In both France and Russia, violent revolution emerged from a combination of economic crisis, war, state collapse and political exclusion, as well as elite indifference to popular suffering. These factors helped transform hardship into open revolt.
In France, the key pressures were fiscal bankruptcy, poor harvests, rising bread prices and a tax system that burdened ordinary people while exempting many privileged groups. The result was not only poverty, but also the perception that the monarchy and the elite were insulated from the crisis that they were helping to create. Therefore, while the idea that the ruling class failed to acknowledge suffering is partly correct, the immediate triggers were concrete economic and political breakdowns.
In Russia, the main catalyst was the First World War, which devastated the economy, exposed government corruption and incompetence, and exacerbated food shortages and land issues. Peasants, workers and soldiers did not simply revolt because they were poor; they revolted because their suffering had become unbearable and the regime seemed incapable of responding. Elite detachment mattered here too, but it worked through wartime collapse and long-standing inequality rather than wealth disparity alone.
Thus, revolutions were likely to occur when rulers treated widespread hardship as manageable background noise rather than a political emergency. In both France and Russia, violent revolutions occurred because war, fiscal strain, shortages and inequality caused widespread suffering, while the ruling elite failed to reform, respond or even fully recognise how dangerous the situation had become.
The Role of the ‘Elites’
In a broad sense, the privileged were responsible for many of the structural causes. In both France and Russia, the ruling elite helped maintain tax, land, legal and political systems that placed a heavy burden on the majority while protecting privilege at the top.
In pre-revolutionary France, for example, the privileged orders were insulated from much of the tax burden, while the monarchy and aristocratic system preserved an unequal social structure. The crown also pursued fiscal reforms that exposed the unfairness of the system, particularly when wartime debts and crop failures rendered the old arrangement unsustainable. Therefore, the elite did not merely ‘fail to notice’ the suffering; they had helped to create and defend the conditions that produced it.
In Imperial Russia, the autocracy and landed elite maintained a system of peasant dependence, weak representation and state repression that left the empire fragile. World War I then exposed the system’s lack of resilience, as corruption, food shortages and military disaster shattered trust in the regime. Once again, the ruling class was implicated not only in neglect, but also in designing and defending the order that subsequently collapsed.
Perhaps the most accurate historical perspective is that revolutions are caused by a combination of inequality, crisis and state failure, rather than by inequality alone. The French and Russian revolutions broke out because the ruling elites had built and defended deeply unequal systems and then proved unable to reform them when the crisis made the suffering visible.
Modern-day comparisons
Considering the historical precedents, it is strange to observe the present regime in the USA doing very similar things to the population yet facing no real resistance. There is a real concern here, as a system of incentives, surveillance and dependence has been developed that stifles resistance. Americans report feeling heavily monitored, and major institutions can access or collect large amounts of data about online behaviour, location, communications and finances. Social media platforms also influence attention and opinion through algorithms, engagement design, and misinformation.
Modern power works through technological dependence rather than overt force. People can become dependent on platforms, devices, and services that they do not control, while firms and governments gain more insight into behaviour than citizens usually have into theirs. The balance of power is shifting towards a situation in which the ruling class is deliberately creating weakness.
Evidence shows that a combination of state security powers, corporate data extraction, platform design and policy choices reduces privacy and increases dependency. Some of these practices are justified in terms of convenience, safety, national security or competitiveness, which makes them more diffuse and harder to resist. Resistance is therefore limited because the system is convenient, fragmented and normalised. Many people feel tracked yet still use these tools because work, banking, communication and social life all depend on them. This creates a kind of soft coercion, not direct domination, but rather a narrowing of realistic options.
The historical parallel with revolutionary France or Russia is not that the US is at the same stage, but rather that elite systems can persist for a long time when people are divided, dependent and uncertain about the possibility of change. In this way, technological control can delay resistance even when dissatisfaction is widespread. The pressure point is usually not abstract ideology alone, but whether daily life becomes bearable enough to continue accepting the system.
If modern US power structures increasingly use technology, data collection and platform dependence to shape behaviour and limit autonomy, collective resistance will become more difficult. If Western governments follow the example of the current US administration, the freedoms that have characterised the last eighty years will disappear.
