(This is part of my journey through Revolutions Podcast, which I talked about HERE. As I said in that post, I'm only going to do video reviews for the individual seasons, and then will put together a written review once I've worked my way through the whole podcast.)
I had already posted about this podcast back in April 2020. But at that time I was skipping around a bit in the podcast to listen to the episodes that sounded most interesting to me. This time around, I listened to the whole thing systematically, from start to finish, 3 times over.
The other stuff I've read/watched/listened to on the French Revolution is below.
Also.... Mike Duncan talks about the history of the Bourbon dynasty and Louis XIV's reign as background to explaining the circumstances of French politics in the 18th century. For a fictionalized account of all this, see the Three Musketeers series:
Why I Watched This Movie
So, unfortunately, the story of how I came to watch this movie is going to start with a confession: I spend way too much time on Youtube.
Regular readers already know this, of course. If it wasn't already self-evident from the amount of Youtube Videos I link to on this blog, I've also overtly confessed to worries about Internet and TV addiction in some of my past posts.
It remains my ambition to someday get my viewing habits under control, and live a normal life.
In the meantime, however, I'm going to review this movie I saw on Youtube.
Despite the fact that I personally watched this movie off of the small screen, I'm still counting it as part of my Movie Review Project because it is a real movie. It got a theatrical release and everything back in 1989.
But I just stumbled upon it while surfing Youtube.
Background
I never heard of this movie before it popped up on my Youtube page, but I've dug around a bit on the Internet, and apparently this movie was released in 1989 to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
Somewhat surprisingly, they decided to go for an international cast. So, for example, Sam Neill plays Lafayette , Peter Ustinov plays Mirabeau, Jane Seymour plays Marie Antionette, etc.
Apparently the film originally got an international release in English. (I'm not sure how that worked--did they dub the lines, or did they record two version of every scene?) But the only version that anyone on the Internet is able to track down nowadays is the French version with English subtitles.
The film is very long. Apparently it was long even in its theatrical release, but for the TV version they added back in all the cut material, and it's now over 5 hours long. It's now broken into two parts: les Années lumière (Years of Hope) and les Années terribles (Years of Rage).
My Viewing Experience
So, as a history nerd, and someone who's always been interested in the French Revolution, naturally I was salivating when I realized what I had stumbled across.
This was the next best thing. At 5 hours long, it was essentially half an HBO season. Close enough.
But it was 5 hours long! I couldn't watch a movie that long on my tiny computer screen. So, reluctantly, I clicked away.
But this movie haunted me for a couple of days. I was really curious as to how they would portray all the different characters and events that I had read about in books.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. "I'll just watch 10 minutes a day," I said. "It won't be so bad for my eyes that way."
But then, once I got started, I had a hard time pulling myself away.
In the end, I ended up watching the whole thing in about 5 days.
The Review
If you like history, you will love this movie. It is extremely faithful to the real historical events.
If you don't like history, you will absolutely hate this movie. Because the movie is rushing to fill in all the events of the French Revolution, it doesn't have time to develop the character or motivation of any of its characters. Consider yourself warned--there is nothing in this movie that would interest anyone who isn't a history geek.
As for me, I'm a history geek, so I absolutely loved this movie. All 5 hours of it. I was completely fascinated from beginning to end.
The film is, however, rushing way too fast to get through everything. But I suppose you can't fault it for that. There's a lot to get through.
5 hours seems like a long time, but when you consider all the different phases the French Revolution went through between 1789 and 1794, there is a lot of material to get through here. And the film doesn't have time to linger. We briefly get one shown one scene in one part of Paris, and then we're rushing off to somewhere else in Paris to document the next part of the revolution.
In a way, this is perfect for the modern short attention span. The way the film keeps moving relentlessly forward is one of the reasons I found it so fascinating. I had a hard time pulling myself away from the screen because I kept wanting to see what would happen next.
But the disadvantage is that although the film does a very good job of showing what happened, it doesn't do such a good job of showing how or why.
For example, every history student knows that Robespierre will eventually rise to power. So from the moment you first see him, you know he will come to dominate things eventually. And he does. But the movie never really shows how he came to dominate the convention. The movie just shows him as an uncharismatic, fussy, fastidious little man who somehow gets more and more prominent as time progresses.
Similarly, the audience is told that Mirabeau is an important figure in the early stages of the Revolution (as he was) but not really shown it. (We don't get many scenes of Mirabeau dominating the assembly, so the audience just has to accept that he's important becomes the film tells us he's important.).
Similarly with several other characters.
But what can you do? Considering this was originally a theatrical release, you can't very well ask for this movie to be any longer than it already is. You just have to accept that there's not enough time for everything, and accept the movie's limitations.
Rating
Keeping in mind that this movie is only for the history geeks, as a history geek I give it 10 out of 10 Stars.
The History
I actually knew most of the history beforehand. (I've been interested in the French Revolution for a long time--see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here , here, here , here, here and here). So there were very few surprises for me in this movie.
But I deprived a lot of pleasure from anticipating how certain events were going to be depicted, and then comparing my idea of these events to what the filmmakers showed.
And it would be an exaggeration to say I learned nothing new from the film--I did pick up a few new tidbits, and learned about a few new names. (One of the advantages of watching a film on the Internet is that Wikipedia is right at your fingertips. So I would often pause the film to look up a name, or double check and event, and that also helped me learn more.)
I also think I caught one or two minor inaccuracies.
