A short history lesson

Louis XVI was not born to be king of France but became one anyway. He sucked at it, historians seem to agree - although he wasn't a bad person. He was just unfit for the role he was thrown into. Because of this, he was vulnerable to outside influences, people that had their own interests to consider, interests that weren't always the same as his.

France had been an absolute monarchy for centuries - this means that in theory the power was 100% concentrated in the hands of the king. There were many issues  wrong with this, and the biggest one was that in the case of a king that was as ineffective as Louis, there was no measure of control from the people, other than rebellion.

As usual, most people preferred not to go there for a long time. We might read a lot about heroes in the history books, but the truth is that in most cases heroes are made by circumstances. People fight for something when the situation becomes so serious that no other option is available. There are, of course, exceptions (people that are more aggressive by nature, for example), but for the majority, the first step when detecting a problem, is attempting to reach a compromise in a peaceful way.

But what happens when the person/system you want to reach a compromise with does not listen? In this case we are talking about a monarch that had basically infinite power and the compromise would have been for him to accept to reduce that power by allowing the people a measure of control through parliament and a constitution. Obviously, the king (and the people around him that had a lot to gain from their influence with the king) was uncomfortable with that, so what he did is stand his ground stubbornly.

130 years later, another absolute monarch, Nicholas II, was placed in the exact same position. Like Louis, he refused to budge.

What do these two monarchs have in common?

They were both executed as a result of revolutions in their countries.

What do the two countries have in common? In both cases, after the revolution, the state of the country (at least for a while - shorter in France, much longer in Russia), the situation AFTER the revolution was much worse than before. Does that mean that that revolution should not have happened? Does that mean that the people should have stayed and swallowed a bad situation for fear of the situation turning even worse?

The solution, from a reasonable point of view would have been to give the people an inch. Had the rulers done that, they would have stayed alive longer and the people would have been happier. The problem was that the rulers never saw beyond "I am an absolute ruler, it is my right to rule, I will not budge". Rulers continuously forget that in order for them to rule, the people must want to be ruled by them. Power for rulers comes from the people. The people may not always be willing to remind them of that, but if the situation gets bad enough they will.

The problem is that most of the time, when the situation gets bad enough, it's already too late to fix it in an appropriate, peaceful way. When it gets to people fighting in the streets, blood will be spilled, and it's not always the smartest course of action that is taken - because by that time, people are too angry to think straight.

Unfortunately, people nowadays do not read history - it's too boring. So they keep going through these loops over and over again.