Gilded Youth vs. Jacobins

Or, why revolutions always fail.

Paris, midnight, 1795. The "Bal des Victimes" is in full decadent swing at a pilfered aristocrat’s mansion. The party by the children of the French Revolution is popping off. Four hundred young men and women with their hair shorn at the nape—a ghoulish homage to guillotine victim preparation before their heads are chopped off —twirl across marble floors once sticky with revolutionary blood. The women wear sheer, near-transparent Grecian gowns with red ribbons slashed across their throats; the men sport black tailcoats with collars so high they're practically architectural sculptures.

At the entrance, two gilded youth in outlandish dandy costumes check invitations with surgical precision—your family member must have been decapitated by the Committee of Public Safety to enter this exclusive celebration of death. They gatekeep with the precision of a Soho House bouncer: show us your guillotined relative’s death certificate or GTFO. Inside, a dandy with flawless “dog ears” hair reenacts Robespierre’s execution. When he mimes tossing a Jacobin head into a basket, the crowd loses it, toasting with champagne looted from some dead duke’s stash. A girl whose parents got guillotined months ago swoons in choreographed rapture, caught by three muscadins who’ve rehearsed this bit down to the second.

Behold, the Gilded Youth of the French Revolution, where trauma transmutes into fashion, revenge becomes entertainment, and counter-revolution masquerades as a rave.

The theatricality and drama of the French Counter-Revolution is instructive to our current époque. Why do revolutions inevitably always birth counter-revolutions?

And why do revolutions (almost) always fail?

The Russian Revolution wanted stateless socialism and ended up with Stalinist terror and totalitarian bureaucracy. It still hasn’t found its bearings 100 years later.

The Chinese Revolution wanted peasant empowerment and ended up replacing feudalism with a one-party authoritarian state.

The Iranian Revolution wanted democracy and ended up with a medieval theocracy.

The American Revolution….well, that one’s just a misnomer. It’s really just a war of secession from the British Empire.

But what about the French Revolution, the gold standard of revolutions? How did "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” turn into guillotines and terror and end with the restoration of monarchy a mere few years later?