This past weekend, I refreshed my memory about the causes of the French Revolution. I did it to address a niggling little voice in my head, that Trump 2.0 may not be repeating history, but was rhyming with past themes.
And I found myself looking more and more at the opulence and extravagance of Versailles, the home to Kings Louis XIV, XV and lastly, XVI.
Common assessments by historians say the revolution was caused by a lack of bread, heavy taxes and huge amounts of money spent on the army, navy, wars with Great Britain, and vital aid to the American Revolution and victory at Yorktown.
French kings were absolute monarchs and society was divided among the three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the remaining commoners, consisting of wealthy merchants and lawyers, urban workers, peasants and the poor— about 96% of the population, who carried almost the entire tax burden and had minimal rights.
For about 1,000 years before, the king ruled with absolute power, backed by the clergy and nobility, and the common people obeyed. There were lots of wars, frequent shortages of food, heavy taxes and no revolution.
What changed?
I attribute it to Guggenheim’s press and rapidly expanding literacy, the Enlightenment and spread of progressive ideas, the example of the American Revolution succeeding in gaining freedom from an English monarch, and the vast sums of money spent on Versailles and court extravagances.
The preceding changes set the stage, but it was the highly visible opulence at Versailles that, I think, tipped the scales toward unrest and finally an explosion of violence and revolution.
Now turn to the past 45 – 100 years. Note the sequence: the Roaring Twenties of extreme wealth, the crash of ’29 and Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal and strong unions, World War II, the Marshall Plan, the rise of the huge middle class in America, war in Viet Nam and LBJ’s Great Society and civil rights, the Powell Memo (look it up), the Reagan Revolution and dramatic rise of the millionaire and billionaire class.
And here we are with Donald J. Trump, our wannabe Sun King, who promised economic hope and change to a middle class slipping into desperation. Trouble is, Trump has only delivered vast tax breaks to the 1%, while tariffs and inflation are brutalizing the middle class.
Mar-a-Lago is a pale imitation of Versailles, but the billionaire class of the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other corners of the world outweighs anything imagined by Louis XVI, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
We have an aristocracy of vast wealth and 98% of the world population facing global warming, AI, and loss of government services and security.
What will be our tipping point? We the People, who have 400-500 million civilian firearms?
