Horatio Nelson! The 200th Anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar

How much of the morning can I waste playing with the Animated Map of the battle?

COME ON PEOPLE, IF IT WASN'T FOR NELSON YOU'D ALL BE SPEAKING FRENCH!!!

I will be celebrating the day later in the manner befitting a true Englishman. A five hour bender followed by getting my mate to video me happyslapping some unfortunate on his new mobile. N.B. This may not actually be true.

Also, Nelson, my gosh, he was brave, was mortally wounded during the battle because he STOOD ON THE DECKS TO INSPIRE THE TROOPS, but kept alive til the battle was won.

I mean, he bum-rushed the French line in an awe-inspiring and brave fashion. I wish I knew more about this than I do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar

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-- Paranoid Spice (masonicboo...), October 21st, 2005."

yeah, hell of a reform! now insanely rich people *in the north* can vote. oh GRATE.

Discussions about 19th Century politics are good, but please judge them with regard to context?

Parliamentary reform of the early 19th Century was not perfect, but I think it was better than what was going on in France.

Honestly, I don't actually know much about French history. But it seems like it was pretty unpleasant. Revolutions don't always bring about the sweeping social change that they advertise.

Not to pick a fight, but the Regency era actually wasn't that great and was a time of unrest and repression. Peterloo and Six Acts anyone?

Gordon Riots, American War of Independence (from a British PoV), endless trade wars with the Dutch, anyone?

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Um, maybe in the 1790s. Not before or after; and in practice, not at all. Napoleon was an aristocrat who got his military training in one of the officer schools that had been set up to give careers to non-wealthy aristocrats.

I was just hoping for pictures of tall ships and handsome sea captains, really.

xpost France was dominated by the upper classes even in the twentieth century. The Dreyfus Affair clearly demonstrates this and the De Gaulle regime later -- that was one of the reasons for the student and worker protests of 1968.

Even missing an eye and an arm, pointy-nosed HOTTNESS!!!

i know, i know, but at least they *had* those protests, they *had* a popular front, they *had* a strong movement against heriditary rule -- we *still have* an unelected second chamber. de gaulle didn't represent the 'upper classes' so much as a technocracy of advisorcrats a la blair. pick your poison.

but also it wasn't exactly the 'upper classes' in france and they never evolved the kind of public school system we have here.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/upload/img/BHC2889_20050112162541.jpg

::fans self::

http://www.thefullfonty.com/images/Horatio_N_300.jpg

(Oh my god, it's actually a Nelson FONT!!! - I wish I'd known that before I emailed the TGL.)

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This is a good book despite me never making it all the way through. Because it is a million pages long.

xpost Oh because Napoleon surely would have brought "liberty" to all the countries he invaded. This argument sounds oh-so-familiar today with Bush and co and their cynical excuses.

However, in the period we're talking about, being an aristocrat didn't mean you were rich. Most - especially the provincial ones - were rather worse off financially than the professional class of lawyers and merchants who ended up making up the National Assembly.

saleXander / sophie -- a bit anachronistic, i think, but fatefully bound up with questions of nationalism. most of the democratic movements in germany and italy took *some* inspiration from the french revolution. on this question britain was closer to russia or austria.

Additionally, I don't know much about French history in the later 19th century. What I *do* know is that a lot of the major tropes in current French political dogma originated with the Third Republic, and its aggressive republicanism and secularism.

I'd say that France *was* more democratic, but only after the Franco-Prussian war. Before that, it was probably the other way around. The Third Republic could even be described as the defining moment in moving away from absolutist government.

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PS i *like* aggressive secularism

So do I.

Yes but Britain had a long parliamentary tradition unlike France and it was therefore a much more stable political entity, so of course conditions favoured the status quo. There was more room to reform from within the system especially as the government learnt their lesson from the civil war.

well -- kind of. but by then (1840s) look how far ahead french political thought was! i don't think there was much room for reform in the british system, as evidence by the total failure of the chartists, for example!

http://mobry.dyndns.org/~bhorling/photos/honeymoon/london3/PC010704.jpg

mmmm, phallic...

France wasn't always ahead in political thinking and there were vast reforms in the latter years of the 19th century in Britain. Women also got the vote in 1918 in Britain compared to 1945 in France.

but in 1945 we still had a house of lords and a monarchy, and within a few years we had handed over our foreign policy to washington.

Even though you might disagree with the House of Lords on principle they have very little influence. Yes it would be better not to have the damn thing and it is unrepresentative, but in practice it doesn't hold much sway.

he actually said "Fuck me, Hard!"

wait he already has the hat thing.

http://www.seabritain2005.com/upload/img/nelson-on-pickle.jpg

The real argument regarding the 19th century and the legacy of the French Revolution vs. British Parliamentarianism is one of radical change vs. slow, ameliorative (one hopes) evolution. Both sides have good points.

Almeida Garret, our biggest liberal writer, admitted to a childhood infatuation with Napoleon, but when he had to leave the country he went to England. Go figure.

* Well, actually it was more like:

PORTUGAL: Hooray! We found gold! Let's throw it on the streets of our various embassies and stuff.

UK: Hmmm. Say, Portugal, we've long been interested in that delicious port wine of yours...

PORTUGAL: W0rd?

UK: Yes. So we were thinking, maybe we could buy that stuff from you with our strong british pounds...but in exchange, you'll have to buy some of our stuff, k?

PORTUGAL: Ok! This gold is only lying around, anyway...

(some time passes)

PORTUGAL: Wtf, we're out of gold!

UK: Haha pwned! *hic*

Over here we always think of him as a pint-sized loser with relationship issues and a poor taste in wallpaper.

No, I didn't, either.

Was there a connection between Nelson and Glasgow, or was it just a monument for the sake of it?

I thought they would make a bigger fuss of him in Brighton, to be honest, but I suppose even though it's a seaside town, it's not very naval. I should have taken the bus to Portsmouth, but I spent too long wandering around the PaviLion.

a quick google says "1,154 men born in Scotland served at Trafalgar"

there's a nelson monument on calton hill, in edinburgh, too

There was a am dram re-enactment (using a fake Nelson similar to the one above) of the battle on the Victory followed by pyrotechnic fake broadside that looked a little underwhelming.

http://napoleon.gery.pl/polska/somosierra/somosierra.jpg

I read a bio of Nelson written - I realized once I finished - by a management consultant. The intended lesson was that Nelson won because he ran his fleet the way consultants advise running companies (clear strategic guidance but lots of autonomy at the unit level.)

https://charlespurcellblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/business.jpg

Nelson is important mainly because his fleet won some very consequential naval battles. He had something to do with those victories, but so did every single naval officer and sailor on both sides, plus a good amount of luck, because battles always incorporate lucky breaks that no one foresaw when planning the engagement and did not control when they happened. So, Nelson is just another rather good military leader who is wildly celebrated for outcomes he had only a minor influence upon.

well that was sorta the author's point, Nelson and the Brits accepted that battles couldn't be run top-down while the French were trying to have everything orchestrated, with complex signals from a flagship telling everyone what to do

i went swimming out near trafalgar last year on my birthday. would love to be there again. popular kiteboarding spot.

https://imgur.com/gallery/SEHVaZ8

When I was little I had the idea that the Battle of Trafalgar was a swordfight between Nelson and Napoleon, held in Trafalgar Square. Not sure how old I was when I changed my mind on that one.

An Egyptian-style cloak worn by Napoleon the night before the battle of Waterloo. It was seized from his baggage train at the field, following the defeat. pic.twitter.com/UOFZxltXnF

— Marina Amaral (@marinamaral2) October 27, 2020