#frev ideology

[sieclesetcieux]

Translation:

Marc-Antoine Jullien son was certainly the youngest figure to play a political role in the Revolution. Born in 1775, he was 16 years old when he was accepted as a member of the Club des Jacobins, where not anyone was allowed, and spoke at the rostrum to everyone’s astonishment - his voice had barely changed, and he was rather short. He was 18 years old when the Committee of Public Safety sent him, in August 1793, in the Western départements on a surveillance mission of the highest importance, for which he had to write frequently; he was by far the most active of those Michelet called Robespierre’s missi a determining role maybe, which we will talk about later.

Saint-Just, whom he knew closely in Year II, and was 7 years older than him [Jullien], wrote in 1791: “Because I was young, it seemed to me that I was closer to nature.” Jullien later took the same idea: “still young, but thus [...] farther from corruption”, and clearly felt like he was vested by his very youth, by the purity it gave him, to a revolutionary legitimacy in his mission. Elsewhere, he demanded equality of age with his elders. In 1794, in Bordeaux, [he wrote]: “I am old in the career of liberty: I am the same age as all the French.” Already in early 1792, he wrote to Jacobin leaders: “The true patriots, the firm friends of the Revolution are those who wished it before it happened, who got ahead of it by their desires […] in a time when the word of patrie was barely a French word. However, I can flatter myself to be among those pure patriots […] because

[cont. next page] I was the friend of the Constitution before there was even a Constitution” - that is, at the age of 14! “The Child and the Revolution” [title of the book this is published in] - here we see the child as actor of the Revolution.

From: Pierre De Vargas, "L’éducation du « Petit Jullien », agent du Comité de salut public", in Marie-Françoise Levy, L'enfant, la famille et la Révolution française, 1989, p. 219-248. (Here are p. 219-220.)

(Please note that the rest of the article is extremely biased against Year II, rambles nonsense about "pre-totalitarianism" and borders on reactionary trash.)

[frevandrest]

Royalist Hérault bio: He was always a royalist and he worked with baron Batz at bringing the monarchy back!

Also royalist Hérault bio: That jealous (and ugly) bitch Saint-Just unfairly accused Hérault of being a traitor!

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Why do so many people stan Marie Antoinette? I understand that she was probably victim to false accusations and was born to unfortunate circumstances, but she also did abandon her country and commit other crimes. (I ask this because many Antoinette stans are currently after me because I said I don't think Antoinette should be stanned as she is stanned today) Many of these people lack empathy for the citizens of France who suffered in the French Revolution too. (Many people also say that she didn't deserve her fate, and that the world was cruel to her)

I think you’ll have better luck asking these questions to the Marie Antoinette stans themselves than you’ll have asking me. Maybe try confronting them with the things you’ve already mentioned here (the Flight to Varennes, asking foreign powers to invade France, etc) to see what their approach is to that?

Sorry if this is a boring answer, but I can’t really speculate on the opinions of a group I myself don’t belong to.

[sparvverius]

the frev truly makes people come up with the wildest and least ideologically coherent sentences imaginable. "robespierre was a liberal dictator and forerunner of pinochet" is going in the same hall of fame as "marat was spiritual kin to bill o'reilly"

[pilferingapples]

I am, regrettably, thinking about Gillenormand

and I think--part of why he's so deeply unpleasant is because his basis of morality isn't centered around considering people as people, themselves, individuals with their own unique needs and wants , but as Roles

for Gillenormand, doing the Right Thing is not about how his actions actually affect other people, but about how well he's playing his perceived role (which in his case is Haute Bourgeoisie, with a pre-FRev understanding of that role)

This is why there's no problem for him with being generous, in paying his servants or offering individual charity or just giving gifts, etc; that's what a man of his station SHOULD be like, in his reckoning of the world ; it's a way of asserting his social status, arguably even a social duty in that (to him) it enforces social order. Servants, poor people, and/or the women and children of a household should expect financial largesse from their patriarch; certainly they shouldn't be independent of their betters! And a good bourgeois patriarch should be able to extend gifts on a whim-- it proves his security and enforces his social power. The flipside to this of course is that the beneficiaries of this should be Grateful, and above all should recognize the rightness of his authority here. He provides them with material possessions; they center their lives around doing everything he wants, and acknowledge his authority. Huzzah for the patriarchy!

So in terms of less material generosity, in terms of anything that would require considering his kids or his servants as fully separate people who not only could but even perhaps should have desires and plans that aren't About Him -- oh he's not having that. That is Defiance! Chaos! Romanticism, Probably! Scandal! The Reds!

Exceptions exist , to be sure-- if they fit a person's Role. Gillenormand is entirely fine with the idea that Marius is having affairs without telling him, that's what a good bourgeois boy should be doing! It's Fine if Magnon tries to extort money from him, with the implication of affairs-- that's playing into their respective social roles. But if his own daughter wants to talk about their family? When he said not to? HORRIBLE. Marius isn't psychic and doesn't spend enough time ferreting out Gillenormand's True Secret Meaning? Treachery! Marius is hurting him on purpose!

It's not entirely unlike Javert's concept of social order, although Gillenormand's version is nigh-inifinitely more complicated--but then, both he and Javert would probably agree that Gillenormand should be the one handling complexities; Javert only needs to know who he should Obey (practically everyone, by the rules either of them keeps).

if all of that's right, I think part of what's going on with him after Marius recovers is not just that he's realized Marius is able to operate independently of him and thus isn't someone he can bully anymore--it's that Marius is , in his eyes, really moving into being the acting male head of household, and thus the person the rest of them owe fealty to. Especially with Marius getting married and probably starting his own family, and ESPECIALLY especially with Marius being independently wealthy--he's becoming the center of the family, instead of Gillenormand.

I really hope that's right, actually, because if it is then Marius and his new role in the household is something Gillenormand won't be trying to work his way around to taking over the household again; this is the order of things and he's got his new role. But also: gad, what a depressing ideology. What a depressing person.

[pleasecallmealsip]

without the Jacobinical "excess", there would be no "normal" pluralist democracy.

Žižek frev commentary compilation

title from For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991).

We must start at the beginning, in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Here, apart from closely examining Walter Benjamin's late (in every sense of the word) writing, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Žižek also quoted Robespierre and Saint-Just directly. (all pink emphases mine.)

Rosa Luxemburg ... her argument against Eduard Bernstein, against his revisionist fear of seizing power 'too soon', 'prematurely', before the so-called 'objective conditions' had ripened ... Rosa Luxemburg's answer is that the first seizures of power are necessarily 'premature'... The opposition to the 'premature' seizure of power is thus revealed as opposition to the seizure of power as such, in general : to repeat Robespierre's famous phrase, the revisionists want a 'revolution without revolution'.

