Question about Robespierre and The Terror

[fromrequired.livejournal.com]

 I don't have much knowledge about the French Revolution (as you can tell by looking at my userpic, I'm more of a WWII fangirl) but I'm greatly interested in it. 

So in my AP Euro History class, we had to watch this documentary about the French Revolution. I'll post a part of it below:

I'm sort of lost because I thought Robespierre originally was for the rights of the poor and the ordinary people? It doesn't seem plausible to me that he can just turn into a sanguinary dictator overnight. Even in my textbook it says that Robespierre killed everyone whom he deemed unfit for his "Republic of Virtue," but history is never that simple. I know, I study WWII ;)

Anyways, can y'all people enlighten me about the cause of The Terror and Robespierre's role in it? Sorry if I'm asking too many questions.


EDIT: Here's the part that succeeds it. It basically describes the fall of Robespierre and says he inspired later dictatorships and revolutions. 

Comments

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I understand your incredulity; when one has grown up in a society with a history of racism (and as I'm sure you know, the development of the concept of race happened differently in the English colonies and in yet another, third way, in the Spanish colonies), it's difficult to conceive of racism as being anything but a universal instinct that has to be overcome. But the evidence is there, if one is willing to examine it. I gave one particular example, but I could multiply them. When the segregationalists in the colonies started to gain the upper hand in the 1750s, many mixed raced members of the dominant class sailed for France where they had no problem integrating into the larger society - and by that I don't just mean that they were able to marry, but that there is no evidence that they encountered any kind of discrimination or harassment.

As I'm sure you've had occasion to observe, racism can exist without slavery, but so too can slavery exist without racism - in fact, it did for thousands of years. The concept of race as we know it was just starting to be developed in the 18th century and didn't really take on all the characteristics that we still ascribe to it until the 19th - even in the US, where because of specific historical contingencies, it developed earlier than in the French colonies (an example of one of these contingencies: when your colony is on a large continent, it's very easy for slaves to run away and, if you don't have some way of differentiating them, disappear into the surrounding population; when your colony is on a tiny island, as was the case for the French colonies, this problem is virtually non-existant - which is not to say that slaves never ran away, just that they were reduced to hiding out in the mountains, at which juncture it didn't matter what they looked like).

I should also note that there is a difference between racism and xenophobia or discrimination based on the belief in one's cultural superiority. That belief that someone is a savage (whether of the noble or the to-be-killed/converted-on-sight kind), while repulsive, is not necessarily always racist and I would argue that whatever any given group of European colonists politics concerning them (ranging from intermarriage to extermination, though, again, for particular historical reasons, the French and Spanish were - on average: no need to cite early Virginia or Columbus, I am aware of them - more receptive to intermarriage and the English more inclined to extermination) had much less to do, at least in the beginning, with their looks and much more with their cultures and beliefs.

Bonaparte is also beloved for very specific historical reasons, involving a complex mixture of his propaganda, his military genius, contradictions in his policies (eg, remember how I said he restricted the rights of French Jews? He's more often remembered as the emancipator of the Jews, because he forced the governments of occupied countries to give them basic civil rights) and the fact that, with the 19th and (especially the first half of the) 20th centuries being the heyday of racism and imperialism, very few people knew or cared about his colonial policy and if they did they tended to think of it more as being for the greater glory of France than for its eternal shame. That said, credit where credit is due: Bonaparte was largely responsible for the success of the siege of Toulon.