There's no point in me writing down all my thoughts on the history. I've got got other things I need to do today, and you can access Wikipedia just as easily as I can.
But I will write down a few things that struck me.
On the Plus Side
* I became interested in Camille Desmoulins a few years ago when I was reading a lot about the French Revolution. He was one of those names that would pop up in every history of the French Revolution, and he seemed to represent the more romantic and idealistic side of the revolution.
But it was very hard to find any biographies about Camille Desmoulins. At least in English. (I searched Amazon.com, and found nothing.)
This movie puts Desmoulins front and center as one of its main characters. So I was happy about that.
* Most movies about the French Revolution, and indeed many books about the French Revolution, completely leave out Jacques Hebert. This is unfortunate, because if you want to understand Robespierre's actions you need to understand that he felt he was in danger both from the Left and from the Right. If you leave out the story Jacques Hebert, you leave out all the pressure Robespierre was getting from the Left.
The movie didn't have time to develop Hebert, of course, but I'm glad they remembered to put him in at all.
Nitpicks
* I'm disappointed that the movie omitted such characters as Talleyrand, Thomas Paine, and Abbe Sieyès. But I understand there was no room for them.
Other Notes
I've been interested in the French Revolution since high school.
But it's scary to think how much I've aged since my school days. I'm now at a point in life where I am older than pretty much all of the French Revolutionaries.
Danton and Desmoulins were 34 when they died. Robespierre was 36. Saint Just was only 26.
What have I done with my life?
This has nothing to do with anything that is in the news lately, but it's something I stumbled across years ago while browsing through a collection of the complete works of Thomas Paine in the library one afternoon, and it always stuck with me. Unfortunately this little gem is largely buried. It's hard to find this speech cited any where, but it probably deserves wider circulation. So I've finally decided to repost it here, and apologies if this is seems a little random.
Looked at objectively, Louis XVI probably did deserve the guillotine (by this point he had been caught inviting foreign armies into France to crush the revolution, and was clearly guilty of treason). And yet, rather than cold justice, how much more appealing is Paine's urge for humanity. "If, on my
return to America, I should employ myself on a history of the French
Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors on the side of mercy,
than be obliged to tell one act of severe justice."
Given that within the year, the French Revolution would spiral out of control and start to eat its own children, think how much different history could have been if Paine's simple appeal to mercy had been listened to.
For that matter, given, how many subsequent revolutions in world history have followed the French model, think how different world history could have been if this advice had been followed.
The Sandinista Thomas Borge is another positive example [LINK HERE]. One can only hope that in the future revolutions, history follows the examples of Paine and Borge.
(Read in French by Deputy Bancal.) Very sincerely do I regret the Convention’s vote of yesterday for death. Marat [interrupting]:
I submit that Thomas Paine is incompetent to vote on this question;
being a Quaker his religious principles are opposed to capital
punishment. [Much confusion, quieted by cries for “freedom of speech,” on which Bancal proceeds with Paine’s speech.] I have the advantage of some experience; it
is near twenty years that I have been engaged in the cause of liberty,
having contributed something to it in the revolution of the United
States of America. My language has always been that of liberty and
humanity, and I know that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of
these two principles, l under all circumstances. I know that the public
mind of France, and particularly that of Paris, has been heated and
irritated by the dangers to which they have been exposed; but could we
carry our thoughts into the future, when the dangers are ended and the
irritations forgotten, what to-day seems an act of justice may then
appear an act of vengeance. [Murmurs.] My anxiety for the cause
of France has become for the moment concern for her honor. If, on my
return to America, I should employ myself on a history of the French
Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors on the side of mercy,
than be obliged to tell one act of severe justice.
The continuing disasters in Afghanistan have again made me remember Robespierre’s quote:
During the French Revolution, Brissot and the Girondists wanted to export the republicanism to France’s neighboring countries by force. They were convinced that if the French army were to overthrow the monarchies of its neighbors, and set up republican governments, then they would be welcomed as liberators by the local people.
During the euphoria of revolutionary France, Robespierre was one of the few politicians clear-headed enough to see through this. And over 200 years ago, he spelled out exactly what the dangers of this way of thinking were.
The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries.
Robespierre’s faction lost the vote, and France did invade its neighbors. But the war was a disaster, and Robespierre was vindicated by the actual events.
Actually I’ve already mentioned this quote twice on this blog already, so you might think I’m over-using by bringing it up a 3rd time
However I say this quote doesn’t get used enough.
It so perfectly applies to our present day situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, you would think this quote would get used more. But how many times have you heard it? Do a Google search and see how few times it pops up.
[Admittedly Robespierre’s historical legacy is a bit mixed, and that could be part of the embarrassment of repeating a quote associated with his name. This quote comes from the time of his life when he was just a charming liberal, before the stress of the revolution caused him to lose his mind and become an insane dictator. But either way, it doesn’t make him any less right.]
Conservatives, by and large, have done a very good job of cherry picking their favorite quotes from history and repeating them ad naseum until they get forced into mainstream culture. We liberals need to do more of this.
So repeat this quote. Repeat it and repeat and repeat it. Post it on your blog or on your facebook page. This quote needs to be repeated ad nauseam until it gets forced into the mainstream.
Actually on the topic of under-used historical quotes, I can’t help but remember Herman Goring's quote.
Goring, one of the Nazi leaders, when on trial for war crimes gave his thoughts about how the Nazi's had manipulated the German people into supporting the war:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars. Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Now I know what you’re thinking: this was already widely quoted in the years running up to the invasion of Iraq.
