revolution_fr | Monthly Discussion Point: Maximilien Robespierre

Does it piss anybody else off that he's often portrayed as a blood-crazed murderer?

Edited 2010-05-03 14:27 (UTC)

(deleted comment)

Hm... I'm by no means an expert on the topic, but from what I've read, most seem to agree that (at the very least) he was a bit delusional, and honestly thought he was protecting the people by executing traitors (you know, executing one so many might live sort-of-thing). I tend to think that he was a bit delusional, but that by-and-large not nearly as bad as people make him out to be; I mean, contrary to what a lot of things seem to say, he wasn't a dictator... People voted for him and with him to get policies across, so his sentiments (paranoia?) were definitely shared by others. After all, the Terror kept going after Robespierre's death.

Just out of curiosity, how does the blood-crazed murderer amuse you? (I personally find his forgetfulness to be quite adorable).

I am sorry but this reveals a pretty simplistic vision of how things actually worked during the French Revolution, how the power was exercise and how individuals influenced collective decision-making process.

This may be a bit of a silly question, but was that in response to my comment or the original (sorry, at first glance it seemed to be about what I wrote...if not, then sorry to bug you...)?

No, celine, it was a response to slowpunk's comment, not to yours ;-)

Definitely not a blood-crazed one - his method of murder is very detached, and it is generally believed that he thought honestly of his methods.

Insane, perhaps, but his voting in was democratic, and he wasn't a dictator.

Just a murderer? De grâce, grant him at least the due title of mass-murdering Omnicidal Maniac (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OmnicidalManiac) with a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuicidalCosmicTemperTantrum)! He wanted to depopulate France! Then All Of The World! To guillotine all of it! They just didn't want to read The Social Contract. :( (Not that anybody cares of the other books. But those who will tell you this ~~complete utter nonsense~~ serious and truthful fact unfortunately only know that one book written by Rousseau. ~~The losers.~~) They just didn't want to like it as much as he did. :( Oh, well: at least then he could make himself shorts out of all the corpses! Or eat them. Or drink their blood. And he could stop the crops from growing too! And he was green! :D

؟؟؟ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark)

Edited 2010-05-24 18:39 (UTC)

(deleted comment)

So, if some event of history were to terrorise in the name of a virtue that you agree with, it wouldn't be murder?

You really can't just pick and choose whom you see as a murderer like that - either the massacre of civilians is murder by group, or it isn't. The consensus is that it isn't murder, it's a policy of eliminationism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminationism).

Edited 2010-05-27 06:42 (UTC)

The first part is my point as well. Which I will develop once my the heat-and-insomnia-induced migraines go away. However,

Eliminationism is the belief that one's political opponents are "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised — either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination — in order to protect the purity of the nation".

Although most of everybody (who usually hate the French Revolution and are determined to see it as a monstrous atrocity on the historical timeline) would jump on the occasion to say the French Revolution used the metaphor "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised" -- and yes they did use it a lot -- I would argue that it's really associated with 18th century philosophical and political speech, that it's entirely part of their entire culture, and that they were doing it for the triumph of the revolutionary principles, which are based on human rights.

You see where this discussion becomes a slippery slide.

Moreover, that term seems to apply to ethnic genocides, which they call "cleansing the purity of the nation", and so that makes me really wince if applied to the Fr Rev.

I get your point though that if someone really wants to be a nit-picky basher of the Fr Rev, it shouldn't be called murder, but this.

Hmm.

I've read the work in which it was first used, and he was talking specifically about how the Nazis first considered the Jews political enemies before a policy of ethnic cleansing was even thought of - as Robespierre and co. considered counter-revolutionaries. The article I linked isn't exactly the best source - but I lack a copy of the book to reference /o\

It is an icky thought, I agree - but I can completely see how "cleansing the body politic" for the eventual spread of liberty can be related back to a sort of "purity of the nation".

Why would people see the Fr. Rev as a monstrosity on the historical timeline? That opinion befuddles me.

Edited 2010-05-28 01:46 (UTC)

1. Yeah, I read that sort of argument often. One compares Louis XVI to the Jews. I profoundly disagree, on an emotional, rational and ideological level. For one thing, the reason Jews might have been seen as political enemies before ethnical enemies (I'm not convinced; also the two merged) was because they were likened to communists. Domenico Losurdo explains how the nazis saw communism as an "oriental ideology", like the Jews were "oriental". Russians, Jews, communism (read, pretty much anything on the left though) -- all the same.

The reason I disagree is that D. Losurdo traces back that sort of "application of ethnical characteristics to the leftist enemy" back in the 19th century and up to the Counter-Revolution itself and the Royalist writers. The poor were seen as another race in the 19th century. Would the systematic murderous onslaught on the poor working class by savage capitalism through the 19th century be ever called an "ethnic cleansing"? Of course not. Think why. We all know why. Moreover, the way the Jacobins were described in the 19th century is in direct filiation with how the Communists were by the nazis/various right wing movevements. The only characteristics that comes to my mind is the whole "they think ABSTRACT": accusation sent to philosophers, Jacobins, marxists/communists and Jews. Add in there freemasons, various left movements, feminists and lgbt advocates or else, and you've got everything that stirs up la bête immonde.

So all of this sums up to a "who started it all?" debate, and the only reason anyone generally pursues to bring an answer to this debate isn't to enlighten the process, but to take an ideological side. Also, the whole "The Jacobins All Started It; It's All Their Fault" is more and more sounding to my ears as a "The Victim Started It All; It's All The Victim's Fault" sort of reasoning that never takes into consideration the real causes that made fascism/nazism possible in the 1930s, in a country like Germany for example where the left was developed and active and where women and homosexuals rights were very advanced and organized (http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/prideseries0701.php).

