[002]
JulianLapostat
Current Version
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-- I do agree with Clemenceau that \
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-- I do agree with Clemenceau that \\\"the Revolution should be seen as a block\\\". As for preaching one thing and practicing the other, I don\\\'t see why you can\\\'t accept that ambiguity and still respect the achievement. The point of the Enlightenment is that human beings apply their reason to solve problems and I don\\\'t think the revolutionaries were saints nor did they claim to be, they were deeply flawed individuals, people who had no experience or local precedent for political life except for discussions in seminary and convent schools and village salons (Lot of the arguments and parliamentary debates are fairly juvenile in rhetoric, its essentially \\\"you are a counter-revolutionary because you suck\\\"). I mean I don\\\'t think Mirabeau was wrong about serving as a secret advisor to Louis XVI, it was definitely a gamble (I respect people who take such actions even if it falls flat) and, who knows, if Louis XVI had listened to his advice instead of Marie Antoinette\\\'s, maybe it would have avoided further unpleasantness and no one would have made a fuss about the \\\"armoire de fer\\\" documents. He could have been France\\\'s first Prime Minister (and he would have been great at it). Likewise with Danton, I am not a fan of corruption in general but he had great talent and intelligence, he certainly had a pragmatic sense of looking beyond the Terror to peacetime and rebuilding relations. The thing is, Revolutions are risky affairs and gambles (cf, Cromwell\\\'s \\\"Why do we Rebel then?\\\" or Franklin\\\'s \\\"Hang together or hang separately\\\"), and people should be skeptical about treating it as a one-dimensionally positive thing (there aren\\\'t any pro-gambling films after all). There\\\'s that film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, \\\"Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice\\\" (which dealt with the Paris Commune). But I don\\\'t think acknowledgement of the gamble takes away from the ideals or partial-achievements.
And you know people hold the American Revolution as a positive model (like Hannah Arendt and other liberals these days), and I don\\\'t think any French Revolutionary ever attained the stark contrast of preaching-one-thing-and-practicing-another as the person who wrote \\\"All Men Are Created Equal\\\" and then went home to his slave-run plantation and took his concubine to bed. Thomas Jefferson consistently supported the French Revolution and he was a great President, but at the end of the day, he probably made more people suffer than the Reign of Terror did, by allowing the slave states to function, leave alone, abandoning his own illegitimate children to be raised as slaves. Even Thomas-Alexandre Dumas\\\' father and other French aristocrats under the Code Noir were not so callous. This is the Mark Twain defense, a moral or aesthetic judgment if you will. It\\\'s not a one-to-one legal comparison. In either case, even with this hypocrisy, the truth of the American Declaration or the achievements of the founders still endure. The same is true of the French Revolution and Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre.
-- You are probably right about Brissot not being a \\\"war criminal\\\", I wasn\\\'t thinking in legal terms but moral, judgmental, ahistorical terms. I was thinking in terms about how George Bush and several members of the Western government are war criminals, the kind who don\\\'t really get brought to trial. I read the French Revolution in the last few years in the shadow of the Iraq war and the recession, and to me the Girondins are the neocons (albeit more tragic-sympathetic than cynical) of the Enlightenment.
-- According to Eric Hobsbawm in his book \\\"Age of Revolution\\\", the French Revolution nurtured a class of small businessmen and independent shopowners and that while France didn\\\'t develop proper industries, by the 1815, French lower-classes were better off than the English were. The effects of the Industrial Revolution took a while to develop in England and show effects. Napoleon\\\'s Continental Blockade came very close to fruition since England had a surplus of goods produced but didn\\\'t have access to European markets (they had the same problem in India, where the Bengal Cloth trade had a higher demand on the local market, they solved that problem by brute force by sacking local shops, including forcefully breaking the fingers of handscraftmen). So I don\\\'t think the Industrial Revolution was delayed from arriving in France solely because the Revolution broke out. The truth is that the English, under William Pitt Jr, kept agitating against France in order to curtail local tensions and they were the ones who first violated the Amiens peace and forced Napoleon on the war footing. I have stated this elsewhere and I regret repeating this.
