Not another Anti-Robespierre paper...

[citoyenneclark.livejournal.com]

Today, I typed in Robespierre death penalty, trying to find a copy of his speech. Instead, I came across this:
http://www.termpapers-termpapers.com/dbs/a3/bqg260.shtml

Which, besides the sad fact that some idiot out there, is probably trying to pass off this sorry peice of work as a term paper, it is another paper about how evil and power hungry Robespeirre was. 
Oh well, back to studying for finals. :(
btw: Marat's chapter should be up once I finish finals...

Comments

[wildsong.livejournal.com]

I've been studying the French Revolution for the past semester now, and although I have noticed Robespierre's redeeming features, especially pre-1792; I can't say that I feel compelled to not consider him radical and somewhat tyrannical in his actions. Perhaps I've been reading too much Schama, however, I cannot condone his actions as commendable from the summer of 1792 onwards.

So, my question to you is thus: how were Robespierre's actions justifiable during the period of the Terror?

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Just opened this page, haven't yet had a chance to read your paper, and I'm racing out, but PLEASE don't read Schama - he's reheated Carlyle and criminally inaccurate: he loves Danton, hates Robespierre, therefore - 2 quick examples - attributes a famously gory Danton quote to Robespierre, then later (to suggest Robespierre is incredibly treacherous) has Robespierre writing the letter to Danton on the death of his first wife in spring 1794 - despite Schama himself having just written that Danton was off in Arcis with wife no.2 for the last few months! Oh, and Danton isn't allowed to kiss - that'd be gay - he has to merely 'meet' in the basket, the Princess de Lamballe can't be a lesbian because 'she was too pretty'...and so on. No historian takes him seriously - he's a TV entertainer. J.M. Thompson is meticulous, as I think is Hampson.

[citoyenneclark.livejournal.com]

Simon Schama even said he's biased towards the revolutionaries. My personal favorite quote was about Saint-Just and discipline in the army. "He was capable of draconian acts, expecially if there was looting." So, is Schama saying that if he was like the rest of us, looting was just swell? One has an army to enforce, they have weapons. The people they are stealing from do not. Offenders must be punished, otherwise there would be chaos.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

That's just bizarre - I'm reading stuff on what used to be called the 'English Revolution' (till 1789) but is now less controversially called the 'civil war', and one of the reasons the New Model Army was succesful was because they were unusually disciplined (fined for swearing etc), whilst other armies regarded looting as part of their pay, and it wasn't treated as an offence - even though it meant soldiers leaving the battlefield midway through! Saint-Just was, shall we say, very enthusiastic about discipline, but no more so than in world war 1.

You get that Schama attitude in the play 'Poor Bitos' - the Bitos/ Robespierre character is 'bad' because he has sentenced a collaborator with the Nazis, whose acts led to French deaths, to death, even though the collaborator was a childhood acquaintance. The play implies that a judge who ISN"T biased towards an aquaintance is bad! (And Anouilh makes the Nazi collaborator parallel Desmoulins, yeah, right). (It would be interesting to see the war records of the revisionist historians!).

On your chaos point, my father used to work in Africa - he once took us to Lagos, Nigeria, as a bad 'joke': there were execution posts on the beach (it wasn't a tourist place!), shiny Mercedes cars literally driving over dried leather shapes that were once people on the roads: I thought, this is what the 18thC Europe was like. Most of Africa is absolutely screwed because of the corruption, but Libya wasn't - my father once turned up to a meeting to find that the man he was supposed to be meeting had just been summarily executed - literally, shot on the spot - for corruption. My father was both horrified and impressed - Gadaffi didn't tolerate any shit, and Libya was unusual in Africa because as a nation, it 'worked'. I'm not saying it's a great regime, but compared to the rest of the continent...which reminds me, there's an online resource for the Coleridge / Southey play The Fall of Robespierre (actually, there are a few, but one is excellent), which has the newspaper reports of 9-10Thermidor: the London Times' editorial is - surprisingly - oh shit, Robespierre was the stabilizing factor, now there'll be chaos! (And they were right - cue 20 years of war...).

Another Africa point - did you see the bit of newsreel from Libya a few months ago? At the start of the 'trouble' - I don't really know what to call it - they showed a non-violent political demo led by a very articulate student: they were all wearing green leaf cocardes...then, a few days later, it all got violent, tribal and horrible...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Oh,on my last paragraph there, I mean Kenya, not Libya...

[citoyenneclark.livejournal.com]

That's really intresting. Must have kind of ruined the meeting. :) But as much as I hate to say it, sometimes a government has to make an example, to keep things from spinning out of control.

I didn't see the newsreel, but I think to ghost of Camille strikes again. Did you know that during the Turkish revolution, the leaders gave each other French REvolutionary nick-names?

On the note of revisonist history, my mom just got back from Berlin, currently, the stance on the GDR (east Berlin) is that it was a terrible opressive place. (Just wait for the revisonist view, the same people like Schama are going to do their spin, That the GDR was not THAT bad a place, the secret police employed plenty of the population. After the fall of the GDR, all these people were unemployed.) :)

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

There's a French website on Lycos - I don't know how to do a link, but if you google 'sur la peine de mort mai 1791 robespierre' it should bring you joy - there are a lot of his speeches up there. Marxists.org (or is it marxist?) has edited bits and bobs in english. I think the new Zizek book misses it out because it doesn't fit in with their 'terror is cool' agenda. I might be wrong there but no time to check this morning!

[citoyenneclark.livejournal.com]

Thanks, its a great site, its helped me out in the past, finding primary documents.

I just finished my paper on analysing Robespierre's rhetoric in his "Death Penalty speech" Posted it to my journal if anyone is intrested.

http://citoyenneclark.livejournal.com/2085.html#cutid1

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've just seen the paper. I'm surprised there are footnotes with actual books cited, 'cos I get the impression they've just watched an episode of the Scarlet Pimpernel and taken their 'history' from that!

[lucilla-1789.livejournal.com]

If I was in power, I would actually guillotine people, who create those essay-pages and those who used them. (It's good thing I'm just a historian and not in to politics)

Students are supposed to educate themselves, not copy. And the quality of that essay was horrible.

I don't really approve all Robespierre's actions during the Terror, but it is so much complicated than this oh he was so evil and powerhungry crap. And what makes Danton any better?

It's hard to trust British historians with French Revolution. It would be a same thing that I would write books about Russian revolution and Soviet Union. It's near imposible to be objective when writing about, well, former mortal enemies. I'm Finnish and Soviet Union tried to invade us. Interestingly though, I'm now studying history in UK and our lecturer (falsely) claimed that Soviets never started any aggression during WWII. Tell that to Baltic countries and Finland (Off the Topic, but this shows how biased (and leftist) British can sometimes be)

[kurotoshi.livejournal.com]

btw: Marat's chapter should be up once I finish finals...

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!