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Hello, this post is About one of the most entitled Person I know. My oldest sister is 25ish now. I know her since my birth and experienced her path to the ultimate entitlement. TL;DR at the mystic end of that beast. We'll just start at the beginning, so let's go.
Firstly, the cast (just the important ones):
Me: a Little Bowling-ball (In dialogue just OP)
M: my mom
S: my older sister
ES: my oldest sister, and the sister, which I meant in the title
N1: my first niece
N2: my second niece
My oldest sis was firstly a normal Girl. Took care About her little sister and her Little brother and so on. But Things changed rapidly. When she attended 5th grade, the bullying startet. It went so far, that she went no longer to School after when she was in grade 7. Since then, she started smoking and was going out with strange guys. My mom was super supportive and said to herself, that ES probably will learn from her mistakes. After she left school at grade 7, what is illegal in germany, she started to ruin our family and the health conditions of M and also my brain. S still takes responsibility for nearly everything, even she isn’t living near us anymore, ‘cause she just had to leave this situation.
When we were childs, ES wanted a dog. She went with my parents and got her a brown Chihuahua. (even this is over a decade ago, and the dog wasn’t a pupper when they gottem, he is still alive) Quickly we all noticed, that ES isn’t able to care about Doggo 1 (just D1 for short).
In Germany, the Czechian border is the place, where you can get cheap rip offs or just cheap stuff in general, so my parents often went there, and often with my two sisters. Some day M left with ES because they wanted to go to Czechia. At the next day, they came back with D2. D2 was sold them out of the trunk of a car. A thin little dog, no papers. Now my mum had a new dog, after ES didn’t care after two weeks. It was a hart change for my family, ‘cause we only had big dogs before. Not long, and D1 made D2 pregnant. Three adorable puppies and we kept one of it. This one was mine. ES wanted this dog hardly but I said no. She even tried to steal him.
Things got heated up at home and so M just concentrated on work, and was literally only at home to eat and sleep. Her oldest daughter being an entitled brat, she searched for distraction and recognition, and worked hard for a pretty high position. ES is 17 or so now and M got the first burnout, caused of her work and the behaviour of ES. After a year, M just went on as nothing happened. The second bournout came, and that one just wrecked M. Since then, and it was 5 years ago, M is unable to work or even talk to strangers or being just near to them. M had to quit her job, but didn’t get any money. Not from the government, how the most people without work do, neither from her health insurance. Our family went well, we had enough to have a pretty decent live. After the second burnout, that was done immediately. Now we had to rotate every penny and couldn’t even think about vacation while summer breaks.
When ES was 20, she was in love with a 16 year old boy from russia. They had a baby together, my first niece (N1). After one year we had finally enough money to go on vacation. We drove to hungary. I was 11 at the time. Since that vacation my mind and my brain, and how it works changed… forever. I sat with N1 in the living room of the house, we’ve rented, and played something. BF2 (BF1 was actually good, and helped ES behaviour, but they split up after a huge arguing, which resulted, that they assaulted each other (ES started)). He makes as loud as he can and as horrifying “Boo!” and N1 starts to cry. ES stormed in and yelled at me “What the fuck have you done you stupid son of a bitch” (in German “Hurensohn”) without realizing, that she insulted herself with it too. After an hour BF2 said to ES what happened, but she doesn’t apologized for it or anything. This thing hitted me hart. Since then, I never really showed my insultable side. Especially in school I was cold. I literally could kill someone, and it wouldn’t touch me, because ES startet bullying me whenever she could. When she stopped I was an emotional wreck, with splitted personalities, one insults the other. I had multiple nervous breakdowns and thought a lot about suicide and stuff.
At the time, we had been in Hungary, ES didn’t even lived with us anymore. (I won’t mention everytime she moved but it had been around 15 times in 7 years or so)
Short after N1’s second birthday, ES and BF2 split up, ‘cause ES cheated on BF2. And in comes BF3 and BF* number with countless digits* at the same time.
