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

[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.