Lbeer:

...most were political opponents and leaders in communities who resisted Paris control of the new Government.

inspired the French, did you know that? But if people were dying of hunger, then at that point, it's either die of hunger or take a gamble and either die a martyr to the cause of freedom from tyranny, or win a revolution.

And your statements make me think you should probably re-think your assessments of those revolutions.

on the both American Revolution and the French Revolution.

I think Patrick Henry also put it well, 'give me liberty or give me death.' But I need to go back and re-think my assessments of those prior revolutions. lol Or so I've been told.

I could support no faction, thus I would have been put to death.

but Marat, especially at first, probably would be most representative of my views.

But that's based on a quick review of the groups you list here.

As I say above, I'm more of a Thomas Paine guy myself.

doing his Power of Art series segment on Jacques-Louis David who of course painted that outstanding picture of Marat in the bathtub...David was able to do that in person (ugh)

Because right wing "historians" say so? They always attack the person, never what he actually said or wrote. France needed more Marats.

They needed more Dantons.

That said I'm amazingly glad to have this conversation because out in the world I get blank stares when I ask that question... So, once again I'm very glad DU exists.

I agree with you. Danton was one of the most genuinely admirable of the revolutionaries. But for purposes of the poll I went with Marat.

The more extreme he grew, the more likely I probably would've taken a ride to the guillotine.

Breathtakingly good play that expresses both sides of that schism very, very well.

lots on Marat in that segment on David. Now the artist himself was another opportunist, taking sides for convenience or probably for survival. He painted the nobles before he saw the handwriting on the wall and switched alliances and when that went sour he was fawning over Napoleon...see my art post from last Friday
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027263836

Glenda Jackson, etc...

a French/Polish film about revolutionary leader left off the poll. It centers around the Danton/Robespierre split.

Clearly with the Montagues and against the Capulets.

while those all about me were losing theirs.

I'm reading the Oxford history right now. It's odd how compact the high school history I got was. Louis XVI was actually king for over a year after the Bastille fell.

be improved upon if a revolution is the goal.

p.s Martin is going to surprise a lot of folk.....a less grumpy Sanders would be more popular.

A thousand years of tyranny ousted by 70 years of strife is not such a high price to pay.

There was no clear path to a kinder, gentler revolution. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous.

Last edited Tue Oct 27, 2015, 12:42 PM - Edit history (1)

But the disregard of our condition might eventually make me go Jacobin.

I made that mistake for years before I moved to India...

I know better too but probably still do it at least half the time.

Other than that you were pretty much fucked if the Committee for Public Safety got you in its crosshairs.

Napoleon did get around a lot, and conscription was very popular at the time, the latest thiing, the levee en masse.

So much of the modern world, for better and for worse, came out of those few months in Paris.

JK. 😋

or maybe try to come to America...didn't that work for some folks?

Standing for tyranny and oppression and aristocracy should never even be considered.

Depends on my social class though.

If I can afford it, I would have immediately relocated to either Spain or Italy.
Soooo... Put me in the "other" category.

If I can't afford it, well, I'll be a recluse of some kind.
Maybe even ask for sanctuary at the local parish.

And that's only because the National Guard fought the Breton rebels to a draw and neither wanted to actually finish the war.

Seriously, the more I read about the Revolution, the more I realize how simplistic my high school curriculum was.

I would still opt on trying to leave.

In Japan!!!

Ohayou gozaimasu!

A tavern, preferably.

I have been to all of those...

hiding from just about everyone, a Voltaireian believer in universal human rights, but appalled at the eventual Reign of Terror tactics. I'd take Voltaire's advice to "cultivate my own garden" literally.

As to whom I would have supported going in, before knowing anything, I can't say. Having read (laboriously) François Fumet's The French Revolution some years ago, it's hard for me to tell. There were all kinds of economic policies and factors that played into these factions, and the characters were shifting from one club to the other with some frequency. I perhaps would have been a Girondiste.

I have been thinking a lot, though, lately of factions like the sans-culottes and the Jacobins, whose idealistic ardor we see repeated often here. While our initial instincts might have led us to take up the cry with them, I shudder to think of what they would inevitably become. Every time I hear a plea to jail this or that bankster, or to rationalize every ill under the guise of Goldman Sacks, I think of this ... and then realize how the simplification of complex problems can take a horrible, misguided turn. It took 100 years for France to undo the excesses of the Revolution--swaying between emperor-dictators to royalist re-installations, to short-lived communes, before a true, benign democracy of the people was established,

such is the price of weeding out deep seated, imbedded evil. It took a thousand years of suffering before the less than 100 you decry. Were there a better option, certainly that would have been preferable--but there was not.

This is literally a Jacobin website par excellence. This post must just not have attracted their attention.

The real problem with using terror as a tool of revolution is that it's hard to STOP using it once it's become normalized. The mass executions of the aristocracy who supported the overthrow of the republic and the return of the monarchy? I don't have much of a problem with that. Marching nuns to the guillotine because they refused to swear off their gods? Executing fellow revolutionaries by the thousands simply because they wanted to moderate the bloodshed? You're entering ISIS territory now...

The monarchy and aristocracy had held the French peasantry hostage for centuries under a system that allowed the upper classes to order the execution of the lower classes for essentially any crime. Robespierre's initial declaration with the Terror was that he was making the system "fair" by extending it to the aristocracy itself. He was using the aristocracy's own weapon against them. The Jacobin failure laid in the the fact that they forgot that the true crime of the aristocracy was not simply the fact that it executed people, but that it did so arbitrarily and unjustly. When the revolutionaries began executing people over trivial "crimes" that had little or nothing to do with oppression, they essentially became the same unjust aristocracy that they'd fought to overthrow.

Sooner or later I would have said something someone didn't like. That was usually enough to get your head chopped off.

Kind of reminds me of DU these days, come to think of it!

Marat was an idealist as was the robbespierre. Danton was robbespierre's right hand. But ultimately each one of them went to the guillotine. This what that is the most frightening truth about these revolutions

Not quite the guillotine in that case...

I've enjoyed reading the thread.

being "shortened." He was a funny guy and had lived in Paris many years and knew his Louvre and Musee d"Orsay...

He was stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday while sitting in his bathtub.

The Germans have the same expression, by the way: "Die Revolution frisst ihre Kinder auf." You heard it a lot in the months following February 1, 1979.

... walk away in the night, become invisible.

It's in my genes.

That's how all my ancestors ended up in the Wild West of America, escaping wars and persecution in Europe, and lastly the U.S. Civil War.

My Berserker heritage is strong, therefore I MUST be a pacifist.

My family is matriarchal Berserker, so I guess that makes me a Son of Berserkers.

My wife's family is similar, Native American survivors, plus a few Irish and French Catholics escaping European and U.S.A. Protestant persecution. Then re-immigrants to the U.S.A. from Mexico and Canada, once things cooled down here.

as far away from the guillotine and the hangman's noose as I could get...

to the scaffold.

with anything of value I could carry.

These sorts of thought experiments are fun. Sort of.

The terms "left" and "right" came from the Estates General that met at the start of the French Revolution.(that was the French Legislature at that time)....Now those in favor of keeping things the way they were, and making few changes. were on the Right.......Farther Right you were the more you supported the king

Those on the left were in favor of change...farther left you were, the more you were in favor of more significant changes such as took place after the American Revolution. Those who were for the most change were farthest left..

Those in the middle were ...in the middle, some change but some stay the same....