Louis XV lacked his father's consuming passion for directing the state and delegated more than he should have to ministers, but was an improvement on the Regency and, when he chose to focus, had acceptable capability. The problem was that there had been so little effective effort to strengthen and rationalize governance that much of the power that Louis had soaked out of the nobility was just allowed to dissipate instead of being consolidated for the benefit of the state. Louis XVI was a full order of magnitude less competent than his father, it seems to me. My point was that there are a great number of times in various kingdoms when the monarchy was threatened but very few times when successful revolutions occurred.

The French Republic harnessed political, social and military power on a scale that created a new norm. The only other kingdom in Europe to have gone through such a transformation was Great Britain, so Great Britain and France resumed their traditional roles as rivals on more equal terms that before the revolution, with Great Britain playing a largely defensive role, financing and supporting those increasingly fewer allies it could find on the continent.

The energies released by the French Revolution set France on the path of transition to a more industrial nation, but intermittently. Slowing that process was one result of the Congress of Vienna, though the intent may have been more to slow secularism and republicanism, especially from the point of view of Austria and Russia, but anything that slowed France from going through an agricultural commercial, and industrial revolution was a benefit to Great Britain.

But we have now 'progressed' to the point where we have recreated the kind of parasitic, unaccountable, rent seeking dominance by a small group in the financial sector that we previously saw in the clergy and nobility of the ancien régime in France or in pre-Civil War Stuart England. Even though the 18th Century was an 'empty world' and we are now in a quite 'full world' and facing ever rising prices for natural resources I think we could still harness a much greater efficiency by instituting economic and social organizations that mobilize the full potential of the whole population and serve to equalize both wealth distribution and leisure rather than, as at present, further concentrate wealth at the top.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."