Which faction would you have supported in the French Revolution?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The big big problem with the Girondins is their warmongering with austria was quite possibly the worst singular mistake of any French government of that era (even worse than Louis listening to his more reactionary courtiers or Napoleon's Peninsular War). Like, you can pretty much draw a line before and after war breaking out: after there was war pretty much everything went to pot with the whole nation breaking it into mutual conspiracy madness, authoritarianism and contempt for peasants who really mainly didn't see the point of being conscripted to die en masse for some abstract concept. And the Girondin ministry, in particular Brissot, were really the primary villains of spinning these nonsensical conspiracies. I think they get a better press these days because a) they weren't holding the ball when things really spiralled out of control and b) everyone likes the people in their orbit, like De Gouges and Paine, but they were pretty lousy political actors who defined themselves with incredibly petty faction scoring and dithering.

I think the Dantonists come across as most sympathetic in the mess. Danton himself is often portrayed as some mad, glory-seeking and corrupt brute who opportunistically tried to dial things back when the heat got too much: but i read him favourably - a romantic revolutionary who desperately wanted unity in a seething sea of resentments and pettiness, as opposed to Robespierre who wanted unity by believing in this impossibly ethical moral standard for good Frenchmen to be held to, like Robot Santa from Futurama. (The Dantonists were pretty corrupt, I give you that, but was true out of everyone except Robespierre's virtue crew, a man too boring to be amusingly corrupt).

Herbert himself was very much a nasty opportunist, happy to feed just about anyone to the death machine to satisfy his own advancement including other far left types.

I think you could break the monarchist factions down a bit: you have the Monarchiens, the Society of 1789 etc. Some of them had some OK people, but I can't get past the passive-active stuff.

The thing with the Vendee is it was left isolated so you ended up with a series of monstrously esculating reprisals: one of the causes of Robespierre's increasing centralisation was to curtail the more demented of the Jacobin terrors.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The big big problem with the Girondins is their warmongering with austria was quite possibly the worst singular mistake of any French government of that era (even worse than Louis listening to his more reactionary courtiers or Napoleon's Peninsular War). Like, you can pretty much draw a line before and after war breaking out: after there was war pretty much everything went to pot with the whole nation breaking it into mutual conspiracy madness, authoritarianism and contempt for peasants who really mainly didn't see the point of being conscripted to die en masse for some abstract concept. And the Girondin ministry, in particular Brissot, were really the primary villains of spinning these nonsensical conspiracies. I think they get a better press these days because a) they weren't holding the ball when things really spiralled out of control and b) everyone likes the people in their orbit, like De Gouges and Paine, but they were pretty lousy political actors who defined themselves with incredibly petty faction scoring and dithering.

I think the Dantonists come across as most sympathetic in the mess. Danton himself is often portrayed as some mad, glory-seeking and corrupt brute who opportunistically tried to dial things back when the heat got too much: but i read him favourably - a romantic revolutionary who desperately wanted unity in a seething sea of resentments and pettiness, as opposed to Robespierre who wanted unity by believing in this impossibly ethical moral standard for good Frenchmen to be held to, like Robot Santa from Futurama. (The Dantonists were pretty corrupt, I give you that, but was true out of everyone except Robespierre's virtue crew, a man too boring to be amusingly corrupt).

Herbert himself was very much a nasty opportunist, happy to feed just about anyone to the death machine to satisfy his own advancement including other far left types.

I think you could break the monarchist factions down a bit: you have the Monarchiens, the Society of 1789 etc. Some of them had some OK people, but I can't get past the passive-active stuff.

The thing with the Vendee is it was left isolated so you ended up with a series of monstrously esculating reprisals: one of the causes of Robespierre's increasing centralisation was to curtail the more demented of the Jacobin terrors.

They called him The Incorruptible.

That's the point really: at a certain level, anti-corruption became less a cause for good governance and more a deranged moral crusade. His philosophy was that people are fundamentally virtuous, aside from individual immoral actors ruining everything with their corruption and wickedness. He could not face the messy reality of people outside of their Rosseaun ideal, and so simple financial corruption or overt factioneering was essentially the same as being personally unvirtuous and ruining the entire body politick.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I like the Girondins myself, especially Brissot, and I agree with their decision to go to war against Austria. With the exception of Joseph II, the Habsburgs were a vile dynasty of reactionaries and bigots that should have been sent packing 90 years earlier, if not for that meddling Marlborough.