Which wasn't the case for the Terror. Context =/= not the same at all.

However, if anyone really wants to see embryonic fascism in the French Revolution, without any ethnical motivation, one should rather look for the horrors that happened during the Thermidorian Reaction and especially the White Terror. Unsurprisingly, nobody cares about it, or thinks the Jacobins just asked for it.

To conclude this point, because I disgress, those who link it all back to the French Revolution -- or worse, some blame the whole Enlightenment!! -- and see obviously only the radical currents to be blamed is an ideological diversion to maintain conservatism. Moreover, saying radical social changes lead to nazism!! is precisely the reaction that lead to it in the first place. >:( It's like that idiotic loser here who says Hitler and the Nazis were gay and that's Really The Cause To Everything (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/afas-fischer-outdoes-himself), or masculinists who use "feminazi" to call feminists.

2. "cleansing the body politic" =/= "purity of the nation". I'm pretty sure no one ever equals Catherine de Médicis or Isabella of Castile to "Nazi concepts". (Odd though, because they're women and rulers, so you'd think there'd be some huge bashing taking place. Alas, I don't see it explained quite this way. Though there is bashing.)

The Nazis were the response to the French Revolution (they opposed themselves specifically to it and to erase what it had accomplished); the French Revolution was the response to the Religion Wars. Atrocities are often answered with atrocities. And more. And then more again. Because in History, people always resist, while others always crush them. It's sad, depressing, horrible, etc.

Would the systematic murderous onslaught on the poor working class by savage capitalism through the 19th century be ever called an "ethnic cleansing"? Of course not. Think why. We all know why.

Well, even though the same thing is still occurring both inside and outside the rich-world, I'd call it something, as an anarcho-communist who advocates capitalism's end.

Anyway.

I think we are talking over each other, in that I meant only to offer

slowdeath an alternative term to 'murder'. Though the original author used it in terms of tracing the history of anti-Leftism in the context of the Nazi regime, I felt that it was fitting enough to refer to the actions of the politically motivated Jacobins acting on their fears of liberty's end. It did not refer to them as proto-fascists, only to their actions in specifically attacking people as enemies of the proto-state. Perhaps co-opting the term from scholars of WW2 may bring with it that idea, but that's a linguistic debate.

The idea that the Jacobins were not responsible for their actions of (the first) Terror is patronising, and leaves the Left open to an assault on our morals -- how are our ideas better when our methods are just as violent? There is a definite difference in blaming a person for sequential actions and taking responsibility for actions which were not in the best interest or even the best moments of people.

3. Because conservative jerks see and state (although with less straight-to-the-point details) that the "problem" of the French Revolution was the failure of the first elite that sparked it -- i.e. liberal nobility and high bourgeoisie -- to keep the control of it and to contain the social explosion, which is what Furet calls the dérapage of the Revolution and dates it to... the proclamation of the Declaration of Rights of August 1789. The elites thought that granting it would calm down the country: it did not.

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

Everybody stopped reading after the first sentence of course: everything necessary was there to make the Revolution the one of the petit-bourgeois, the peasants, the workers -- and yes, the women's and the black (slaves)'s too.

The conservative rightist Thermidorians knew it. By Year III, they took off from their re-made Declaration that first article, what makes the Revolution being the Revolution, and Boissy d'Anglas stated it was the source of all the "anarchy" that had prevailed for the five first years.

To sum up, the French Revolution, through the "failure" of the elites, sparked two hundred years of social unrest which pisses off the Old, Rich, White Men (and their allies who have privileges to gain through that power structure).

Because conservative jerks are often the frank enemies: like when Chaunu calls abortion the "White Plague".

That's why people hate the French Revolution. Because not everybody likes "those filthy *insert your choice of minority here*" to be their equals.

tl;dr: 1. Domenico Losurdo: Freemasons, Philosophers, Jacobins, Socialists, Marxists, Anarchists, Communists, Jews = here goes one big group of "Those Evil Others Wrecking Our Social Order" to ponder about, the other is straight from the Counter-Revolution through Fascism/Nazism, by passing through Maurras; 2. Large-scale atrocities cause traumas in the human society on the whole or in one or many groups and when not healed properly might lead to other atrocities as a response to the first trauma: my Ethical Humanist Conscience is horrified by this, but my Ruthless Avenger Of Oppressions Conscience is much less, so I'm very conflicted on this, as much as when I watch Inglourious Basterds; 3. conservative jerks are assholes who'd obviously hate the Fr Rev that took away the privileges they'd otherwise be securely enjoying without protest or any source of it.

Edited 2010-05-28 04:51 (UTC)

It's getting quite boring, this selective approach.
There was as much place for the counter-revolutionaries in the France of 1973, attacked from everywhere, its capital threatened with complete destruction, as there was a place for Hitler's active supporters in London during the WW II bombing. There are limits to a legitimate opposition. Only recognizing this we may talk about the terror and its crimes. But I cannot accept the comparison to genocide or that empty category of eliminationism.
Leaving aside the assumption that in the European continent people could have achieved freedom and self-government without a fight. Oh yeah, we have seen the willingness of the absolutist at the Congress of Vienna, haven't we?

(deleted comment)

I always thought of sarcasm as a very good method of argumentation when the argumentation ground of the debate was rather lacking in the opponent party, especially when the original argument of said party consists in the contradiction:

- Robespierre was a murderer
- Robespierre amuses me.

Without any evidence or explanation but murderers being obviously funny, har har har.

Yes. Highly.

Yay, I'm not alone! And I started some chatter, double yay!

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