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Oddly enough, you're omitting the English Civil Wars, which have killed an order of magnitude more people than the French Revolution.

But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses.

Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many of which immediately backslid during reconstruction, because the Union's policy of appeasement and compromise with the losers

And that's just the English-speaking world. In much of the rest of Europe, it took the industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war to destabilize its monarchies of the early 20th century. Autocrats rarely give up power without violence, or the threat thereof.




I agree that the English Civil War was much bloodier than the French Revolution. However, that was not what started the pattern of guaranteeing basic human rights in England. The English Civil War was followed by Cromwell, whose regime was anything but a respecter of basic human rights, and then by the restoration of the monarchy, without very much in the way of change. The Revolution of 1688 was the one that really changed things in terms of respect for human rights in the English system.

I mentioned the American Civil War and its death toll in the post of mine that started this subthread. I agree that it did also establish basic human rights for the former slaves, who had not had them recognized before in the U.S.

The backsliding you refer to, however, did not happen during Reconstruction, when the Union's policy was anything but appeasement and compromise: the former Confederate states were basically under martial law. What started the backsliding was the back-room deal that gave Hayes, the Republican candidate in 1876, the Presidency in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to end Reconstruction, after the election went to the House of Representatives. In any case, the backsliding was not a matter of changing the actual legal status of basic human rights; it was simply state and local governments in certain regions deciding to just ignore that actual legal status when they felt like it, and the Federal government being either unwilling or unable to override them. What eventually changed that was the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.




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