(no subject)

[tearosefury.livejournal.com]

Ah hahaha I want to be the first one to post here! So, I suppose what I would start out by saying is that, for those of us who tend to attach ourselves to certain sides or figures in history, the FR is a prickly one, isn't it? Cause pretty much everyone behaved pretty horribly at one point or another! So do you feel sympathetic towards the Jacobins or the san-cullotes or the Giordonists (sp?) or what?, because they all resorted to killing at one point or another. Personally, I find Robiespierre a very tragic figure, someone who lost their goodness in zealous pursuit of it; so he is a great parable for what can happen when we get a little *too* into our ideas, and we are a little *too* sure they are right. Marat however I think was a complete sack of scum, depsite how much I like that painting....and when I wrote a paper for my FR course, I argued that the san-cullotes and their demands were largely responsible for a lot of the human rights abuses and the escalation towards the Terror...

And finally, there has recently been an excellent article on the Terror and the new book on it in the New Yorker, I highly reccomend reading it. If it is not available online, and I get enough requests, I would be willing to try to figure out a way to make a PDF file linkable from here, but I will have to get enough requests for that!