revolution_fr | (no subject)

My first question before offering any suggestions must be: can you read French, or must they be in English?

They must be in English - I don't speak or understand French.

That gives you less options, but it does make it easier to compile a list. I would recommend anything by Timothy Tackett, J-P Gross's Fair Shares for All, Marie-Hélène Huet's Mourning Glory, Isser Woloch's "The New Regime." I would give a somewhat qualified recommendation to Whaley's Radicals and R. R. Palmer as well. Also, read Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul, Vovelle, Bouloiseau in translation. And I would recommend E. Hobsbawm for historiography as well, though he does get a bit dry and go on a bit long on the Soviet Union for my taste.

Icon love! That remains one of the most adorable pictures I have ever seen of anyone, ever.

Thank you! It's Robespierre as a small child. :D

I know. :)

You know, my personal way to have the best general view of a topic in the shortest time is to read about it in at least two sources, the more contrary, the better. In the case of the French Revolution, I'd recommend to read pro-ancien régime classic Pierre Gaxotte, comparing him with Albert Mathiez, one of the first historians defending Robespierre. Read both and add them to each other, the actual truth about Revolution will probably be perfectly in the middle.

Thank you for the suggestion! I'll be sure to check them out :)

Nothing personal, but I would contest this point of view. In fact, I've already contested it and come up with a name for it on previous occasions: the Centrist Fallacy. The truth does not necessarily lie exactly or even approximately between two opposing viewpoints: sometimes one side is better documented; sometimes neither side is well supported and the truth lies not between them but outside them; sometimes one side is more open about its biases than the other; sometimes one side is even, whether deliberately or not, outright lying or making absurd claims not supported by the evidence. So, no, the truth is not necessarily a compromise between those sides.

I say this as a matter of principle, but I think it holds true here as well.

Ah, I do agree that the more read and the more voices listened, the better - but isn't listening to both sides a base? Audiatur et altera pars, a matter of principle to me. What I said about choosing two books was considered a start: realizing that there are always two sides of a coin and many possible points of view on past events and historical figures. As much as the authors try to be objective, they never are, subjectivism can be minimalized, but never gotten rid of. I like to compare different sources and make my own opinion.

I'm not a professional historian, but a philologist, and as such I do not trust written word, favouring critical reading. The point of view of university historians might be and probably is different from mine. My hobbistic studies of French Revolution are still going on and perhaps I'll change my opinion on some particular positions, but as I read both Gaxotte and Mathiez, they seem quite good documented, which makes comparing them even more interesting.

I'd recommend to the author of this topic a few books written in my native Polish, but they have probably never been translated into English - sadly including Ostatnie noce Ventôse'a / Last Nights of Ventôse, a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, relatively little known even in Poland, in my opinion with a simply excellent characterization of Robespierre... but who knows about this book? A longer story, why I do.

However, there are no "both sides", there are many sides...So, equidistance from what?

Indeed. As for equidistance, I mean here taking no word for granted, when reading glorifications or condemnations, and whoever I may personally favour, being not blind to their controversial or ambigenous moves.

Then I must agree :-)

Equidistance and critical reading are not the same. I find for the latter it's generally more useful to compare historians to their original sources than to each other.

I certainly don't think that reading opposing viewpoints is a bad thing--far from it. I just don't think it reasonable to assume that the truth lies halfway between them. Moreover, not all histories are of equal quality, though one would hope that using the judgment that one need not be a historian to acquire, one would be able to tell the difference. Critical reading is, as you say, essential, though I'm not exactly sure why you think it's any less essential for historians...

How interesting! I doubt it's ever been translated too, but that's a pity for those of us who don't read Polish...

Equidistance and critical reading are not the same. I find for the latter it's generally more useful to compare historians to their original sources than to each other

I generally try to avoid alleging my roots (geographical, national, historical or however you wish to call it) but in this situation I think it would be necessary to clarify my point of view. I'm from Poland, a small country in Central Europe, not to bore you with history: rubed out from maps by a few political powers for over a hundred years, independent for twenty years, then after Second World War for half a century under forced Soviet "protection". Sorry if you know that all, but I think it may be important here that I'm neither American nor Western European. Polish access to bare facts and the possibility to freely discuss it were limited for a time long enough to teach us how easily facts can be manipulated, forcing to learn how to find them, digging in the mass of author's opinions. The line between left and right wing was so thick that it was easy to bascially guess sometimes even before opening the book what a person from a particular group will write, making reading a kind of game: what to omit and what to search for and how to separate author's opinion.