"From Symptom to Sinthome", in Chapter 1, "The Symptom", in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London and New York, 1989

Žižek's perspective still feels refreshing, not simply because he presented the French Revolution in positive terms, but because he avoided the cliché of a Leninist or Stalinist reading of the French Revolution. Instead, Žižek had a Jacobin reading of various 20th-century revolutions.

The transubstantiated body of the classical Master is an effect of the performative mechanism already described by La Boétie, Pascal and Marx: we, the subjects, think that we treat the king as a king because he is in himself a king, but in reality a king is a king because we treat him like one. ... The formula of the totalitarian misrecognition of the performative dimension would then be as follows: the Party thinks that it is the Party because it represents the People's real interests, because it is rooted in the People, expressing their will; but in reality the People are the People because ― or more precisely, in so far as ― they are embodied in the Party. ...Because the People cannot immediately govern themselves, the place of Power must always remain an empty place; any person occupying it can do so only temporarily, as a kind of surrogate, a substitute for the real-impossible sovereign ― 'nobody can rule innocently', as Saint-Just puts it. And in totalitarianism, the Party becomes again the very subject who, being the immediate embodiment of the People, can rule innocently.

"You Only Die Twice", in Chapter 2, "Lack in the Other", in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London and New York, 1989

In his second book, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991), Žižek expanded on how the Jacobins were not a Party (keep in mind, Žižek uses the word "Jacobin" as more-or-less synonymous with "Robespierrist") :

Within the post-revolutionary "totalitarian" order, we have witnessed a re-emergence of the sublime political body in the shape of Leader and/or Party. The tragic greatness of the Jacobins consists precisely in the fact that they refused to accomplish this step: they preferred to lose their head physically, rather than to take upon themselves the passage to personal dictatorship . ... The Jacobins lacked the absolute certainty that they were nothing but an instrument fulfilling the Will of the big Other (God, Virtue, Reason, Cause). They were always tormented by the possibility that behind the façade of the executor of the Terror on behalf of revolutionary Virtue, some "pathological" private interest might be hiding. ... As such they were, so to speak, ontologically guilty, and it was only a matter of time before the guillotine would cut off their heads. It is precisely for this reason, however, that their Terror was democratic, not yet "totalitarian", in contrast to post-democratic totalitarianism, in which the revolutionaries fully assume the role of an instrument of the big Other, whereby their very body again redoubles itself and assumes sublime quality.

"Much Ado about a Thing", in For They Know Not What They Do, Verso, London and New York, 1991

The pessimism here is twofold. The Jacobin project must take place, and the Jacobins themselves must meet unfair and cruel ends for all the good they have done. This pessimism permeates every book that Žižek has written, but all this is in no way a denial of the revolutionary becoming. For example, the quote before the cut, from Chapter 2 of the Sublime Object, might have made you wonder, "did Žižek say that the People in real-socialist countries are similar to the kings of the ancien régime? " In which case, let's see what Žižek thinks of even the royals whose function was (or is) that of figureheads:

A distinction between king as a symbolic function and its empirical bearer misses a paradox that we could designate by the term "chiasmic exchange of properties" introduced by Andrzej Warminski. ... As soon as a certain person functions as "king", his everyday, ordinary properties undergo a kind of "transubstantiation" and become an object of fascination. ... The more we represent the king as an ordinary man, caught in the same passions, victim of the same pettinesses as we ― that is, the more we accentuate his "pathological" features (in the Kantian meaning of the term) ― the more he remains "king". Because of this paradoxical exchange of properties, we cannot deprive the king of his charisma simply by treating him as our equal. At the very moment of his greatest abasement, he arouses absolute compassion and fascination ― witness the trial of "citizen Louis Capet".

"Much Ado about a Thing", in For They Know Not What They Do, Verso, London and New York, 1991

So much for the tired and depressed and often missing Louis Capet. And therefore:

The paradox of the Hegelian monarch is thus that, in a sense, he is the point of madness of the social fabric; his social position is determined immediately by his lineage, by his biology; he is the only one among individuals who already by his "nature" is what he (socially) is ― all others must "invent" themselves, elaborate the content of their being by their activity. As always, Saint-Just was right when, in his accusation against the king, he demanded his execution not because of any specific deeds but simply because he was king. From a radically republican point of view, the supreme crime consists in the very fact of being the king, not in what one does as a king.

"The Wanton Identity", in For They Know Not What They Do, Verso, London and New York, 1991

This logic extends to the crime of being a hero, and not what one might do that abuses the status as a hero. Danton's crimes of accepting of bribes, association with the embezzling Fabre d'Églantine, encouraging Desmoulins to do journalism of questionable quality, etc, were condemning enough, but the crime of accepting the lauding of the Parisian poor was the last straw. The director Wajda was therefore unintentionally justifying Danton's death by starting the film with the poor and unfed running to stop the carriage that Gérard Depardieu as Danton was sitting in, and vying to shake his hand like he was a 20th century celebrity. Danton seemed unaware that the people who surrounded him had neither time nor economic stability to celebrate in.

Robespierre's argument against Danton does not consist in any positive evidence of his guilt. It is enough to recall the obvious, purely formal fact that Danton is a revolutionary hero and as such elevated above the mass of ordinary citizens ― that is, claiming a special status for himself. In the Jacobinical universe, the hero of the Revolution is separated from its traitor by a thin, often indefinable line. The very form of hero can turn into a traitor one who, as to deeds, is a revolutionary hero; this form raises him over ordinary citizens and so exposes him to the danger and lure of tyranny. Robespierre himself was quite aware of this paradox, and his tragic greatness expresses itself in his stoic acceptance of the prospect of being decapitated in the service of the Revolution.

"Much Ado about a Thing", in For They Know Not What They Do, Verso, London and New York, 1991

Despite not commenting directly on what impacts the French Revolution had on sexuality (legalisation of divorce, decriminalisation of sodomy, advent of the capitalist notion of the love-couple, etc), Žižek shows that he would extra-doubt those whose only progressiveness lie in their attitude towards sexuality:

Casanova is Don Giovanni's exact opposite: a merry swindler and impostor, an epicure who irradiates simple pleasure and leaves behind no bitter taste of revenge, and whose libertinage presents no serious threat to the environs. He is a kind of correlate to the eighteenth-century freethinkers from the bourgeois salon: full of irony and wit, calling into question every established view; yet his trespassing of what is socially acceptable never assumes the shape of a firm position which would pose a serious threat to the existing order. His libertinage lacks the fanatic-methodical note, his spirit is that of permissiveness, not of purges; it is "freedom for all", not yet "no freedom for the enemies of freedom". Casanova remains a parasite feeding on the decaying body of his enemy and as such deeply attached to it: no wonder he condemned the "horrors" of the French Revolution, since it swept away the only universe in which he could prosper.

