[ChuckF]

A sinkhole! That's exactly what it is! Because every time I feel like I start to have a grasp on its conceptual edges, I sink further into it and I lose my grip on the metaphor entirely. I know that happens with virtually all history, but usually at some point I feel like "OK, I have a pretty firm grasp on this." Not so with the Revolution. I just feel more and more like I have no fucking clue wtf happened.

For a long time in grad school I was seriously considering entering a PhD program in Poli Sci or History, and the question that I thought I wanted to study was this: How do states behave in extremis? Basically, when confronted with coup d'état or revolution, what does a regime do? How do individual actors within the regime decide what to do? At what point do they decide to abandon the old regime and guarantee the victory of the new? Most of my interest in this was based on a sub-obsession of mine, the August Coup of 1991, and a few other examples within my East European comfort zone, like the Romanian Revolution. But to get out of my zone, I decided to go back to the grand-daddy of European Revolution and dig into the French Revolution. I had had some exposure to it as a French major in undergrad, like what a French kid might learn in middle school I imagine, and I thought I knew some shit. Damn, I was so wrong yo. Three days of pussy-ass old communists trying to lock Gorbachev in his bedroom ain't shit.