the french revolution

feel like the Queen thread is appropriate

so… in Israel's terms, would Robespierre be an inheritor of the 'moderate enlightenment' (which in his eyes is bad and wrong and not actually Enlightenment)? As opposed to the radical materialist/democratic/toleration package (which iirc, for israel, is monolithic & the actual only Enlightenment) coming down through Spinoza etc?

i have always considered Robespierre to be the pragmatist overcome by contingencies, i.e. Israel's "moderate enlightenment" backed up against a wall, i guess, whereas Saint-Just wd be yr hardcore rationalist. feel like Rousseau wants to be the latter but enjoyed the finer things too much to fully follow thru?

Yeah, woof, that would be my guess. Haven't read any of his books, just the articles written by the commentator in my newspaper, who is a big Israel-fan, and writes big articles on his thougts every couple of months. It sounds to me a lot like you described it: 'like a lot of evidence shoved together to fit a sympathetic but not particularly tenable thesis.'

Reading Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution last summer, I thought the only coherent parallel between Robespierre and Hitler was his abstemiousness. Otherwise his vision for France was closer to totalitarian necrocracy: "If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue,” Robespierre wrote, “its basis in a time of revolution is both virtue and terror — virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power."

not a very good book btw. I wrote at the time that it boasted the stupidest sentence I've ever seen in a preface: "“I have tried to be his friend and to see things from his point of view."

that quote itself is wracked with desperation/maybe despair, i think

Robespierre = what a monster, killing people left right and centre, paranoid that they were agents of the monarchy! They were agents of the monarchy

― cardamon, Saturday, 13 July 2013 02:32 (10 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think this is closest to the truth, and beautifully put

wtf with these results

robespierre and marat over condorcet and madame roland? we should just do a poll that is like, the girondins vs. the montagne.

babeuf was pretty interesting if you prefer a more radical figure.

well, I don't know a great deal about these particulars, but if there's any truth to the Georg Buchner play then I'd put Georges Danton miles ahead of Robespierre

Idk about the play but there is a lot of truth to the proposition that robespierre was infinitely shittier than danton

I'm listening to the Simon Schama Citizens audiobook at the moment. What fun!

Idk about the play but there is a lot of truth to the proposition that robespierre was infinitely shittier than danton

Danton? Overrated. Robespierre deserves this little victory. Some important omissions though: Saint-André, Hérault de Séchelles, both Prieurs.

The Buchner was made into a Play for Today (dir by Alan Clarke btw). The speeches and detail are accurate.

LOL wiki calls it "documentary theatre"

That's because Buchner nicked them verbatim, naughty boy.

Yeah couldn't recall whether it was nicked or not.

Can't blame him for that, it's dynamite material.

Maximilien Robespierre, "On the Voting Rights of Actors and Jews",

"Things have been said to you about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contrary to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different people be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate, by granting them imprescriptible human rights of which no human power could despoil them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, exaggerated by the sectarian spirit and by interests. But to what can we really impute them but our own injustices? [...]?"

By the way, don't try googling Robespierre and Jews, that way lies madness.

What is the best book French Revolution book apart from Scurr or Schama?

Revolutionary Ideas by Jonathan Israel

Scurr, Schama and Israel? Filthy anti-Robespierrists!!!! I don't know about the entire revolution but I recently read "Twelve Who Ruled" by R.R. Palmer, about the Committee of Public Safety, and it ruled. I'd also recommend Peter McPhee's "Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life", 'I am the unhappiest man alive'.

I liked Scurr's Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution: the mass murderer as a bore.

However, three yeas later I'm still embarrassed that a scholar wrote, “I have tried to be his friend and to see things from his point of view” in a preface.

Also reading (some of) Robespierre's speeches: full citizenship for Jews and Protestants (and, er, actors); abolition of slavery; abolition of capital punishment (irony); universal suffrage; progressive taxation; opposition to wars of conquest. Hello, Western democracy!

... though they get progessively more wild-eyed and paranoid as they go on.

I'm pretty sure the French revolution had more than enough implacable enemies, both foreign and domestic, to justify the revolutionaries' fears.

