revolution_fr | Bloody vegetarian!

That is, John Oswald, Scottish poet, soldier, vegetarian activist, angry Jacobin, who died on 14th September 1793 fighting counter-revolution in the Vendée. He's sadly little known, except by vegetarians (like me!), but I'm going to root out some more stuff on him and, I dunno, write a radio play or something. I mean, hell, his life is a damn sight more interesting than some bloody 'Duchess' played by Keira Knightley, but...no, I feel a rant developing so...

Tom Paine allegedly commented: "Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh you now have a most voracious appetite for blood!". My links seem to be playing up, but googling 'The Cry of Nature' may bring you some joy if you're interested. This may or may not work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Oswald_(activist) !

On a not unrelated note, the English aristocracy still call the foxes they tear to pieces with dogs (it's illegal now, but that hasn't stopped them!) 'Charlie' or 'Charles James', after Pitt's opponent Charles James Fox, Revolution sympathiser; in Tory cartoons of the 1790's Fox was called 'Robespierre' and shown guillotining Tories (if only!) - thus, 200 years on, the act of ripping a small ginger mammal apart with a pack of dogs is the English Tory's way of symbolically destroying the revolution of 1789-94! (Ho hum, when it was banned, a French town applied for an EU grant to expand their airport so English aristocrats could fly into France and carry on killing foxes there!)

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I had no idea about the vegetarian thing and this kind of cracks me up.

Yes, it's really interesting - specially in his case when it's coupled with some pretty fiery Marat-like views on killing people! There are a lot of those aspects of the revolution that really don't get flagged up: like the legalisation of homosexuality: that generally gets attributed to Napoleon, and I love the idea of Saint-Just's semi-vegetarian France (remembering the difficulty trying to find something to eat when I stayed with a friend in Aix a few years ago!). I wish they'd been sounder on women's rights, though -there are some cool activists, but the Convention just want strangling with their remarks on that issue!

It could have been a fraud since I don't remember who funded it, but two or three years ago there was a story going around the news that someone had done a study claiming to find that vegetarians were more agressive than other people. Your Mr. Oswald made the memory of it return.

If it's even true it probably just means that a person willing to take a "agressive" stand on one issue is more likely to be "agressive" in other ways.

This was very interesting info! I didn't know anything about John Oswald before. Or about the English aristos calling the foxes that. How...special of them. x.x!

Regarding the English fox hunt...

That always seemed like a prime example of how human beings can put a huge ammount of time and effort into something, weave all this history and tradition and legend and lore around it...and have it all be for something totally stupid.

Funnily enough, it was probably what politicised me back when I was 7 or so years old - I couldn't believe that it was still legal for one bunch of people (rich with titles) to kill animals for 'fun' when anyone 'normal' doing the same thing in an inner city would be arrested for cruelty. That led me to find out about the Parliamentary system, the inbuilt aristocratic veto on all laws c/o the House of Lords ( the Commons - the Third Estate in 18th c terms - is the only bit we can elect), land ownership, land rights, the enclosure acts and highland clearances, etc. and made me at an early age into the angry little Jacobin I am now..!

I liked this little article - it brought guillotines into it! http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/nov/23/britishidentity.hunting

Was there ever a time in England when the power and privleges of the aristocracy was challenged? I know that there were times when kings were challenged and even executed...but was there ever a serious attempt to tear the whole thing down and start over? My impression is that there was always just enough change to keep things from exploding...at least after the return of the king (Was it Charles II?)

Yes! Ironically, the existence of the "New World' meant that there was a place for radicals to go to try to establish their utopia when things got difficult at home - for example, the Cromwell family were beginning to settle in N. America when the opportunity arose to, perhaps, achieve what they were after in Britain - but this also meant that the pressure was relieved here, sadly, in the 17th and 18thc, e.g. in the case of 18thc radicals like Paine, who'd go to America or France instead. (Sorry, I'm not as coherent as I'd like to be here - birthday drinks!). In the 1640's in particular the Levellers and Diggers (aka True Levellers) tried to go the whole hog - marxists.org has some of their declarations - including a sort of proto-rights of man. The historian Christopher Hill has written a lot on them, and they are finally getting their due - a permanent exhibition in Putney to commemorate the Putney Debates (there's a theory that Cromwell deliberately engineeered Charles 1's escape from prison to force them to curtail these radical debates and return to war), and the Digger Winstanley's words were used on banners at the various anti-capitalist demonstrations in the last decade. The 'English Jacobins' in the late 18thc, and the Chartists, very much in the Jacobin tradition, in the early 19thc, were violently suppressed. There's also a feeling tha WW1 gave the govt a convenient excuse to pack a lot of young men off to war and slaughter, thus avoiding radicalisaton at home - the Tsar was refused asylum in Britain because this was also believed to be provocative.
On the 20thc - I might blog on my lj at some point my theories on the 1940's and 1980's - I've got a thesis on 1940's/50's cinema, and how 'brideshead revisited' wa used as a propaganda tool inthe early 80's, I need to explore!

Oh, bloody hell, by coincidence, they're reshowing the early 80's tv series of Brideshead Revisited today (preparing us - along with the upcoming film remake - for a right-wing government again?). They've just had the scene where the young aristo Sebastian, in full Bullingdon Club regalia, has vomited through middle-class Charles' window, and they have fallen in love. This is symbolised by the following morning's history faculty lecture - the end of the Puritan Republic and the Restoration of Charles II 1660 (which is of course wonderful), and the first meal with Sebastian and his aristocratic, Old Etonian, Christ Church College, Bullingdon Club friends - I hadn't noticed before - it's Lobster Thermidor! Hmm, what are they trying to spell out there?
The scriptwriter, John Mortimer, and the two leads, Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, are these days all bigwigs in the Countryside Alliance, the massively rich and influential anti-Labour pro-bloodsports pressure group that kept the Tory flame alive during the Blair years. This is the sort of crap we swallow in Britain - and we don't even notice...!

The mention of Jeremy Irons reminds me of that silly _Lolita_ remake they did a few years ago. We still laugh when we think of Frank Langella running away from Irons with his privates flapping around.

eep! I think I'll give that one a miss!

Happy Birthday...assuming it's your birthday that you're celebrating.

It's funny to think of Cromwell taking over America. He always seemed like someone I might want to read more about, but I have yet to get around to it.

I suppose that England had less dissent than it might have had because people fell for that "We have the responsibility for an Empire" excuse.

I have a feeling that reading your theories on 'brideshead revisited' would be more interesting than watching it.

Bloody vegetarian!

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