I have watched it again recently and it is really a well-made manipulation. Leaving aside all the royalist shit, the parts dealing with the revolutionaries is also extremely manipulative. Whenever there is a "positive" event connected with the participation of the people, Danton and Desmoulins are around, being one with the people of France, meanwhiles Robespierre is cautiously hiding at home. Whenever there is dirty cabinet/parlament politics, Robespierre is there, plotting and manipulating. The invisibilisation of the link between the robespierristes and anything "heroic" is confirmed by no mention of the role some of they played as the "representants en mission". One can accuse Robespierre of many things, but to accuse him of cowardice and lack of contact with the people and popular movements is a big and unnecessary manipulation. More: Danton and Desmoulins seem very sad when voting for the king's death. Have the authors read Le Vieux Cordelier to have some idea of Desmoulins' verbal enthusiasm for killing? For some reason it was him, not Saint-Just nor Robespierre, who was called The Attorney of the Lanterne, ne c'est pas? More: Couthon, same as in Wajda's Danton, is shown as an unkind person. He might be guilty of the bloodthirsty Prairial law and it could indeed have been stressed, but according to all sources, on a personal level he was a very kind and polite family-man. It is very medieval to suppose that being disabled in body he had to be bitter and devious in his everyday behaviour. Well, and no need to point out that the thermidoriens, including Collot and Billaud, are shown as men who are fed up of bloodshed..oh yes. Anyway, all the part that shows the Thermidor events is just horrible: no place for any beautiful gestures - no Le Bas and Augustin asking to share the fate of their colleagues, no Saint-Just attempting at compromise, a semi-empty tumbril instead of the twenty something people executed on the 10th (not mentionning the seventy something the next day), no persecution of the families (Mme. Duplay and Elisabeth Le Bas with her baby are not worth a couple of seconds Lucile had had?)
no subject
More: Danton and Desmoulins seem very sad when voting for the king's death. Have the authors read Le Vieux Cordelier to have some idea of Desmoulins' verbal enthusiasm for killing? For some reason it was him, not Saint-Just nor Robespierre, who was called The Attorney of the Lanterne, ne c'est pas?
More: Couthon, same as in Wajda's Danton, is shown as an unkind person. He might be guilty of the bloodthirsty Prairial law and it could indeed have been stressed, but according to all sources, on a personal level he was a very kind and polite family-man. It is very medieval to suppose that being disabled in body he had to be bitter and devious in his everyday behaviour.
Well, and no need to point out that the thermidoriens, including Collot and Billaud, are shown as men who are fed up of bloodshed..oh yes. Anyway, all the part that shows the Thermidor events is just horrible: no place for any beautiful gestures - no Le Bas and Augustin asking to share the fate of their colleagues, no Saint-Just attempting at compromise, a semi-empty tumbril instead of the twenty something people executed on the 10th (not mentionning the seventy something the next day), no persecution of the families (Mme. Duplay and Elisabeth Le Bas with her baby are not worth a couple of seconds Lucile had had?)