@cstross As a victim of an American education I know basically nothing about French history, so I learned that this *this year* after watching the recent (terrible, interminable) Napoleon movie. In the American version the whole French Revolution is just a footnote in the chapter where Jefferson invents Liberty. So on realizing that after all that fuss with the beheadings and whatnot it only lasted ten years, I had to pause the movie and go "wait, what?" on Wikipedia for a while.