Well, it was widely quoted on liberal blogs. (I've used it on this blog in the past myself.)
However I saw very little reference to it in any mainstream publications. It also deserves to be repeated ad nauseam. Ideally it would get repeated so much that there wouldn’t be a school child in America who was unfamiliar with it.
This is another classic history. It was originally published in 1962, but has gone through numerous reprintings and is still available today.
Eric Hobsbawm is a famous British Marxist historian, and this book is part of his series analyzing recent history from a Marxist perspective.
I bought this book, along with another Hobsbawm book: "Revolutionaries", a few years ago in a Nagoya bookstore. Both books have sat on my shelf ever since and although I would leaf through them from time to time (I quoted Hobsbawm in this 2004 post) this is the first time I've read this book cover to cover.
It was not an easy read for me, which is why I waited a long time before sitting down and seriously reading it.
As the title indicates, the book covers the Revolutionary period of European history, specifically the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, and the years in between. But Hobsbawm never tells you what happened during those Revolutions. Instead he analyzes the conditions leading up to the revolutions, and the conditions resulting from them.
If you, like me, enjoy narrative history rather than analytical history, than this is strike one against the book already.
Added to that is a prose so dry and academic that you really have to concentrate hard to follow what Hobsbawm is saying.
A typical example: When we come to analyse the social and political structure of the world in the 1840s, however, we leave the world of superlatives for that of modest qualified statements. The bulk of the world's inhabitants continued to be peasants as before, though there were a few areas-notably Britain-where agriculture was already the occupation of a small minority, and the urban population already on the verge of exceeding the rural, as it did for the first time in the census of 1851. There were proportionally fewer slaves, for the international slave-trade had been officially abolished in 1815 and actually slavery in the British colonies in 1834, and in the liberated Spanish and French ones in and after the French Revolution. However, while the West Indies were now, with some non-British exceptions, an area of legally free agriculture, numerically slavery continued to expand in its two great remaining strongholds, Brazil and the Southern USA, stimulated by the very progress of industry and commerce which opposed all restraints of goods and person, and official prohibition made the slave trade more lucrative. (p. 369). And on it goes like that. And the sad thing is, that's only half the paragraph.
I know I ripped that out of context, but just imagine a whole book written in that dry tone.
I constantly found my mind wandering as I tried to work my way through this book, and in the end I could only get through it in small doses at a time.
It's a pity this book isn't written in a more accessible style, because once you get past the dry prose the ideas contained within are really fascinating. If you take the trouble to engage this book, you will learn a lot of interesting things from it.
Hobsbawm has taken an 60 year period of history when all of Europe was consumed with the struggle between absolutism and liberty. "Liberty, that nightingale with the voice of a giant, rouses the most profound sleepers...How is it possible to think of anything today except to fight for or against freedom? Those who cannot love humanity can still be great as tyrants. But how can one be indifferent?" (Ludwig Boerne (W) quoted in Hosbawm p. 138)
Every history student knows about the great revolutions of 1789 (which started in Paris and then spread to the rest of Europe) 1830 (which started in Paris and then spread to the rest of Europe) and 1848 (same deal).
But to this broad picture, Hobsbawm adds several more waves of revolution which don't always make the history books, such as the wave of uprisings that took place between 1820-1824.
Hobsbawm describes how the European revolutionaries during this period saw each local revolution as being connected, and dreamed of a single unified Republic. He compares the unified front against absolutism in every country as being similar to the struggle against fascism in the 1930s. And he compares events like the Greek Revolution in the 1820s which drew left wing support from all over, to the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century.
(And for that matter, comparisons are made to the Spanish civil war in the 19th century, in which liberal intellectuals threw their support behind the international brigade which went to support the Spanish liberals against the reactionary Clericals in the Spanish civil war of 1820-1823).
But it is not just the political revolutions that Hobsbawm is interested in. He examines the dual industrial and political revolutions and their impact on each other. For example, the political revolutions abolished feudalism and serfdom. Although this was partly done because of idealistic reasons, it also had the affect of flooding the cities with cheap labour needed for the factory owners. Thus ideology was largely shaped by the industrial necessity.
Hobsbawm also highlights some of the paradoxes of the age. For example liberal opinion eventually eliminated the slave trade in Europe, but that same liberal opinion placed a preeminent value on free trade, which helped to ensure that slavery would remain lucrative in its two remaining strongholds: Brazil and the Southern United States.
Also the liberal attitude idealized a laizefaire state, but, partly as a result of liberal reforms a bureaucracy was created and by 1840 government expenditure in liberal Britain was four times as great as autocratic Russia.
Hobsbawm also charts the birth of capitalism, it's earlier disasters and recessions, and how its proponents quickly established it in the popular mind as the only possible system of human existence.
The book has chapters on almost every imaginable facet of society: war, peace, land, religion, secular ideology, the arts and the sciences. These are all interesting in their own ways. For example, Hobsbawm in his chapter on science Hobsbawm explores the early conflicts between religion and science.
In his section on the arts, Hobsbawm claims that almost all of the art of lasting value from this period was politically motivated (contrary to the post modern view that true art must be separated from politics). He cites examples from Mozart's "The Magic Flute" to Beethoven's "Eroica" to the French painters such as Delacroix and David to all the romantic and revolutionary novelists of the period.
However as fascinating as all these sections are, once again one finds oneself having to wade through very dry and thick prose.
