[HN Gopher] Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre
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Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre
Author : benbreen
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-07-13 04:37 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (literaryreview.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (literaryreview.co.uk)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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_Wor...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| random314 wrote:
| If you have studied world war 2. We can make a more
| informed guess. The Japanese admiral considered the war
| doomed from the start, with the only hope being the
| destruction of all the 4 American aircraft carriers.
|
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _There 's no one to prove you wrong._
|
| Dude named Oppenheimer begs to differ.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Such comments totally ignore the human element of warfare,
| totally agreed with you.
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| crubier wrote:
| No one knows with certainty indeed. But we do know with
| high probability that the outcome would have been roughly
| similar given the massive unbalance of important metrics.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| My guess is that it would have taken a couple more nukes to
| settle things. Whoever got the Bomb first was always going to
| win WWII, if only because there was so little social or ethical
| opprobrium associated with atomic warfare at the time.
|
| 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.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| 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.
| mongol wrote:
| 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?
| dudul wrote:
| 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.
| SEJeff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| Igelau wrote:
| Petrov saves the day by doing nothing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 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.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| If Georg Elser (or someone else), would have succeeded in
| assassinating Hitler.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser
| iso1631 wrote:
| 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.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well, we will never know, but I think it is very likely to
| have had a huge impact. All sorts of outcomes are possible,
| from internal Nazi power struggles, leading to more
| moderate forces taking over and making peace with the west
| and later in a new alliance against russia, or simply
| consolidating Nazi germany as a mid european superpower
| between soviets and the western alliance.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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)
| eschulz wrote:
| 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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Some 80 or so years prior to Caesar's assassination, a consul
| fomented a mob to kill a Tribune (G. Gracchus) who was
| pushing hard for land reforms. Historians often cite this as
| laying the foundation for the Roman revolution because it
| normalized violence as a political tool. It was followed by
| proscriptions and the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63 BCE.
|
| 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".
| ithinkso wrote:
| 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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I've wondered if this isn't a "just so" story told by
| Octavius. Caesar just may not have had a lot of good
| choices, so posthumously adopted Octavius and made him his
| beneficiary, in which case it could have happened
| regardless of the trip (though it might be hard to make
| that case stick).
| eschulz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| McRask wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Station
| TrevorJ wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, for example.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| Sir Francis Drake raid on the Spanish Armada in 1588 [1]
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Round_Top
| fsagx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| 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_Ass...
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Good point.
| mongol wrote:
| 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
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