Thread by @FrameTheGlobe

1/ The 1979 Iranian Revolution is often taught as a spontaneous uprising of the oppressed against a U.S. backed dictator. But this version of events omits what followed: the swift hijacking of a popular revolt by a Shia clerical vanguard that consolidated power with breathtaking speed. This was not a revolution in the classical sense, it was a well-executed religious capture, carefully staged, externally tolerated, and later mythologised into folklore.

2/ Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s so-called architect, did not rise from the streets of Tehran. He returned from a Parisian suburb. Exiled in Neauphle-le-Château, France, in 1978, Khomeini transformed that quiet village into a global broadcasting center. French authorities granted him total freedom of movement, communication, and access to global press, a level of liberty denied to most exiled revolutionaries. His aides ran a PR operation rivaling any modern political campaign. Cassettes of his speeches were smuggled back into Iran by the thousands. Western outlets, notably the BBC Persian Service, amplified his message, presenting him not as a Shia absolutist, but as a spiritual democrat.

3/ France’s tolerance of Khomeini’s revolution was no accident. At the January 1979 Guadeloupe Conference, leaders from France, the U.S., West Germany, and the UK agreed the Shah’s days were numbered. Western intelligence agencies had long assessed the risk of a communist takeover if the monarchy collapsed. Khomeini’s Shia clerical network was seen as a preferable alternative: hostile to the USSR, religiously grounded, and, critically, capable of neutralising the growing leftist tide. This quiet consensus allowed the West, and France in particular, to facilitate a controlled transition without appearing to interfere.

4/ France had done this before. Under the League of Nations mandate over Syria (1920–1946), France created the Alawite State, a sectarian enclave governed separately from Sunni majority Syria. The French colonial strategy hinged on empowering minorities to rule over majorities, thereby securing loyalty. They disproportionately recruited Alawites, members of a small Shia sect, into military academies and local administration. This engineered imbalance laid the foundation for Hafez al-Assad’s military ascent and the eventual dynastic rule of the Alawite Assad family over Syria.

5/ In both Syria and Iran, France facilitated a sectarian class’s rise by exploiting societal fractures. In Iran, France provided a launching pad for a Shia clerical coup. In Syria, it nurtured an Alawite military elite. Both regimes weaponised religion and identity to entrench power. And both regimes have since used that power (Assad now gone) to wage regional campaigns under the guise of anti-imperial resistance, while internally suppressing all dissent.

6/ The Iranian Revolution’s first casualty was pluralism. Once in power, Khomeini’s circle moved swiftly. The 1979 constitution enshrined Wilayat al-Faqih, a doctrine placing ultimate authority in the hands of a single Shia jurist, the Supreme Leader. This was not an organic evolution of Islamic governance. It was a doctrinal innovation rejected by many senior Shia clerics, including Khomeini’s own mentor Ayatollah Boroujerdi. But within Iran, this dissent was extinguished. The theological became political, and the political became sacrosanct.

7/ The new Islamic Republic wasted no time in eliminating ideological competition. Leftists in the Tudeh Party were purged. The nationalist Freedom Movement under Bazargan was neutralised. The Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a militant Islamist-Marxist hybrid, were declared enemies of the state. Ethnic minorities who had supported the revolution, Kurds, Arabs, Baloch, were labeled separatists and met with military violence. What had begun as a diverse anti-Shah coalition was reduced to a single ruling caste: Qom-trained Shia clerics, loyal to Khomeini and intolerant of all rivals.

8/ This internal theocratic consolidation paralleled Iran’s foreign ambitions. By the early 1980s, the Islamic Republic began exporting its revolution as a blueprint for Shia political ascendancy. The IRGC’s Quds Force became a transnational operations arm. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Supreme Council in Iraq, and later the Houthis in Yemen were all nurtured by Iran, for building a durable network of sectarian-aligned militias capable of shifting regional power balances.

9/ France’s own commercial calculus in this new Iran remained intact. Despite the hostage crisis and the rhetoric of “Death to America,” French businesses never fully disengaged. French telecom, arms dealers, and later energy companies like Total found pathways back into Iran’s markets. What France had enabled ideologically, it continued to exploit economically. This was about influence, first geopolitical, then commercial.

