Which faction would you have supported in the French Revolution?

[Georg Ebner]

As a Christian naturally the reaction.
And that were not the "enlightened"/decadent aristocrats fleeing into the restoration; but the saintly farmers of the Vendée!

[Georg Ebner]

In general i really cannot understand any somewhere between. Either everything or nothing - anything else is not defendable. The F.R. demonstrates this excellently: Sure, left/liberal/conservative historians have collected lots of facts - but have not had any clue, what was really going on, why the process of the Rev. was in se coherent&consequent. Only someone beyond the most extreme LeftExtremism like MICHELET was - despite being a "sweating prole" (NIETZSCHE), knowing far fewer facts, telling lots of lies - able to understand it, as an InSider - LOUIS PHILIPPE - told ACTON once. (The other one was deMAISTRE, who was beyond RightExtremism, but no historian.)

[Georg Ebner]

In general i really cannot understand any somewhere between. Either everything or nothing - anything else is not defendable. The F.R. demonstrates this excellently: Sure, left/liberal/conservative historians have collected lots of facts - but have not had any clue, what was really going on, why the process of the Rev. was in se coherent&consequent. Only someone beyond the most extreme LeftExtremism like MICHELET was - despite being a "sweating prole" (NIETZSCHE), knowing far fewer facts, telling lots of lies - able to understand it, as an InSider - LOUIS PHILIPPE - told ACTON once. (The other one was deMAISTRE, who was beyond RightExtremism, but no historian.)

Funnily enough, Isaiah Berlin claims somewhere that de Maistre made himself unpopular among other ultra-royalists by saying, correctly as it turned out, that the Revolution wasn't completely reversible and a Bourbon restoration would have to behave at least slightly more demurely than the Ancien Regime.

He - and MICHELET - were the only ones aware, that it was finally faith vs. regnum hominis, what it was all about. (In His youth deM. had been an InSider as a high-ranking FreeMasoner and radical revolutionist.)
Thus deM. knew, that an external restoration could not repair broken souls.
Yet, for the longer distance He was sure, that the revolution with its irrationality will have been "completely reversible" - if i remember correctly, He even spoke of an "inavoidable restoration" (of the souls).

[Georg Ebner]

Any good book recommendations for an introduction to the French Revolution? I just finished Alan Taylor's American Colonies and am in the mood for something on the other side of the pond.

The famous specialists are AULARD, MATHIEZ, H.LEFEBVRE, SOBOUL - but amusingly they have realiter not achieved anything else than confirming the basical correctness of BURKE...

[Georg Ebner]

(in contrast to Simon Schama’s contemporaneous Citizens, which I haven’t read but I’ve heard is a little florid).

Schama has a style that isn't to everyone's taste,* but it's a very good book and has an important place in the historiography of the French Revolution and, well, of Modern History generally. Essentially impossible to credibly write or even think about the French Revolution in the old way after its publication, though some people have tried anyway.

_{*And he can be a bit of a troll: a few years after Citizens he wrote Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, which really wound up certain serious-minded people, much as it was intended to.}

I have never read it: Its SubTitle "Chronicle" and various DeScriptions of its method let me
assume - and several ReViews shared my suspicion - , that it doesn't provide an OverView (perhaps the latter stands behind or between the lines, but then it is still a failed concept).
His central thesis seems to be, that the terror was an integral part of the whole revolution - what is right and doubtlessly better than those naive historians (especially AngloSaxons), who love to differentiate a "healthy" 1789 and a "strange" 1793. But He should have also asked, which ideas caused le terreur and then He would have seen, that they came not even from "Les Philosophes", let alone from real PhiloSophers like DESCARTES or HUME, but from nowadays forgotten and per se unimportant journalists&publicists (a la BONNEVILLE, FAUCHET, MERCIER, PONTARD, RESTIF), whose "rationalism" was a weird mixture of occultism, envy, imposture, gullibility.
"The French Revolution seems admirable to those, who know it badly; terrible to those, who know it better; grotesque to those, who know it well." (GOMEZ DAVILA)