US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

Setanta wrote:

I should also add that Bonapart took part in no street fighting, apart from the famous incident in which he fired on the mob in October, 1795--an incident immortalized by Thomas Carlisle as "a whiff of grapeshot." Napoleon commented that the practice of firing blank charges to disperse a crowd was folly, because, discovering themselves unhurt, they would come on the more resolutely and with greater anger. So he poured grapeshot into the crowd, which very effectively dispersed them. In so doing he ended the Revolution, and ratified the right-wing counter revolution which had created the Directory.

You really have a lot of reading to do before you are sufficiently informed to comment on that period.

You just proved my point.

He took part in it.

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You are apparently unaware that the First Estate is the noblesse, and not the people. As Walter has already pointed out, the Wars (plural) of the Fronde included aristocratic insurrection as well as peasant insurrections. Just as was the case when the middle class exploited the peasantry during the revolution, the noblesse exploited the jacquerie during the Wars of the Fronde. The taxation to which you refer was largely an expedient of the era, although some of it was codified and made permanent despite the Wars of the Fronde. There was no "related fighting" pushed by Richelieu and Mazarin. Richelieu decided to underwrite Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedes because he wished to curb the power of the Imperialists, and gain a political power base in Germany. To that end, French troops were eventually sent to operate against the Imperialists along the middle Rhine; later they joined the Swedes in operations against the Imperialists in Wurtemburg. The French and the Spanish were already at war over the Netherlands. Much of what is now a part of northern France was then a part of the Spanish Netherlands. Quite without reference to the Thirty Years War, Richelieu thought he had seen his main chance to grab territory in the north while Spain was embroiled in the renewed war with the Dutch, who were still fighting their 80+ year war of independence against the Spaniard. The French got their butts kicked repeatedly, until Condé crushed the main Spanish army at Rocroi in 1643. The Spanish retreated into the Netherlands, while the negotiations which eventually lead to the Peace of Westphalia began. The Wars of the Fronde only began after the Spanish war and the involvement in the Thirty Years War were well over. The conditions were not at all like those which obtained in 1789.

I know as a reactionary, it is comforting to see such simple-minded convergences, but it just ain't so.

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Lash wrote:

You just proved my point.

He took part in it.

That's hilarious. You need to read Carlisle's The French Revolution. There was indeed some street fighting. Setting up an artillery battery in front of the Tuileries and firing a salvo of grape shot into a crowd which had fought no one, however, hardly constitutes street fighting. In general, there was very little street fighting during that Revolution. There were three specific incidents of murderous violence which took place in Paris during the Revolution. I'm sure even you have heard of the storming of the Bastille--July, 1789. In August, 1792, the mob stormed the Tuileries, slaughtering some of the Swiss Guard there.

In September, 1792, the mob went mad. They stormed the hôtels (city mansions) of the noblesse, committing rape and murder, mutilating their victims, plundering the property. It lasted for days, and the participants were proud of themselves, proud to call themselves septembriseurs a play on the name of the month and the word briser, to break or shatter. Their pride did not outlive the revolution, however. This was the event which caused the middle class to draw back, to withhold their support for the Comité de salut publique and Robespierre. They bided their time. When the Committee for Public Safety and Robespierre fell, the streets began to fill with young, right-wing men, who dressed in fancy clothing, and carried heavy canes with gold plated, lead-weighted heads. They used these to assault any member of the lower class who they considered insolent. They were known as the jeunesse doré, the gilded youth. With their aid in intimidating the mob, and the excuse of the Austrian invasion, right-wing members of the National Assembly took over and establish the Directory, the counter revolutionary government which eventually called Napoleon to Paris in 1795 to put a final end to the threat of the mob.

Once again you demonstrate how very little you know about this period in history.

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Once again, you not only prove my point, but how stiff-necked one can become when they think they know it all, and how desperately some will wiggle to avoid admitting they were wrong.

You make several comments that act as though I said something I didn't.

I know very well who the First Estate was, and the character of the Frondes.

