Quotation help wanted...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

On page 792 of the hardback US Edition of Schama's 'Citizens', he winds up his chapter 'Terror is the order of the day' with the lines "Commenting on the Revolution of the 10th August, Robespierre had rejoiced that 'a river of blood would now divide France from her enemies'"

Leaving aside that horrific 'rejoiced' - cos, yeah, he did it for the lulz! - I've only ever heard those 'river of blood' words attributed to Danton. Did Robespierre ever use the same words?

Comments

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

God, all I can think of is: lol, omsb, LOL. Such an idiot.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

It's worse than idiotic, if Robespierre never actually said it (and as far as I'm aware, it's famously attributed to Danton) - he uses the words to sum up that the Terror as a sadistic, Robespierrist enterprise. I was looking up the references in 'Citizens' because someone online was praising Schama...his intro to Robespierre says 'these lessons in moral earnestness he learned from his lawyer father' - wtf? Was that before he disappeared? On the next page, he says Robespierre was a provincial nobody, yet immediately describes him as attracting fan letters from Saint-Just in "1789" (he says the letter was "1789" again later in the book, too, and then goes on to describe Saint-Just's "black hair" in the same paragraph). On p815, he says Robespierre wrote to Danton on the death of his wife in Febrary 1794 just before his arrest: even though Schama has already mentioned Danton's second marriage and new wife on p 809! (I've just noticed, flipping through the pages, the line "Miffed at being denied an execution, Fouquier-Tinville..." Miffed? Miffed is a schoolgirl word, dictionary definition 'petulant displeasure/a petty quarrel' - not a word a serious historian should be using to describe the life or death workings of a tribunal. God, he is awful!)

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know: I don't have the book -- why the hell would I? -- but I know that he says Desmoulins perished at the hands of Saint-Just -- oh yeah -- and doesn't even give the right age of death to Desmoulins!

He is an awful, vastly incompetent, unjustifiably arrogant and overpaid idiot. Factual mistakes? His whole career is a factual mistake.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Isn't Büchner his source? You know, Dantons Tod, the theater-play. But as far as I remember not even there it's Robespierre the one to use such expression :-) I have to check it, but it seems to me as another example of Schama's "creative historiography".
As "the State killed 55.000 people in 1793-1794"...Another good one.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

According to Mathiez, it is Danton as minister of Justice, who states after Valmy:
J'ai voulu que la jeunesse parisienne arrivât en Champagne couverte d'un sang qui m'assurât de sa fidélité. J'ai voulu mettre entre eux et les émigrés un fleuve de sang.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Wasn't it actually Enoch Powell? xD
By the way, what do you think about preparing all together a text with all the factographic mistakes Schama makes in his Citizens? We should not criticize his disgusting reactionnary interpretations- as that would be dismissed as ideological opposition- but hardcore factographic errors, they are MANY of them inthat book. This would really discredit him.
If we call it Errors in Schama's Citizens, it will surely appear in google search when people look for Schama's books.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I've just posted a load of comments under the Youtube video (9/9) pointing out the ones I found yesterday. A webpage is a good idea, one you could add to as you found more - I think I would go insane if I had to read the whole book, though! Every page has me hopping mad.

God, the youtube comments boxes are a pain in the arse to use, though! You have gone over your character limit....I suppose it's to stop people posting essays up there.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, they're not just slips - they actually make no sense in context: I'm surprised his editor didn't say, hang on, if Robespierre is unknown at this point, why's this person writing him fan letters already? Ditto the wife point, and the 'river of blood' line which he not only wrongly attributes but also wrongly dates as being about the rather less bloody '10 August'. The book was basically a rush-job commissioned for the bicentennary that has now - horribly - become the still-in-print 'bible' of the period to a generation besotted by TV historians.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Why has it achieved such prominence if it is obviously so bad? Because it gives convenient messages:
1) A nationalist, self-satisfied one. We are great, they are awful. We cannot learn anything from them, they should learn everything from us.
2) Building US-UK aliance: US revolution was great, that was the good, conservative, bloodless (it's not true...shhhhh) non-revolutionary revolution (which is a message that I doubt Franklin or Jefferson would be happy with, but whatever). As the other countries can never be like us (UK) with our wonderful traditions, they should at least follow the example of our US friends.
3) The most important one: any attempt at radical social change is doomed to failure, those who try it end up as criminals, so kids,don't you ever think of anything like a revolution! Forget liberty, equality and fraternity and continue destroying the planet and promoting famine and poverty by your irrensponsible consumerism. And, of course, masturbate over my (Schama's) delicious detailed descriptions of violence! Oh yes!

