One of the funniest things I ever read was (and I’m only slightly paraphrasing because I don’t remember it verbatim) “Marat used his journal to spur the illiterate rabble into acts of violence.”
And I’m like,
If that’s Marat’s plan there’s a rather glaring issue with it,,,
Charlotte Corday was a 24-year-old living during the French Revolution. she was a republican- not like the modern political party in America; like someone who believes the government of their country should be a republic. she supported the general aim of the revolution, namely the end of the French monarchy and the establishment of a representative government in its place. even though, as the daughter of a minor noble, she’d have more to gain by the preservation of the old system
however, she strongly disagreed with the rapidly escalating violence of the new government and writer Jean-Paul Marat’s “kill everyone who disagrees with killing everyone who disagrees with us” attitude (he literally advocated killing 500 or 600 more people to make everything better in France). she decided somewhat shortsightedly that killing Marat would stop the Terror. so she did. she was executed, as she knew and accepted she would be, and the Terror intensified with Marat as a new emblematic martyr
she wrote an entire final letter to the people of France about how she felt she was acting to preserve the republic. but sure, just because she didn’t think a bloodbath was the best way to fix a broken country, she clearly supported every single thing the king did and didn’t give a shit about the starving peasants
tl;dr- “can you maybe chill?” Charlotte Corday said to the more murder-happy factions of the French Revolution via a kitchen knife. “how about you chill?” they replied via the guillotine
My apologies, friend. While I agree she was not a royalist, she was a Girondin, at a time when the Girondin were arguing for policies of federalism (regions having more power) which was lending itself to civil wars in France where the English and the Spanish and the Prussians and the Austrians could all send their forces onto French soil with promise that they would get to Paris and kill all the Conventionelles.
Marat also called for the death of 300 emigrated aristocrats because they were emigrating and then leading armies back to France to kill the Republic and all of its ardent supporters, certainly all the Conventionelles and Regicides.
Marat also acted as a democratic maximum, a kind of “beyond this, you shall not go.”(Gross, J.P., Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice, Introduction). After his death, several people tried to take up his mantle, but not to act as the democratic maximum, but instead to rally citizens to the Left, the Enrages (Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varenne, Fouche, and Carrier) and the Herbertists (Pere Duschene was written by Herbert), calling for more violence than organized ways to combat corruption and civil war and foreign war and win the type of republic that everyone wanted that Marat was suggesting, albeit in his overdramatic fashion. Marat becried the deaths in the Champs de Mars massacre; Marat called for the king not to be put back in charge after he tried to run away to Austria to crush the Assembly Nationale; Marat called for death within 24 hours for the king because he felt that otherwise emigres would use the king as a rallying point to enter France with armies (they did); the Girondin called for Marat to be arrested and tried (he was and argued so well that he was freed), and many of the Girondin voted not to kill the king but to send him to America (which would have been an awful idea: see Louis-Philippe d’Orleans and 1830-1848).
Guillotining was new and was designed to allow the poor to be killed in the least gruesome, fastest way possible (much less gruesome than hanging). It is still considered by some to be the best way to give someone the death penalty, particularly as injecting someone with death drugs has been found to cause pain and not to work very efficiently and as many states are running out of these drugs). (Or you could have no death penalty, but even Marat couldn’t argue that far ahead, for all that he tried [he predicted the Russian Revolution, the rise of Communism, and the Cold War]).
And political assassinations still get either life in prison or the death penalty.
amarguerite asked:
needsmoreresearch answered:
Wow now that’s a toughie. I’m going to narrow it down a bit and just do Top Five French Revolution Cravats:
1. Start with the basics. As Victor Hugo tells us, Saint-Just habite une cravate.
2. On the other hand Marat just slings the damn thing around his neck and dashes out into the street. He’s not a model, the portrait artist just happened to be there:
3. In the middle, balancing structural support with natural flow, we have Robespierre. Don’t look so anxious, friend, it’s a little fussy but you make it work:
4. Really, we can all agree that a sympathetic artist makes all the difference in a cravat’s set. See David’s self-portrait:
5. …vs. Mirabeau’s disaster:
“La mort de Marat” whitout Jean-Paul Marat
Where is he ?
They managed to get him to A&E this time…
I always thought the French Revolution flew off the rails around the time the zombie apocalypse began
The Good Omens thing where the dude is locked up in the Bastille during the French Revolution kind of reminds me of the middle-school-age textbook I saw that earnestly told me that Marat never bathed.
I was screaming at the sceen, is what I did. I choose to explain it in-universe as Crowley just having woken up from a lonnnng sleep and getting confused.