The Reign of Terror, ... Little street fighting...? You know better. There were little revolutions and mass civil disobediences for generations before the Revolution was settled.

I can't believe you are trying to deny it.

But, we are no longer discussing anything remotely related to this thread.

So, Napoleon WAS involved in the Revolution? It's really not worth the typing.

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Lash, honestly, there a thousands of (original) sources, which easily can be viewed (in origals).

But it's quite intering, I admit, to read some speculations like yours - now and then.

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The Fronde, by Orest Ranum Norton $35

American's premier historian of 17th-century France has written a lively yet solid account of a forgotten revolution. Its oblivion, especially within the "hexagon," is doubly paradoxical. First, the Fronde was anything but a routine uprising: beginning as a strike by ambitious civil servants, it grew to threatening proportions under the princes of the blood, whom Richelieu and Mazarin had failed to domesticate. Second, if the Fronde had been successful (and it nearly was), Louis XIV might never have reigned (or he might have been the puppet of that odd and finally incompatible coalition); the ancien regime might have been less rigidly authoritarian; and (most importantly, perhaps) 1789 might well have been a year like any other.

----

I wonder if the great ones would defer to Ranum, if not to me.

I wouldn't be so bold as to disagree with people who have a deeper knowledge of history than I, unless I had very recently read on the subject at some length.

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A great many members of the peasants in the countryside, especially in the Vendée, rose against the various incarnations of the revolutionary government. Insurrection in the countryside can hardly be called street fighting. Slaughtering the Swiss Guard on the steps of the Palace while they desparately try to save themselves, and obey their orders not to fire on the crowd might be considered street fighting. Murdering members of the aristocracy and mutilating the corpses might be called street fighting. All of that is a stretch.

Unlimbering an artillery battery and firing on a crowd which has engaged in no violence cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called street fighting. That's like saying you sucker-punched someone and it was a tough fight. I have never denied that Napoleon was involved in the revolution, although his only contribution was to end it. What i denied was your silly contention that he was involved in street fighting. After his failure in Corsica, he was assigned to the topographical bureau, an assignment he detested--he immediately secured leave, and never returned to his duties. He happened to be in the right place at the right time, and was given command of the artillery at Toulon by the représentant en mission who was present--that might have been Carnot, but i couldn't be sure without looking it up. He had already schemed to get General Dugommier appointed to the command, which assured him of a job. The English had taken a fleet into Toulon, which was a stronghold of rebellion against the Revolution, and with emigrés and Spanish troops, hoped to set up a base to support the Vendean rebels. Napoleon, trained as an artillery officer immediately saw the obvious, moved the batteries closer to the city, and then lead the assault on the main redoubt which overlooked the harbor. With that in French hands, the English had no choice but to weigh anchor and leave--ironically, exactly what Washington did when he took Dorchester Heights in March, 1776 and forced the English to evacuate Boston. The resemblance, of course, ends there. That was mid-December, 1793. When the last gasp of left-wing fanaticism sought to organize the mob once more, in 1795, the Directory called upon Napoleon, who had wandered back to Paris, looking for work and trying to pretend that he hadn't already been assigned to the topographical bureau. His performance at Toulon had won him promotion to a rank equivalent to Brigadier. His "whiff of grapeshot" got him a chance to choose an assignment, and he asked around, and was told his best shot would be the campaign in Italy which was being planned. (The Austrians had invaded France after Marie Antoinette--Maria Antonietta, the daughter of Maria Teresa--had been imprisoned. The Austrians controlled most of northern Italy, so it was a natural place to attack them.)

The rest, as is said all too often, is history. Napoleon was an army officer in the pay of whichever government currently controlled Paris. He looked out for his main chance--he never participated in any street fighting in Paris.

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Setanta wrote:

I should also add that Bonapart took part in no street fighting, apart from the famous incident in which he fired on the mob in October, 1795--an incident immortalized by Thomas Carlisle as "a whiff of grapeshot." Napoleon commented that the practice of firing blank charges to disperse a crowd was folly, because, discovering themselves unhurt, they would come on the more resolutely and with greater anger. So he poured grapeshot into the crowd, which very effectively dispersed them. In so doing he ended the Revolution, and ratified the right-wing counter revolution which had created the Directory.

