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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Is the French Revolution "Western", when they rejected everything that came before them, desecrating cathedrals built over hundred of years in an explicit repudiation of the values of those who built them? Calling such people "Western" is perverse, when they've rejected the core values that created and sustained the world they seek so eagerly to grasp.

Did they lose their western cred on religious or political grounds? Might want to eject all protestants, the english for the civil war, and the americans for their revolution as well. The only truly western country appears to be the russian empire.

This goes for Hlynka too. Explain to me how hobbes falls on one side of the american revolution and the other on the french.

Explain to me how Hobbes falls on one side of the American revolution and the other on the French.

In addition to what @FCfromSSC said...

Another obvious difference is that while the de jure rule in the 13 Colonies might have been that everything must go through Parlament and the King (or their duly appointed representatives) the De Facto reality was that it wasn't the british government that was paying the constabulary, maintaining the roads, or adjudicating disputes between neighbors. It was the local officials. To that end the American revolution was not an "overthrow" of the existing social order as much as it was a "rectification" of the de jure and de facto authorities.

Since the commoners were paying for everything before and after the french revolution, it doesn't qualify as an overthrow either.

Is this de jure/de facto thing based on hobbes, or did you just make it up to carve a providential exception? I suppose they should have just acted like they were in a revolution, without legislating for a bit, and later play the de jure/de facto gambit, and then it would only have been a 'rectification' and everyone would be happy.

Is this de jure/de facto thing based on Hobbes, or did you just make it up to carve a providential exception?

No, I did not make it up. It's one of the core questions being wrestled with. Is it the vestments that make a man a priest, and the crown that makes a man a king? Or is it doing God's work, and other men being prepared to die for you?

You're retreating into mysticism now. But I'll humour you. It's military and political genius that makes Bonaparte a king. And his compatriots were certainly prepared to die for him and each other. As to gott mit uns, there are contradictory claims as to who the old man really supported in the various events under consideration.

I'm not retreating anywhere. I'm standing exactly where I have been this whole time.

Bonaparte's charisma and genius made people want to follow him, and the people following him made him an emperor. Simple as that.

The British Government can claim to rule North America, and the Aristocrats of Europe can whing about who's claim to what throne is strongest, but history is not obliged to listen to them.

I think I’ve made it clear I‘m not on the side of the aristocrats of europe. You’ve got strange views. Your god-fearing simple american persona manages to assimilate all europeans to aristocrats and also to utopist bloodthirsty revolutionaries. Where is the common frenchman, your brother? Should he have honored the ancestral pledge to leviathan you cast off so readily?

The common Frenchman, I Imagine, would "just want to grill" and that is a significant part of what I think sets the classes apart. You're starting from the assumption that there is an answer to be had, and I am starting from the assumption that there isn't.

The common Frenchman, I Imagine, would "just want to grill" and that is a significant part of what I think sets the classes apart.

What the common Frenchman really wanted at the time (I assume from context it is the time of Great French Unpleasantness).

We can actually tell rather well, not only from newspapers, pamphlets, letters and memoirs of the time, but also from this official "lists of complaints" composed by people of all three estates. These documents survived, were digitized and are accessible on https://gallica.bnf.fr

Cahiers de doléances

https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/301ModernEurope/Cahiers.html

The nobility were especially keen on personal liberties and on the authority of the upcoming Estates General: the common theme here is a concern with the arbitrary power of the king and his officials, who had been nibbling away at traditional, local privileges. We can interpret this concern with the "liberty" and power of Estates as a traditional, noble complaint, expressed in the language of Enlightenment.

Like the nobility, city-dwellers are concerned with the authority of the Estates General, but are more concerned with barriers to the market: concerns about customs duties and taxes on legal acts, for example, pertain to the free flow of trade. Their concern with Estates General, moreover, reflects and eagerness to diminish noble privilege: voting by head in the Estates General, for example, would throw more power to non-nobles.

And the overwhelming mass of people at the time, the peasants?

Unlike the nobility and the city-dwellers, rural people are overwhelmingly concerned with the burden of state taxation: after "taxation in general," which they share with the other two orders, all but two of the rural "top ten" concern taxation. By contrast, concern with the voting rules for the Estates General are almost entirely absent from the rural "top ten."

Yes, ordinary Frenchmen were just like ordinary Americans, they wanted to grill untaxed meat seasoned with untaxed salt and wash it down with untaxed booze.

More comments

Did they lose their western cred on religious or political grounds?

Say rather on ideological grounds, which is where the two meet. The French Revolution, drunk on its own self-image as titans of rationality, destroyed every social safeguard and descended into an orgy of absurdity and barbarity. The American revolution did not, in fact, do this, and neither did the British revolution.

The breakpoint I'm asserting is not changing the system of government, or even changing religions. It is adopting the belief that your cadre alone has found the universal solutions to every human problem, and that the only reason these solutions won't work is if bad people obstruct your perfect plans. This is not a subtle or ambiguous belief, and it has nothing to do with Protestantism or the English Civil War.

I think the American Revolutionary War was more precisely a war of secession rather than a revolution. A "Declaration of Independence" is synonymous with a statement justifying secession, and IMO the American document is an excellent basis for analyzing other secessionary movements. Arguably, the Constitutional Convention resulted in an actual revolution--in that it replaced the government under the Articles with the Constitutional system, and not via a means permitted under the Articles--though an effectively bloodless one.

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