Conclusion

Notwithstanding the inspiration, the legitimacy, and the fodder for political polemics France’s revolutions provided, the Bolsheviks would have been better off had they known nothing of the French Revolution, and of the revolutions in France that followed it in 1830, 1848, and 1871. The analogies they drew with these revolutions—even those they rejected to show how distinctive their own proletarian revolution would be—obfuscated and obscured more than they clarified. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ unfortunate infatuation with French revolutions from 1789 to 1871 lends credence to James Bryce’s assertion in 1908 in The American Commonwealth that ‘the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies’.