"Hegelian Llanguage", in For They Know Not What They Do, Verso, London and New York, 1991

We might be aware that praising Robespierre was not (and is not) an exclusively leftist position; Joseph de Maistre, known as the other dad of modern conservatism along with Edmund Burke, and literal enemy of the republic on the frontline, was in awe with how Robespierre made close to no tactic error in matters political, economical, and military alike, notably without having much knowledge in the latter.

What we do know about (non-royalist) conservatives, however, is that they tend to praise Bonaparte as a leader worthy of his position. Žižek's labelling of Bonaparte cannot be more different:

The usual critique of patriarchy fatally neglects the fact that there are two fathers. On the one hand there is the oedipal father: the symbolic-dead father, Name-of-the-Father, the father of Law who does not enjoy, who ignores the dimension of enjoyment; on the other hand there is the 'primordial' father, the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the 'Master of Enjoyment'. At the political level, this opposition coincides with that between the traditional Master and the modern ('totalitarian') Leader. In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian, the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more 'repressive' figure of the 'anal' father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin). The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader. In short, here Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: 'primordial father' is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority.

"From Patriarchy to Cynicism", in The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso, London and New York, 1994

Žižek's later famous "coffee without caffeine" "cream without fat" "beer without alcohol" pet phrases seemed to have stemmed from Robespierre's "a revolution without a revolution". One would be mistaken to think of Žižek as solely complaining about food products; the "coffee without caffeine" served as metaphor for liberal-conservative attempts at avoiding the their own disintegration: e.g. multiculturalism that focuses on the exotic veneer of the Other without confronting the immanent contradictions in every way of life, and therefore introduces "the Other without Otherness", while decolonisation necessarily involves the abolishing of the western way of life. Liberal multiculturalism therefore constitutes what Saint-Just would call "revolutions done in halves" -- digging one's own grave.

An Act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the madness of a decision: it is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome – why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates into which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate: they want an Act without risk – not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical 'transcendental risk' that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire. In short, to paraphrase Robespierre, those who oppose the 'absolute Act' effectively oppose the Act as such, they want an Act without the Act.

"Conclusion: The Smell of Love", in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso, London and New York, 2002

Žižek would always admit that any revolution had innocent victims, and even more keenly aware how these victims can be misrepresented and abused yet again by reactionary forces. Significant was the difference between the violence that was visible, had a clear perpetrator, and easy to be the subject of outcry, and the violence that constitutes our daily interactions, our conforming to irrational standards, our objectification and alienation.

When the US media reproached the public in foreign countries for not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complained about the innocent victims of revolutionary terror: 'Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.'

"Introduction: The Tyrant's Bloody Robe", in Violence, Profile Books Ltd, London, 2008

Apropos Benjamin's Divine Violence, the French Revolution provided good positive examples for what it is.

Divine violence is not the repressed illegal origin of the legal order – the Jacobin revolutionary Terror is not the 'dark origin' of the bourgeois order, in the sense of the heroic-criminal state-founding violence celebrated by Heidegger. ... This is why, as was clear to Robespierre, without the 'faith' in (a purely axiomatic pre-supposition of ) the eternal idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, a revolution 'is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime'. ... Or, to paraphrase Kant and Robespierre yet again: love without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is blind, a short-lived passion which loses its persistent edge. The underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence – it is this link which raises it ‘over and beyond the natural limitations of man’ and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive.

"... And, Finally, What It Is!", in Violence, Profile Books Ltd, London, 2008

Hegel, to whom Žižek awards the status of an extra-terrestrial creature, constantly disturbing all other philosophers dead or alive, often thought of by the general public in turn as both incomprehensible and somehow embodying the conservative-essentialist false concept of German essence (which often abhors revolutionary excess), was to Žižek not a counterrevolutionary at all, nor an unconditional singer of the Jacobins' praises, but a pessimistic confirmer of the necessity of the Terror.

Shut up, Barère, the truly radical Anacreon of the guillotine was 3 years younger than Saint-Just.

Let us take Hegel’s critique of the Jacobin Revolutionary Terror, understood as an exercise in the abstract negativity of absolute freedom which, unable to stabilize itself in a concrete social order, has to end in a fury of self-destruction. ... In other words, the point of Hegel’s analysis of the Revolutionary Terror is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral assertion of abstract Universal Reason and was as such doomed to perish in self-destructive fury, being unable to transpose its revolutionary energy into a stable social order; Hegel’s point is rather to highlight the enigma of why, in spite of the fact that Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational State.

from "In Praise of Understanding", in Chapter 5, "Parataxis: Figures of the Dialectical Process", in Less than Nothing, Verso, London and New York, 2012

In 2012, the same year as he wrote the preface to Sophie Wahnich's La Liberté ou la mort — Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme, Žižek also attacked the "1789 without 1793" formula of liberal reactionaries.

It has been said that the French revolution resulted from philosophy, and it is not without reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit [world wisdom]; for it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of things, but also truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world. ... one should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution (and its key supplement, the Haitian Revolution). One should be very clear here: Hegel in no way subscribes to the standard liberal critique of the French Revolution which locates the wrong turn in 1792–3, whose ideal is 1789 without 1793, the liberal phase without the Jacobin radicalization―for him 1793–4 is a necessary immanent consequence of 1789; by 1792, there was no possibility of taking a more “moderate” path without undoing the Revolution itself. Only the “abstract” Terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for post-revolutionary “concrete freedom.” If one wants to put it in terms of choice, then Hegel here follows a paradoxical axiom which concerns logical temporality: the first choice has to be the wrong choice. Only the wrong choice creates the conditions for the right choice. Therein resides the temporality of a dialectical process: there is a choice, but in two stages. The first choice is between the “good old” organic order and the violent rupture with that order ― and here, one should take the risk of opting for “the worse.” This first choice clears the way for the new beginning and creates the condition for its own overcoming, for only after the radical negativity, the “terror,” of abstract universality has done its work can one choose between this abstract universality and concrete universality. There is no way to obliterate the temporal gap and present the choice as threefold, as the choice between the old organic substantial order, its abstract negation, and a new concrete universality.

from "The Differend", in Chapter 5, "Parataxis: Figures of the Dialectical Process", in Less than Nothing, Verso, London and New York, 2012

