have turned out entirely differently without Chamberlain's successful order of the 'right wheel forward' maneuver bayonet attack when the 20th Maine was out of ammunition, which held a key ridge in a pivotal battle. [2]
Those are merely the first two that come to mind.
That being said, "revolution devouring its own children" is a pretty much hard rule with very few exceptions.
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.
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).
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.
I buy the argument that modern representative democracy is descended from Germanic practices. Germanic warriors 'electing' their leader -> landed men having representation through a house of lords or parliament -> modern suffrage movemetns. See the origins of the Icelandic or British parliaments. But nearly any society based on a widespread warrior class was in some way democratic, from Rome to the Mongols.
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.
(That said, I don't necessarily fully doubt the story, either. He certainly seemed to like putting himself in dangerous positions.)
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".
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)
I would have gone back and made sure he made it into art school.
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.
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_Wor...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
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.
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.
The policy of isolationism was very strong in the continental US. It's quite easy to imagine that the US gets bogged down in internal politics for years before stepping up.
What would you have said about England after Dunkirk? (With no hindsight allowed.)
It was a far closer fight than the United States and Japan. An invasion of the isles would have been impossible to pull off, and the war would almost certainly had gone the same way that it did - years of fighting over African colonies.
The battle of midway instead knocked out of all Japanese aircraft carriers. Unbeknownst to Japan, the United states was already pumping out several aircraft carriers per month and was also developing the nuclear bomb. The only possible change could have been surrendering to the Soviet union instead of United states. However, even that seems unlikely given the N bomb.
Dude named Oppenheimer begs to differ.
America still takes a lot of flack for demanding unconditional surrender which led us to drop two nukes on Japan. “The US could have just accepted peace terms with some concessions to Japan, then they wouldn’t have had to drop the bombs” is the line of argument.
Once the US had nuclear weapons, the result was not in doubt.
Putting aside nuclear arms as your comment seems to do, the question is not nearly as open as you make it out to be: Japan was heavily outmatched in resources, facing an array of enemies while having no significant allies of its own in the Pacific theater. So, even on a non-nuclear basis, they were in deep trouble. The best they could have hoped for was a stalemate: the Allies reclaim all lost ground, but don't invade the Japanese mainland.
There is a nice video somewhere on YouTube that shows the production of US naval ships vs Japanese naval ships in scaled time.
It is shocking the amount of ships that that US was producing starting near the middle of the war. A new destroyer or cruiser rolled out every couple of days. Japan wasn't even close.
I imagine that staffing the ships at some point was going to become a problem.
That's why using atomic bomb had no real military justification, it was just a very powerful political demonstration and USA retaliation on Japanese people.
That's the official pretext / party line of the US, to self-justify the nuclear bombings (as if they ever could be justified).
The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender. They just didn't want an unconditional surrender, but to save some face/dignity.
Anytime one hears the "the Japanese were looking to surrender" narrative, it should be understood that, even being generous, it's a half-truth that isn't borne out by a closer examination of the historical record, which even Japanese historians interviewing wartime Japanese officials, who had every possible reason to want to save face for their country, don't contradict.
The reality is that while, yes, there was a peace faction in the Japanese government who did want to surrender but the ultranationalistic Japanese military was quite firmly in control and was very much _not_ interested in surrendering, even at the cost of millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties involved in continuing the war. The aim (and preference of all factions) would have been a peace treaty that let Japan keep its ill-gotten gains in Asia. It took a direct order from the Emperor to initiate the surrender, over the objections of the military, and even then a coup attempt was made by fanatics willing to defy even the Emperor in an attempt to prevent the surrender proclamation from being broadcast (the Kyuujou incident).
Just how widespread was this sentiment at that time? Reading the accounts of the Kyūjō incident starting from the Wikipedia entry and branching from there [1], I got the sense that some of the Imperial Japanese Army leadership prevarication in the very early phases of the incident up to Kawabe's organizing of the agreement was this history's knife's edge playing out again. I just lack the cultural referents to even understand how significant was the fact that after the emperor's stiffly formal announcement, there was a broadcast immediately following to confirm in lay language that indeed it was a surrender announcement.
If specialist historians with the appropriate cross-cultural training can confirm it was that opaque to the Japanese themselves, then I wouldn't be surprised that the Americans misread the cues that Japanese were giving in their attempts to surrender, not helped by their selection of the Soviet Union as an intermediary that turned out to be an unreliable partner. This is all on top of the usual chaotic swirl of the fog of war.