I recommend this book with caution. It's not an easy read, but for the reader willing to struggle through it there's a lot of interesting material in here.
Addendum: Also any one not fluent in French will find all the untranslated quotes an additional annoyance.
Since I'm trying to spend my free time putting together an independent study of European history, the last time I was in the states I thought I would go to the college text book stores and see what history books were being assigned to college students these days.
This book I got at a used textbook store (I think the book was designated as required reading for a Grand Valley history class, if I remember correctly).
It is, if nothing else, a very ambitious book. The author has clearly bitten off a lot to chew on here.
In his 20 page introduction, David Bell outlines the multiple interrelated themes of the book, and the many various assertions he seeks to prove.
Bell is attempting to trace the development of modern attitudes towards war.
He believes that both the attitude of modern doves, who believe that war is wrong, and that of modern hawks, who believe that war is necessary when combating a great evil, come from the history of the enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Before the French Revolution, war and military life was considered a normal part of existence,and a constant state of war was considered the norm for European kings and the military aristocracy. As a result, argues Bell, 16th and 17th century warfare was (some exceptions aside) relatively restrained and limited.
During the enlightenment, for the first time moral criticism of war appeared in mainstream intellectual thought, and this eventually culminated in the French Revolution, and the Revolutionary Assembly's formal declaration rejecting war.
Ironically, the same French Revolution lead Europe into 20 years of the bloodiest warfare it had ever seen. (Bell views the Revolutionary Wars and the following Napoleonic Wars as all part of the same long war.)
However, because after the Revolution intellectual currents were against war as a normal course of politics, it was now necessary for both sides to justify this war as a necessary evil leading to a greater peace.
It also became necessary to completely demonize the enemy, so that the gentleman's code on the battlefield no longer existed, but instead horrible atrocities were committed on both sides as part of what they viewed as a final apocalyptic war.
In his introduction and conclusion, Bell goes on to draw parallels with our modern age, and suggest that the way we view war now is a result of the intellectual upheavals in the enlightenment.
For example, Bell makes several parallels between "The war to end all wars" rhetoric of World War I, and the same belief during the French Revolution. In both cases soldiers believed they were fighting one final apocalyptic battle in order to bring about an era of world peace.
Bell also attributes our tendency to always describe the enemy of the moment in terms of absolute evil to this same intellectual history.
As you can see, there's a lot of balls being juggled here. And at times the thread of the book is in danger of being lost among all the different layers of argument, and I have my doubts about whether Bell has successfully proven everything he set out to prove.
But then this book is not written as an academic thesis, as Bell makes clear in his introduction.
"I have written 'The First Total War' for general readers, not only my fellow historians. I have therefore tried, as much as possible, to embed my arguments in sketches and stories...rather than in analysis alone....If these qualities make the book something other than the definitive, exhaustive pronouncement on the subject...so be it."
If this book is judged by the standards of strictly proving all of its assertions, then I have my doubts. But if you want something that will provide a lot of food for thought to chew on for a while, this is your book.
The first couple chapters are a bit of a mess. Bell is trying to show how pre-modern attitudes about wars were different from the modern era, but it's filled with so many exceptions, caveats, and counter-examples that I almost got a little dizzy trying to figure out what he was actually saying.
Once the book gets to the French Revolution, however, the narrative really takes off.
Bell spends a lot of time talking about the horrific French civil war in Vendee. This is the same ground that Victor Hugo covered in his novel, "Ninety-Three". And in fact Bell quotes from Hugo's book several times.
However the perspective Bell gives to the conflict is entirely different than Hugo's. Both portray the war as horrible, but Hugo shows how man's noble nature rises out of the horror. Reading Bell, one gets a much more depressing view of human nature as he gives example after example of terrible atrocities committed by both sides.
As Bell promised in his introduction, his history is interspersed liberally with interesting stories to keep the narrative alive. However, to paraphrase Dickens, the interest we find in reading these anecdotes is not the sort of interest that credits humanity. Instead, it is the interest in the macabre and the horrific that keeps us reading through Bell's list of atrocities, starting with Vendee and continuing onto the Peninsula Wars.
However, there is a point to this. This isn't some fiction out of the mind of Stephen King, but the actual record of human history. And what's more, as Bell emphasizes, these were wars that were supposedly fought for humane and enlightened reasons.
This book was published just last year, and like a lot of recently published history books, it tries to highlight some of the parallels between the 18th and 19th Centuries and the mess we find ourselves in today.
For example, Bell retells the debate in the French National Assembly concerning whether or not to invade neighboring countries and impose Republican governments on them by force. Robespierre opposed the war, and Bell writes that:
"Robespierre showed a better grasp of some basic principles of political sociology than have some more recent democratic leaders, and his words are worth quoting:
'The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries'." (Robespierre quoted in Bell p.118)
Also, whereas Juan Cole saw Napoleon's Egypt as a parallel to the Iraq War, Bell often compares the guerrilla war in Spain to Iraq. "In particular, Spain saw the development of a guerrilla war every bit as destructive--and eerily similar to--the insurgency now under way in early twenty-first-century Iraq" Bell writes on page 70. (One of several instances in which he directly makes the Iraq-Spain comparison.)
Although Bell makes reference to the Bush administration many times, he never mentions Bush's infamous Orwellian quote, "When we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." (Full text of remark here). But in his concluding chapter, Bell makes clear that he's very concerned about the use of language which seeks to form every new war as a conflict between good and evil.
