Cessna posted:

Schama was taken to task for focusing on the lurid stuff - guillotining and the like - without mentioning any of the positive outcomes of the revolution.


For Thirty Years War, I've always had a soft spot for Geoffrey Parker's book because he mentions an old SPI wargame in the bibliography.

Cessna posted:

Schama was taken to task for focusing on the lurid stuff - guillotining and the like - without mentioning any of the positive outcomes of the revolution.


For Thirty Years War, I've always had a soft spot for Geoffrey Parker's book because he mentions an old SPI wargame in the bibliography.

Hunt11 posted:

Considering just how much of a bloody mess the revolution was it is not surprising that the focus was on how bad it was.

Mr Enderby posted:

Divorce was basically impossible without proof of adultery until 1969. The standard procedure up till then was for the man to hire a room at a hotel, with a prostitute. At an agreed time, two members of staff, who had been paid off ahead of time, would enter and witness the couple in bed. They could then testify in court and you got a relatively trouble-free divorce. If you couldn't get the staff on board, you could hire private detectives to do the same. This isn't some fringe thing. Lots of novels from the period describe this procedure as if it were fairly common.

Before the mid-19th century, it was basically impossible to get divorced, without an act of parliament (though ecclesiastical courts could provide annulments). There was a very widespread idea in the 18th century that you could break up a marriage by the man publicly selling his wife. This had no basis in law, but was apparently commonly practiced and tolerated. In 1744 the 2nd Duke of Chandos bought an ostler's wife for half a crown, though the practice was generally more common among the lower orders.

HEY GUNS posted:

Very few people do this actually! They get "is it correct" and "is it important," but loving MISS "do i sound like a goddamn computer wrote this"

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

How about The Oxford History of the French Revolution?

There's also a People's History of the French Revolution but at quick glance that seems to be really skewed to being overwhelming positive about everything.

Ghetto Prince posted:

Really? What about batshit crazy stuff like Jean-Baptiste Carrier and the Vendee war? Or do they just gloss over the terror?

Hunt11 posted:

Considering just how much of a bloody mess the revolution was it is not surprising that the focus was on how bad it was.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

I feel that the extent of The Terror is usually exaggerated. There were 'just' about 16,000 executions total by revolutionary tribunals with the vast majority of those killed being people who rose up in armed revolt as part of the Federalist Uprisings.

I don't think the massacres in the Vendee are technically the Terror. That was outright scorched earth war.

SlothfulCobra posted:

Well there's certainly revolutions that put more people in the ground, but that's still not a number to sneeze at. The French themselves certainly resented it enough to give Robespierre the axe and have some of the other organizers of the terror killed as well.

And while the vendee massacres are technically a separate thing, that still boils down to a whole hell of a lot of people being killed by the same governing body.

Throatwarbler posted:

The Revolutions podcast with Mike Duncan was pretty good on the French revolution I thought.

HEY GUNS posted:

this will restart the Communism Discussions, but there are people that love that poo poo, or gloss over it as justified

Panzeh posted:

The Vendeeists were reactionary scum that deserved it.

OwlFancier posted:

Very moreish thing, the guillotine.

Ithle01 posted:

The situation in Algeria was really hosed up at the time. In addition to what Tekopo said there wasn't going to be a solution that was mutually acceptable to the Algerians and to the French. Even de Gaulle realized that any victory was pyrric at best and he would talk in private about how winning meant almost ten million Muslim Algerians voting in French elections - something he found unpalatable. The legacy of over a hundred years of imperialism wasn't going to vanish in one generation and during the war the French and French-Algerians were no strangers to war crimes against the Algerian population. Any chance of winning their trust was dead before the war even started and only got worse as the atrocities mounted. Check out the Phillipsville massacre or the FLN narrative of the Million-and-a-Half Martyrs and then reconcile that alongside attempts to establish liberal democracy through infrastructure or cultural education. The FLN didn't win Algeria by being a military threat to France, they won by keeping their leadership out the country, eliminating all the other Algerian rivals for a post-war government, and refusing to lose first.

