The French and Haitian Revolutions are one of the most fascinating and momentous events in what passes for western history, and yet the way liberals treat these subjects is just downright atrocious
While the horrific counter-revolution of 1776 is glorified, the French Revolution is treated like some ugly step-child they'd rather keep locked in the basement
I'm sick of it, I just want to learn about a cool-ass revolution without power-worshipping liberals throwing a conniption
I have searched so hard for any documentaries or fiction set in the revolution that are not reactionary. Hope people have had better luck than I. It is maddening that the most famous cultural touchstones of the event are Tale of Two Cities and Scarlet Pimpernel
I'm uncultured but I heard Dickens was pretty progressive no? Like, socialist sympathies at least
I like Dickens quite a lot. However he is a Brit and was a lib. Dickens' personal history is very tragic and his trauma over child labor encouraged much of his work. A Christmas Carol was written to bring the findings of an investigation into labor in England to the British middle class and essentially shame them. He originally wanted it to be more of a polemic called "'An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child", but realized that a story could do more. Writing
However as progressive as he was, Dickens was still very anti-revolution. He did not really view injustices like slavery, wage or chattel, as part of a larger evil, but rather as social moral failings. Dickens said he read Carlyle's history of the Revolution 500 times as his basis for Tale of Two Cities. A book by a Brit and very anti-Jacobin though also utterly anti ancien regime which Dickens was as well. French historians took their time to really approach the era again and when they did history had become a much more professional field, so even the more critical ones are much better as histories than Carlyle's. Not that Carlyle was unbearably bad, Marx and Engels favored him to the rest of British writers
It is just that he viewed history as epic poetry, not science. Plus he disliked democracy so there's that.
For Dickens the revolution was inevitable cause the aristocracy wouldn't ease up and be compassionate, and he was warning the English that they would suffer the same fate. So there is a class analysis there, it is just not a dialectical one, it ignores the processes of history and the conflict between absolute monarchism and emergent capitalism as well as the historically progressive nature of the Jacobins. Dickens did become soured on reformism after '48, but he was never really pro-revolution.
Interesting paper on all this, though more focused on Marx and Engels' adoption of metaphors and rhetoric. https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/65/1/1/640507
also one I only read part of on British literature and the revolution https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/file_store/production/56179/7CC434AE-5845-4850-8A4B-C52268FB6D90.pdf
The Jacobites are the ultimate enemy of tale of two cities (not that it stops them from being based)
You mean Jacobins? though a Jacobite resurgence during the revolution would be hilarious
Yes and yes, in the words of my people Rise and follow Charlie.
The Jacobites are the original communists in one way, they too had the music. White Cockade is a fucking bop, there is a reason its tune was the original one for The Red Flag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NNkP5bJNSY
and Bragg version https://youtu.be/zEKYQ4GOqmk So much better than the "o christmas tree" version
Though it should really only be sung in an Irish accent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60C-RjGkuOo
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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