What are you reading now?

[Enrique]

I saw the picture with Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry.

Carl B. Boyer: A History of Mathematics, 2003.

[glindhot]

Sinclair Lewis: Elmer Gantry
Just finished it and declare it's my favorite of those I read this year.

[Peter]

Louis should have ordered the Swiss Guard to open fire and the whole course of world history would have changed - for the better.

I'm not so sure - one of the great 'what ifs?' - I think the revolution would have happened anyway sooner or later, after all even after the reinstatement of the monarchy France suffered further revolutions. I've always thought that had Napoleon not been defeated we wouldn't have had 2 world wars, (the Congress of Vienna was a disaster) but again who knows?

[AeolianHarp]

I never said I condone the violence, just that when people have been starving and living filthy hopeless lives they act out of desperation.

[Enrique]

Well said.

[Megan]

Louis was on the way to creating some kind of constitutional monarchy in France. He came to believe that reforms were needed to the system of Estates, that is of the nobility, the church etc. But that wasn't enough for the madmen that took control. Reform is never enough for the madmen and women. They want revolution. They couldn't give a farthing for the number of dead and wading through a sea of blood. A very similar thing happened at the time of the Russian Revolution, when the moderates - the Mensheviks, were on the road to reforming Czarism, but were overwhelmed by Lenin and all the other nutcases in the Bolsheviks.
The simple historical fact is, that revolutions produce vastly greater mysery and death than the failings of the system they target. And to think that the poor in some way benefit or in some way justify the actions of the revolutionaries would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
Louis should have ordered the Swiss Guard to open fire and the whole course of world history would have changed - for the better.

[AeolianHarp]

People were starving and living in filth and horror- is it any wonder they snapped? A few words to the super priviliged- share the wealth or this is what can happen. Desparate people resort to desparate measures. It is heading this way again. When lives are so full of poverty and misery they have nothing left to lose.

[Megan]

I would never have the guts to read a biography of Marie Antoinette. I would be too deeply moved by the indignities committed against her person (a that of her husband, who was a good man) by those scoundrels that played to be God. The invasion of the Tuileries by the mob, the removal from her son and the days at the Conciergerie must have been Hell in Earth for her. And then the last humiliation, the way to the guillotine, before the populace, stripped of all her finery. Who can see the sketch made by David, the Revolution painter, without shedding tears? I understand she never lost hope she would eventually be freed.

Undoubdetly, Louis made a number of blunders, but perhaps the biggest was when the mob was on the point of total anarchy and needed a firm hand to restrain them, he refused point blank to allow the Swiss Guard to open fire to protect themselves and the royal family and which resulted in these animals tearing the guard limb from limb. George III, lamented that ''the whole of Europe was waiting for the King of France to act like a man.''
HIs good nature was infact used to bring about the destruction of the Ancien Regime.
The notion that has been carefully promoted by communists that the king and queen did not alleviate the condition of the poor is refuted by the public works of that were carried out at royal expense to feed and clothe the poor, esecially in Paris.
Robespierre , St. Just, Danton and the rest, were simply inhuman dogs, and you have to wonder how these blood thirsty fanatics were regarded as heroes and still are by the Left.
Mao Tse-tung was once asked, what was the effect of the French Revolution. He replied, he would let the person know when the French Revolution had ceased to have an effect, ie, its effect was still continuing.
Exactly, and it explains many of the horrors of the New World Order that is growing up all around us.

.

[Enrique]

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, by M.Joseph Bedier. The closest thing to Gottfried von Strassburg's work I could find.

[Sorrano]

The money spent by Louis XVI and his court was a trifle compared with that spent during the costly wars waged by Louis XIV, which left France financially in ruins and the way of life the king imposed on his court, which made the nobility residing at Versailles dilapidate huge fortunes until, bankrupt, they had to live on the royal favour. And what good did the Revolution do to France? From that moment on the French lived going from one extreme to the other, from monarchy to republic and from republic to monarchy and back to republic. Is not the present one the Third Republic?

Just read Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Powerful. He certainly was a genius.

Have you read Les Miserables? This is much of what I get from that book.

[Sorrano]

Yes wonderful book, the only annoying thing I found was the lengthy historical interjections in the story, even though valid, they break the continuity.

These incursions, though lengthy, I think provided a lot of the meat to what Victor Hugo was trying to tell. The story and the actors supplant these accounts and give us a picture of France and humanity through Hugo's eyes.

[Enrique]

The money spent by Louis XVI and his court was a trifle compared with that spent during the costly wars waged by Louis XIV, which left France financially in ruins and the way of life the king imposed on his court, which made the nobility residing at Versailles dilapidate huge fortunes until, bankrupt, they had to live on the royal favour. And what good did the Revolution do to France? From that moment on the French lived going from one extreme to the other, from monarchy to republic and from republic to monarchy and back to republic. Is not the present one the Third Republic?

Just read Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Powerful. He certainly was a genius.

[Peter]

Currently reading Les Miserables. This book paints a pretty bleak picture, as well, of life after the revolution.

Yes wonderful book, the only annoying thing I found was the lengthy historical interjections in the story, even though valid, they break the continuity.

[Sorrano]

I'm not sure things improved for the poor much after the revolution. It was the same with the Russian revolution.

Currently reading Les Miserables. This book paints a pretty bleak picture, as well, of life after the revolution.

[AeolianHarp]

I'm not sure things improved for the poor much after the revolution. It was the same with the Russian revolution.

Yeahhhhhh....as I am wont to tell my activist friends- nothing is going to change dears.