There's also the possibility that COIN just doesn't work.

Squalid posted:

Civil wars are not like tea parties. If you don't have a good plan you are going to lose whether you are the government or the insurgent. The Social War of the Roman Republic seems like the best model to follow in my opinion. The Roman's Italian allies rebelled because they were denied any possibility of citizenship. The Romans gave citizenship to everyone that didn't rebel, crushed those who were intransigent, and then within a few years gave citizenship even to those citizens that had rebelled. If you can't make any political compromise you best be prepared for a forever war like Israel in the Palestinian territories or India in Kashmir because those situations are going to be your best case scenario.

Ithle01 posted:

I agree with you and the Social War is a good example. Obviously, counter-insurgencies can work because humans have been fighting asymmetrical wars for thousands of years, but the question is whether the specific COIN doctrine developed by the French and United States in the 20th century is the remedy to modern insurgency. And if it is, can we actually implement it without undermining it at the same time.

Squalid posted:

though perhaps we shouldn't try to take too many lessons from cases in which victory was achieved through genocide.

Squalid posted:

Fair point, however I think popular discussion of these issues is sometimes hampered by narrow focus on a few exceptional cases like the Vietnam war. Most insurgencies are small and rarely studied by anyone but a few eccentrics like me, for example Egypt's Nile Delta conflict of the 1990s. Insurgents who lose are easily forgotten, which can leave us with a skewed perspective on the possibility of defeating them.

Though direct involvement was minimal, the United States trained and advised many allied governments in various COIN tactics. The defeat of the tupamaros in Uruguay in the seventies is often held up as an ideal example of how the state can win these wars. More neglected are the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, though perhaps we shouldn't try to take too many lessons from cases in which victory was achieved through genocide.

I guess I just see the hand-wringing over tactics as pointless. The tactics that exist today are actually pretty good, they just aren't miraculous. France couldn't have won in Algeria by shuffling its troops around differently or being more/less atrocity prone. That makes a difference when you're fighting small organizations too radical to gain popular support or whose support in concentrated in small minority groups. Big civil conflicts though almost always start and persist because of political failings, and politicians demand militaries deliver miracles that will obviate the need to make hard political choices. Politicians like to be seen "bombing the poo poo" out of enemies, they don't like being seen bribing them, or pardoning them, or inviting them into government. It's that weakness that makes COIN hopeless, though I guess that's what you mean about not being able to avoid undermining the implementation.

my dad posted:

This is the military history thread.

quote:

My principal criticism, however, concerns the first quarter of the book,
where Schama deals with the Old Regime. Relying heavily on Guy
Chaussinand-Nogaret and Pierre Léon, Schama draws a very favorable
picture of the French economy in the eighteenth century and of French
society in general. The Old Regime, he tells us, was dynamic, even
"modernizing," the nobility was on the whole enlightened and even
entrepreneurial, the seigneurial system was in "rags and tatters" (p. 319)
privilege was eroding, a new amalgam of notables and landlords was already
forming, and even agriculture registered an annual growth rate of 1.9 percent
( pace Morineau). Since Schama has decided at the outset that "structural"
causes of the French Revolution are negligible, if not wrong-headed, he sees
no need to discuss such matters as the distribution of wealth, rents, prices,
wages, or the village community and its relations with seigneur, church, and
crown. That Georges Lefebvre spent a lifetime demonstrating that the
French Revolution was also a peasant revolution (and not simply another
jacquerie) seems forgotten or irrelevant.

