This is a really fascinating historical parallel. I'm currently reading the book "La tyrannie du présent" ("The tyranny of now") by Pierre Rosanvallon, one of France's greatest scholars on democracy. He explains that under the French monarchy of Louis XIV, back in the 17th century, we had a legendary statesman named Jean-Baptiste Colbert (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-B…), notably famous for building France's navy and turning the country into Europe's dominant economic power. Colbert is so renowned as a statesman that, to this day, "Colbertism" in the common language means using the full power of the state to plan and build for the long term. Rosanvallon has an entire chapter on "French Forest Policy" and Colbert's visionary approach to forest management. He notably explains that Colbert's thinking was that to be powerful, France needed a great navy. And to have a great navy, back then, one needed great powerful oak trees that you could cut down to build ships. However, oak trees take more than a century to grow, so for Colbert, a policy of national defense had to be planned across more than a hundred years via forest management. That was the spirit of his famous 1669 ordinance that regulated France's forests down to the smallest detail, creating one of the most ambitious long-term resource policies of its time. The fascinating aspect of this particular chapter of the book is that Rosanvallon contrasts this with what came after the French Revolution, which turned property into a sacred individual right. A 1791 law, just 2 years after the Revolution, left private forests to be managed by their owners "as they see fit". What was bound to happen happened: many simply cut everything down for a quick profit, with no regard for the long term whatsoever. By the 1830s, French forest cover had fallen to its lowest point in history, only around 15% of the territory. However, the book isn't "long term planning and absolute monarchy good" vs "short-termism and individualistic democracy bad": Rosanvallon is much more subtle than this. As he explains, Colbert's forest policy was genuinely unpopular, which means that while it was designed for the sustainability of forests, it was fundamentally unsustainable because it never won over the people. For the peasants who depended on the forest for firewood, grazing and building materials, Colbert's rules only meant negatives for them personally - fines and harassment by guards - and the long term was an abstraction with no connection to their lives. When you think about it, this is a key - perhaps THE key - tension in any type of political regime: how do you ask people to make sacrifices today for benefits they will never see themselves? Colbert's answer was authority and control, and that doesn't quite work: from a regime's standpoint it's arguably the courageous thing to do but it's heartless and therefore brittle. The Revolution's answer was "you don't" and that obviously doesn't work either: it's compassionate toward the living but heartless toward the unborn, which makes it just as brittle in the end. This forest story is such a great parable for every society that wants to last. The real test of a political system is whether it can plant trees whose shade it will never enjoy, and get its people to want to plant them too. Colbert managed the first half. Most countries today manage neither. Very few manage both.