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the comment of vicar2 a month ago in which he says: "Furthermore if we are talking about tangible results and not intentions, then the American revolution most definitely trumps the French. North Atlantic (and ostensibly English) Republicanism continues to have a massive influence around the world today. Jacobinism's most resounding contribution to the modern world was the manner in which its totalitarianism has been replicated by other secular messianic ideologies. Again, this is what Schama is really getting at."
So THAT is what they are made believe in school? I AM SHOCKED (I don't have a youtube account, for I would have recommended him some SERIOUS bibliography). He knows nothing about the 19th century. The French Revolution meant a symbolical end of the Old regime! Meanwhile USA was a non-entity in the 19th century world history (with a sligh exception of Latin America), the French revolution influenced so many historical movements in the 19th century that still have very tangible results nowadays: creation of new INDEPENDENT STATES, the desintegration of the Old Regime empires (creation of Latin American countries, independence of Greece and Balkan states, preparing the ground for German and Italian unification, etc, etc), leaving aside the symbolical level of bringing Nation to the core of legitimacy of political power. And I don't know a country in which the revolutionaries would use nicknames as Madison or Washington, but I can name you a few in which they called themselves Danton, Robespierre or St.Just
And I get the message: to deprive aristocratic landowners of their feudal fiefs is totalitarian and uninspiring, meanwhile to carry on a genocide on the native people to get their land is just a small spot on the great and inspiring history of national success. We've done it for the progress, they were so primitive, you know :D

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Great job! BTW, the argument of the one below is ridiculous. I don't give a damn about how many points Schama got in Cambridge. We are supposed to live in a rational society when truth is proven by quality of arguments and proofs, not by a reference to the Holy Scripture (or a diploma from a prestigious university). Actually, if Schama had low-quality education, I'd be able to pardon him more easily for all those errors and open manipulations he makes, but he has no excuse.

[misatheredpanda.livejournal.com]

I just want to put in that I quite like the idea of making a website, I would participate. :D

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, the episode 'Thermidor'? He has a fat, sadistic Robespierre leering at Tom Paine, who protests that Robespierre is killing some ludicrous number of thousands a week - apparently, Gaiman pitched the idea of a French Revolution episode to his publisher, then, knowing nothing about it, hurriedly read Schama. I've long held the Thermidor comic against Gaiman, teaching a generation of comic book readers that the revolutionary left were a bunch of gloating sadists who stage puppet shows with bodies, but maybe I should blame Schama instead?

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Blame them both, at least Gaiman should have tried harder :-) BTW, I love M.Steel, he's trying so hard to change the stereotypic view of the FR using very British weapons.
I feel so lucky that I grew up on Rolland and Feuchtwanger and I haven't been obliged to get through the Tale of Two Cities or Scarlet Pimpernel ;-)

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Ha, I think we all grew up on 'Carry On Don't Lose Your Head'! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUS89dI5hO8

Actually, quite a fun film if you are 7 years old - also has some pretty adult jokes:"my brother - the count", when said the way Joan Sims says it in this film, was the rudest word ever broadcast on afternoon TV!

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

SO THAT'S WHERE THEY'VE GOT THE "FATAL" FROM!!! Very serious sources of nowadays historiography :DDD

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I searched Google Books with the words "Robespierre 'fleuve de sang'" and even then it only came up with that quote attributed to Danton. According to l'AMRID, he was also supposed to have been referring to the September Massacres, rather than 10 August. Of course, it's nothing new for Schama to misattribute quotes in order to better "prove" his point.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

It's a really quite breathtaking bit of lying, even by his low standards! He actually uses that quote to hang the conclusion of his 'Terror'chapter around, despite the fact that it's misattributed, and attributed to the wrong event, and the chapter itself is discussing September 1793 not 1792. I tried googling, too, and it seems to be quite a well known attributed-to-Danton quote, from the number of times it came up, so this has to be deliberate.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Really, it's doubly disgusting. Even if it were correctly attributed, taking a quote out of context like that, one can prove just about anything. For example, I wouldn't even have to misattribute a quote in order to "prove" that Robespierre was a royalist--all I would really have to do is take a quote about the "good prince" Louis from his 1788 pamphlet and insert it into a chapter on 1793. It's absurd how easy it is to make those kinds of falsifications. More absurd, however, is how people just seem to eat that kind of thing up!

[wolfshadow713.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've only heard the quote attributed to Danton. It seems more his style--while both Danton and Robespierre seemed to like metaphor and somewhat stylized oratory (but, really, what revolutionary politician didn't?), the imagery seems more in keeping with Danton's.

