Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.

brissot

stealing this screenshot from a post that was made unrebloggable but whats incredibly funny is that almost none of that shit happened in 1789. slavery wasn't abolished until 1794 the height of the "reign of terror"

saintjustitude

That made me groan very loudly.

18thcenturythirsttrap

Reblog if, rather than living in the current hellscape, you fancy trying the caring leadership of Maximilien Robespierre for a change.

alqahera

I genuinely want to know when that Revolution: part one 1789 (good) and Revolution: part two 1792 (Robespierre killed everyone) thing started

usergreenpixel

It seems to be a moderate French and sometimes American narrative. The so-called liberal version of Frev that “started well but got too violent”.

The English usually paint Frev as completely bad.

saintjustitude

@alqahera yes, what @usergreenpixel said.

It arises very early. The Directoire still tries to cling to 1792 for obvious reasons but the idea is already there that "they messed up". Early 19thc liberals will make it easier for them: 1789 was "good", 1793 (or 1792 even) is when "everything went too far". Of course that includes both the Terror and socio-economical rights aka the foundation of the Providential State. As Guillaume Mazeau wrote in Pour quoi la Révolution?, they became linked together.

This myth (1789 = good, 1793 = bad) helped shape French politics and ideologies. Until Furet had the "ingenuity"(*) to say "actually it was bad as early as 1789, when the nasty minorities became violent and demanded 'rights' they were never entitled to" so... as early as July-August 1789.

(*) It's not actually original. He mostly recycled the ideas of conservative Augustin Cochin and """liberal""" Alfred Cobban:

- Gwynne Lewis, introduction to Alfred Cobban's The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, 1999 (second edition), p. xiv-xv.

saintjustitude

@alqahera

Basically they work as an echo chamber and reinforce each other as the "true" narrative/interpretation.

"See, the French are translating us!"

"See, the English are translating us!"

Translations can be political too, what is deemed "important enough" to be translated. Some works will shape the cultural landscape. For example, most French/francophone people have no idea what The Scarlet Pimpernel or A Tale of Two Cities are. I sure as hell had never heard about it until I started studying the French Revolution and more specifically the Anglo perspective. Carlyle had a durable influence on Anglo culture, and still gets recommended nowadays (?!?); although his works were translated to French in 1866-1867, he had little to zero impact in France. The French and the English are petty bitter enemies who will easily pretend there's no one on the other side of the Channel/Manche. They each have their own experts, novelists, etc. and only listen to them first. Even nowadays, French historians largely live in their own bubble and have little care for what the British or USAmericans say - and a lot of time, they can't even understand/speak English well or at all. (Which is why it's bizarre that OP in the drowned post calls it "the Reign of Terror" because French people don't call it that. You'd translate it to "the Terror" - that's it. The same way most of the world calls it the Napoleonic era while England stubbornly calls it "the Regency".)

Furet re-popularizing Cobban is part of a distinct ideological movement, like that of the concept of "Atlantic Revolutions" or even "Western Revolution" pushed by R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot. The context is quite obvious: it was the Cold War and NATO had just been created. As for Furet, he reaches his peak of popularity with the fall of the Wall of Berlin and the collapse of the USSR. (Yes, of course, it's all related.) Fukuyama proclaimed it was "the end of history" while Furet said it was "the end of the age of revolutions". Of course they were both dreadfully wrong and their apathetic conclusion that "liberal democracy" and capitalism had triumphed, and that was it, led us straight into the nightmarish hellscape we're in right now. Then again, nowadays Fukuyama is a "proud" supporter of Azov and has no problem posing with them for pictures. So maybe it was always leading exactly to this. The demonization of the French Revolution is one of the many gateways to fascism, because it's been in the very roots of conservatism from its inception.