Ouch.

[montagnarde1793]

Has anyone seen the bookmark they made for Sergio Luzzatto's biography of Augustin Robespierre? This is the quote they chose for it:

"Au cours de l'année qui, pour les frères Robespierre, devait être la dernière de leur vie, Augustin, bien plus que Maximilien, osa regarder en face la République jacobine et reconnaître ce qu'elle comportait d'ambiguïté, de fausseté, voire de laideur."

("In the course of the year which, for the Robespierre brothers, was to be the last of their life, Augustin, much more than Robespierre, dared to look at the Jacobin Republic straight on and recognize what it contained of ambiguity, falseness, even ugliness.")

Is it just me, or does this seem unreasonably vitriolic? I hope it doesn't set the tone for the book. I've never read anything by Luzzatto, but from what maelicia has quoted of him, he never seemed to me like someone who thought the Republic of the Year II needed to be knocked down a few pegs.

It's not even that I think that assessment is entirely false; there were undoubtedly ambiguities and ugliness in what was going on in the Year II. But it seems to me that the implication of the quote is that Maxime was blind to this and that since he manifestly wasn't blind to what the future Thermidorians were doing, the only reading I can really take away from this is that what was wrong with the "République jacobine" was ideological and that Maxime was therefore blind to its faults for ideological reasons, which is absolutely ridiculous. To the extent that there were problems with the Republic in the Year II, they existed where it failed to live up to the ideals on which it was based, not because those ideals were inherently flawed. Maybe I'm misreading it, but that's what it seems to imply to me.

Moreover, this is not a case of debunking some sort of golden legend. It is not generally accepted among historians and certainly not among the general public, that the "République jacobine" = utopia. So no, you're not being original when you rather gratuitously point out that this was not so. That goes without saying. However, there are plenty of people under the false impression that it was a pure dystopia. Pointing out that those people are wrong would serve the truth better than knocking down straw-arguments.

(On the other hand, although I seriously doubt it, it's possible that Luzzatto really does portray the Republic in the Year II as some kind of paradise and this quote is there for nuance. But that wouldn't be very professional either.)

In any case, I'm sure it's not Luzzatto himself who chose that quote for the bookmark, but it's clearly something he wrote. Which invites the question: Seriously, people, is the only way we can make Augustin likeable to make Maxime blind and the Republic ugly? I thought we were over that. Apparently not.