…this is why Aziraphale’s so insistent about the crepes
he recognizes Crowley’s gotta eat and maybe then he’ll realize they’re not in the Bastille??
Or maybe they’ve just gradually become so English that they’ve started actively ignoring everything that happens in France. Possibly so English that they think “bastille“ is just “prison“ in French.
I feel like canon very much supports this.
Anonymous asked:
bunniesandbeheadings answered:
They were teeny.
Marat was one foot five feet tall
Robespierre was five-foot-three (and referred to as a “pygmy” and as a “little bugger).
A quick google search is telling me that Danton was 5′11, but no source has been provided so take that with a grain of salt or a saltmine
There were hundreds of French Revolutionaries, I can’t name them all here, unfortunately. I also don’t know many offhand.
I know mentioning Marat, Robespierre, and Danton seems to reinforce the idea of their being a triumvirate but it actually just reinforces the idea that I’m incredibly lazy.
neil-gaiman asked:
luciens-library answered:
Huh. Thanks for the heads up!
The English Wikipedia page on Montmartre doesn’t mention this name-change, but the French one does. However, it doesn’t tell us why Montmartre was called Montmarat. For that, we ended up at the Danish Wikipedia page on Montmartre - I’ve no idea why that one is more detailed than the others, but there you go. As a name, Montmartre means ‘Mount of the Martyr’, after the martyr St Denis, who got decapitated up the top of the hill. When the Revolution set about de-Christianising everything, they renamed Montmartre to Montmarat, to celebrate the famed journalist and Montagnard politician Jean-Paul Marat. This guy lived from 1743 to 1793, when he was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin supporter radicalised against the Montagnards. I’m not able to find anything on the exact date when this name-change took place, but all of the sources I have found describe the name change as happening in honour of the fallen Marat - which suggests sometime after July 1973. I’m also not finding any specific dates on the return to ‘Montmartre’, except that it was pretty quick. Best guess: end of the Revolution with the rise of Napoleon in 1799.
Check out more on the Girondins and the Montagnards here, or read our original post on Montmartre here.
Hello, citizens! This is a collection of tools, archives and primary sources that can facilitate research on the French Revolution ; all of them are accessible online for free.
Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française (40 volumes): parliamentary history of the French Revolution ; includes primary sources such as records, speeches, decrees etc.
Histoire du tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris (6 volumes): history of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris ; includes primary sources such as records, writings, orders etc.
La Société des Jacobins (6 volumes): Aulard’s history of the Jacobin Club ; includes primary sources such as records, speeches, writings etc.
Collection complète des lois, décrets, ordonnances, règlemens et avis du Conseil d'État (34 volumes): collection of the laws, decrees and orders that were issued between 1788 and 1830
Réimpression de l'ancien Moniteur (31 volumes): reprint of Le Moniteur Universel, which was one of the most prominent newspapers during the Revolution
Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan, etc. supprimés ou omis par Courtois. précédés du Rapport de ce député à la Convention Nationale (3 volumes): collection of documents that were found in the course of Courtois’ investigation ; includes many notes, letters and manuscripts written by Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon etc.
Archives Parlementaires (101 volumes): collection of the procès-verbaux of the legislative sessions during the French Revolution
Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public, avec la correspondance officielle des représentants en mission et le registre du conseil exécutif provisoire (30 volumes): collection of the orders and correspondences of the Committee of Public Safety
Œuvres de Robespierre (11 volumes): collected writings, letters and speeches of Maximilien Robespierre
Œuvres de Saint-Just (2 volumes): collected writings, letters and speeches of Louis Antoine Saint-Just
Œuvres de Marat (1 volume): collected writings, letters and speeches of Jean-Paul Marat
Œuvres de Danton (1 volume): collected writings and speeches of Georges Jacques Danton
Œuvres de Desmoulins (2 volumes): collected writings, letters and speeches of Camille Desmoulins
French Revolution Digital Archive: project set up by the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France ; offers free access to the Archives Parlementaires, as well as to an archive of images that were created during the French Revolution
Gallica: digital archive of the Bibliothèque nationale de France ; offers free access to images, writings and documents of the French Revolution
Guillotinés de la Révolution Française: portal searching the index of the people that were guillotined during the French Revolution
Condamnés à mort pendant la Révolution: portal
searching the index of
the people that were sentenced to death during the French Revolution
Emigrés de la Révolution Française: portal searching the index of the people that emigrated during the French Revolution
Dictionnaires d'autrefois: portal that searches Dictionaries from the 17th to the 20th century ; the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française from 1798 is particularly helpful when researching terms in connection to primary sources of the Revolution
Dictionnaire de la révolution française: dictionary of institutions, persons and events in connection to the French Revolution
Dictionnaire des parlementaires français: dictionary of the French deputies from 1789 to 1889, offering brief biographical sketches of the representatives ; particularly useful when researching relatively obscure deputies
Feel free to add things, citizens. Have a nice day!