That said, it hardly surprizes me that someone would attribute it to Robespierre and I doubt Schama is the only one to do so. While I am reluctant to accuse anyone of intentional errors in historiography, failure to fact-check points defending one's opinion appear unfortunately common. What it comes down to is that regrettably many historians seem about as polarized about the French Revolution as the revolutionaries were themselves.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

I would not be so generous. Schama uses this quote to make a very strong argument about Robespierre, so he should have checked it. Sorry, but one cannot work like: "Well, a nice bloody metaphor, it sounds like Robespierre to me. When could he have said it? OK, let's say after August 10." Writes it down to Citizens. :-D Btw, the book is full of mistakes of this kind.
In my opinion, the polarization per se is not as regrettable as the factual errors/manipulation that appear when historians defend one or another interpretation. If you cannot trust the factual correctness of your "rival", the debate gets to a lower, less interesting level (that of legitimate accusations of lack of professionality)

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

As long as history books are written by humans, not robots, a degree of political polarisation is bound to creep in, but I feel if a historian wants to write a book that is a political 'argument', he should call it something else rather than a plain history - in the case of Schama's Citizens, the average reader doesn't realise it came about as part of a left-right historian pendulum: they think it's "the definitive' history of the revolution! But any argument has to be backed up with solid facts, like a barrister making a court case producing 'exhibit A'. Schama just seems to make 'facts' up to suit his case, even down to saying Robespierre is long-nosed (like the child-catcher or any number of pantomime villains, but the opposite of the historical truth) and Saint-Just black-haired (the sinister, raven-haired temptress leading France into sin, perhaps?)!

Even if he'd forgotten, everything about the quote suggests Danton or someone like that - it was said at the frontier (not somewhere Robespierre ever went), to the Duc de Chartres, and the quote its entirity just doesn't sound like Robespierre's language. My french is only so-so, but if I can tell the stylistic differences in the linguistic styles of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Danton etc, someone who is presumably fluent and is highly paid to be a 24/7 historian should, one hopes, have a feel for the characters of his subjects.

The parts of the book I have read are full of errors of a basic factual nature, and in this particular instance it feels so convenient to the thrust of his argument - at the point in the book it occurs, it takes on a great deal of significance in the way it is used - he implies this is Robespierre's gameplan in a nutshell - that it must be deliberate. All facts and quotations in a history book should be checked and have footnotes, too: every quote in a university degree-level thesis has to have a reference, so a man who was by then a tutor, with Britain's most famous and comprehensive library on his doorstep, and presumably also had an editor, has no excuse for mistakes of this schoolboyish nature.

What I often find - and it's the reason I had to improve my French so I could read primary sources, because I found the various books I had at that point contradicted each other - is that modern historians don't generally misattribute quotes, because the general practise is to provide references for each one: instead, they carefully select a few words from a much longer phrase so that, in some instances, you get the opposite impression from that which you get when you read the full quote, or discover the full circumstances around an event (like the omission of Hébert and co. from that BBC docudrama, or films like 'Danton' ). This sort of decontextualising is the most common practise: Mark Steel says it's like saying in the early 1940's British people taped up their windows and blacked them out for no apparent reason!

It's the standard practise in British newspapers, too!

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Another very clever srategy is that of "giving chance to speak to the so-called both sides". That's an easy way of fabricating "common sense" and "extremist" positions. For example, chosing Žižek to defend Robespierre against Schama, Mantel and co. is very significative. It actually makes Schama's opinion seem "common sense" and makes all the sympathizers of the FR seem "dangerous radicals". However, the FR has been widely accepted and celebrated even by right-wing people like Charles de Gaulle.

[wolfshadow713.livejournal.com]

Aside from the carefully selected quotes, there can also be the somewhat strangely translated quotes...

What interests me is how Robespierre is built into this omnipotent pillar of the Revolution when, in reality, his influence only stretched so far. It's certainly a way of sidestepping the complexities of the situation and, if you're writing for a general audience, it might increase the sales of your book, but there is something ironic about when his strong critics do this because, to create this image of Robespierre the Monolith, they generally gloss over the aspects of his political philosophy and personality that probably encouraged the aspects of his politics to which they object--parts of his character even more positive accounts of him seem to recognize as weak points.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

It makes it an easier tale to tell for historians - I think that's one of the reasons they ignore 'the street' or the role of religion. There's also a tendecy to blame negative events on the power of an individual who somehow bewitches or forces a nation to behave in such and such a way. I think those on the French right who want to have the Revolution as a 'founding myth' but want to forget/deny general responsibility for the bloodshed like to say it was all Robespierre's doing. Sibylla-oo linked to a recent Zizek lecture where he made that point about medieval persecutions, which were often (I'm reading Norman Cohn's books on them at the moment) ground up and spontaneous, not commanded from on high (the Pope or whatever): in fact, bishops often intervened to try and stop the massacres of European Jews and the lynching of witches in the early medieval period.