Of course, there are no "both sides", but many - either the author is from the left wing and pro-Revolutionary, or from the right wing and anti-Revolutionary.Of course, there are as many shades as many authors exist, but generally you are able to sense one of these directions. Objective historians do not exist.

I try to read as much as I can to know in which moments the author manipulates the facts to make them go well with his or her personal outlook on life.

I am sorry to disagree, but I would not simplify like that, saying that left-wing historians are pro-revolutionary and the rightists are against. In France, for example, the French Revolution was admitted and glorified by the Gaullian right. Of course, the right did not coincede with the left in which part of the Revoluton had been the best one, but both the left and the right mainstream agreed on the perception of the Revolution as a glorious moment of the French history.

I meant Polish historians, and the ones translated (& officially published) in the years 1945-1989; making a list of what was published for the first time during last twenty years would take a while, but I'm suddenly willing to do it. And it is very interesting what you are writing about! Would you mind developing a bit?

Of course, I agree about the impossibility of being objective.
On the other hand, what does it mean left wing, right wing historians? To be left-wing in the 1830s indeed meant a pretty different thing than being French marxist historian in 1968 :-) I am sure that even during the communism, you could find in Poland the works of the 19th-century French and British historians of the French revolution. And I just cannot see how for ex. Soboul, Michelet, Taine, Carlyle, Jaures, Aulard or even intellectuals like Tocqueville or Constant etc. can be easily separated to right-wing anti-revolutionary and left-wig pro-revolutionary, and read as such in order to create an equidistant image..BTW, even if you think of Przybyszewska, a communist. What did she have in common with the official Polish communist historiography of the 1970s? Anyway, I think that we are trained to see and mistrust the Marxist interpretation, but we may be much less sensitive to the nationalist "naturalizations" or an economicist view of human beings, shared paradoxically by Marxism and the contemporary neoliberal historiography.

Probably being politically "left" and "right" means different things in different countries.

Of course, if original sources aren't available, you use what you have. I didn't mean to imply that nothing can be learned by comparing historians... Though even there, it's more useful to compare their choice of sources than their opinions per se. Though I doubt with a background like that you'd be likely to take any opinion for granted.

it's generally more useful to compare historians to their original sources than to each other

Agreed, if we could have access to all original sources, being sure that they are actually *all* sources. Weren't many documents destroyed after Robespierre's death? Automatically, the side of his oponents will be better documented.

On returning to the great borderline between what is from left and what is from right, perhaps not that visible (or am I wrong?) in the USA or Western Europe, and not so painful when it comes to being manipulated. So what if you get an original document found by a right-winged historian if the person does not mention another document of equal value, witnessing something totally opposite. Same thing with the left-winged, they will minimalize certain things, like Terror, and expose others, like actual gains of the Revoultion. If you confront two contrary sides, it is probable to find documents that both sides "failed to mention". It's not the question of the historians' opinions, but of not alowing them to manipulate the sources, playing their own games with them. Are you aware of how many facts are they able to "forget to mention"? Perhaps you are. We learned about it painfully. Western European and American historical scholars have longer tradition of objectivism, with no such censorship and a duty to write everything you want to have published (and therefore actually read by people) according to Marxist philosophy.

I wonder how the French Revolution is now percieved by French historians, if there's any trend. A different type of censorship., I think - rather an authocensorship. When you're writing about your own country and nation, it's hard to write about its less "pretty" moments. Same thing in Poland, same thing probably everywhere.

As for methodology. If I know that a book was written by a Marxist, during my lecture I will beware of Marxist myths, if by a psychoanalyst - of psychoanalytical myths, if by a feminist and a gender studies specialist - well... ;) Every methodology uses its own simplifications and cliches. Theoretically, you should be aware of them all. It does not mean that while studying Robespierre you have to read a book written by a Marxist, psychoanalist and feminist (though I'd like to get the last two!;)). But if you know the theory of particular methodology, you know how to deal with it. You know what it omits and magnifies. And, as *every* methodology omits *something*, therefore, you acquaintance yourself with the second one to know what the first one did not mention because of its - inconvenience?

Critical reading is, as you say, essential, though I'm not exactly sure why you think it's any less essential for historians..."

I don't think that historians are more objective and critical readers just by being historians. It's not automatically obvious to me. Of course the historians will read critically, but that does not mean they will not try to play with actual truth. I don't think that the more sources you know, the more objective you are. There is always censorship, either forced from above, or your own.

