Discussion request: I guess I should possibly have tried to do this long before.

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Apart from those I already know here, I was wishing to know if anybody else would be interested into discussing political philosophy and theory? Because I'm very much into that (maybe even too much), and it would be fun if there was someone to discuss with, maybe to help sorting out the chaos. I'm quite a beginner, of course, having read very little through Montesquieu and Rousseau.

Just so I specify: I'm working on the political thoughts (but also socio-economical) of Robespierre, Saint-Just and the Jacobins. Trying to understand through historians I can read on the website www.revolution-francaise.net. Of course, it's in French... But some links, in case anybody around can read them: Guilhaumou's "The Hatred of the French Revolution: a Form of Hatred of Democracy", Wannich's "The French Revolution in the Country of Ghost Trains" and Gross's theories on "Terror and Equalitarian Liberalism". I also recommend reading this, also by Gross.


Reading through "Lire Saint-Just" (To Read Saint-Just), by Miguel Abensour, the text introducing Saint-Just's Oeuvres complètes, the 2004 edition.

I think I'm starting to understand why the historians always refer to the "enigma" of Robespierre and Saint-Just. Beyond their "Janus" double image -- where they are torn between the justification of terror and the fight to establish democratic justice -- there is something deeper: their idealism ignite a fire of political inspiration, but the understanding of their political pragmatism cool you down as much as it paralysed the revolutionary government itself, 200 years ago.

The way I read it, I also understand that these men were trying to lead the People to the real Freedom: "to force them to be free", as Rousseau said (I believe?). The Freedom in question is more than law-freedom, it should be nature-freedom, the one we've lost because of the Slavery we've been put into for centuries, a form of Mental-Slavery our modern democracies obviously inherited when they stopped trying to actually fight it: so it continues. I think that this particular Freedom, the one inspired from Nature, also has something to do with the People taking back control of its own destiny: therefore leaving the Mental-Slavery in which it always remains, still nowadays.

In this, the political theory and political attempts of Robespierre and Saint-Just are still actual to our world, no matter some historians (Furet, Gueniffey, Hampson), philosophers or even filmmakers (Rohmer's L'Anglaise et le Duc or Coppola's Marie-Antoinette) who try to make us forget the Revolution with aristocratic glamour or to classify it as "repulsive".

S. Wannich said: "We are in the middle of the sensitive construction of a new way to be receptive towards the French Revolution which forced, by the disgust for political crimes of the 20th century, a disgust for the revolutionary event." Hence, the qualification of "totalitarism".

So let's conclude with something easier: their political aspiration has, more than likely, something to do with the reason why so many are trying to demolish their reputations. It is not surprising. I've already said it quite often. It doesn't mean they would have found the way to lead the People to Freedom, since they, themselves, got into the trap of idealism frozen by pragmatism: when their closest colleagues decided to turn on them to save their own lives, the Plaine on which they relied watched the Montagne self-destruct in silence and the People abandonned them, shrugging indiferently and unconsciously because of all the political fights, which bored them, naturally irrlevant to them, outsiders to the deadly political game.

...Of course, maybe that was something we all already knew, but I was trying to state all of this logically and simply, so that it ends up making sense, at least in my mind. Or at least, as much as it can make sense.

Thoughts?



Btw, anybody speaks French here? Or is from France? Anybody knows French forums -- which are active? (I'm from Québec -- so I speak French. That's why I'm asking.) Because I can hardly believe this LJ community could be the only one in the world? Or is it? -_-;

Comments

[sunliner.livejournal.com]

I will have to come back to this when my mind is not clouded by sleepiness and hours of writing down notes on a plot for a story I'm attempting to write (seriously, don't even ask). But anyway, I figured I'd put it out there that I like philosophy and have a teensy bit of experience when it comes to Enlightenment stuff, mostly Voltaire and Rousseau. It came in very, very small doses and was very, very simplified, but it's experience besides.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

When I was at the New York Public Library, I found a book that looked interesting--although I didn't really have time to look at it--that seems relevant to mention here: Robespierre: Une politique de la philosophie by Georges Labica.

