Discussion Main / FullCircleRevolution

What exactly does The Stinger mean on this page? I can't make sense of it, and unless it's a reference from a work invoking this trope, I don't see what point it serves.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.) Hide / Show Replies

Deleted this line from the Iran example in real life:

• … though one can argue the institutions of the Islamic Republic are somewhat less dictatorial than the old regime, it's still far from a model democracy.

Your Mileage May Vary, big time. Therefore, unnecessary. Deleted.

The French revolution did not replace a government with another conducting business as usual. In the short term, the Reign of Terror was unlike anything before or after. In the long term the revolution ushered in the modern era by breaking with the status quo which had held for centuries. In the medium term Napoleonic France is not France under the Ancien Régime. It is the opposite of the trope.

• The trope description fits the French Revolution to a tee, especially the first one. After the zaniness inflicted upon them by Robespierre and his cronies, the average Frenchman was all too eager to accept Napoleon as Emperor.
  • Well, Napoleon was actually very progressive for his time. He adopted French revolutionary ideals, promoted civil freedoms, promulgated a new law code, and preserved most of the land reforms from the Revolution. But he also messed around with other countries, leading to a huge backlash and the Bourbon Restoration, upon which you could call the French Revolution a Full Circle Revolution.
    • Although it was still not completely a Full-Circle Revolution, as the King ruled as a relatively liberal constitutional monarch, compared to the absolutism of the pre-Revolution monarchy.

Edited by Camacan

I do not see that this is true. The horrors of The Terror are quite unlike pre-revolutionary France. What you might be latching on to is that Robespierre was Hoist by His Own Petard - but that's Hoist by His Own Petard, not Full-Circle Revolution

• The Sandman: "Thermidor" is the title of a story that deals in part with this trope happening to the French Revolution.

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This is not likely to be an example and most of the discussion is beside the point: what we need to see is how the revolutionary government starts to enact exactly the same policies as the Earth government — something which apparently doesn't happen. In any case please Repair Dont Respond and please don't misuse double stars as a way of going Thread Mode — we need folks to use double stars for sets of two or more subexamples, only.

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A Heinlein dealt with the Post-Revolutionary Government. The heroes used the Lunar Master Computer to rig the election results so the government was their puppet. Ironically, the "puppet" managed to do stuff beyond what they wanted. Later they lost control, as the computer was no longer around. In his "sequel" The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, the heroes note that 100 years or so later, the Post-Revolutionary Government is actually worse then the pre-revolutionary one.
  • They note that it's an unpleasant place... but they're also extremists who can't function in what we would consider a normal state in Real Life, so there's a lot of bias to the view. It's also still a functioning state: notably, part of the justification for the original revolution was that the previous administration was running the Moon into the ground, and would have resulted in the total collapse of Lunar society if it had continued.