The French Revolutions

In the world of Athena Minerva, in the country of France, in A.D. 1789, common French women (who were seldom referred to as 'common') and men finally decided they were finished with allowing nobles to rule their lives and minds.
The previous form of government in which the most educated and smartest made the decisions for the lesser minds had started off acceptably, (see the policy of "We'll kill you if you don't go along with it",) but the large separation and communication barrier between the nobles and the commoners had led to abuses which had become intolerable...
(...to the commoners. No complaints from the nobles.)

Causes of the Revolutions

The French commoners had already by this time shared the ideas of Enlightenment, which proposed that (1) people can think for themselves (although anecdotal evidence to the contrary is abundant) rather than blindly accept everything that self-appointed authorities say, and (2) a society works best and is more valued if all people rich and poor, educated and un-, work together to build it.
Also, they learned of a successful revolution by England's Thirteen Colonies in the Americas which had overthrown the monarchy and established a government by the common people.

The Executions

As could be guessed, the nobility was rather opposed to the whole shift, so the need arose to execute nobles easily and often.
In that atmosphere, a man rolled into Paris named Chriskill Joyeux, offering his Systèmes d'Exécution Joyeux.
He strongly proposed that the modern and efficient way of dispatching a noble was to use his invention, the Righteous Rotisserie, ("Rôtisserie Vertueuse"), which would hold and spin the noble while a blade slowly approaches, propelled by a series of gears.
Monsieur Joyeux demonstrated with a 1/8th scale model into which he had inserted a chicken. The slow blade did in one motion quickly remove the feathers and skin, remove the internal organs, and shred the meat. The meat then fell into a sausage skin (Fragrant herbs could be added at the same time.) which at regular intervals could be twisted and neatly separated by a heavy falling blade he called a guillotine. The sausages were immediately ready for cooking and consumption by the commoners.
As an aspiring executioner, he did not succeed. His morally questionable sales pitch mostly fell upon deaf ears. However he was set upon by French chicken farmers interested in duplicates of the 1/8th scale model prototype, which in their minds embodied the highest ideals of the revolution, specifically to serve to commoners fancy sausages previously only reserved for the plates of the nobility.
The salesman was overwhelmed by the demand and the incoming funds, so much so that he did not notice how many other commoners had taken and duplicated his sausage-sizing guillotine at 8-times the scale. They used the larger version to reduce the scope of their excess nobles a little bit each.
This revolution finished officially with The Storming of the Bastille, on 14 July AD 1789.

The Empress of France

Joséphine de Beauharnais avoided the guillotine by politically distancing herself from her scapegoat husband Alexandre who met with it quite directly. In an amazing public-relations turn-around victory, she reestablished her position by taking as her next (scapegoat) husband a hero of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Epilogue

Basically the same thing happened in AD 1830 and again in AD 1848, but eventually the revolution stuck and held.
Meanwhile, the dejected Chriskill Joyeux, was never mentally the same after the failure of his Righteous Rotisserie invention, but he kept busy appearing at every culinary academy in France as the spokesman of the beloved Saucisse de Poulet Rotisseey with rosemary, sage, and thyme, an instant classic flavoured with Freedom.

Conflict Type

Political Debate