I know this is the same tired old response, but honestly, I don't think that the fact that they were caught up by pragmatism to the extent they were has anything inevitable about it; we have to remember the circumstances, after all. I think in even slightly less trying circumstances they would have done much better--concerning the "freezing" of the Revolution (to use Saint-Just's term), if not as far as "lead[ing] the People to Freedom" (to use yours) goes.

As to forums, activity is relative. I don't know of any French forums that can compare to LJ for activity, but there's a difference between, say, the royet.org forum which has occasion activity and the forum of les Amis de Robespierre, which is pretty much dead.

...Oh, and Rousseau did say that, by the way, about "forcing people to be free," but it's often misinterpreted. I'm afraid I won't be of much help on that score though, since I've read mostly what one might call "Rousseau-lite" (ie, Emile and his Confessions, though Emile has more philosophic content than one might think). The only serious philosophical work of his I've finished is the Contrat Social although--before I misplaced it--I was reading his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité. *facepalm* And, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, apart from that I've only read a little bit of Diderot and Voltaire, and much more about them than their actual writings at that. >__

[morgan-wang.livejournal.com]

I think the "enigma" is the result of wanting to do somthing, but not knowing fully how or the consequesns. Robespierre was a lawyer, not a politican. He wanted to do somthing, but wasn't the type of person who could survive in politcs. A poltican has to compromise. At the end, Robespierre was forced to, the situation caused it. Look at Jean-Baptiste Carrier. I'm not defending what he did, it was terrible, but you can see how a normal person can be warped to do terrible things. The pressure in the Vandee must have been huge. With the royalist rebellion killing everyone they could, you can sort of see why he over reacted.

So on one side you have Robespiere's dreams, the other, what he thought he had to do to get there. He probably didn't like that path, but to him there was no other choice.

Has anyone here read Social Contract?

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but the Revolution can hardly be considered "politics as usual" from a modern perspective. In fact, it seems to me that the main goal of the most principled of the Revolutionaries (whatever party they belonged to) was to make sure that it never became what we now see as "politics as usual"; they were trying to create a new kind of political reality, where people would be shaped by the new institutions to feel that political participation was every citizen's duty, and not a way of accruing wealth and power. One might well decide that this dream was foolish, but that is, first, to have the hindsight of more than two hundred years, and second, to declare that something is not worth doing simply because it has failed a few times in the past.

I don't think what Robespierre "thought he had to do" (I assume by that you mean the Terror) was so much a personal decision based on what he thought would be necessary to achieve "his" dream, but rather a course chosen by all the conventionnels based on the very real necessities of the foreign and civil wars and the other hardships facing France at that time.

I've read the Social Contract, but I think it's wrong to assume that just because many of the Revolutionaries had that they were modeling their actions on anything other than its most general of principles; they certainly weren't trying to implement its ideas literally--that sort of dogmatism is a feature of later Revolutions and has no relation to this one.

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Yes, but politicians are mostly lawyers too. I think Robespierre mostly sought compromises, no matter his firm principles and no matter what people seem to believe. Only, at the end, he was growing tired and depressed and saw that the Festival of the Supreme Being didn't seem to have the "union-effect" for the deputies that he had hoped. While Saint-Just was willing to compromise, Robespierre was probably refusing because he saw it was pointless, since he knew the others didn't want to.

[morgan-wang.livejournal.com]

What I ment by Robespierre wasn't the best politican was, he wasn't like Danton, Mirabeu or Talleyrand. True, all of them were lying, dishonest, thieves, (expecially the last two) but they did manage to keep a country together...sort of. I should have been more specific, true most of the Convention was made of lawyers. The committee of Public Saftey has 8/12 lawyers.

Usually the way its portraied in historybooks, the stubborn one is SJ. So why did he want to compromise? That has allways struck me as strange.