Egypt Isn't 18th Century France

Yesterday via a variety of sites I went to this site and read this, number 11 of 20 dealios that explain Egypt:

To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

I don't know which historian he has in mind but the poor lawyers characterization is most likely some garbled version of Burke's prediction, in the Reflections, that provincial lawyers with no experience in governance would seize control over the Revolution with disastrous results. Presumably we're meant to think of Robespierre and the Terror. However, if you think about the Revolution as it occurred the key event would have been the alliance of members of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Estates walked out of the Estates General, when voting by head instead of Estate was rejected, created the National Assembly, and agreed to the Tennis Court Oath. It is simply not true that lawyers, of whatever economic class, made up the men who created this diverse group of dedicated reformers.  "Radicalization" and Robespierre's domination of the Revolution's course waited on the King reneging on the agreement to make a constitutional monarch, his flight, and clear desire to wage war on the France with his fellow absolutists, which led to his trial and execution and Jacobean domination.  It's not even vaguely correct to associated the Jacobeans with poor or provincial lawyers.

The French Revolution was more about the desire of reformers to reform France through the expansion of, what Hirschman called, voice, understood here to mean effective participation in France's governance. Reducing the event to poverty among the "middle class" and then insisting on a rough parallel between then and now misleads on both revolutions and will have the unpleasant result of distorting response to the Egyptians' demands. It is, after all, difficult to fit the Google guy into the category of poor lawyers and he is not the only one of his "class" taking part in the multivocal revolt against tyranny and despotism, is he? Personally, I've always thought the notion of "excess men" overblown as a causal explanation for revolution at whatever point in history or geography.

The "arguments" he makes about 19th century France are equally vapid and superficial; cafes weren't like raves for example.

On economic success, Egyptian history and the Revolution see also, too.