There are criticisms against the narrative the Japanese were trying to surrender but the US ignored those attempts because the US wanted to use the nuclear bombs [2]. And there are narratives that the nuclear bombs were not decisive, but the Soviets opening another front was [3]. This account gives some useful color background to the decisions' context [4].
General consensus of casual discussions (as opposed to scholarly studies, which I couldn't find) of why the US didn't use the nuclear bomb on Tokyo seems to converge upon the US leadership emerging a strategy that desires a negotiated peace with some Japanese power structure intact. So any narrative that the US "just wants to use the bombs" takes place within the framework of the demonstrated and carried out desire for a negotiated conclusion. It might not have been as simple as "we want to use The Bomb, and by God, we'll use it", it might have been used as an instrument to achieving the strategic objective.
And there is definitely room to strenuously object to that use even within that framework, but for me to be convinced it was objectively black-and-white "wrong", I'd have to know more about the information and context the decision-makers on both sides operated upon, not the hindsight information we are privy to. Would appreciate any pointers to material along those lines.
What I took away from that pivot point in history is war is indeed, hell.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
[2] https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52502
[3] https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/education/008/expertclips/01...
[4] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...
The short version is that the Japanese did not have the merchant tonnage available to support operations already in progress at that point in the war. An invasion of Japan would've required landing several infantry divisions, across thousands of miles of open water, too far from any airstrips for land-based aircraft to support them. The Hawaiian islands are small, but Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii are big enough for maneuver warfare.
An American loss at Midway would've been a huge setback, especially had all three carriers been lost. The rate of commissioning of new Essex-class ships, not to mention the light and escort carriers, however, would've more than made up for the loss by mid-1943, and the Japanese simply did not have the industrial capacity to sustain a long naval war of attrition.
An American victory was not inevitable, but there's a fairly strong case to be made that the means by which the war was begun, by a sneak attack, had incensed the American populace sufficiently that even further serious naval defeats wouldn't've sapped their willingness to fight on. Indeed, several more American carriers were lost throughout 1942 (Hornet and Wasp), as well as the calamitous loss of four cruisers at Savo Island.
I don't actually think they would have "won" the war. I think their aims were really to dominate Asia and have the U.S. accept that, if grudgingly. There was certainly no desire to do a Man in the High Castle thing.
If forced into an existential conflict by a string of Axis victories on all major fronts, we would've turned most of the planet into a smoking crater, and there would have been nothing Japan, Germany, Russia, or anyone else could have done about it.
Everything leading up to August 6 was just so much posturing.
Look at the dates: Aug. 9 was Nagasaki. It wasn't until the 15th that they surrendered. Up until then, the war councils actually thought Stalin would intervene and force a better peace than the "unconditional surrender" the Allies demanded.
I know everyone believes the A-bomb ended the war. Unfortunately even that wasn't enough. If it was, the Japanese would have surrendered on Aug. 10.
That's not to contradict CamperBob2 about the US would have done. We could only produce about one bomb per month, though, IIRC.
Tip to HN users: "This is indisputably true but I don't like it" isn't a good reason to downvote people.
1: https://socratic.org/questions/why-did-germans-forces-surren...
That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there.
The Japanese, at that point, not so much.
So, angry retribution against Wehrmacht soldier scum was to be expected...
This didn't really matter for the Soviets. Though the Manchurian invasion was too rapid and short-lived to really escalate to European-level Soviet brutality, the Red Army engaged in plenty of the same random massacres, mass rapes, brutalities and mass deportations after they entered and occupied Manchuria.
Many of these soldiers had already long since been brutalized by their campaigns in eastern and central Europe (from which they had been shipped in massive trainloads shortly after VE Day) and the basic nature of the Soviet leadership hardly fostered a spirit of good military conduct to civilians at any time.
Some deeper reading about the Soviet Manchurian campaign reveals quite a few of the uglier details.
Also, none of this in the least bit excuses the grotesque behavior of the Japanese Army in the same region during its long occupation. Regardless of how the Japanese are perceived today, their army's habits during the 2nd World War were completely beyond justification in their genocidal viciousness.
And would the US be so magnanimous in victory had the toll been higher due to Axis victories on all major fronts (meaning that the human losses of the Axis were transfered to the Allies) up to the Atomic bombs use?
About 2.5 times as many people in Asia were killed by the Japanese as died in the German Holocaust. Let that sink in.
Anything the US did would have been seen as negligible in comparison.
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.
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?
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.
If you look at what marat published, one can recognize the paper-civil-war-rage-culture, that is alive and hell on twitter.
Thermidor can't come soon enough.
>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."