By the time Louis (and the bulk of the 1st and 2nd Estates) was purged, the Assembly was the government, and in power for a couple years already.
And with that, I actually am done with this thread. Your reply sent me a notification, so I guess muting this thread is the next recourse.
To be clear though the OPer @Whack-a-Mole was pretty clear he was specifically talking about the purge of the reign of terror not the wider French revolution:
Its only @MrDibble that has conflated the two and insisted on sidetracking the discussion into whether the wider French revolution was a success. Which is not going to be settled here, it’s one of the great debates of European history.
The actual question the OP asked is much simpler to answer. The great terror was absolutely 100% not a success for anyone involved, neither the revolutionaries, the revolution or French society as a whole.
Except that is what really happened during the Reign of Terror. It started out as a revolution, then turned into a purge, even for minor spiteful personal grudges.
Right.
I guess the Night of the Long Knives was successful in 1934 Germany. It didn’t last forever, because Germany was defeated in WW2. But if they had not had a WW2, and let’s say they’d stopped grabbing land after the deal to get the Sudetenland in 1938, Germany might have settled in for a long period of stability within their own country. No one wanted a war with Germany at that point. But that wasn’t enough for Hitler, as he wanted Lebensraum in the East, and he wanted to annihilate the Jews…and the rest is history, as they say.
But the Night of the Long Knives seemed to remove all of his potential political opposition. I would say it was successful, and Hitler’s ruin was from activities afterward, not from the purge itself.
1945-50 had the largest mass migration in human history. The partition of India had 1 million deaths and 10-20 million displaced. I presume the latter was related to the former and that this is not atypical. Jews fled Europe. 13.5 to 16.5 million German speakers fled central Europe after WWII: deaths number 300,000 to 3 million. 1.5 million Polish people were deported from newly Sovietized territories starting in 1944. Millions of Japanese speakers were expelled from Sakhalin, China, and Taiwan.
All this seems relevant, though we will have to define “purge”, “succeed”, and “society”.
ETA: Stalin’s purges worked out well for the surviving middle class. Purges create a number of job openings after all. I understand there has been some scholarly work on this. Cite: Red Plenty. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18634818-red-plenty
As Dirty Harry almost said:
As the French revolution advanced, the guillotine began to claim the heads of a number of the original revolutionaries themselves. So can’t the same thing be said about the French revolution and, in fact, many revolutions? If rebels do succeed, their next logical concern and project is keeping power, so I can see how a revolution can morph into a purge.
The American Revolution was unique in that it took almost a century for the winners to turn on themselves.
Pretty much by that time all the “winners” were dead.
Mutatis mutandis, DrDeth.