The Iranian revolution may be replaying French and Russian revolutionary phases

Evidence

The war could be explained in economic terms, as a dispute over oil interests; as a conflict between regional powers for regional hegemony—for control of the Gulf, of the eastern half of the Middle East, possibly with eventual subsequent ambitions even for the western half. Some have remarked, then and subsequently, that the Iranian revolution has been going through the classical phases estab­ lished in both the French and the Russian revolutions. They inflicted and en­ dured the Terror; they achieved their Valmy; they entered and have not yet emerged from their Thermidor; Napoleon—or Stalin—might come next. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1605

Categorization

• SEED: A potential essay angle: whether post-revolutionary states reliably cycle through Terror, Valmy, and Thermidor phases, and where Iran currently sits — a framework testable against other modern revolutions from Libya to the Arab Spring.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does any social-science literature formally test whether revolutionary trajectories actually recur across French, Russian, and Iranian cases, or is this just a retrospective patching exercise?