Another problem with the ideal of shaking off the old regime, then immediately achieving fully-automated luxury gay space communism is that universality can peek into a liberal democracy in many ways, some more sinister than others.

for Hegel, modern bourgeois society could only have arisen through the mediation of Revolutionary Terror (exemplified by Jacobins); furthermore, Hegel is also aware that, in order to prevent its own death by habituation (immersion in the life of particular interests), every bourgeois society needs to be shattered from time to time by war. ... In war, universality reasserts its right over and against the concrete-organic appeasement in prosaic social life. ... This necessity of war should be linked to its opposite: the necessity of a rebellion which shakes the power edifice from its complacency, making it aware of both its dependence on popular support and of its a priori tendency to "alienate" itself from its roots. ... The beauty of the Jacobins is that, in their terror, they brought these two opposed dimensions together: the Terror was simultaneously the terror of the state against individuals and the terror of the people against particular state institutions or functionaries who excessively identified with their institutional positions (the objection to Danton was simply that he wanted to rise above others).

from "Interlude 3: King, Rabble, War … and Sex", in Less than Nothing, Verso, London and New York, 2012

Marat warned of the state spending more on formalities and ceremonies than on meeting the economic needs of the peasants and the urban poor. His advice was not heeded by the National Convention, and his funeral, organised by Jacques-Louis David as a member of the Committee of General Security, was grand and expensive. The Friend of the People was elevated to a status he neither wanted for himself nor posited that anybody deserved. While David was known (and notorious) for taking artistic liberty when it came to his subjects, his subjective view of Marat's "sublime body" was libertied in such a way that betrayed David's own unease between individualism and collectivism:

When the sovereignty of the State shifts from King to People, the problem becomes that of the people’s Body, of how to incarnate the People, and the most radical solution is to treat the Leader as the People incarnated. In between these two extremes, there are many other possibilities―consider the uniqueness of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, “the first modernist painting,” according to T. J. Clark. The oddity of the painting’s overall structure is seldom noted: its upper half is almost totally black. (This is not a realistic detail: the room in which Marat actually died had lively wallpaper.) What does this black void stand for? The opaque body of the People, the impossibility of representing the People? It is as if the opaque background of the painting (the People) invades it, occupying its entire upper half. ... Is this not also the logic of the Jacobin Terror―individuals must be annihilated in order to make the People visible; the People’s Will can be made visible only through the terrorist destruction of the individual’s body? Therein resides the uniqueness of The Death of Marat: it concedes that one cannot blur the individual in order to represent the People directly―all one can do to come as close as possible to an image of the People is to show the individual at the point of his disappearance―his tortured, mutilated dead body against the background of the blur that “is” the People. ... It is quite impressive that this uneasy and disturbing painting was adored by the revolutionary crowds in Paris―proof that Jacobinism was not yet “totalitarian,” that it did not yet rely on the fantasmatic logic of a Leader who is the People. Under Stalin, such a painting would have been unimaginable, the upper part would have had to have been filled in―with, say, the dream of the dying Marat, depicting the happy life of a free people dancing and celebrating their freedom. The greatness of the Jacobins lay in their attempt to keep the screen empty, to resist filling it in with ideological projections.

from "Presence", in Chapter 10, "Objects, Objects Everywhere", in Less than Nothing, Verso, London and New York, 2012

The "keeping the screen empty" was tragic also in the verbal sense:

Louis Althusser once came up with a typology of revolutionary leaders worthy of Kierkegaard's classification of humans into officers, housemaids, and chimney sweeps: those who quote proverbs, those who do not quote proverbs, those who invent (new) proverbs. The first are scoundrels (Althusser thought of Stalin); the second are great revolutionaries who are doomed to fail (Robespierre); only the third understand the true nature of a revolution and succeed (Lenin, Mao). ... Radical revolutionaries like Robespierre fail because they just enact a break with the past without succeeding in their effort to enforce a new set of customs (recall the utter failure of Robespierre's idea to replace religion with the new cult of a Supreme Being).

"Venezuela and the Need for New Clichés", in A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name, Polity Press, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 2020

In a continuation of the refute of "1789 without 1793", Žižek pointed to the proper sequel of the French Revolution as a sequel of 1793, albeit with a twist.

The continuity between the French Revolution and the Commune is at another level. The reception among the enlightened public of the first phase of the French Revolution was enthusiastic, and this enthusiasm turned into horror when the Jacobins took over: 1789 yes, 1793 no. At the level of political dynamic, the Commune was the reappearance of 1793 – but not a precise one. Something happened with the Commune that did not happen in 1793.

"Paris Commune at 150", in Heaven in Disorder, OR Books, New York, 2021.

Despite Robespierre's cult of the Supreme Being being viewed as "utter failure", Robespierre's non-atheist stance was in line with republicanism-as-theology.

Why are so many essays entitled "politico-theological treatise"? The answer is that a theory becomes theology when it is part of a full subjective political engagement. As Kierkegaard pointed out, I do not acquire faith in Christ after comparing different religions and deciding the best reasons speak for Christianity ― there are reasons to choose Christianity but these reasons only appear after I've already chosen it, i.e., to see the reasons for belief one already has to believe. And the same holds for Marxism: it is not that, after objectively analysing history, I became a Marxist ― my decision to be a Marxist (the experience of a proletarian position) makes me see the reasons for it, i.e., Marxism is the paradox of an objective "true" knowledge accessible only through a subjective partial position. This is why Robespierre was right when he distrusted materialism as the philosophy of decadent-hedonist and corrupted nobility, and tried to impose a new religion of the supreme Being of Reason (the main target of his hatred was Joseph Fouche, a radical atheist and an opportunist plotter). The old reproach to Marxism that its commitment to a bright future is a secularization of religious salvation should be proudly assumed.

"Why Politics is Immanently Theological", in Christian Atheism, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024

Interestingly, Terry Eagleton's attitude of "secularization of religious salvation" in Chapter 3 of Why Marx Was Right (2011) was a much more ambiguous one. Eagleton is also firmly Marxist, but what he is not as firm about is whether this salvation, once achieved, could justify all the sufferings that capitalism, prolonged for two hundred years in its own rotting, has already done to each of us.