.

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Note Lash, that your source says that 1789 might have been a year like any other, if the Princes of the Blood had prevailed in the Wars of the Fronde. That is a far cry from claiming that one event lead to the other, or even that the causes were the same.

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Yes, i wrote that. I haven't denied that he took part in the Revolution, i simply denied your vague and silly claim that he particpated in street fighting.

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'The Fronde', only to mention that, has been the first book on the subject written in English in 65 years.

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That i did not know, Walter. But, as i am able to read French, i read French history in French. Sadly, i must read German, Italian, Spanish, etc., histories in English, as i don't read those languages.

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Well, I didn't know neither, since I've been to French archives and museums and read all about that in German :wink:

Quote:

With no general synthesis in English since P. R. Doolin's book, published in 1935, the long-awaited study of the Fronde by Orest Ranum will be welcomed by students and scholars alike. Since more specialist works in English, such as Sal Westrich's book on the Ormee and Lloyd Moote's book on the Parlement of Paris, are long since out of print, this new study fills a longstanding gap in the literature of seventeenth-century France. It is much more, however, than just an updated synthesis of earlier works, as the subtitle suggests.

The reader might wonder if the subtitle is just a convenience required by the series in which the book is published: Revolutions in the Modern World. This is especially the case since Ranum acknowledges that the Fronde altered neither the political nor social institutions of seventeenth-century France. "Like the family after a dispute, the parties combatting one another during the Fronde made up and lived on together, as the dust settled during the 1650s. There were no ineluctable shifts of power or authority" (84).

Ranum is quick to add that historians should not evaluate revolutions by their success, nor is his simply a rehashing of the standard theme of a revolution manquee. Although he readily admits that the Fronde was nowhere near as threatening to the monarchy as the sixteenth-century religious wars or the Revolution of 1789, it clearly had what he calls "revolutionary moments," when the bourgeois urban masses threw their support behind the judiciary elites in their dispute with the queen regent and the royal council. When this occurred, as in Paris between August 1648 and March 1649, and in Bordeaux in the summer of 1650, the body politic and public order were clearly threatened. So, Ranum endorses neither the majority of historians who have traditionally overrated the Fronde as a vital check on royal absolutism and a precursor to the Revolution of 1789, nor those few historians who have underrated it as simply one of a series of disputes between recalcitrant elites and the crown during a regency government. It is a convincing interpretation, all the more so because Ranum shows how and why "the people" - and not just the usual political elites - were prominent actors in the Fronde's drama. When the urban bourgeoisie withdrew their support, the movement lost any chance of success, and when the young Louis XIV came of age, it collapsed altogether.

Despite the lack of the usual scholarly apparatus (there are no notes or references of any kind), this book is not really suited for a general audience, who will find it hard going. The litany of characters and events is confusing; a short list of central figures, as well as a list of the main events would help enormously. This is a well-crafted and thoroughly researched historian's monograph that both specialists and their students will appreciate for years to come.

Mack P. Holt George Mason University

COPYRIGHT 1994 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Original source: Historian, Summer, 1994 by Mack P. Holt

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Apparently, Walter, Lash missed that part of the book.

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Setanta wrote:

Apparently, Walter, Lash missed that part of the book.

Set's response originates to my original post above (I later found the complete article and edited my post):

he readily admits that the Fronde was nowhere near as threatening to the monarchy as the sixteenth-century religious wars or the Revolution of 1789

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In the interest of complete disclosure--i do read French history in English, but i rely upon French sources for validation of what i've read. Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution is a classic, and worth the read, although it is difficult going for those not accustomed to writing styles of the early 19th century. It is also much colored by his general contempt for the French, and for regicides in particular.

An excellent recreational read on the subject is Christopher Hibbert's The Days of the French Revolution. The title refers to the word journée, which means a day in it's entirety, and which came to mean the day of a significant event during the Revolution--which is how Hibbert uses it. The word was more commonly used anciently than it is now. I was greately amused to discover that the Québecois say bonne journée to one another when parting.