At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions — the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values.
A quite different French version sought equality of result.
It starts off illustrating the French Revolution with Les Mis, and somehow the quality still manages to go deteriorate
French firebrands saw laws less as absolute, but instead as useful to the degree that they contributed to supposed social justice and coerced redistribution
Right… The laws, not absolute. This is pretty much the most incorrect thing you could say about the ideology of French Revolution. To the revolutionaries, the laws were an expression of the general will, and therefore sacred. Like, that’s the main theme running through any discussion of law that took place at the time. As for the rest… which ones? the dudes who declared property rights to be sacred?
They ended up not with a Bill of Rights and separation of powers,
They totally did end up with a bill of rights, though. Actually, they didn’t so much end up with one as start off the revolution with one.
but instead with mass executions and Napoleonic tyranny.
The “firebrands” didn’t cause 18 brumaire. The reactionaries did. Not to mention that the American revolution didn’t exactly lead to sunshine and kittens. They didn’t fight their wars with hugs.
Our revolutionary inspirations are now Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien de Robespierre, not the Founding Founders.
Congratulations. You’ve upgraded.
I believe one of these revolutions abolished slavery and established universal male suffrage. You’d think it would have been the one that “opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values” but history is strange that way.
Hello, citizens! This is a collection of primary sources on the French Revolution that are accessible online for free; in my experience, they are extremely helpful when searching for contemporary speeches, letters etc. Most of them consist of multiple volumes, so I’ll offer the links leading to the collections. Please add some if I forgot anything! Thanks to @valeria-lagrimas & @montagnarde1793 for their help!
protocols & documents:
oeuvres:
Have a nice day, citizens!
Imagine it’s the year 1789 and you are waking up in Paris. You might hear an angry mob outside your window, about to storm the Bastille prison. Tonight, however, the mobs in Paris will be happy — celebrating Bastille Day, which marks the beginning of the French Revolution and the beginning of the end of French royalty. Along with all the ruckus and rioting that accompanied the revolution, commentator Miles Hoffman says there was also music in the air.
Drop in to any concert hall or ballroom and you could have heard plenty of Italian and French opera, choral music and orchestras. But most of the significant music of the day, Hoffman says, was not written by the French.
“The most important composers in France at the time were foreigners,” Hoffman says. “One of the composers very well known in Paris at the time of the revolution and just before was Joseph Haydn.” He was commissioned to write a set of six symphonies, known as the “Paris” symphonies today. One of them turned out to be a particular favorite of Marie Antoinette, and was later nicknamed “The Queen.“
Music was not suppressed during the revolution, Hoffman says. The theaters and opera houses were not shut down.
"The people who were in power were aristocrats or members of the upper middle class, and they didn’t necessarily have an allergy to high culture. They co-opted classical music. They inspired, or directed, important composers of the time to write great ceremonial pieces for big outdoor celebrations. So music became, in a sense, a tool of the revolution.” And it became very grandiose, such as the Hymne a la Victoire by Luigi Cherubini.
Music Of The Masses
Hoffman notes that the revolution spawned almost 3,000 popular songs, including the prominent hit of 1790 called “Ca ira” (“It’ll be fine”) which people sang in the streets. As the revolution became more violent, the words to the song were altered accordingly (“aristocrats to the lampposts, we’ll hang them …”).
But eclipsing that song, and outlasting it, Hoffman says, is “La Marseillaise.”
“It was written in 1792 by Rouget de Lisle, an army engineer, and picked up by volunteer soldiers marching from Marseille to Paris. They sang it along the way, and it became the unofficial anthem of the revolution. And in 1795 it became the official national anthem of the country.”
Legacy Of A Revolution
Was music changed by the French Revolution? Hoffman says one of the obvious ways was that a certain spirit of grandiosity became more common.
“Bombast, when it’s not tied to genius, is just loud and gives you a headache,” Hoffman says. “When it is tied to genius, as it was with Beethoven and later Berlioz, they took some of these ideas of grandiosity and they turned it into great music. Music that was great in itself and music that influenced great composers who came afterward.”
[Source]