In short, the true aim of Robespierre's last two speeches in the Convention was not to further strengthen the Terror but to diminish it, to slowly bring it to an end. As is well-known, he threatened in his last speech that the Convention should be purged of a group of corrupted traitors, and, when repeatedly called to name them, he refused to do it — as we know now, not to spread fear and guilt among the members (each of them afraid that he is on the list), but because the names he targeted were in large majority from his own group of Montagnards. Robespierre's aim was not to spread fear among the enemies but to constrain the need for enemies which led the Jacobins to Terror — in short, he wanted to restrain Terror in order to focus on the ultimate social antagonism in France at that moment: how to save the people's republic from the threat of a military dictator (a threat clearly predicted by him and Saint-Just, and realized with the rise to power of Napoleon). The complications give us a hint of how Communism will eventually enter the stage: not through a simple parliamentary electoral process but through a state of emergency enforced on us by an apocalyptic threat.

"Why Politics is Immanently Theological", in Christian Atheism, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024

We can try to answer Eagleton's question, try to imagine what to make of the presence when we arrive at Communism. But what makes Eagleton's question compelling, what makes it an unavoidable question to be pondered upon in the first place, is that divine violence, as supposed to founding violence, is more unskippable than an unskippable ad: some people can block or refuse to experience it some of the time, but never can all people block and refuse to experience it all of the time; yet unlike an ad as the command of the big Other, divine violence has no guarantee from either the Supreme Being or the godess of Liberty, neither Virtue nor Reason nor historical inevitability can confirm that divine violence is truly divine. The risk-taking cannot but be done by the revolutionaries themselves.

The Benjaminian ‘divine violence’ should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will’, but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, not covered by the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral’, it does not give the agent the licence to kill mindlessly with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is justice, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which the ‘people’ (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price – the Judgement Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering.

"Introduction", in Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, tr. John Howe, Verso, London and New York, 2007

Happy Birthday, Maximilien.

I would like to thank all my mutuals. I am really enjoying my research and translations more because of your emotional labour (of putting up with my monomania), and this is why Die Partei hat immer recht.

[hejdzz]

Once in a while I see a post on this hellsite when someone mentions the Vendée uprising and most of the time even if it's not total crap it is just too boring.

Like yeah, we all know about the famous and terrible war the peasants fought with the Republic but did y'all know that they had a false bishop? The man just spent months pretending to be a bishop of some diocese in India and all the insurgents believed him. It was just that much of a mayhem

And their generals were a small but colourful troupe consisting of the stereotypical libertine prince tormented by gout and whatelse, the guy with Too Many Waistcoats, the young man who was either very brave or just desperately wanting to die (maybe both), the Nerdy Nerd, and some more. And their opposition to the revolution was more, well, circumstantial than ideological.

(Not to mention the memorialist girls. I love them my heart is theirs)

Also, the Republican generals weren't all bloodthirsty beasts. Some of them were pretty decent men and for those who were indeed atrocious, the study of their descent can sometimes be surprising. There's always something captivating in learning about the dark side of humans who seemed completely normal isn't it?

Anyways, I'm def not a specialist on this subject, but I am trying my best. It might be just my special interest and most people might not find it as entertaining as I do. However, I still believe that having a better comprehension of what was going on in the West could maybe deepen the understanding of the whole period among the frev people.

[vapaus-ystavyys-tasaarvo]

Alright, notes on 1.1.10 for Les Mis Letters:

"a former member of the Convention"

The Convention here refers to the National Convention which governed France through the first years of the First Republic (from September 1792 to November 1795). This was an eventful period which involved some massive progressive reforms for the time, various interesting experiments such as coming up with a new calendar, a new form of religion and the metric system, as well as the trial and execution of the former king and queen, and of course the famous Reign of Terror.

The Convention did some genuinely good things like abolished slavery (until Napoleon RE-ESTABLISHED IT BECAUSE HE SUCKS) but obviously also some extremely questionable things.

The Convention was abolished in 1795 and replaced by the much more conservative Directory.

"when people called each other thou"

The Hapgood translation tends to use the very archaic thou to translate the French pronoun tu. French (like most languages) has two words for "you": tu in singular and vous in plural. Vous is also used in place of tu as a form of polite address. In this era tu was actually used in very limited circumstances.

I won't get deeper into this topic because I would need to do more research into the specifics but generally speaking, in this era, the general use of tu for everybody in all contexts was seen as ideological and radical. I don't actually know how common it actually was among the radicals, I'm not a FRev expert.

The "citizen" thing definitely was a thing though.

"How did it happen that such a man had not been brought before a provost’s court, on the return of the legitimate princes?"

This indicates that we must be at least as far as the year 1814 now. The words of the Conventionist seem to confirm this date, although it's a bit ambiguous; it could also be later. I would assume that it wouldn't be later than 1815, but apparently the law that exiled the "regicides" wasn't passed until 1816, so idk, maybe this does take place later actually! In that case this episode would come chronologically after The Fall, which is the next book.

"The legitimate princes" would mean Louis XVIII and Charles the Count of Artois, the younger brothers of the overthrown Louis XVI. Louis XVIII was put on the throne by the Allies after Napoleon's defeat in 1814. (The reason why Louis XVIII is called the "eighteenth" rather than the "seventeenth" will be explained soon.)

The Bourbon Restoration, as this return of the royal family to the throne is called, was not a complete return to the pre-revolution system; there was a new constitution (the Charter of 1814) which at least in theory limited the king's power, and the Napoleonic Code was kept as the basis of the legal system.

The reception of Louis XVIII varied, and a lot of people obviously weren't happy that he was placed on the throne by foreigners who France had only just been at war with, but this is the South which was generally more royalist. (This reminds me, I should relisten to the 1814-1815 episodes of the Siècle podcast...)

"'93!"

I already talked about the year 1793 earlier so I won't repeat all that now

“Louis XVII.?”

(CW: child abuse)

As a royalist Myriel refers to the son of the former king as "Louis XVII". According to the royalists, at the moment of Louis XVI's death his son automatically became Louis XVII, despite never being crowned king. This is why the actual next king, Louis XVIII, is called the eighteenth. (As a recap: Louis XVIII was "Louis XVII's" uncle)

Little Louis died in captivity in 1795, at the age of ten. In the autopsy it was discovered that his body was horrifically scarred due to physical abuse.

"the brother of Cartouche"

Cartouche (1693-1721) was a famous highwayman and a folk hero, eventually caught and executed in 1721. I don't know much about him but now I kinda want to look more into it. His little brother Louis AKA Louison was hanged two years later as an accomplice despite being only about 15 (meaning he would have been only about 13 at most when he was supposedly being an accomplice to his brother.)

"fleur de lys"

⚜ The heraldic symbol of the French monarchy:

Supposedly representing a lily but apparently it might actually be an iris, idk.

"Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?"

Bossuet was the bishop of Meaux 1681-1704, and a famous orator. He will come up again later in Les Mis.