My point is, isn\\\'t the more interesting counterfactual (rather than If-The-Revolution-Didn\\\'t-Break-Out) was if England (and its allies) wasn\\\'t so anti-Revolutionary, perhaps that would have eased tensions better. At the least, not prevent the Revolution from becoming a problem for other nations. It could have at least dialed down France\\\'s developing siege mentality (which preceded Brissot declaring war on Austria). After all, Burke didn\\\'t rage against Robespierre, he went after Mirabeau and the Tennis Court Oath. It was the Anglophile Girondins who finally declared war on England, and even after they got rid of the \\\"dictateur sanguinnaire\\\" they didn\\\'t make peace with the Thermidor or Directory government either. The English foreign policy was belligerent and reactionary and they wanted the Revolution to fail. Now the Revolution had its own flaws, certainly and I am not blaming anyone but the French for those mistakes, but did England do anything other than fan the flames or pour gasoline? I don\\\'t think they did and I can\\\'t find evidence to the contrary. Madame de Stael, in her book of Reflections, stated that the English government would dishonor itself by treating diplomatically with Marat and Robespierre, but they didn\\\'t treat with anybody else either and those two were the only ones who wanted to avoid war with England. And funnily enough, of the two, Marat was an Anglophile who publicly criticized French xenophobia towards England(He had spent several years there after all, unlike the provincial Robespierre who never saw life beyond a quarter of France, leave alone Europe). The Terror wasn\\\'t a product of solely the Revolution, it was also a product of International relations as well.
And you know people hold the American Revolution as a positive model (like Hannah Arendt and other liberals these days), and I don\\\'t think any French Revolutionary ever attained the stark contrast of preaching-one-thing-and-practicing-another as the person who wrote \\\"All Men Are Created Equal\\\" and then went home to his slave-run plantation and took his concubine to bed. Thomas Jefferson consistently supported the French Revolution and he was a great President, but at the end of the day, he probably made more people suffer than the Reign of Terror did, by allowing the slave states to function, leave alone, abandoning his own illegitimate children to be raised as slaves. Even Thomas-Alexandre Dumas\\\' father and other French aristocrats under the Code Noir were not so callous. This is the Mark Twain defense, a moral or aesthetic judgment if you will. It\\\'s not a one-to-one legal comparison. In either case, even with this hypocrisy, the truth of the American Declaration or the achievements of the founders still endure. The same is true of the French Revolution and Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre.
-- You are probably right about Brissot not being a \\\"war criminal\\\", I wasn\\\'t thinking in legal terms but moral, judgmental, ahistorical terms. I was thinking in terms about how George Bush and several members of the Western government are war criminals, the kind who don\\\'t really get brought to trial. I read the French Revolution in the last few years in the shadow of the Iraq war and the recession, and to me the Girondins are the neocons (albeit more tragic-sympathetic than cynical) of the Enlightenment.
-- According to Eric Hobsbawm in his book \\\"Age of Revolution\\\", the French Revolution nurtured a class of small businessmen and independent shopowners and that while France didn\\\'t develop proper industries, by the 1815, French lower-classes were better off than the English were. The effects of the Industrial Revolution took a while to develop in England and show effects. Napoleon\\\'s Continental Blockade came very close to fruition since England had a surplus of goods produced but didn\\\'t have access to European markets (they had the same problem in India, where the Bengal Cloth trade had a higher demand on the local market, they solved that problem by brute force by sacking local shops, including forcefully breaking the fingers of handscraftmen). So I don\\\'t think the Industrial Revolution was delayed from arriving in France solely because the Revolution broke out. The truth is that the English, under William Pitt Jr, kept agitating against France in order to curtail local tensions and they were the ones who first violated the Amiens peace and forced Napoleon on the war footing. I have stated this elsewhere and I regret repeating this.
My point is, isn\\\'t the more interesting counterfactual (rather than If-The-Revolution-Didn\\\'t-Break-Out) was if England (and its allies) wasn\\\'t so anti-Revolutionary, perhaps that would have eased tensions better. At the least, not prevent the Revolution from becoming a problem for other nations. It could have at least dialed down France\\\'s developing siege mentality (which preceded Brissot declaring war on Austria). After all, Burke didn\\\'t rage against Robespierre, he went after Mirabeau and the Tennis Court Oath. It was the Anglophile Girondins who finally declared war on England, and even after they got rid of the \\\"dictateur sanguinnaire\\\" they didn\\\'t make peace with the Thermidor or Directory government either. The English foreign policy was belligerent and reactionary and they wanted the Revolution to fail. Now the Revolution had its own flaws, certainly and I am not blaming anyone but the French for those mistakes, but did England do anything other than fan the flames or pour gasoline? I don\\\'t think they did and I can\\\'t find evidence to the contrary. Madame de Stael, in her book of Reflections, stated that the English government would dishonor itself by treating diplomatically with Marat and Robespierre, but they didn\\\'t treat with anybody else either and those two were the only ones who wanted to avoid war with England. And funnily enough, of the two, Marat was an Anglophile who publicly criticized French xenophobia towards England(He had spent several years there after all, unlike the provincial Robespierre who never saw life beyond a quarter of France, leave alone Europe). The Terror wasn\\\'t a product of solely the Revolution, it was also a product of International relations as well.
