TERROR, on YOUTUBE!

[missweirdness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, i guess what i found on youtube?

That dreadful Terror! Robespierre and the french revolution..

here's the link -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcZxrb_L0_M

part 1 of 9, hahahah

enjoy =O

 

 and apparently the emo GUY is ST. JUST! GASP!

 

I'm watching now..=( 

now discuss!

 

 

Comments

Re: Andress's classism

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Andress bothers me. He gets a lot of praise simply for not being a revisionist, which, I'm sorry to say, does not in itself a good historian make. I read his entry in the book of the Rouen colloquium on the Terror and I wasn't impressed. He spends far too much time (especially for a 10 page essay) making sure that no one could possibly construe his analysis as a justification and not enough actually making his analysis, takes a condescending tone toward the Revolutionaries and frequently his fellow historians as well, implies against all evidence that every power that claimed to represent the State was actually under the direct control of the Convention, if not the CSP (as if they could have had that much control even if they wanted it!) and - in a French essay in a book of French essays - a sizable majority of his sources are English!

By the way, when I speak of Andress's condescension, I mean it principally in the way you point out in this comment: of the "of course they didn't know what they were doing, they shouldn't have meddled in affairs of state" variety.

Re: Andress's classism

[(Anonymous)]

It gets worse!
1) the Law of Prairial introduced thought-crime to the European history? The idea of a sin by thought is a bit older, I would say. And many people has been killed, tortured or expelled from their homes before the FR for what they thought in Europe. Any chıld who ever had Medieval and Early Modern History lectures in school should know that. BBC, what has happened to you?
2) OK, mister Andress aka serious historian of the 21st century: since May 1794, R, SJ and C executed people due to their personal paranoia. How sophisticated interpretation of history...Poor students at Portsmouth is this is the level of scholarship they get from their teachers :-o

Re: Andress's classism

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

That is worse, decidedly. At least he moderated himself a little bit in the essay I read. As far as I can tell, he thinks we're living c. 1850, with an analysis like that. Oh and, re the invention of thought crime, does anyone else think it's ironic when they blame the Revolution for things the Church did?

Re: Andress's classism

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I think 'condescending' is the standard tone of academics the world over, sadly. It's annoying enough when it comes from an English don, but when a bunch of modern people who have never done anything more stressful than ordering a book up from the stacks in the History Faculty or marking an 18 year old's essay and spend their lives in cosy studies sitting in fat padded armchairs start saying things like Saint-Just was an adolescent with no life experience I just want to shake them. Very violently.

Re: Andress's classism

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

There's condescension and then there's condescension though. I've read a great many historians, but even just to use the example of the book from the colloquium in which I read Andress's essay, there were other historians in that book whom I would describe as mainly straightforward, mainly persuasive, mainly aggressive in tone. Andress is the only one whose main tone really stood out to me as condescending. Maybe it's just me, but the other historians seemed to generally want to find out more about how people at all levels of society, from the members of a popular society in a small provincial town to members of the CSP, understood their world and were understood by others in it. Andress seemed more interested in condemning (again, in a very condescending fashion) than understanding.

I know exactly what you mean though, apart from that. Saint-Just had a lot more life experience in his short life than many historians do who live to be 90.

Re: Andress's classism

[(Anonymous)]

I would not like my previous comments to sound like English historiography bashing. I love the work of a great number of UK historians, though less so their work on the French rev., I have to admit. I think that there are certain common negative traits that frequently appear in a particular tradition of history writing, and a classist condescending tone,especially towards the foreign subjects of history, together with a certain self-referentiality is the one that seems to be quite frequent among certain English historians. This does not mean that other historiographic traditions do not suffer from the same of other problems. For example, until very recently, the French historians tended to see as somehow positive or justifiable anything they defined as a popular action or movement, as if "the People", whatever it means, could never be wrong. And I can think about other defects as purposefully incomprehensible language and lack of common sense :-) But I insist again, there is no genetic predisposiion towards certain way of history writing and there are examples of many different attitudes towards history-writing everywhere, of course. Sib.