"The survival of a belief in redemptive war has not yet, thankfully, led to a resumption of real war on an apocalyptic scale....It is only the language that is apocalyptic for now....But as I have tried to show in this book, language matters." (Bell p. 316)
Link of the Day
This Chomsky-William F. Buckley debate from 1969 is fascinating both of a time piece, and to see Chomsky wipe the floor with another right wing ideologue. I linked to it a few years ago, but that was before the full version was available on-line (at that time it was just a 15 minute clip). The whole show has now been uploaded, and is well worth watching.
It's a bit confusing telling which order the clips go in, so I've tried to help by putting the links in order below. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
This book recounts the relationship between George Washington and the marquis de Lafayette.
In my school days, I remember hearing about Lafayette's role in the American Revolution. However, with the typical American-centric education common to most schools, Lafayette's story ended there. It was not until the last 2 or 3 years that I started to realize Lafayette played an important role in the French Revolution as well.
If your education was similar to mine, you might find this book quite interesting. It traces not only Lafayette's friendship with Washington and his role in the American history, but also follows him through the events of the French Revolution.
As the subtitle to the book indicates, the author has clearly bitten off a lot to chew. In one single book he tries to cover the biographies of two different men, as well as two different revolutions.
And at times, you do feel like you are only getting glimpses at each man, instead of the full on biographical treatment. But like any good writer, Gaines posses the ability to skim through history and pick out the most interesting parts without getting bogged down in the details.
(James R. Gaines (w) is not a historian, but a journalist by and former magazine editor by profession, and he obviously brought those skills to bear in writing this book.)
Gaines has an eye for picking out interesting details and digressions. For example, you'd be surprised to learn how much the American Revolution was influenced by the the relationship between Pierre Beaumarchais (the author of the "The Barber of Seville and the Figaro plays (w)) and Chevalier d'Eon (w), a sexual confused French spy.
There are a lot of interesting tidbits about George Washington in this book as well.
Considering how much we revere George Washington in America, it's shocking how little the average American actually knows about him (apocryphal stories of Cherry trees and wooden teeth aside). Gaines book gives us a good look at the man behind the myth. It's a mostly reverential portrait of America's father, but he doesn't shy away from some of Washington's eccentricities and blunders.
For example, Gaines quotes from some of George Washington's early letters, and comments that given how great a man he was later to become the young Washington's letters show us more than we might wish to know about the man.
Gaines also writes about how Washington's first military command was to preside over a massacre at the outbreak of the French-Indian War.
There's a lot of biographical information in here about Lafayette as well. And again, if, like me, your knowledge of Lafayette kind of faded out after the American Revolution, it is interesting to read how Lafayette was for a brief time the most powerful man in France at the start of the French Revolution.
Once the Jacobins rose to power and the revolution started to eat its own children, Lafayette crossed the boarder and surrendered to the Austrian army. He spent six years in an Austrian prison, but survived to again become one of the leading figures in the 1830 Revolution.
***********
There's a fair amount of overlap between this book and "The Great Upheaval" by Jay Winik (another book I've recently read). Both books cover roughly the same time period, and both authors were apparently mining the same material, because a number of the same quotes even appear in both books.
That being said, there's enough different material to make each book worth reading on it's own. (Jay Winik almost completely neglects Lafayette's role, while Gaines focuses on it exclusively).
Both books also contrast the chaos of the French Revolution with the stable government and peaceful transition of power that the American Revolution created. And to a certain extent it is a comparison worth noting. Comparing the American Revolution with the French Revolution makes you realize how unstable Revolutions inherently are, and how easily the new American government could have fallen apart, and how astonishing it is that the new American country managed to hold together.
At the same time, there's a fine line between simply noting this difference, and descending into a smug sense of inherent American superiority. Gaines prose, and the patriotic language he uses, seems to walk this line.
But Gaines is no reactionary patriot. Like Winik's "The Great Upheaval", Gaines uses historical parallels to subtlety criticize the Iraq War. Gaines praises the wisdom of America's founding fathers in wanting to stay out of foreign wars. He contrasts this with the French Revolution's disastrous attempts to bring republican governments into other countries by military force. Like Winik, Gaines never mentions the Iraq War directly, but his choice of language won't leave any reader in doubt about his meaning.
I ran into this book in the airport, of all places, at one of those small book stands next to the coffee machine.
Being a bit of a literary snob, I almost turned up my nose at this just because of that. But the more I flipped through it, the more hooked I became. I finally ended up buying the book and I can safely say, it was a great purchase.
To start with the author has chosen a fascinating subject. The book, subtitled "America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800", seeks to show how, even during the 18th Century, the world was just as internationally connected then as it is now. To demonstrate this, Winik focuses on 3 countries: Russia, France, and America, and seeks to show how what was happening in Moscow at the time had a direct impact on Paris and Washington, and vice-versa.
Of course, there has already been a great deal written on how the American Revolution impacted the French Revolutions . But what is unique about Winik's book is he starts at 1788, when the American Revolution was already finished. The book, therefore, is much more about the French Revolution, and how the French Revolution impacted American domestic politics, which is a topic much less explored than the reverse.
But where Winik really gets creative is when he also throws Russia into the picture, and attempts to tie in events in Moscow to what was happening in France and America. It's a really interesting concept.
For my money though, the really great thing about this book is the writing. For a historian, Winik writes surprisingly well, and this book was an absolute pleasure to read. Much of the book almost feels like a novel instead of an old dry and dusty history book.
