Every Revolution Eats Its Own — Paris 1794, Moscow 1937, Tehran 1979

History Onion · 9:14

Paris 1794. Moscow 1937. Tehran 1979. Every revolution eats its own — and the phrase was coined by a Frenchman three days before he was guillotined for it. Three centuries. Three cities. One script that ends the same way every time. This is the story of why revolutions consume the people who made them — told through three regimes that ran the same playbook two hundred years apart. In Paris, Pierre Vergniaud watched the Republic he helped build turn on its founders. He named the pattern from the dock and was beheaded for it three days later. By the time Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety was finished, around 17,000 had been executed in ten months — and then the Convention guillotined Robespierre too, in ten days.