French statue-topplers make Brits look like a bunch of amateurs

Toppling statues is relatively novel in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, for whom revolutions, coup d’etats and regime change are a rarity. That is why the Anglosphere is taken by surprise when statue toppling happens, why they do it so childishly and with so little historical maturity. But for the French who have been doing it for centuries it is akin to a national sport. That is why they are more experienced and adult about it and why unspoken rules apply.

The French Revolution was by no means the beginning of the French people’s experience of political iconoclasm, but it taught them its excesses and how subsequently to manage it. And they had plenty of opportunity to learn from the domino effect of regimes falling one after the other in a line that stretched from monarchy to republic to empire then back to monarchy, republic, empire and republic, with the Vichy interlude to boot.