Oh definitely, I still think he'd pretty much lost his marbles by 8 Thermidor Year II.

full citizenship for Jews and Protestants (and, er, actors)

I keep think of that exchange from "The Producers":

Leo Bloom: Actors are not animals! They're human beings!
Max Bialystock: They are? Have you ever eaten with one?

nearly done with 'greater safety,' wanna throw a shoutout to Mirabeau. I've been thinking--if he'd survived past 1791, would he have succeeded in making the revolution a bit more moderate? the assemblymen/convention deputies seemed to respond to strong personalities, and it seems like he had enough charisma to counter Danton. and he was an effective operator, not just a mouthpiece, with the admiration on some of those who eventually reigned in terror.

then again, he might've found his head on the guillotine like Orleans did.

Being a Royalist double agent would scarcely have helped matters tbf.

it certainly turned out to be a liability, but it was certainly more excusable during his lifetime than it was shortly afterward

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i45Y4Hf_so8

otm

so i'm at the point in a place of greater safety where the shadow of THE MACHINE is just starting to loom, and the charlotte corday legend took me down a terrible terrible addictive but so terrible late-night rabbit hole — which ended up (CN: severed heads) here

which is a lengthy foucault-shaped discussion of the philosophical and medico-legal debates about the biopolitics of the self when the revolution (and the guillotine) transformed the relevant rhetorics of justification in the capital punishment debate

this is the charlotte corday legend: marat’s assassin was seized, jailed, tried, sentenced and executed, all very speedily, without much resistance on her part (she believed she’d acted bravely, nobly and correctly; she entirely expected this outcome and more or less gave herself up to the authorities). as her head dropped into the basket, a fellow named legros stepped onto the platform, grabbed it and slapped it hard. the crowd — so it’s said — saw corday’s cheeks redden, as an angry scowl passed across her face…

(legros got a three-month sentence for this act btw: part of the the official executioner’s job was to ensure égalité, which meant that no one got to mess with certain bodies, however enragingly anti-revolutionary their crime)

anyway the piece is less about the modern-day science of how long a severed head retains consciousness, awareness, sensation (if it does at all: modern-day opinion remains divided), and also not much about the facts in the corday case (and several similar urban-myth type tales, from ann boleyn to the 1980s). It’s more about the specifics (and the jargon) of the philosophical debate that erupted in the late 1790s and early 1800s, in other words after the fall of robespierre, when it started maybe to be a bit safer to argue that the guillotine was (in general) bad not good. the argument in favour had after all been that (as well as equality of punishment) — it delivered a minimum of suffering (bcz death was instant), but if death wasn’t instant, this was exactly and dreadfully untrue. what if a head knew for many terrible seconds what was still going on, processing thoughts, feelings and emotions…

anyway that’s the rabbithole, and boy do I advise against diving down it

revolutionary who spent his entire tumbrel-ride to the guillotine alternately fainting and shrieking in terror: jacques hébert aka père duchesne, the bombastic leader of the enragés

also the guillotine operator did three lol-troll fake-out runs on him -- blade falls but then stops short -- before actually chopping off his head (which doesn't seem very scientific)

also i just learned that marat's death-bath was filled with cooling water rather than boiling hot

Because of his painful skin condition?

In July, I read Jeremy D. Popkin's newish A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution. Quite good on the Revolution's social advances and sans-culottes hypocrisies and heresies.

(xp) That was Marat. That's why he was in the bath when Mme. Corday came a-calling.

i knew abt the condition, i just somehow always imagined the bath was very hot and that this contributed to marat's constant fury

He thought, "You know what? This will make a great painting one day".

with good reason: jacques-louis david was right there! he's the instagram influencer of the national convention

Just realized I misread J. Redd's post, I thought he was saying Hébert had a painful skin condition. Wouldn't have surprised, they were an unhealthy lot, Robespierre was forever pulling a sickie.

apparently he had a pain in the jaw before he was guillotined, that hypochondriac

The wee fella wis up tae high doh in the weeks afore Thermidor. As Boaby might say.

the lancet has opinions

"his disease did not play any part in his death" <-- hard to argue with i suppose

Believe there is an R.E.M. song that mentions the incident. This one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWgTv9TvZys