Hanburgs were vile, sure, but did they really represent an inherent threat to France when the war was declared or were they just a despotic, useless mess.

The problem is it's hard not to point out the war as a key turning point, and not for the better - we go from Rights of Man and the abolition of feudalism to conspiracy theories from all levels of government, forced conscription, the prison massacres and the alienation of potential foreign allies. I do believe Brissot was an idealist and not a cynic who thought that war was some free way to bolster his own personal support, but it's a really fitting display of how disastrous liberal interventionism is in practice - classic case being them mistaking the anti-Austrian sentiments in the Austrian Netherlands for some kind of parallel liberal revolutionary sentiment, rather than if anything a conservative movement against Joseph II's "enlightenment" reforms. In every case, the sister Republics established by France were little more than dominated piggy banks for France.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Well whatever our views, I hope we can all agree on the one indisputable fact: that 'Philippe Égalité' was pondscum.

The worst people were those like Fouche and Barras imo.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Sorry for the bump, but I was actually reading the thread back when I was logged out, and it took me everything I had to avoid logging back in to sh*t on PSOL's laughably nonsensical takes. It takes a truly remarkable degree of buffoonery to be willing to write so confidently and pretentiously about something  he is so clearly ignorant about. I would almost be impressed, if he wasn't talking about a period of my country's history I'm deeply passionate about and I've been studying since I was a child. As things stand, I just hope that any leftist who's interested in actual facts and not LARPy bullsh*t knows better than to listen to a world of his pseudointellectual drivel.

Hey Tony, welcome back and congrats on the pHd.

What is your take on the Feulliant club, and their leadership of by Barnave, de Lameth and Duport? Obviously they are far to oury right ideologically, but what's your stance on how they ran the Assembly and their downfall?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Don't know anything about it except that I believe the ideas of "right" and "left" came from the French Parliament around that time?

I would have strongly opposed the guillotine and the madness but also felt that France needed to be basically what it is today.

I don't think I would have liked the French Revolution at all and it really doesn't sound like any positive change came out of it.  Les Miserables, the classic book by Victor Hugo (and amazing Broadway musical), is about a student revolution that fails in maybe the 1830s or around that time?

Yes. To sum up, in 1830 the Restored Bourbon Monarchy, led by the youngest brother of Louis XVI, Charles X, was toppled via a popular insurrection in Paris after Charles, a far right loon, tried to abolish freedom of the press, disenfranchise the middle class and overturn recent elections. Concurrent to the insurrection and forced exile of the king, the official political liberal-conservative opposition, along with their backers in the press and finance installed the King's cousin, Louis-Philippe of the cadet Orleanist branch, as the new monarch. Much of the popular support behind the insurrection was mollified by the support of Lafayette, one of the few surviving revolutionaries who had some weight to throw around, who believed that he was lending his support for a monarchy with Republican institutions; but this wasn't enough for many of the veterans, artisans and students who had manned the barricades who despised the new July Monarchy, especially as the monarchy itself turned Right, with liberal ministers - including Lafayette himself - being outfoxed in the political Game of Cards, and  Charles X's former ministers being "left off easy" with life in prison.

The group in Les Mis is based on a group of neo-Jacobin students called Friends of the People, who used the death of a liberal Bonapartist General to launch an insurrection against the July Monarchy, like the one that had killed the Restoration Monarchy in the 1930, but planned this time so the suits couldn't take it over this time. Apparently the big plan was amidst the chaos was to grab Lafayette and essentially force him to declare a new Republic with himself as President (Lafayette was tipped off and quickly fled). The tragedy was, although the men of the 1832 June Revolt were passionate and probably right, they misjudged the mood of the nation: the Parisian people largely did not join them in the barricades, the National Guard did not defect as it did in 1830 and the professional liberal politicians did not touch this hopeless cause.