The novel by Przybyszewska focuses on the relationship between Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins. Certain undertones more visible than in Danton's Affair, interesting psychological portrait of both.

I've noticed I've written that "I don't think that the more sources you know, the more objective you are", while writing "the more voices listened, the better" before. Were I my own opponent, I'd use it against myself ;) so I feel a need to explain that it was a mental abbreviation, which I hope I explained (?).

I am subjective,I cannot not be. Torn between the need to both cultivate and fight it, but aware of the fact itselef.

What an interesting debate. Actually, in France there has been a period of neoliberal revolution-bashing, comparing the revolution to stalinism, etc.
Being from a post-communist country you may be more sensitive to the "manipulations" of Marxist history (though the historiographical production of the communist countries was also heavily nationalistic, which seems to be more difficult to realize for those who denounce the impositions of the Marxism), but the common-sense approach of many UK and US historians hides ideologies, as well. And I would say that it can be even more dangerous, as it is not declared. Doing history from gender approach, for example, is not more, nor less, manipulative, than writing an empiricist list of the executed, which, eventually, can serve to present the French revolution as a perverted massacre, at the same time implying the glorification of, for example, the slow elite reformism on the other side of the La Manche Channel (...and making invisible the hundreds of people condemned to gallows by aristocratic judges for petty crime resulting from poverty).

Very true.

You mistake my meaning (though perhaps I worded it badly). I should have said one should compare a historian with *the* sources, which must also be read critically. Taking someone else's selection of sources for granted is about the same as taking their opinions for granted and this is never wise.

I actually don't think what you've said of French historians is generally true--at least not in recent years. It's certainly true of the 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries though. This is not to say that they do not have their biases, because obviously everyone does, but historians from countries that have been historically inimical to France and to the Revolution have their own biases which are often even stronger and which they are generally more reluctant to admit.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that one should adopt only one approach to studying history. To look at the Revolution entirely through the lens of, say, gender studies, would be to miss a lot. But it takes all kinds. My main criterium is that I cannot respect a historian who lies to make history more interesting or to support his or her views. But lying, I mean putting words into historical figures mouths that can't be found in any credible historical source, or worse, any historical source at all, or deliberately contradicting a "known" fact just in passing, without giving any reason or even acknowledging that one is doing so. I've seen both of these topics, as well as extreme distortion in certain "historians", and that, I can't abide, whatever their viewpoint.

I should also point out that when I say that critical reading is essential for historians, I don't mean that it's necessarily practiced by all of them, merely that it should be, ideally.

That does sound like an interesting novel. A pity it's only available in Polish.

I'm in the middle of Ruth Scurr's biography of Robespierre, Fatal Purity, and it's very good. Obviously, I can't give you a complete review of it because I'm not done, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to get a grasp on most everything that's known about the enigma who was Robespierre as well as those who want a good overview of the political, social, and economic climates of pre-Revolution provincial France and Paris up until the Thermidorian Reaction.

Having finished Fatal Purity, I wouldn't recommend it in particular. I've read a lot of biographies of Robespierre and this one not only brings nothing particularly new to the table, it doesn't keep in mind what others have had to say before it or make much use of the newest studies. Moreover, Scurr makes some questionable judgments on her subject that don't seem paricularly well-supported. Still, with the possible exception of G. Rudé, you're not likely to find much better in English, unfortunately.

^This about sums up my thoughts on Fatal Purity, too. To my (admittedly foggy, since I read it 2 years ago) recollection, it starts out pretty good and gradually gets worse. I think there was one point where I was tempted to throw the damn thing across the room, but I don't remember what part of the book that was. XD;

I second your recollections and add that I read it 2 years ago as well, which would be reason for not giving more specific examples.

Perhaps some biographies about the main characters from the Revolution could help you too.

I have read "Marie Antoinette" by Stefan Zweig, and he also has published a biography about Joseph Fouché.

There must exist a lot more of well recommended biographies in English, of course, but for now I only know these ones.

You have no idea how much this is going to help me out :D I'll be going on a bit of a French Revolution binge this summer, and I really wasn't sure where to start. Thank you so much for all of the suggestions!

If you don't mind philosophy, I'd highly recommend Albert Camus and his (book-length) essay L'Homme révolté - as far as I know, edited in English under the title The Rebel. Among other topics, a long analysis of French Revolution and people involved, with a focus on Saint-Just. Not exactly what one might call a "light reading", but worth it, as everything by Camus (said by a person disliking the language of theoretical philosophy...).

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