Counter-Currents
4,989 words
Marcel Gauchet
Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most
Princeton University Press, 2024
This 191-page study of Robespierre’s revolutionary career is not a biography in the usual sense. Such works have already patiently collected everything that can be known about the man’s life before the French Revolution, but the main lesson to be drawn from them is that nothing from Robespierre’s formative years is of much use for explaining his political behavior.
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8 comments
There is a very good movie from 1983, Danton, which focuses on the conflict between Danton and Robespierre. The latter is portrayed very much as he is described here. The movie also vividly depicts the times, with a general uneasiness and terror, regular people in bread lines, fanaticism, lawlessness of the ideologues, shifting political sands, thwarted or misdirected idealism, and the bloody results.
Like this good piece by Mr. Devlin, it will make you want to read more.
Agree, very good movie. Though I can’t stand Depardieu, he is ” acceptable ” in this role ( Danton ).
Yes, I thought that Depardieu was excellent as Danton, showing the latter’s vigor, courage, intelligence, and, I guess, impulsiveness. A combination that was sometimes charismatic. I haven’t seen Depardieu in a lot of other films, although I did think that he was also very good in The Return of Martin Guerre.
I have not seen that movie, but I did get to see a production of Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death at an East Berlin theater pre-1989.
The movie Danton is based in some small ways, supposedly, on another play by a Pole, Stanislawa Przybyszewska, but I’m guessing that both plays cover much of the same ground. My understanding is that Wajda did not much share the ideological outlooks of Przybyszewska, and from the little I’ve read about either of the plays, it seems that Wajda would be more congenial to Buchner’s interpretation. So maybe some of the written sources about the movie, such as IMDB and Wikipedia, are wrong.
The movie has a combination of French and Polish actors, and was filmed in France. Many of the French portrayed Dantonists, while many Poles played Robespierrists and other Jacobins/radicals. It was directed by the famous Pole, Andrzej Wajda, and if I recall correctly, part of Wajda’s interest in the subject was from having observed utopianism in action in post-WWII Poland. Wajda also made some other good movies showing the problems of Communism, Man of Marble and Man of Iron.
For me, one among many vivid elements of the movie is the portrayal by Boguslaw Linda of Robespierre’s fanatical associate St. Just (sorry, I don’t know how to add Polish/German/French diacritical marks). Also, the transformation of one of the Dantonists from a determined supporter to a betrayer of Danton, when he sees how the power is shifting. And, there are lots of small, telling scenes of people caught up in a revolutionary meatgrinder.
A very atmospheric movie.
When I first saw it as a liberal young man, it helped bring my feet back onto the ground, reminding me of what the Left was really like.
I’ve just seen that this film is available in its entirety on YouTube with English subtitles.
For those interested.
Were Robespierre and Saint-Just homosexual lovers?
Robespierre was a man of abstractions and rhetoric, to which concrete realities were sacrificed with the utmost ruthlessness.
According to the revealed preferences of a heavy majority of our intellectuals and academics, struggling for concrete realities like the good of our race is vulgar, stupid, and reprehensible, while struggling for abstractions and fine-sounding phrases as Robespierre did is praiseworthy.
You’d never guess it by results.
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