On that last point, I was wondering to what degree things like the Law of Suspects gave free reign for people to act, at a local level, to have neighbours they'd had long feuds with arrested on the pretext of being royalists or whatever. The late medieval witch persecutions seem to be due to a relaxation in the law that makes it easier for people to bring legal cases and attack neighbours they don't like by calling them witches, then sitting back while the state does the rest. Keith Thomas, the historian of medieval/16th/17thc witchcraft, thinks many of the trials in England were purely down to longstanding village tensions - a similar thing to Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, then. The depressing thing about the work of Cohn and Thomas is the way it shows a repeated pattern of such behaviour for hundreds if not thousands of years: it seems to be inbuilt into the species - but historians find it easier to blame an individual!

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Actually, Schama does indeed blame "the people" (and Robespierre) for the violence of the FR. I think it is a rather common interpretation in British and US mainstream historiography (plus Taine and the revisionists in France) to combine monstruous figure of Robespierre with irrational mob violence. On the other hand, the movie La Révolution française, for example, works with the notion of people in a very different way, more typical for French mainstream historiography (mainstream since the Third republic). People and their group actions are shown as heroic and to show that a politician is "in touch" with people is a way of making his deeds legitimate (Danton in RF). Those politicians to be seen in a negative way (Saint-Just and Robespierre, in this case) are shown as "plotting", "abstract", cabinet politicians out of touch with people, not as poeple's seducers in Hitler style.
Yes, the link is on my LJ, it is public.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I think Hilary Mantel, in a book review, pulled up the historian Ruth Scurr for using the word 'mob' instead of 'crowd'. The recent trend in British school-level history has been to concentrate on 'people's history' rather than on big names or monarchs - "Imagine you are a cotton mill worker" or "imagine you are a slave" being the sort of essay titles my younger relatives get these days. This doesn't seem to have altered the popular French Revolution portrayal, though - judging by the omission of the ideological/rational motivations of the 'crowd' in that BBC programme, and the way they gave Collot - representing the 'mob violence' for the BBC - a cockney accent like the Orcs in LOTR!

That's not to whitewash the idea of mob violence - it clearly could be brutal and terrifying - but the sole image of the crowd/populace you get in popular portrayals in Hollywood or Britain is these grimy neanderthals with heads on sticks. George Rudé wrote a paperback history of the French Revolution for a mainstream readership in the late 80's, too, and that DID look at the revolution as a totality - Rudé has specialised in studies of the Crowd and comes from a Marxist Group background - but it was overshadowed by the hype around Schama's book, which gave the public what they wanted: the French Revolution as a grotesque Gillray print or Dickens novel, dripping with blood.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I am totally aware of the "orientation towards people" of British historiography, people like Thompson and others have done wonderful and inspiring job! The history of workers' movements, on the popular culture, on the production and use of technology are just impressive.
When I mentionned UK and US mainstream historiography above, I referred just to the mainstream interpretation of the FR. It is SO surprising how this "popular" orientation which is so strong in other areas has had hardly any impact on the interpretation of the FR (of course, except for Rudé and few more) in the UK historiography (it's not only Schama, it's all the historians who actually appear in the docu-drama) which remains combining big fish with wild mobs.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

As for wolfshadow's second paragraph: it is a very interesting question. Why is the interpretation of the Revolution so personalized in some historiography? One would say: why is it personalized AGAIN? I think it has very much to do with giving up or marginalizing certain approaches to history, like marxist or neo-marxist analysis, social and economic history that focus on 1) a macro-level 2) wider population. This has meant mainly two things:
1) return to an old-fashionned intentionalist interpretations (Schama), often flavoured with some fasionable psychoanalytic explanations
2) cultural history and postmodern discourse analysis approach to the FR
- it has produced wonderful contributions precisely to the understanding of the diffuse dynamics of action, of the revolutionary violence, of the social imagery, etc.
- on the other hand, many cultural historians are quite lazy as for the search for the sources, so what's the easiest thing to do? Analyze the texts produced by the "big fish" of the Revolution.