Favorite French Revolutionaries?

[TNF]

Too many names to list, so I'll opt out of doing a poll. Who are your favorite figures from the French Revolution? Mine are Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just.

[Murica!]

François-Noël Babeuf; Maximilien Robespierre; Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois; Jean-Paul Marat. Can't think of any others.

[Incipimus iterum]

Jacques Pierre Brissot, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Charlotte Corday, Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud,  Napoleon(Prior to becoming emperor).

[Murica!]

Jacques Pierre Brissot, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Charlotte Corday, Napoleon.

What the hell is wrong with you?!

[Incipimus iterum]

Jacques Pierre Brissot, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Charlotte Corday, Napoleon.

What the hell is wrong with you?!

Nothing I feel perfectly fine

[Antonio the Sixth]

Danton, Desmoulins, Carnot, Fabre d'Eglantine (the Revolutionary Calendar was the best thing ever), Babeuf. Also Mirabeau and La Fayette prior to their betrayal.

[TNF]

Danton, Desmoulins, Carnot, Fabre d'Eglantine (the Revolutionary Calendar was the best thing ever), Babeuf. Also Mirabeau and La Fayette prior to their betrayal.

I love the Revolutionary Calendar. Something that ought to be brought back.

[politicus]

Jacques Pierre Brissot, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Charlotte Corday, Napoleon.

What the hell is wrong with you?!

One might as well ask "What the hell is wrong with you?!" for including Robespierre.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Robespierre was basically an Atlas poster, albeit one who ended up with the authority to order the execution of his political opponents. Atlasia can give you a wonderful insight into the mentality of those at the top of The Mountain.

[Zioneer]

I like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, his life was just so interesting.

[The Dowager Mod]

Pauline Léon.

[H. Ross Peron]

Danton, Desmoulins, Carnot, Fabre d'Eglantine (the Revolutionary Calendar was the best thing ever), Babeuf. Also Mirabeau and La Fayette prior to their betrayal.

This plus Charlotte Corday.

[politicus]

Charlotte Corday.

[Antonio the Sixth]

How could I forget Charlotte Corday? Yes, she's a massive FF too (though I'm not fond of Girondins in general).

[ingemann]

None, absolute none.

[TNF]

None, absolute none.

get out

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Marie Antoinette

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Bonaparte for ending it.

[The Mikado]

Charles François Dumouriez, one of the most entertaining figures in history.

Of course, my emotional sympathies lie more for the Vendée rebels, but sadly "Give us back our King, our God, and our good priests!" isn't quite as catchy as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Bonaparte for ending it.

Debatable.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Of course, my emotional sympathies lie more for the Vendée rebels

So you've gone full reactionary. Good to know.

[The Mikado]

Of course, my emotional sympathies lie more for the Vendée rebels

So you've gone full reactionary. Good to know.

This post deserves a response.

It is interesting that the self-professed champions of liberty would force the clergy of France to swear a loyalty oath to the state and to renounce their allegiance to Rome after a century of Gallicanist moves by the French monarchy to control the Church hierarchy in France had already limited that authority in all but name, and then ruthlessly persecuted those driven by conscience to reject this repugnant oath to loyalty of state over church, and then to slaughter those who rose up in defense of the conscience and convictions of those brave clergymen who resisted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

The Revolution eradicated the traditional divisions of the French state, those ancient provinces whose identities predated the Capetian monarchy itself in many case, and with them the traditional bonds that had united people of those provinces together in a shared identity. It replaced them with an artificial and bizarre "French" identity that had no appeal or significance for the vast majority of them, dividing them into departments with little historical or cultural commonality, and refused to even listen to those, preferring rule by decree from Paris to any sort of sharing in the obligations of government with the provinces. The government decreed that the dialects, which since time immemorial had had royal decrees published in them alongside Parisian French, as degenerate patois, even the Breton that had once been spoken in the Breton court in Nantes and the Flemish and Catalan spoken over vast stretches of neighboring territory. The French Revolution finally ended all hope that movements like the Fronde had shown in the previous century of decentralizing and ending Parisian rule over the rest of France, instead completing Louis XIV-XVI's work and beginning over a century of tragic and systematic stamping out of regional variance and identity in the French "nation."

Why shouldn't I sympathize with the people of the Vendee, standing up against a distant and alien Parisian government that cares not for Vendee's particularities, rebelling against the unjust orders to wipe out the non-juring priests and rising up to protect their Church from an alien imposition from Paris attempting to destroy them and even forcibly recruit their children to die in a moronic war with Austria to uphold the principles of a revolution they abhorred? How can you not have a heart for people who risked and often lost their lives, property, and livelihood in a valiant campaign to preserve the liberty of the non-juring clergy to reject an impious oath of loyalty to a state that clearly did not deserve it?

[Antonio the Sixth]

We're all (aside form Snowstalker and his acolytes) aware of the bad stuff the revolutionaries did, and we all would have preferred that the Revolution had taken a less authoritarian and centralist direction. One can understand the rebels' grievances.

This doesn't alter the fact that 90% of the changes the Revolution brought were for the better. The struggle against the material wealth and spiritual hegemony of the Catholic Church (which was continued and eventually won by the future generations of Republicans in the early 20th century) is one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to France. It wiped out one of the most corrupt and harmful institutions to ever exist in Europe, and removed one of the biggest obstacles to progress in countless domains. The creation of a "national identity" (which is always an invention), while it eventually became exacerbated and led to catastrophic results, was still a historical necessity. This sense of belonging to a collective is the necessary precondition to the efficiency of State action: as an Italian, I can testify for the dire consequences of failing to complete this nation-building process.

[The Mikado]

This doesn't alter the fact that 90% of the changes the Revolution brought were for the better.

I don't think this is even close to true, and this statement is absolutely mind-boggling to me. I suppose this is the point where we have to agree to disagree, because my ratio of positive to negative changes resulting from the revolution is not quite the inverse of yours, but fairly similar to it. As an opportunity to attempt to put in the ideas of the alleged "Enlightenment" into practice the Revolution merely showed how intellectually bankrupt that movement was, and I fail to see a France out of the intellectual hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church and monarchy and subject to this alleged "progress" you mention as a positive...that way lay the intellectual tyranny of the heirs of Voltaire known as laïcité, the repression of conscience and testaments of faith in exchange for propaganda and state-worship.

Regarding nationalism, my point was more that if the French Revolution had actually been organized against tyranny, it's goal would have been to undo the Medieval construction known as France itself and dissolve itself into a reemerged Brittany, Flanders, Languedoc, Catalonia, Lorraine, and others. The Revolution as it stood is the successful project to subject France to the linguistic, political, and cultural hegemony of Paris more than it is anything else, and had dire consequences for the rest of France that are almost the opposite of "Liberty" in any serious definition of the term.

EDIT: I'll just throw in an endorsement of Francois Furet's Interpreting the French Revolution as a fantastic volume that puts the French Revolution in its proper context as a watershed in the progression of Paris' political and cultural dominance over France to the misfortune of the rest of the country.

http://www.amazon.com/Interpreting-French-Revolution-Fran-Furet/dp/0521280494

It expands on themes going back to Alexis de Tocqueville's fantastic The Old Regime and the Revolution.

[BaconBacon96]

I have a soft spot for one Napoleon Bonaparte...