For an example, read below the scene in which Danton and Camille Desmoulins (two French Revolutionaries who were instrumental in starting the French Revolution, but who were victims of a power struggle with Robespierre) are carted off to the guillotine.
"It was a cloudless spring day when the condemned men were carted off in five tumbrels to the familiar Place de la Revolution--like the monarchists before them, like the king and queen, like the nonrefractory priests, like their friends and colleagues from the Convention; even the radical leader Hebert had been cut down less than two weeks before. Danton was thirty-four and so was Desmoulins; it seemed like an eternity, and perhaps it was, since that fateful moment when Camille had risen up and exhorted Parisians to head for the Bastille. Passing through a huge and silent crowd, Danton bore up well; not so Desmoulins, who was near the cracking point. Leaning over the red-painted tumbrel he meekly appealed to the people: "I was the first apostle of Liberty; it was I that called the people to arms at the beginning." Pausing at the house where Robespierre lived, Danton, defiant as ever, rose up to his feet and shrieked once more, "I'm leaving everything in a frightful mess. Not a man of them had an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than to muck about with this politics." By now, night was falling. Reaching the scaffold, Desmoulins was third in line, Danton last--thus he could hear the whistle and thud as the blade fell on all the heads before him. For a fleeting moment he faltered, then roused himself, muttering: "Courage Danton, no weakness." As he approached the blood-splattered plank, he altered the ghastly ritual, exhorting Sanson, the executioner, "Don't forget to show my head to the people. It's worth the trouble." A hush fell over the crowd. Eight days later, it would be Lucile Desmoulins, along with Hebert's widow and his Commune compatriot Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, taking their turn at the guillotine. The ledger was now wiped clean."
Isn't that great the way Winik just hooks you in and then carries you right along? If you like history, I can guarantee you'll enjoy this book.
One can nit-pick Winik's writing style a little bit. He does have the annoying habit of, Rumsfeld-like, asking his own questions, and then immediately answering them the sentence following.
And he does occasionally slow down the narrative with pages of fluffy (and in my opinion, unnecessary) analysis.
But on the whole, it's a great read.
Winik also does a good job of following through on his thesis, and demonstrating how politics in Paris, Moscow, and Washington were all inter-related.
It is not, however, strictly an academic book in the sense that not every word in it is relevant to the main thesis. Rather, Winik uses the thesis as a jumping off point from which to explore other stories he finds of interest.
Thus, there is a lot written about Catherine the Great of Russia, and her war against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. This has minimal relevance to what was happening in Paris and Washington, but it is an interesting story, and the parallels to modern history (the story of what happens when a Western superpower gets bogged down in a war against a Muslim nation) will not be lost on the modern reader.
Winik does attempt to bring out some international connections even here. He emphasizes the role of John Paul Jones (the American naval hero famous for coining the phrase, "I have not yet begun to fight") who briefly served on Russia's side during the war. But John Paul Jones's part in the war was very small, and he served as a private individual, and not as a government representative.
However, I was willing to forgive these narrative digressions because I didn't know anything about the Russia-Ottoman war, and because it was interesting to read about.
I was a bit more frustrated by the fact that the sections on the French Revolution focused almost entirely on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (as English speaking histories have a tendency to do sometimes). Most of the French Revolution is retold as if the most important thing was the personal hardships of the royal family, and all the other leading figures of the French Revolution are pushed off to the sides.
Once King Louis and Marie get their heads sliced off, then Robespierre and the Jacobins are allowed to take center stage. But by then the only part of the French Revolution left to tell is how it descended into more and more terror.
Winik should have focused on the French Revolutionaries earlier, to make a more dramatic contrast between the early idealism at the beginning of the Revolution, and the chaos it ended up becoming.
As it is, his analysis sections are heavy with commentary about how the French Revolution descended from idealism to despotism, but we never fully get to see the transition in his narrative.
Also key figures like Thomas Paine and Lafayette, who symbolize the international connection between America and France, are cited repeatedly in the analysis sections, but we learn very little of them from the narrative sections.
Granted, Winik has an almost impossible task before him. He needs to track not just one, but 3 countries over the course of 12 years, and deal with all the historical giants that populated this period: Washington, Jefferson, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Madison, Adams, Robespierre, Lafayette, Thomas Paine, Danton, Mirabeau, John Paul Jones, Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette, Talleyrand, Napoleon, etc, etc,etc. I guess it's no wonder he fails to do justice to most of them.
Although the subtitle of the book is "AMERICA and the birth of the modern world", I suspect this was probably added by the publisher. It is France and the French revolution which take up the bulk of this book, both in terms of pages allotted to it and its impact on everything else. There are, however, some very interesting sections on the rivalry between Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Burr, and the 1800 election.
One final note: this is a quibble, but the index in this book is noticeably incomplete. In a book with so many names being tossed about, it would have been nice to have a more thorough index to help the reader keep track of everyone.
I saw this book in a Fukuoka bookstore, and thought, “Talleyrand..., Talleyrand..., that sounds like a familiar name. I've heard that before somewhere.” And that was about the extent of my knowledge before buying this book. However, looking over it, and noticing that Tallyrand’s life dealt with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (areas of history I wanted to learn more about) I decided to buy the book and give it a try.