Changed line(s) 3 from:
n
-- I do agree with Clemenceau that \
to:
-- I do agree with Clemenceau that \\\"the Revolution should be seen as a block\\\". As for preaching one thing and practicing the other, I don\\\'t see why you can\\\'t accept that ambiguity and still respect the achievement. The point of the Enlightenment is that human beings apply their reason to solve problems and I don\\\'t think the revolutionaries were saints nor did they claim to be, they were deeply flawed individuals, people who had no experience or local precedent for political life except for discussions in seminary and convent schools and village salons (Lot of the arguments and parliamentary debates are fairly juvenile in rhetoric, its essentially \\\"you are a counter-revolutionary because you suck\\\"). I mean I don\\\'t think Mirabeau was wrong about serving as a secret advisor to Louis XVI, it was definitely a gamble (I respect people who take such actions even if it falls flat) and, who knows, if Louis XVI had listened to his advice instead of Marie Antoinette\\\'s, maybe it would have avoided further unpleasantness and no one would have made a fuss about the \\\"armoire de fer\\\" documents. He could have been France\\\'s first Prime Minister (and he would have been great at it). Likewise with Danton, I am not a fan of corruption in general but he had great talent and intelligence, he certainly had a pragmatic sense of looking beyond the Terror to peacetime and rebuilding relations. The thing is, Revolutions are risky affairs and gambles (cf, Cromwell\\\'s \\\"Why do we Rebel then?\\\" or Franklin\\\'s \\\"Hang together or hang separately\\\"), and people should be skeptical about treating it as a one-dimensionally positive thing (there aren\\\'t any pro-gambling films after all). There\\\'s that film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, \\\"Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice\\\" (which dealt with the Paris Commune). But I don\\\'t think acknowledgement of the gamble takes away from the ideals or partial-achievements.
And you know people hold the American Revolution as a positive model (like Hannah Arendt and other liberals these days), and I don\\\'t think any French Revolutionary ever attained the stark contrast of preaching-one-thing-and-practicing-another as the person who wrote \\\"All Men Are Created Equal\\\" and then went home to his slave-run plantation and took his concubine to bed. Thomas Jefferson consistently supported the French Revolution and he was a great President, but at the end of the day, he probably made more people suffer than the Reign of Terror did, by allowing the slave states to function, leave alone, abandoning his own illegitimate children to be raised as slaves. Even Thomas-Alexandre Dumas\\\' father and other French aristocrats under the Code Noir were not so callous. This is the Mark Twain defense, a moral or aesthetic judgment if you will. It\\\'s not a one-to-one legal comparison. In either case, even with this hypocrisy, the truth of the American Declaration or the achievements of the founders still endure. The same is true of the French Revolution and Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre.
-- You are probably right about Brissot not being a \\\"war criminal\\\", I wasn\\\'t thinking in legal terms but moral, judgmental, ahistorical terms. I was thinking in terms about how George Bush and several members of the Western government are war criminals, the kind who don\\\'t really get brought to trial. I read the French Revolution in the last few years in the shadow of the Iraq war and the recession, and to me the Girondins are the neocons (albeit more tragic-sympathetic than cynical) of the Enlightenment.
-- According to Eric Hobsbawm in his book \\\"Age of Revolution\\\", the French Revolution nurtured a class of small businessmen and independent shopowners and that while France didn\\\'t develop proper industries, by the 1815, French lower-classes were better off than the English were. The effects of the Industrial Revolution took a while to develop in England and show effects. Napoleon\\\'s Continental Blockade came very close to fruition since England had a surplus of goods produced but didn\\\'t have access to European markets (they had the same problem in India, where the Bengal Cloth trade had a higher demand on the local market, they solved that problem by brute force by sacking local shops, including forcefully breaking the fingers of handscraftmen). So I don\\\'t think the Industrial Revolution was delayed from arriving in France solely because the Revolution broke out. The truth is that the English, under William Pitt Jr, kept agitating against France in order to curtail local tensions and they were the ones who first violated the Amiens peace and forced Napoleon on the war footing. I have stated this elsewhere and I regret repeating this.