One of the most thorough biographies of Napoleon from a military point of view available in English is that of Theodore Ayrault Dodge, the great American military historian of the late 19th century. Once again, it might be hard going for readers unaccustomed to the writing styles of the 19th century.

Me, i like to read classic histories for recreation. I would even have liked to live in the 19th century, if only they had had decent plumbing.

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Setanta wrote:

I would even have liked to live in the 19th century, if only they had had decent plumbing.

You'd likely have invented it had you lived then, Setanta and instead of the slang, "Where's your crapper?", we'd now have, "Where's your Setanta?". Smile

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ican711nm wrote:

However, in particular, the current wisdom of those I call castroites (i.e., those who favor different rules for different people) is wrong when that wisdom evaluates the relatively small transgressions in the US's current efforts in Iraq within the context of historical US flaws, but outside the context of historical other-nation flaws.

In some respects, measuring the US by higher standards than those used to measure other nations is flattering. But hating the US for its failures to consistently live up to those higher standards is irrational. Worse, blaming all Americans for the serious flaws of only some Americans is just another form of bigoty.
....

The difficulty of the US's current mission in Iraq and Afghanistan is enhanced and not eased by incessant fault finding absent specific recommendations on how to overcome those faults. Expectations of near perfect perfomance, when neither the US or any other nation has ever exhibited such peformance, is not only naive; it is foolhardy and destuctive.
.

I fully agree with that. It often seems that contemporary Europeans in particular have quite suddenly become amazingly forgetful of their own bloody awful history - even events duting the post WWII period - in their often shrill condemnation of U.S. actions. Perhaps many believe that with the advent of a United Europe, the historical slate has been wiped clean and a new era of universal lawfulness has begin. This, of course is, at best, an illusion, quite contrary to the facts before our eyes. I believe it likely that, among many, envy in some form is an important element in all this.

The fact remains that power in its various forms has run the world since history began. There have been periods of domination by single (or a few) great powers and periods in which various players have contested for primacy in a new order. The exercise of power is in some ways independent of the historical merits of the party exercising it - thus the British Empire behaved in many ways as did the Soviet Union in the expansion and preservation of its power, notwithstanding the enormous differences between them and the values they stood for.

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Some US military commanders believe that there are too few American troops in Anbar province to deal effectively with the guerrillas there, who simply flow around the US and establish pockets in areas the US is not able to patrol. This article says there are now 145,000 US troops in Iraq. When did that happen? But it also says that only half of those, or 72,500, are combat troops that might encounter the enemy. And there are only 10,000 US troops in Anbar Province (presumably only 5,000 of them actually fighting troops). If the US is attempting to clean out Anbar with only 5,000 troops, no wonder not much progress is being made. Presumably, however, it needs the other 67,500 fighting troops elsewhere, especially in Baghdad itself, and in the other trouble spots such as Babil, Diyala, Salahuddin, etc. The article says Rumsfeld is tired of hearing about the argument of Gen. Shinseki that several hundred thousand US troops would be needed to secure Iraq. He may be tired of it, but we're not forgetting that his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz said that he "couldn't imagine" that it would take more troops to secure the country than to defeat Saddam's army. He either did not know much about colonial history or he did not have a good imagination. Oh, and Donald? Just one word for you: Shinseki.

The US commanders expressed their happiness that the guerrillas at Ubaydi are standing and fighting, on the grounds that if they do that, they will be finished faster. I wouldn't be so happy if I were them. The jihadis are making themselves martyrs in order to give other young men a reason to fight. It is a recruitment drive. Since guerrillas have managed to kill about 14 US troops in recent days, moreover, it is a way of signalling that the US is not 10 feet tall, but is rather vulnerable. If the US has this much trouble with about 2500 foreign fighters in Iraq (and over 20,000 Iraqi ones), imagine the problems if the jihadi recruitment drive succeeds, and the foreign contingent doubles or triples.

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US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

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