10/ The French Mandate in Syria and the French hospitality to Khomeini were not disconnected episodes. They reflect a persistent colonial tactic: weaponise religious minorities to create regimes that are too sectarian to be democratic, but too stable to be easily overthrown. In both cases, France facilitated the emergence of regimes that would, over time, dominate their regions not through popular legitimacy, but through sectarian patronage systems.

11/ The Assad regime in Syria, founded on the Alawite military infrastructure France designed, became one of Iran’s closest allies. Tehran’s intervention in the Syrian civil war was not ideological, it was existential. Assad’s fall would have undone decades of Iranian strategic depth. The Shia axis from Tehran to Beirut, facilitated by France in both origin points, was now defended by blood, propaganda, and proxy war.

12/ This sectarian axis, built in Paris, cemented in Qom and Damascus, and enforced by Hezbollah and the IRGC, is the true legacy of the 1979 revolution. It is not a liberation story. It is a transnational architecture of minority authoritarianism: regimes rooted in sectarian identity, exporting ideology under the cloak of resistance, and legitimised by historical myths carefully curated by state machinery.

13/ Khomeini’s revolution was enabled, by Western realpolitik, by French hospitality, and by an underestimation of how effectively sectarian ideology can be weaponised when fused with militarized theology. The clerical state that emerged was the outcome of deliberate decisions made in embassies, boardrooms, and intelligence briefings.

14/ Today, the Islamic Republic survives by recycling the tropes of its origin myth: resisting the West, protecting the oppressed, and preserving Islamic dignity. But behind these slogans lies a regime that tortures dissidents, executes protesters, and imprisons women for demanding autonomy. Its real mission is survival, of the clerical caste, not the Islamic nation.

15/ To critique the 1979 Revolution honestly is to dismantle the comfortable lies surrounding it. It was not a victory of faith over tyranny. It was a sectarian capture, midwifed by French calculation and Western indifference, that gave rise to one of the most rigid authoritarian systems in the modern world.

16/ The real revolution, the one stolen in 1979, was never allowed to unfold. It was systematically suffocated before it could take form. The revolutionary energy that surged from the bazaars, universities, and working-class neighborhoods of Tehran did not culminate in self-determination, pluralism, or national rebirth. It was diverted. What should have been the beginning of a new republican order was instead redirected into a sectarian cul-de-sac, orchestrated in the private drawing rooms of Paris and the conference halls of Guadeloupe.

17/ In Paris, a cleric in exile was granted a stage and a signal. Khomeini’s messages were polished, broadcast, and mythologised through Western media channels, while more grounded, democratic, or leftist voices inside Iran were either sidelined or criminalised. Meanwhile, at the Guadeloupe Conference in January 1979, four men, Giscard d’Estaing, Jimmy Carter, Helmut Schmidt, and James Callaghan, decided that Iran’s monarchy was unsalvageable, and a controlled transition was preferable to the risk of communist infiltration. Khomeini, with his theocratic credentials and nationalist rhetoric, was the least dangerous option. Not ideal, but manageable.

18/ The cost of that decision was paid in Sanandaj, where Kurdish aspirations for autonomy were met with martial law; in Khuzestan, where Arab workers demanding labor rights were bombed by helicopter gunships; and in Balochistan, where Sunni tribes were imprisoned en masse. Across Iran’s diverse periphery, those who had hoped for decentralisation, social justice, and representation found themselves staring down the barrel of tanks operated by the very regime they had helped bring to power.

19/19 The revolution they fought for, multiethnic, ideologically diverse, and grounded in collective emancipation, was liquidated. In its place rose a clerical caste that fused mosque with military, shrouded its monopoly on power in sacred language, and recast dissent as heresy. What the people birthed in the name of liberation was swiftly hijacked by those who believed obedience to a single jurist was the highest form of citizenship.

This was not the Islamic Republic of the people, it was the Islamic Emirate of the elite. Rule by turban, sanctioned by bayonet. A republic in name only. A theocracy in full. And it began, not in Qom or Tehran, but in Paris.