My point is, isn\\\'t the more interesting counterfactual (rather than If-The-Revolution-Didn\\\'t-Break-Out) was if England (and its allies) wasn\\\'t so anti-Revolutionary, perhaps that would have eased tensions better. At the least, not prevent the Revolution from becoming a problem for other nations. It could have at least dialed down France\\\'s developing siege mentality (which preceded Brissot declaring war on Austria). After all, Burke didn\\\'t rage against Robespierre, he went after Mirabeau and the Tennis Court Oath. It was the Anglophile Girondins who finally declared war on England, and even after they got rid of the \\\"dictateur sanguinnaire\\\" they didn\\\'t make peace with the Thermidor or Directory government either. The English foreign policy was belligerent and reactionary and they wanted the Revolution to fail. Now the Revolution had its own flaws, certainly and I am not blaming anyone but the French for those mistakes, but did England do anything other than fan the flames or pour gasoline? I don\\\'t think they did and I can\\\'t find evidence to the contrary. Madame de Stael, in her book of Reflections, stated that the English government would dishonor itself by treating diplomatically with Marat and Robespierre, but they didn\\\'t treat with anybody else either and those two were the only ones who wanted to avoid war with England. And funnily enough, of the two, Marat was an Anglophile who publicly criticized French xenophobia towards England(He had spent several years there after all, unlike the provincial Robespierre who never saw life beyond a quarter of France, leave alone Europe).
And you know people hold the American Revolution as a positive model (like Hannah Arendt and other liberals these days), and I don\\\'t think any French Revolutionary ever attained the stark contrast of preaching-one-thing-and-practicing-another as the person who wrote \\\"All Men Are Created Equal\\\" and then went home to his slave-run plantation and took his concubine to bed. Thomas Jefferson consistently supported the French Revolution and he was a great President, but at the end of the day, he probably made more people suffer than the Reign of Terror did, by allowing the slave states to function, leave alone, abandoning his own illegitimate children to be raised as slaves. Even Thomas-Alexandre Dumas\\\' father and other French aristocrats under the Code Noir were not so callous. This is the Mark Twain defense, a moral or aesthetic judgment if you will. It\\\'s not a one-to-one legal comparison. In either case, even with this hypocrisy, the truth of the American Declaration or the achievements of the founders still endure. The same is true of the French Revolution and Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre.
-- You are probably right about Brissot not being a \\\"war criminal\\\", I wasn\\\'t thinking in legal terms but moral, judgmental, ahistorical terms. I was thinking in terms about how George Bush and several members of the Western government are war criminals, the kind who don\\\'t really get brought to trial. I read the French Revolution in the last few years in the shadow of the Iraq war and the recession, and to me the Girondins are the neocons (albeit more tragic-sympathetic than cynical) of the Enlightenment.
-- According to Eric Hobsbawm in his book \\\"Age of Revolution\\\", the French Revolution nurtured a class of small businessmen and independent shopowners and that while France didn\\\'t develop proper industries, by the 1815, French lower-classes were better off than the English were. The effects of the Industrial Revolution took a while to develop in England and show effects. Napoleon\\\'s Continental Blockade came very close to fruition since England had a surplus of goods produced but didn\\\'t have access to European markets (they had the same problem in India, where the Bengal Cloth trade had a higher demand on the local market, they solved that problem by brute force by sacking local shops, including forcefully breaking the fingers of handscraftmen). So I don\\\'t think the Industrial Revolution was delayed from arriving in France solely because the Revolution broke out. The truth is that the English, under William Pitt Jr, kept agitating against France in order to curtail local tensions and they were the ones who first violated the Amiens peace and forced Napoleon on the war footing. I have stated this elsewhere and I regret repeating this.
My point is, isn\\\'t the more interesting counterfactual (rather than If-The-Revolution-Didn\\\'t-Break-Out) was if England (and its allies) wasn\\\'t so anti-Revolutionary, perhaps that would have eased tensions better. At the least, not prevent the Revolution from becoming a problem for other nations. It could have at least dialed down France\\\'s developing siege mentality (which preceded Brissot declaring war on Austria). After all, Burke didn\\\'t rage against Robespierre, he went after Mirabeau and the Tennis Court Oath. It was the Anglophile Girondins who finally declared war on England, and even after they got rid of the \\\"dictateur sanguinnaire\\\" they didn\\\'t make peace with the Thermidor or Directory government either. The English foreign policy was belligerent and reactionary and they wanted the Revolution to fail. Now the Revolution had its own flaws, certainly and I am not blaming anyone but the French for those mistakes, but did England do anything other than fan the flames or pour gasoline? I don\\\'t think they did and I can\\\'t find evidence to the contrary. Madame de Stael, in her book of Reflections, stated that the English government would dishonor itself by treating diplomatically with Marat and Robespierre, but they didn\\\'t treat with anybody else either and those two were the only ones who wanted to avoid war with England. And funnily enough, of the two, Marat was an Anglophile who publicly criticized French xenophobia towards England(He had spent several years there after all, unlike the provincial Robespierre who never saw life beyond a quarter of France, leave alone Europe).
