We need less Chemo and Surgery and more "Voom."

[ganulv]

ganulv, what we know as "French Revolution" was about the gazillionth French popular revolt - the one that eventually succeeded. There was no need for the improvement of the odds of a revolt as evidenced by the earlier ones, it was the food price crisis that determined Paris would be involved and not mere peasants far away as usual, the U.S. had no influence on the success chance of the revolt, Voltaire etc provided the enlightenment philosophical underpinnings which made some of the wealthy people join the revolt and there was really little political happening in France until long after 1815 that one could be proud of.

You're apples-and-oranging and not sticking to a fixed definition of "success." There was the overthrowing of the aristocracy and there was the creation of a new governing framework (which ended up being the ascendency of the bourgeoisie). I don't think anyone would argue that the U.S. had much to do directly with the former (plently indirectly through the debt the French Crown ran up in aiding the Revolutionaries), but no influence on the latter? I'll of course give you that the flows from Voltaire, Rousseau, to Jefferson and back across the Atlantic were reciprocal, but come on, the American experiment was looked to.

The chronological proximity and order of the American and French revolutions has been used to build up one more U.S. myth, but I don't subscribe to it.

So you are arguing that things either just happened to occur more quickly in France or just happened to take longer in Germany and Italy?