Schama accepts uncritically the Tocqueville-Furet view that the Old Regime
was not only economically prosperous, but also socially viable and well
equipped with qualified technicians and enlightened administrators. How
could a major revolution occur in such a prosperous and modernizing
society? Human blunder and national hubris leading to national bankruptcy
was part of it, suggests Schama. But deeper down was a hostile popular
reaction to modernization, reminiscent of Iran under the Shah (my analogy).
This is an interesting thesis, though not entirely new of course. But it
deserves development and may tell us about "citizen peasants," surely
culturally distinct from the Parisian sans-culottes and twenty times more
numerous. As Peter Jones has recently written, the French peasantry was a
massive and diverse group. Not all of them were Vendéens fighting for
"Church and Crown." Nor were they all prone to compulsive violence; the
assault on the châteaux in the summer of 1789 took very few lives.

quote:

Robespierre used to chide his moderate opponents of « wanting a revolution
without a revolution. » Simon Schama wants no revolution at all. In « sha-
king off the mythology of the revolution » (see the interview by Mervyn Roth-
stein in The New York Times, April 27, 1989), Schama has created his own
mythology. He admits that he does not believe in « pure objectivity » -
what historian does? But the reader has the right to expect of him a fair
treatment of the revolutionaries in the real circumstances of a profound social
and political crisis. Unfortunately, as Thomas Paine said of Edmund Burke,
« He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. »

Schama sees the Revolution as a series of scandalous events. In this respect
his narrative is a sensational story. He seldom looks at the events from the
revolutionaries' point of view and never with sympathy for them. Instead,
he judges the movement from the victims' outlooik. But the latter are not the
Girondins, Enragés, Hébertistes, or Jacobins of the Left, but, rather, the Males-
herbes, the Neckers, and the Talleyrands. In addition, his book is badly skewed.
The text is 875 pages long, but the fall of the Bastille does not begin until
page 369. Part IV, entitled « Virtue and Death », which covers the most
important, and, in some respects, the most meaningful developments for our
own times, is a mere 170 pages. Yet, this portion attempts to recite the
dramatic events from the winter of 1793 through the fall of Robespierre in the
summer of 1794. He has little to say on Robespierre and the Great Committees,
and nothing but an « Epilogue » after 9 Thermidor. As for his view on revo-
lutions in general, he writes that « asking for the impossible is a good defi-
nition of a revolution. » (p. 322). This tells us more about the author's approach,
however, than it does about his subject.

Let us examine the text in more detail. Schama, like so many of his « revi-
sionist » contemporaries, never doubts that the Old Regime was « modern », or
« bourgeois », but that in any case, it was no longer feudal. Yet, there are nu-
merous references to the seigneurial system, to feudal dues, to labor obligations
(corvées), and to other traditional feudal exactions throughout his text. (See,
for example, pp. 433, 434, 435, 437, and the feudal priveleges surrendered on
August 4, 1789 by the National Assembly, p. 438). He quotes with approval a
conservative French historian, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret that « a noble was
nothing more than a successful bourgeois », (p. 116), then contradicts himself
by writing that « The one thing the Constituent Assembly was manifestly not
was bourgeois. » (p. 478, his emphasis). But if the Assembly was not bourgeois
it must have been noble. (We can assume it is not necessary to demonstrate
that it was not sans-culotte or peasant). Still, how could it have been noble
when, according to him, a noble was only a bourgeois?

Moreover, he ignores Louis XVI 's famous speech three weeks before the
fall of the Bastille (23 June 1789). « All property without exception », said the
king, « shall be respected at all times, and His Majesty expressly includes under
the name of property the tithes... feudal and seigneurial rights and duties [my
emphasis], and, in general, all rights and prerogatives, useful or honorary, connec-
ted with lands and fiefs, or appertaining to persons. » Yet, Schama would have
us believe that the Old Regime was « bourgeois. »

