why did french revolution more affected …

When revolution erupted in Russia in 1917, many of its leaders self- consciously identified their situation with the turbulent era of the French Revolution (1789). Events, trends, individuals, groups, and ideologies either took on or were assigned identities that mirrored previous occurrences in revolutionary France. Bolshevik war commissar Lev Trotsky was compared to French revolutionary general and later emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Trotsky's great rival, Josef Stalin, who was accused of reversing revolutionary ambitions as he rose to power, was said to have ushered in a "Thermidorian Reaction," an allusion to the restrained period that followed the most radical phase of the French Revolution. Are these comparisons valid, and do the two revolutions represent a case of history repeating itself? One argument agrees with the self-conscious interpretation endorsed by members of the early Soviet government. France before 1789 and Russia before 1917 shared many of the same problems: governments of questionable competence, wide social divisions, turbulent capitalist economies replacing stagnant agrarian ones, and ambitious middle groups that felt entitled to greater power. It was only natural that these similarities of cause should lead to similarities of result: a period of limited reform followed in turn by a radical phase of terror; a restrained climb down; and a relatively stable period of authoritarian rule, albeit worse in both cases than what had come before. To other scholars these comparisons seem self-fulfilling and overstated. No matter what Russia's revolutionary leaders thought, their ideology was fundamentally different from that of their French predecessors, as were their attitudes toward law and order, economics, foreign policy, military affairs, and a host of other issues. The causes of 1917 seem more rooted in World War I, while the causes of the French Revolution were rooted in state financial crisis and contentious disputes over modernization. Accordingly, the two revolutions were different and are too complex to be subject to the simplifications of a general comparison.