Historical Fidelity

[selenite0]

The French Revolution. Overthrow of the wealthy nobility. Forced egalitarianism. Addressing each other as "citizen." So what is a modern collector offered to remember it by?




Yeah, you can see a sans-culotte building one of them.

Comments

[kishiriadgr.livejournal.com]

I know it's a guillotine, but...what IS that?????

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Plutocrats smoke cigars, and this clips the ends off them.

Presumably very expensive cigars.

[kishiriadgr.livejournal.com]

Meh, we just use a standard cigar clipper. We call it "the mohel" and yell "Mazel Tov!" whenever a cigar gets snipped.

[snippy]

FTW!

[selenite.livejournal.com]

And bonus prize for username most applicable to the topic!

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, the bucket is a nice touch.

[scottks.livejournal.com]

Just wondering . . . you think the French Revolution was a good thing? In my mind, it's a beautifully brutal lesson on partisan politics taken to the extreme.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Heavens, no. It was a horrible thing, in percentage terms up there with the worst of the 20th century. I'm trying to point out that historical illiteracy is a bad thing.

If you want to make this product some ultra-ironic symbol of defeating the Jacobins by co-opting their symbols on behalf of the successful you can justify it . . . but I'm not seeing that in the sales copy.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

As Americans we tend to learn about the English Civil War through the prism of the political philosophies that grew out of it, informing our own founding (as well as Burke et al on the French Revolution).

So we tend to forget just how bad it was -- with Irish and Scottish campaigns, it was deadlier per capita than either the US Civil War or the French Revolution (though not the Napoleonic sequelae of the latter). I suspect that a good deal of what the English would come to prize and advertise as their calm, thoughtful, "moderate" national character -- "look at how well we managed the Glorious Revolution" -- can be traced to a subliminal awareness of just how bloody-minded they'd been when they cut loose.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

In my mind, it's a beautifully brutal lesson on partisan politics taken to the extreme.

Same here.

It bears comparison with the nearly-contemporary American Revolution. Many academics extoll the French and deride the American Revolution because the French Revolution's goals were more ambitious and its conduct more ruthless, but in doing so they ignore the most important test in the real world: the test of success.

The American Revolution produced a mostly-stable Republic which has lasted for two and a quarter centuries with only one major reorganization (the Constitution of 1787) and only one serious threat to its continuity (the Civil War of 1861-85). As a consequence of this stability and internal peace, America has become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

The French Revolution produced an incredibly-unstable democracy that within less than a decade had mutated through the junta of the Directorate into the tyranny of Napoleon's Empire, and that over the next two centuries would shift almost randomly from monarchy to republic to empire, with no real political stablity until stability was imposed on it from the outside by the Soviet-American rivalry.

As a direct consequence of France's political instability, France badly bungled three wars (Franco-Prussian 1870-71, World War I 1914-18, and first phase of World War II 1939-40). This has resulted in France declining from one of the two greatest of Great Powers to a third-class Great Power.

The lesson is clear: radical revolutions produce rapid change, but the state that emerges from this rapid change is violent and unstable, and the gains are ephermal. Conservative revolutions, like the American Revolution, may mean merely a change of management and a slight internal reorganization, but the gains made are long-lasting.

Most of the Third World has followed the French example -- which is why it lies in a pathetic condition, the playground of the Great Powers in their Great Game.

[estokien.livejournal.com]

You can really pull out many different theories regarding revolutions. For example, the American revolution worked quite well, the English gradually transitioned through several revolutions into a stable modern country, but France had an unstable revolution that devolved into bloodshed. England and America were mostly mercantile societies, France has been mostly agricultural, is that a deciding factor? Was it a question of English intellectual philosophy? How about the Russian revolution, was that a success or a failure? Certainly it didn't bring about the Marxist utopia wished for, and had many bloody purges, but the USSR was stable for many years, and comparatively speaking it had a pretty bloodless collapse.

Perhaps the American revolution succeeded because there was the outside force of England to encourage the American partisans to work together? Perhaps it was the skill of the American leaders? Perhaps the fact that the main enemy of the fledgling state, England, had to sail their troops across a whole ocean to get to them, and they had many supporters among the English as wel?.

The French revolution was indeed highly radical, and it indeed went horribly wrong. But Napoleon was feared not only for his military prowess and huge armies, but also because he was exporting revolutionary ideas with his conquests. Certainly nobody in the Napoleonic era was thinking that the revolution had crippled French power. If Napoleon had not expended so much revenue and manpower attacking Russia, if he had not had Caesar envy and tried to make his family into a new Imperium, would French power have declined so rapidly? Hard to say. To a large extent it was the effort of foreign powers following Napoleon's defeat that led to the restoration of aristocratic Monarchy in France, and the backlash against this imposition that led to the instability, the royalists would have been unlikely to have had the strength otherwise. The French revolution made many mistakes, but still the majority of the French thought it was an improvement over the old system, and there is a reason that the French celebrate Bastille day rather than some Anniversary from a future Republic.

[noumignon.livejournal.com]

This was a fun comments thread! I almost didn't click it because the cultural reference in the OP went over my head.