French Revolutionary Photos

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether or not anyone is interested in this, but I thought I'd post it just in case. I am currently living in Paris and in my free time, here and there, I go to assorted revolutionary sites and take photos. This includes big stuff like the Conciergerie and little stuff like graves and homes of less than famous people. I've been putting it together into albums, which I figured I'd share with anyone who was interested here. This is the first album, a second one is well underway, but I figure I'd post it when it was full.

French Revolutionary Photos

Comments

[wolfshadow713.livejournal.com]

They're really quite sad - the broken cup and the dog-eared case, and the other leftovers...reminds me of clearing houses after relatives have died.

I sort of wonder what historical figures would think of the displays of their artifacts we put on display in museums. The typical objects--desk supplies, dishes, table settings, etc--aren't the things that most people purchase and use with the expectation that, a few generations later, the general public will be staring at them through pane of glass in a display case.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

There was a comment by G.K. Chesterton that the Revolutionaries seem like people who immediately belonged to a sort of classical antiquity or mythology, in that they were all, as a generation, killed - none of the main players lived to gouty old age, or to regale Victorian dinner parties with anecdotes. And of course they don't have graves: even their bones may have dissolved. So, I think it's weirdly appropriate that there's this display of broken china: more like something you'd see in a Museum on pre-history, shards of Roman pottery, a bent celtic torc - or shipwreck leftovers of a political storm where the bodies have been washed away.

On a lighter note, there's a great Alan Coren piece I'l have to root out on seeing Isambard Kingdom Brunel's hat.