The Dragonnades were part of Louis XIV (the Sun King)'s persecution campaign against the Huguenots.

Te Deum laudamus is a hymn and the title means "we praise thee, God".

"Carrier is a bandit; but what name do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what is your opinion as to Lamoignon-Bâville? Maillard is terrible; but Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchêne senior is ferocious; but what epithet will you allow me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tetê is a monster; but not so great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois."

.... Okay I'm not gonna bother with all of these. Skip!

"the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793"

Several religious buildings were torn down during the Revolution, apparently the Conventionist spoke in favour of preserving this one? I don't actually know which abbey this is though or if this is a more specific reference. I can't be bothered to do any more research either tbh

According to an annotation on my edition of the novel, this might be an allusion to Hugo's father saving convents in Italy.

"those who despise it in a cap revere it in a hat.”

The red cap they're talking about is the Phrygian cap, which was worn by emancipated slaves in ancient Rome and which thus became a symbol of the Revolution (as it was a symbol of liberty). The cap is famously still worn by Marianne, the anthropomorphic personification of France.

The red hat Myriel alludes to, I assume means the galero, a wide-brimmed hat worn by cardinals. I could be wrong though, let me know if you have a better idea!

[lanterne]

Hello frev community, making a survey for ✨science✨

[edgysaintjust]

Hey! On anon because I always feel kinda stupid for asking about Frev things that I feel like everyone assumes I should already know about, but can you tell me about Fabré, Hérault, and/or Herbois? I really don't know much about any of them and you seem pretty knowledgeable. Thanks!

Nothing to feel stupid about, we are all constantly learning sth new there! I’m glad if I can help with some revolutionaries and if you find them interesting enough to know sth more. Hope I don’t mansplain this ;)

Hérault de Séchelles was a former noble and a member of the Committee of Public Safety. One of the five people assigned to work on the Constitution of 1793, elected twice as a president of the National Convention, cousin of madame de Polignac and, apart from being a charming and light-hearted gentleman, an over all devoted revolutionary. We had mentions of Hérault participating in the storming of Bastille, but as I was recently informed it is not clear what he did there (and we don’t have any direct/more reliable sources). Just like most 1760s babies he was fascinated by Rousseau, paid 20k livres for an exclusive copy of Nouvelle Heloise, and travelled around France, being even invited to Buffon’s residence and discussing things with him. He wrote shorter, theoretical books, in which some of his thoughts were written down, both in prose, not genius in terms of expressing any idea that would turn the world upside down, but well showing his intellectual and observant nature. As a noble, he received a good education and showed much eloquence and sarcasm in a conversation, and his looks, intelligence and charm attracted many ladies and men. Well, he was also known as the hottest man of the century, after all. 

Hérault was executed along with the Dantonists, but unlike them, he was suspected for being involved in spying, having connections with emgigrees and possibly leaking the files of the CPS. Despite having little ties with the rest of the Dantonists, they died on the same day. The accusations of Hérault participating in any foreign conspiracy were most likely far from the truth. Also, he had an orgy grotto.

*

Fabre was a travelling actor and dramatist, who later in his life decided to participate in politics and the Revolution, joining the Jacobin club and siding with some of the key figures, like Danton and Camille Desmoulins, with whom he also worked in the ministry of justice as a secretary. He wasn’t the embodiment of all virtues, and not necessarily representing any specific ideology with passion, speaking rather rarely at both the Convention and Jacobins, and not expressing his full talent and charisma in the short speeches which proves he wasn’t extremely devoted to politics and preferred to watch the meetings with his opera lorgnette. An opportunist willing to cause trouble and make shady deals. He was, however, expressing some of his stronger views (ex. against the Gironde) and was often assigned with important tasks. 

He’s mostly known for coming up with the names for months and days in the French Republican Calendar, which was used as a revolutionary replacement of the gregorian calendar, and, unfortunately, his participation in falsifying a certain decree and illegally profiting from liquidating French East India Company, one of his many crazy intrigues. His opportunism, greed and love for intrigue led him to be accused of falsification and malversation, and guillotined on the same day as Hérault. But besides all the politics, he was a very romantic and messy mischievous man, and an excellent and sadly underappreciated poet. He didn’t have an orgy cave, but after his death a jar of pickles and three dried plums were found in his apartment so guess it’s even. We don’t know how, but just like Hérault he was a ladies man, (although a womanizer is a better word in his case). Most importantly, he has a bunch of hilarious and totally crazy youthful adventures to entertain us with.  

His theatrical career doesn't belong to the most succesfull ones, but his skills and ease with the pen are certainly more admirable than the 18c public judged. After all, even his name has its roots here - d'Eglantine was added by him to the last name as a poetical particle taken from the contest he won with a sonnet in his youth. The golden eglantine was an award for prose, and not poetry, which was rewarded with a silver lily, but Fabre chose to go with the other one as it was more original and perhaps thought "du Lys", associated with the family of Jeanne d'Arc, was a little too much.

*

Collot d’Herbois shared the profession with Fabre, just like the previous man he was making a living as an actor for a few years, later to become a dramatist and a director. He was way more successful than Fabre back in the day, and his play, Lucie, has even been staged abroad. The two men met before the Revolution in Lyon, an unfortunate city in which Collot will later be assigned with a pacifying mission along with Fouché and three other men, together responsible for massacres occurring there. As an actor, Collot has been most often a leader of his troupes and showed much talent even at the beginning of his career, but he was known to have quite a fiery temper, intimidating audiences with his villain performances and taking a lot of pride in his profession. In the Committee of Public Safety, he represented a radical hébertist wing with his boyf buddy Billaud-Varenne, clashed with Robespierre a lot (almost throwing him out of a window), and, long story short, once almost ended up being assassinated, mistaken for him, which caused more quarrels in case politics wasn’t enough. Together with Billaud, Collot will take a huge part in plotting the Thermidorian Reaction, and be banished to French Guyana for the radicalism represented. The tropical holidays were not the happiest for the former CPS members, as both came down with yellow fever, which, in Collot's case, resulted in his death in 1795. 

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 5.1.20 “The dead are right and the living are not wrong”

The Utopia that grows impatient and turns into riot knows what awaits her; almost always she is too soon. Then she resigns herself and stoically accepts, instead of triumph, catastrophe. She serves, without complaining, and even exonerating them, those who deny her, and it is her magnanimity to consent to desertion. She is indomi­table against hindrance and gentle toward ingratitude.

I have no evidence to back this thought up, but it’s Fantine: te spirit of Utopia turning to insurrection is Fantine. She believed in too much hope; she ended up walking patiently back and forth in a ballgown in the snow, uncomplaining; she turned to riot against mistreatment.

