The Terror bad. Sure. But it's not fair to lump in the whole French Revolution with The Terror. The aristocracy had it coming. The fact that the Revolution turned ugly is very, very bad; but it's grossly unfair to impute the Terror as a motive for the Revolution, rather than a side-effect.

I'm curious where you saw the Iran subtext. The word Iran is nowhere to be found; nor can I find "Middle East," "Shah," "Ayatollah," or any other hints.

I'm curious where you saw the Iran subtext.

Try it; it's eerie.  If you read the subtitle -"The lessons of the first totalitarian revolution" - with a heavy emphasis on "first", you start to hear war shrieks off in the distance.

Robespierre's an odd figure. Up until right about the time he executed Danton (March 1794), I think pretty much all of his actions were justifiable. I mean, the early Terror wasn't pleasant, but pretty serious measures were needed to insure the survival of the Republic - recall that in 1793 there was not only a pretty serious foreign war with all France's neighbors and on all its borders (except the Swiss one), it also faced a massive peasant royalist uprising in the Vendée, and the revolts of several important cities (Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, Bordeaux, Caen) supporting the Girondins. In a situation like that, some kind of excesses are hard to avoid, and throughout this period, Robespierre was pretty clearly trying to limit the Terror, to make sure that excesses didn't occur, and to curb the enthusiasms of the more radical members of the committee (like Collot and Billaud).

But by the beginning of 1794 things are starting to look less urgent - the Vendée's been calmed, the Federalist uprisings by the cities have been suppressed, the Allied invasion attempts have failed - and Robespierre starts recentralizing control, and getting rid of the most extreme terrorists. This is when the Hébertists, one of the least attractive radical factions in the Revolution, got the axe. It's about after this that things start to go off the rails. Even though Robespierre himself has been intimating that it's time to end the Terror, he gets Danton and his friends executed for, essentially, saying that the Terror ought to be ended.

Then, even as the French armies are pretty conclusively putting an end to the threat of foreign invasion, he starts going crazy with the law of 22 Prairial and the massive numbers of executions and so forth. Plus, you get the wackiness of the "Festival of the Supreme Being".

I've never really understood what the hell happened to Robespierre. He seems to have just gone off the rails, to have started expecting that everyone should live up to his exacting standards of virtue, or something. At any rate, others did unto him what he would have done unto them, and he got the axe (or the guillotine) himself. It's hard to have much admiration for the guys who did him in, though. They were either opportunistic political cowards or people (like the aforementioned Collot and Billaud) who were actually more bloodthirsty than him. After Robespierre the Revolution pretty much loses all idealism. The Thermidorians and the Directory were venal and intensely uninspiring, and after them comes Napoleon, who was in his way at least as monstrous as Robespierre, without even the excuse that he thought he was creating a better world - all St. Helena myth-making aside, it's pretty clear that the main thing that interested Napoleon was getting more power to Napoleon.

So, Robespierre, I dunno. He's not a terribly attractive figure, but he's gotten a harsh deal - all the excesses of the French Revolution get heaped on his shoulders, even the ones that he himself tried to moderate - and he gets no real credit for his courageous stands in the 1789-1792 period, like his opposition to the death penalty (yeah, ironic, i know, but there's no real sense that this was insincere), to slavery, and to the war (he was much more insightful about the war than just about anybody else at the time.)

Robespierre's one of those people whose reputation would be a lot better if he'd died two years earlier. Hell, if he'd died 8 months earlier, people would probably be saying "If only Robespierre had lived, he'd have ended the Terror months earlier."

i'm surprised that no one has mentioned that you can read the article - even the last paragraph(!?) - as an analogy for the bush regime at least as easily as you can read it as an analogy for iran.

In my ninth grade English class, we read Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.  Connected with this, we had to write a "research paper" and include some kind of visual object.  There were many mini guillotines decorating the classroom the day the assignments were due.  Not being inclined to construction, I borrowed my dad's old anatomy textbook to diagram a cross-section of the neck -- just what the blade of the guillotine would have cut through and at what point people would have died.  For some reason, people found this ghoulish.

Reading this post also reminds me of the theory, espoused in a lecture by one of my former professors, that there are two models of revolution: the American, based on rule of law, and the French, based on the will of the people.  It goes without saying that the Russian and Chinese revolutions were modeled on the French.  I'm not sure how apt the distinction is, but it's a fun idea to play with. 

No, I didn't really have a point. :)