Ange de Mort
Sunday, 4 December 2005 11:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
montagnarde1793Yes, well. Here I am again. I don't know why I keep doing it, but:
I am officially ashamed.
In other news, I have dropped Living Skills, for *cough* certain teachers are EVIL.
And, I have a rant:
On Saint-Just:
I'm starting to see Saint-Just as a guy who was a bit crazy and who like Sparta a bit too much, but one who was not really "evil." He was well-meaning, and he was certainly brave--and if one is willing to look, like the other Robespierristes who went en mission (Couthon for example), he completed a very difficult task (that of getting Alsace in line with the rest of France) with almost no executions. (Compare that track record to those of Fouche, Collot d'Herbois, Carrier, and even some Dantonistes.) If his ideas were at times unworkable and naive, it's because he was young.
In short, Saint-Just was a victim of Thermidorean propaganda as much as Robespierre (and Couthon) were. Read: Saint-Just wasn't some crazy guy who burned down his boarding school and randomly sentenced people to death any more than Robespierre was a bloodless reptile or Couthon got his deformity by hiding in peat bogs chasing other men's wives, and was from then on consequentially crazy.
And if you believe either of those two things by now, we have a lot of work to do.
--S
I am officially ashamed.
In other news, I have dropped Living Skills, for *cough* certain teachers are EVIL.
And, I have a rant:
On Saint-Just:
I'm starting to see Saint-Just as a guy who was a bit crazy and who like Sparta a bit too much, but one who was not really "evil." He was well-meaning, and he was certainly brave--and if one is willing to look, like the other Robespierristes who went en mission (Couthon for example), he completed a very difficult task (that of getting Alsace in line with the rest of France) with almost no executions. (Compare that track record to those of Fouche, Collot d'Herbois, Carrier, and even some Dantonistes.) If his ideas were at times unworkable and naive, it's because he was young.
In short, Saint-Just was a victim of Thermidorean propaganda as much as Robespierre (and Couthon) were. Read: Saint-Just wasn't some crazy guy who burned down his boarding school and randomly sentenced people to death any more than Robespierre was a bloodless reptile or Couthon got his deformity by hiding in peat bogs chasing other men's wives, and was from then on consequentially crazy.
And if you believe either of those two things by now, we have a lot of work to do.
--S