And then we’re on ingratitude, Marius’s watchword and the burning coal inside him that motivates him to do all the stupidest things he does.

But this is an idea of a mass ingratitude rather than an individual one; the individual doesn’t feel this one at all, unless they’re thinking as a collective. Marius doesn’t understand things beyond individual debts, and even by the end of this book there’s no evidence I can recall that he gets any closer.

..And then we get to the march of Progress being the general condition of the human race, and I have to check out again. Man, I didn’t start this book fucking hating the word Progress, but I sure do now.

(To recap: It’s colonialism hand in hand with everything Europe thought the Industrial Revolution would do for it. It’s the force that tries to stamp out every group of people on earth who isn’t doing that shit and then pats itself on the back for moving the world another inch forward. Fuck Hugo’s notions of Progress forever.)

I don’t disagree with his point that stasis is illusory and change is the condition of everything everywhere--but I really, really fucking distrust that idea of Progress looking a certain way and forming an ideology that condones really, really heinous shit. I also extra hate his corollary to the idea of Progress, that the progression ends eventually in a designated place where all is perfect and nothing needs to change anymore. I lived through an era that called itself the End of History; it’s a shitty ideology that leads to Bad Things.

Change, for both better and worse, forever, seems to me both inevitable and less awful than that.

Because Hugo thinks Progress is inevitable, he runs again into the rift at the heart of Combeferre--he even restates (somewhat more coherently) Combeferre’s arguments about the stains of justified murder and the confusion of Utopia taking up arms.

The thing is, if Progress isn’t inevitable, you don’t have that confusion. There isn’t the French Revolution vs. something-something-the-exact-same-results-as-the-FRev-but-arrived-at-peacefully-some-time-later. Yeah, the currents in society are real, and would have been real whether or not things conflagrated at exactly that moment, and those currents are as big a part of change as the events you can point to... but there isn’t some other thing happening instead of that, that these human moments are some kind of proxy for.

If there is no overriding current towards a predestined end-point, people’s efforts to change the world can stand alone as efforts to change the world--be that for better or worse, too soon or too late, with good methods or bad, all according to the values of the individual observer.

It all just feels a whole lot simpler than whatever Hugo thinks he’s doing.

I also resent his idea that these fights are always about the Ideal first and foremost. It’s not wrong, exactly; ideology and people’s sense of what they’re fighting for matter hugely. But there isn’t something wrong about fighting for, say, better working conditions, or for the sake of not starving this week. His focus on the ideal instead of the more proximate and more urgent causes takes the fight away from the workers and the poor and gives it to the bourgeoisie. Which is a problem he has a lot.

And I resent the jabs against effeminacy. And the Obvious Superiority of France stuff.

We’re at the heart of Hugo’s central thesis for the book, or one of the hearts of it at least, but I just find myself stuck fighting Hugo about our most basic assumptions again. :(

[sieclesetcieux]

My Writings and Contributions

Translations of Frev Sources

Media and books influenced by Thermidorian propaganda

Here are some facts we take for granted that revolutionaries didn't know that will blow your mind

Learning to Be a Lawyer in 18thc France

Brief historiography on women, the law, marriage and divorce (scroll down)

Brief overview of the Thermidorian Reaction

On Saint-Just's Personality: An Introduction

Saint-Just in Five (Long) Sentences

Random Sources and References on Saint-Just's Youth (In French)

Louise Michel's Poem on Saint-Just

On Charles Le Bas, Philippe's brother and Élisabeth Duplay's second husband

References on Couthon

Book and article recommendations:

The "short" version

Part 1 - A Note On Objectivity and Two Approaches (introduction) + Culture: Enlightenment and Antiquity

Part 2 - Ideological Stakes

Part 3 - Old Classics and Syntheses

Part 4 - Specific Topics and Areas of Research

Part 5 - Side-related but still important

Part 6 - Highlights and Short Reviews

My Posts In Progress and Eventual Research:

My thoughts and analysis of Saint-Just's unsent letter to Villain d’Aubigny

A (brief?) introduction to Saint-Just’s many faces and myths

Could Saint-Just have been neurodivergent?

Why Enjolras was inspired by Saint-Just: comparing the text of the brick to Saint-Just’s Romantic Myth

An Episode of the Thermidorian Reaction: the Attack on the Club des Jacobins and the Misogynist Targetting of Women

How the pamphlet about the Club infernal locates them in the circle of Wrath and not Treason - the latter would out them as counterrevolutionaries

Can we call the French Revolution a "fandom"? The invention of celebrity culture, etc.

The differences between Thermidorian propaganda and Anglo-American propaganda (and where they overlap)

Other Important Posts

Some primary and secondary sources available online for free (by anotherhumaninthisworld; some additions by myself)

Frev Resources (by iadorepigeons)

Myths and misconceptions about the French Revolution

Anglo American historiography (by saintjustitude and dykespierre)

On the Terror's Death Toll and Donald Greer (by montagnarde1793) More about this topic here and here (by lanterne, anotherhumaninthisworld, frevandrest and radiospierre)

On Robespierre's Black Legend (by rbzpr)

On Thermidorian propaganda (by lanterne)

On Couthon (by iadorepigeons)

Marat Ressource Masterpost (by orpheusmori)

Collaborative Masterpost on Saint-Just (many authors)

Saint-Just Masterpost (by obscurehistoricalinterests)

One myth on Saint-Just (by saintjustitude and frandrest)

Saint-Just as political philosopher and theorist (by saintjustitude)

Élisabeth Lebas corrects Alphonse de Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins (1847) (by anotherhumaninthisworld)

On Charlotte Robespierre's memoirs (by montagnarde1793 and saintjustitude)

On Simonne Évrard (French and English biography copy-pasted by saintjustitude from the ARBR website)

Regulations for the internal exercises of the College of Louis-le-Grand (by anotherhumaninthisworld)

Were Robespierre and Desmoulins together at Louis-le-Grand? (by robespapier and anotherhumaninthisworld)

Robespierre was not Horace Desmoulins' godfather (by robespapier and anotherhumaninthisworld)

The relationship of Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre in literary works of Przybyszewska (by edgysaintjust)

Last edited: 16/05/2023

Support me!

[frevandrest]

I liked your reply to the totalitarian question, but what to say to someone who wants a quick answer?

History =/= quick answers lol But ok. The quickest answer is:

I mean, what else to say? Totalitarianism is a product of specific historical, political and societal circumstances. It did not exist in the 18c. It's like asking "what about feudalism in prehistory?" (And I don't mean to trash that anon. Saint-Just's wiki page mentions his totalitarian views so it's not surprising that people are curious).

