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

[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.