Unlike many historians who find the Old Regime full of archaic and irra-
tional customs and practices (see Montesquieu's The Persian Letters as an
example), Schama argues that the French elite « was fluid and heterogenous »,
(p. 117), that the term « Old Regime » is a misnomer (p. 118), and that at the
very heart of this elite was « a capitalist nobility » (p. 118). He is convinced
that « a literary conspiracy » existed, which he calls « the Figaro syndrome »
ignored by modern historians, that helped bring down the misnamed Old Regime
by people who did nat really understand the ideas they were promulgating (p. 175).
And in a complete reversal of the many studies done on Louis XVI, Schama sees
him as « lively » (not at all phlegmatic), and concerned with public business
(p. 188).

quote:

The immense outpouring of works occasioned by the bicentenary of the French
Revolution-many of them devoted to criticizing the event while celebrating its two
hundredth anniversary-has begun to subside and to be succeeded by its "echo effect,"
a critical reconsideration of the historical literature it has produced. The reevaluation
of the influential contributions of Franqois Furet, for example, has in itself become a
minor genre in the historiography of the Revolution.' This essay is intended as a
contribution to critical reflections on the recent literature with reference to the phe-
nomenally successful narrative history of the Revolution by Simon Schama.
Schama's blockbuster has enjoyed a mixed response from academic historians -
not always, I suspect, for avowable reasons. It is a best-seller that is fun to read,
written by someone who has published on the period but has not been a lifetime
toiler in the vineyards of the Revolution. Not one of the familiar authorities but a
specialist in Dutch history has turned out the big book of the bicentenary that will
grace the coffee tables of the upper-middlebrow reading public.
But Schama's Citizens is considerably more than a well-written retelling of a
familiar tale crafted to the taste of the literate public. Its subtitle, A Chronicle of
the French Revolution, scarcely does it justice. Celebrated as a "work of rare
brilliance" and as "an intelligent book for intelligent readers that is also a delight
to read," it has been received in some quarters as something like the authorized
version of the Revolution.2 Therefore it deserves serious critical consideration.

Schama says both that his narrative "does not pretend to dispassion" and that
it is "offered more as witness than judgment." 3 It is, in fact, a strongly argued
interpretation of the revolutionary era that has taken the revisionist line at full
tide.4 Methodologically, it reflects the pervasive influence of the linguistic tum,
promising in its preface an emphasis on "revolutionary utterance." The promise
is certainly fulfilled in Schama's representation of the Revolution by way of
political discourse and symbols of ritual and ceremony.
In this essay I will argue that it is not Schama's conclusions that are most
vulnerable to criticism (although I disagree with many of them) but the manner in
which he supports them- that is, through the tendentious manipulation of sources
and the facile disposal of alternate interpretations that demand consequential
refutation.

Recent contributors to the venerable controversy over narrative as an intellec-
tually reputable mode of historical discourse have criticized an excessive
distinction between narrative and "problem-oriented" history.5 The strongest
version of this criticism recognizes no such distinction: inevitably, as in all
historical writing, what is ordinarily called narrative embodies some sort of
explanation as well as the values and interpretive perspectives of the historian.
To a considerable extent Schama's interpretive perspective is integral to his
narrative. It is conveyed by rhetorical effect, by emphasis and exclusion, by the
mining of a wide range of primary sources for the telling anecdote and the
evocative vignette, by the ingenious selection of appropriate illustrations-but
also by argument, in the conventional sense of posing and refuting other
interpretations. Therefore an evaluation of such a work will tend to shift its
grounds according to the form of discourse selected by the author. I have chosen
three issues central to Schama's reading of the Revolution that entail somewhat
different critical perspectives.

Hunt11 posted:

I can't feel too much sympathy for France being invaded during the French Revolution as in order to unite the people, they were quite happy to declare war on Austria first. That war was most likely inevitable but it is hard to claim moral high ground if you start declaring preemptive wars.

Disinterested posted:

golden bubble posted:

I just don't understand the level of the hate and fear the Parisians had for Austria. I think some of the French had Cato levels of feelings for the Hapsburgs, and I have no idea how it got that far beyond normal rivalry and nationalism.

my dad posted:

This is the military history thread.