That being said... Linking French Revolution to 20th century totalitarianism is an ideologically charged take that is relatively common in certain circles, particularly Anglo circles. But it's not about 18th century or the French Revolution, since it didn't exist back then. Numerous experts in frev keep warning against that ahistorical take, but often to no avail.

That not to say that there were no fuckups during frev - there was a lot of mess. But not really in the way it's commonly believed (especially in those Anglo circles), and not in a 20c-21c way. I really wish the popular narrative about frev could focus on stuff that was really going on. And I mean in the negative sense, too.

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

I want advice on how to properly study the French Revolution. Despite the presence of official sources from the contemporaries of the revolution period, you may find that the writer may tell lies about Robespierre or Saint-Just and others, and sometimes you may find books that do not convey the truth only because of the writer's bias towards his political ideas, as the writer may stand against Robespierre only because of his political orientation or his ideology in general without forgetting the emotional bias .. How can I study about the revolution without properly facing any kind of these problems .. because I'm new to frev community.

I can really relate to your struggle as I felt the same way when I started studying frev almost three years ago — everywhere I looked I found new claims which more often than not didn’t have a source attached to them, and this was made worse by the fact that it was clear the person writing very often did so less for the facts in themselves and more with the intention of convincing me how to think about a certain person or event. This just ended with me having some sort of minor crisis having no idea what was even real in the first place and what wasn’t. Now, there unfortunately exists no official ”proper” way on how to study history, everyone works differently. Likewise, it’s also impossible to study history without facing any sort of biases. That said, what cleared things for me personally was mainly getting hold of all the primary sources we have for Robespierre. Basically, the texts found within Oeuvres complètes de Robespierre, Papiers inédits trouves chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan etc and Recueil des actes du comité de salut public are (with a few exceptions) the only things we can prove actually came from his brain. They are therefore the places where it’s most unlikely you’ll find any lies/biases/weird interpretations regarding him. I’ve already compiled these, along with several other primary sources, in this post, and @rbzpr has translated several of the texts found within them into English in case you don’t know French.

For contemporary descriptions, which I would argue are the sources that come in second place when it comes to learning about a historical person, you’re right in that balanced and three-dimensional ones are often really hard to find when it comes to Robespierre (and Saint-Just too I’m sure). This is because most descriptions we have of them were written not with the intention of giving a balenced and accurate picture of they were as people, but rather to convince its readers what good/bad guys they were. None of this does however mean that we should just ignore contemporary descriptions, they can still be an incredible historical source. What we do need to do is contextualize and critically analyze them before jumping to conclusions. A good way to do this would for example be to compare several contemporary descriptions in order to find similiarities and differences (that is what I tried to do in this post) and then critically think about and postulate on what the truth could be. If for example more than one person underlines a certain trait, then it is more likely for that to be true.

As for books, like I said before, you’ll never find any that doesn’t contain any sort of biases, no matter how neutral the author claims to have been. My own rule to avoid misinformation when it comes to books has basically become to not not trust anything that doesn’t have a source attached to it (so books that don’t use footnotes are pretty much wasted on me…). If you think that’s a bit too extreme, I would at least advice you to be cautious with sentences that start with ”It has been said that…” or ”An alleged story goes like…” because it’s not uncommon that will be followed by claims that might actually be apocryphal but hold themselves alive anyway just because no one bothers to check their origin properly.

If you were to ask me for just one book to read if you want to hear the Real Story in regards to Robespierre, without any biases in neither direction, I’d probably say Robespierre (2014) by Hervé Leuwers. When reading it, I never really get the feeling that the author particulary likes nor dislikes Robespierre, he’s just treating him like a normal person and telling his story as far as the primary sources allow him and without ever letting his own theories/ideas get the upper hand. However, I don’t know if it’s too advanced for someone who has just started studying frev (I myself got it when I had already studied it for about a year so idk). It’s also in French, which I don’t know if you know or not… The Robespierre biography that I’d say I found the most helpful when I was new to this was probably Robespierre (1935) by British historian J.M Thompson. While Thompson will give his opinion on things going on more than Leuwers does, it’s easy to tell what is fact and what is interpretation. His biography is also very rigorously sourced, and he has chosen to include and analyse almost every single one of Robespierre’s letters and bigger speeches.

If anyone has any other advice on how to best study frev without meeting too many biases, feel free to share!

[mel-linde]

The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, here we go again

[quillsink]

i’ll finish my frev rant here because why not

so i just talked abt the factions before but i need to talk abt the people . because otherwise you’ll have people like my bestie who think i’m a weirdo for finding mass murderers to be likeable people. they had severe flaws, no doubt, and their moral standards were very fucked. so, imma just explain my view on the four that i know the most about.

robespierre

easily the most famous french revolutionary and the one with the most fucked up morals. he claimed that the reason to guillotine everyone was for “the virtue of the republic” or some shit like that, but personally i think that he went a little bit mental there. however, i can’t help but feel bad for him. he was definitely the victim of thermidorian propaganda, and besides the drama stuff, he just seems like a chill guy. def gives me IXTJ vibes in terms of what i perceive him as personality wise.

saint-just

oh my god, my first frev figure i had an obsession with. i just want to give antoine a hug. his parents were…not very good to him from what i read, then there’s the whole organt/prison business, being robespierre’s loyal servant till the end, and the dying before 30. just, he had it rough, and although he wasn’t a good person either, it’s hard to not feel bad for him. my gay ENTP emo child needs to be loved 🥺

desmoulins

CAMILLE. You know about my obsession with Camille lol. Just a walking ENFP bi disaster who cannot think for himself *coughs in july 12 1789*. always very feverent about revolution & one of robespierre’s childhood friends. the two of them initially were allies during the revolution and shared the same fire with it, but eventually they split in terms of ideology (siding with Danton) and desmoulins found himself the victim of Madame Guillotine (which i personally find very unjustified.) i can go on and on about Camille, but for the sake of your time, i will not. also he’s the favorite child

finally, danton

oh, that bitch. ask alexis, i hate danton with a passion. he’s basically the straight ESTP fuckboy in my opinion, and his attitude from what i read i would dislike. not to mention that maybe camille wouldn’t get killed?? i don’t know, i just don’t like danton at all. if you want to get me mad, talk about danton.

damn was robespierre ok my guy let’s get you some therapy

damn saint just seems interesting to study!

OK DESMOULINS IS MY FAVOURITE NOW I LOVE HIM

Okay we do NOT stan danton in this household