In case you don’t know anymore about the life of Talleyrand than I did, it turns out he had quite a long and interesting career. He started out as a clergyman, and worked his way up to become the archbishop of Autun. Then, when the Estates General was opened in 1989, Talleyrand became active in the French Revolution, helping to create the civil constitution of the clergy. Eventually Talleyrand left the church for greater ambitions, but when the French Revolution got to hot for him he fled to England. When he was declared an undesirable alien in England, he went to America. Once things calmed down in France, Talleyrand returned and became involved with the Directory phase of the Revolution. Talleyrand became foreign minister under the Directory, and organized Napoleon’s disastrous expedition into Egypt. Talleyrand then helped to organize Napoleon’s coup in 1799. After that he served as Napoleon’s foreign minister, reshaping, together with Napoleon, all of the maps of Europe. Once he became disillusioned with Napoleon, Talleyrand helped to organize his downfall and arranged for the restoration of King Louis XVIII. After the Bourbon kings were thrown out in the July Revolution, Talleyrand served as French ambassador to London under Louise-Philippe before finally dying in 1838.
As you can see, there’s a lot of ground that needs to be covered in this biography, and in fact the author opens with a quote from Talleyrand’s secretary, “I have often myself seen [Talleyrand] smile at the idea of anyone attempting his biography.”
Perhaps because of the vast amount of material that needs to be covered, the author Robin Harris gives virtually no background information about any of the events he talks about. The assumption is that the reader is already well-versed in 18th and 19th Century European history, and is just seeking a better analysis of what they already know.
For a paperback history I bought in a popular bookstore, I found it a surprisingly difficult read. This might be partly because it was a written by a British author and published in London, and my impression, from talking to the Brits I’ve met here in Japan, is that they tend to be a lot better educated about European history than we Americans.
If I had my choice, I would have preferred to read a biography of Talleyrand that explained the background of what was happening a little bit more, but I still enjoyed this.
Talleyrand’s life as a Bishop was fascinating to read about because he was incredibly promiscuous. And the impression I got from this book was that in 18th Century France all the clergy were promiscuous, and no one really seemed to care.
This, it turns out, is one of many scandals that surround the life and career of Talleyrand. He comes through in the book like the cocky smart kid
It turns out that Talleyrand was also behind the “X,Y,Z affair” which is something I vaguely remember learning about in my high school American history class.
“Since 1796, French corsairs had been attacking American shipping, in retaliation against the Jay Treaty between the US and Britain, which was deemed by Paris to have breached the terms of American neutrality. A delegation was sent to Paris in the autumn of 1797 to recover damages for US losses and to bring an end to the dispute. But the three American negotiators, John Marshall, Charles Pickney and Elbridge Gerry, were shocked by the treatment they received. They were approached by a series of agents, whose precise status was obscure, but who were clearly working for Talleyrand and who figured in President Adam’s later report to Congress on the matter as ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. The American envoys were told that the precondition for success was the payment of what amounted to substantial bribes. Specifically, they were asked to underwrite a loan of 32 million Dutch florins, to make a gift of 50,000 gold louis to the Directory, and to provide ‘sweeteners’ for the Foreign Minister and his intermediaries. The Americans sent back a long indignant report about these outrageous proceedings, which President Adams duly conveyed to Congress. The scandal in the United States was immense. It then reached the French public through British press reports. Talleyrand indignantly defended his reputation. He even managed to persuade Gerry, the most Francophile of the US negotiators, to lend some support to his protestations of innocence. To the Directory, he simply denied any knowledge. His protestations can hardly have been credible, but for a time he survived in office. This was partly because Barras, his protector, was involved as well. But it was also because, despite the scandal, both the French and American governments knew that no one was better equipped to negotiate the peace between them than Talleyrand. It was in order to press these complicated negotiations forward that the Directory wanted Talleyrand to stay in Paris, rather than go to Constantinople….”
Talleyrand’s corruption and willingness to take bribes is a common theme in the book, but as the author points out, “Far from alienating foreign powers, Talleyrand’s venality pleased them. It seemed to guarantee his flexibility.”
In short, although sections of this book were a struggle for me, I enjoyed it on the whole and I think it helped a lot to broaden my understanding of this time period in history.
Thomas Paine is a fascinating figure, and someone I've always wanted to know more about. (In a past post, I put him on my top 10 list of biopics I would like to see Hollywood do). Ever since my 7th grade history teacher mentioned that Thomas Paine was the penman of the American Revolution, and then went on to become the penman of the French Revolution, I’ve always been intrigued by that one man link between both revolutions.
At Gifu library, they used to have the complete works of Thomas Paine on their shelves. It ran several volumes, as I remember, so I never read the whole thing through, but being a geek I would pick it up and leaf through it whenever I was in the library. I remember randomly coming across Thomas Paine’s speech at the debate over whether or not to guillotine King Louis XVI, and I remember being impressed by the simple elegance of his arguments.
“If on my return to America, I should employ myself in a history of the French Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors dictated by humanity than one inspired by a justice too severe.”
(That quote, by the way, is also reproduced in this book by John Vail on page 82).
For example, I did not know Paine was not an American citizen, but grew up in Britain and only moved to America when he was 37 years old. It was also interesting to learn that after the American Revolution he returned to England for a period to continue his republican agitation there, and only barely escaped from the British government. He was warned by none other than William Blake that he “must not go home, or you’re a dead man.” Paine instead left for France, narrowly escaping arrest.
I also was surprised to learn that he spent most of his life impoverished, and for all his fame he hardly made any money off of his writings. And how after the revolution he complained to the founding fathers about his lack of compensation.
