Great scoop Susie,..I will for sure get this flick. Sounds great...I´m excited to see it. I bought the silent film from 1927 based on your recommendation some time ago.
I´ve studied that time period and place (French Revolution and Napoleonic reign) pretty much. I do think that France´s help we received during
our Revolution made the difference in us winning. But Louis´ motivation was solely to get a dig at England, and to pay England back for England´s recent
crushing of France in the 7 years war, and in the New World and kicking France out completely. Louis XIV and XV contributed to the French all but bankruptcy, and XVI closed the deal. (to me Louis XIV is the most overrated big guy from history).
XVI helped us, for motivations of vengeance, and probably stupidly as his helping the Americans contributed to his downfall with respect to the money he spent (as Susie mentioned) and with respect to him helping a republican revolution that was the opposite of him and his monarchy, with the Americans´ victory also providing spirit and motivation to the French republicans in their bringing of XVI down
The French Revolution was, in the end, a violent bloodbath created by France´s version of Woke in the very early 1790s. They started off with noble ideas as our Wokesters mostly did, but went crazy irrational, became a cult, and then paranoid, filled with hatred. Very much like our current day Woke, but a different flavor for sure. It´s a lesson of history that applies to our times but historians today either are woke themselves, or are afraid of the Woke, so historians of today are negligent in their responsibility to teach us the lessons of history on this front.
Having said that the original ideas and beliefs of the French who started up their revolution were of liberty and quite noble. And because of the wars and France being the center of culture etc. at that time, many Europeans caught on to these noble ideas and thus these noble ideas spread throughout Europe and within a century would transform Europe into a basically classical liberal continent, where a healthy form of nationalism and sense of national self also took hold, for the better overall.
No century in history (with possible exception of the 20th) has moved humanity forward faster and more impressively than the 19th century and it´s not even close. The pollinating of new ideas of justice and liberty accomplished by the French Revolution was one of the principal reasons for this.