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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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The French revolution happened when the king decided to call the parliament in session to address bread riots in Paris during a fiscal crisis; the parliament had so long been disused that the arguing about voting procedure spiraled into the French revolution.

Not just about voting procedure - that argument was itself a proxy for a large number of other policy fights over, e.g. getting rid of the nobility's exemption from most taxes, reform of the Gabelle and internal trade barriers, abolishment of mandatory tithes to the church/forced labor on church lands, conspiracizing about food hoarding, proto-socialistic agitators in Paris, etc.

You mean the Estates General, right? That's the assembly that hadn't happened for a century and a half and squabbled about procedures and then split apart so the Third Estate could found the National Assembly. The Revolt of the Parliaments was a year or two earlier, and the problem there wasn't that the parliaments' judges couldn't agree with each other, it was that they could agree that even impending bankruptcy wasn't a reason to approve new taxes.

(This is confusing as hell because as far as I can tell neither the "parliaments" nor the "Estates General" assembly were actually what modern English would refer to as a "parliament", a legislative body; they were just there to give either a judicial or "popular" stamp of approval to laws that the King made?)