“For all his fame and prestige, Paine enjoyed little in the way of material fortune from his eight-year stay in America. After the American victory at Yorktown, Paine wrote a long letter to Washington complaining of his impoverished condition. ‘While it was everybody’s fate to suffer,’ he said, ‘I cheerfully suffered with them.’ But now that the financial crisis had passed and the country was moving into prosperity, he thought it only fair that something should be done on his behalf.” (P. 47)
It’s hard not to admire Paine after reading this book. He comes through as an honest person who sacrificed so much for the cause of liberty.
Paine’s devotion to honest government got him in trouble with the Silas Deane affair. Silas Deane was an American diplomat who used his position to line his own pockets in 1778. (It’s sad how soon a brand new government already begins to be filled with corrupt politicians). Paine used his position as secretary of the Committee of Foreign Affairs to expose Deane, but as a result made a lot of enemies among Deane’s supporters. It caused Paine to lose his job at the time, and many years later, during the Terror phase of the French Revolution this resulted in Paine languishing in a French prison with no help from the American government. The American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, had refused to help Paine because Morris had been a supporter of Silas Deane.
In fact, Paine only escaped the guillotine by the most miraculous twist of fate.
“Paine escaped the guillotine purely by chance. Each evening, the guards chalked a cross on the doors of the prisoners who were scheduled to be executed. One night, Paine left his cell door opened outwards and the guards mistakenly placed the chalk mark on the inside of his door. When Paine and his roommates returned to their cell, they shut their door for the night, so the mark went unobserved. When the guards made their midnight rounds, they fortuitously passed by Paine’s cell.” (P. 95).
I think Thomas Paine can safely be called one of America’s founding fathers. It’s always interesting to read about the founding fathers, because their views have become sort of like the bible of American government. Whether it’s right or not to constantly refer back to the views of the founding fathers is another question, but anyone familiar with American political discourse knows you can add a lot of weight to your argument by having a founding father on your side.
(Although the founding fathers are often cited by people who have little idea what they actually said. Just like the Bible. Back in my Calvin days, I can’t tell you the number of times a conservative Christian would try and justify the death penalty to me by quoting from the Bible “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It used to drive me crazy because (as anyone whose actually read the bible knows) Jesus specifically repudiates this in Matthew 6:43 “You have heard that it was said ‘Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, Don not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also….”
I’m digressing here I know, but this is one of my pet peeves. )
I don’t think Thomas Paine, and his friend Thomas Jefferson, would have approved of future generations constantly referring back to the founding fathers. Paine is quoted in this book as writing, “No generation has the right to impose its choices upon posterity; whatever government or form of society was right for one generation might be totally unsuited to the differing needs of another.” (p. 36).
However if one is going to constantly refer back to the founding fathers, the impression I got from this book was that Paine would be very comfortable on the liberal wing of Democrat party.
“Paine not only asserted the superiority of republican government but also offered a breathtaking vision of how a republican government could begin to ameliorate poverty within England. He proposed a series of public policies—progressive income taxes, government grants to the poor for education and housing, unemployment relief and public jobs, maternity grants and child allowances and old age pensions. He insisted that his program was not a utopian pipe dream but could be accomplished if the government simply stopped fighting foreign wars and ended its financial support of the aristocracy. The needs of the many, Paine argued, could be satisfied if the selfishness of the few was restrained.” (p. 71)
…No doubt, Thomas Paine would be turning over in his grave if he knew how much the US government is currently spending fighting foreign wars.
Speaking of which, Thomas Paine is also quoted in this book as writing, “If there is a sin superior to every other, it’s that of willful and offensive war.” (p. 20)
That ought to be framed and put on the wall of the oval office. Our Presidents have a habit of forgetting that one.
Paine’s reaction to the Conspiracy of Equals phase of the French Revolution is also interesting:
“Paine wrote Agrarian Justice in the winter of 1795-96. The essay was written in the wake of the suppression of the Conspiracy of Equals led by Gracchus Babeuf, a failed radical coup d’etat that became known as the first communist movement of the modern era. While Paine wholeheartedly condemned Babeuf’s uprising, it nevertheless provoked him to reconsider his own political views. Paine argued that political equality could not be eradicated so long as economic inequality persisted: He maintained that the first rule of civilization should be “that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.”
“Paine retreated from Babeuf’s radical solution to economic inequality, namely the abolition of private property, for he doubted that an equal distribution of property was either possible or desirable. Yet his denunciation of poverty and human misery was never more passionate or forceful. “The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust,” he wrote. “It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye is like dead and living bodies chained together.” (p. 103).
In short, this was an absolutely fascinating little book. I'm not 100 % Thomas Paine qualifies as a “World Leader” but I’m glad they gave him the benefit of the doubt and included him in this series because I really enjoyed reading about him. I hope to someday find a more in-depth biography of this fascinating individual.
Bonus Link: More Japanese Music on Youtube
This is perhaps my favorite Japanese song ever (in so much as it is possible to have a favorite song, since it always depends on your mood at the time.) Yoyake o tsugeni by Off Course.
I have this song on one of my mixed tapes, and it's one of those songs where when I'm driving, I'm constantly stopping the tape and rewinding so I can hear it just one more time.
It's not a very famous song. The group Off Course was moderately famous in the mid 70s, but this song was from their early days before they took off. In fact you can see someone wrote a comment in Japanese which reads (loosely translated) "What? Why would anyone upload this obscure song? What kind of person are you?" (Everyone on the Internet is a critic).