BF3 was the worst of all, but firstly no one expected this. But lastly, he ruined the good reputation of my grandpa and also my grandpas company. BF3 worked for my Grandpa, same did ES. But both showed up, when they wanted to. My grandpa supported a national delivery service, but because he only made red numbers, only made bigger deliveries with trucks. BF3 still worked for him and had a better work attitude now, until he split up with ES for the first time. They got together shortly after and BF3 startet to play with ES. Everything repeated. Insulting, assaulting, splitting up and come back together, just to let the circle begin new. Also ES has depressions. She threatened M, that she would drive against a tree. Because of this I threatened her with a knife, that she give me the keys. I was in full phsycomode and had a nervous breakdown right after it. At the same day, BF3’s brother nearly killed M with his car. He stopped literally millimeters in front of her. Since then BF3 wasn’t allowed near me or M, when I was with her, and especially not his brother. At the time, ES had N2 with BF3.
Since ES had no dog for circa 5 years now, she wanted a dog. 14 year old me said shure, I will lend you thousand Euro for a dog, with everything that belongs to it. But you have to pay 3% interest per month. She said shure, and we made a contract. Guess what, I haven't seen my money since now and she sold the dog, which costet 500€ for a 50€ tatto coupon, which never arrived. Now and than ES is lending money at my great granny, because my grandparents and my parents and I are broke, because of her. She moves at least two times a year and demands, that everyone helps her (
https://de.reddit.com/AmItheAsshole/comments/cbo57j/aita_for_not_want_to_help_my_sis_moving/ ). When my grandparents bought something for N1 and N1 doesn't want it, I ask them, if I could have it. (That are mostly chocolate-hazelnut-drinks(if you know the brand “Monte”, you know what I mean)) When I want to drink them, ES snatches them out of my hand and say something like “OP you don’t deserve it, your grades are to bad, and I’m the mother of N1 so I deserve it most, if N1 don’t want it” (N1 lives at my grandmas house and N2 lives with me and my parents, none of them is living with her, and she only takes them, if she have to look good in front of her friends)
ES’ bad and entitled behavior destroyed me mentally. Im unable to remember things, I’m stressed, all the time, I’m near her and take every mistake I make very serious. I’m often not able to understand sarcasm and I’m unable, with dealing with some situations. I’m not really able to work with people face to face and I was three years long addicted to gaming electronic. (Like Wii/PS3/Laptop/Gameboy Color (yes we still have one in Pokemon yellow edition)/Nintendo DS and so on)
I’m unable to deal with lies. I’m unable to trust people, because ES ruined that trust I gave her.
TL;DR: My entitled sister ruins my life and the life of my family just because she wants everything and everyone should do, what she want.
Edit: Btw. N1 is still saying to me sometimes "Bad OP" and sometimes cannot stand me, because ES told her shit About me firstly.
Again, assuming the object is illegal in Germany but legal in Poland.
submitted by This is part II ! Read
part I first if you haven't done it already.
Next we get to Louis XVI's trial, and OS is already doing as if Robespierre was the ultimate dictator of France, with him playing chess against Austria and Prussia. Yet at this point he's a mere conventionnel. A popular one, sure, but he is in no way more powerful than any of his 748 co-workers at this point. And he was far from being the only one advocating for Louis' death; maybe he didn't even have the most influential speech in this direction, as that title could be attributed to Saint-Just.
29 errors. This emphasis on Robespierre is completely unjustified : again, he is a mere deputy at this point, and he's part of the opposition at that. What's next ? Ah, OS peddles the idea that Louis' fate was decided by one vote - it was not. There was an absolute majority of just one vote not in favor of death, but in favor of death
without conditions - 70 other deputies voted for death with a conditional sentance, making a total majority of 431 for death against 290 for all other options.
30 errors.
Surprisingly, OS says nothing egregiously wrong after that - until he says "so as the Revolution turned increasingly violent and anti-christian" : again this is caricatural as it doesn't take the slightest nuance into account and hammers how horrifically violent the Revolution was - the reality is that it was not violence
per se that apalled the conservative, but violence against refractory priests. But let's be lenient for once, because was indeed
perceived rabidly anti-clerical, albeit things are always more complex. Still his introduction of the Chouannerie and the Vendée rebellion are approximately correct. But then he confuses the royalist insurrections with the federalist insurrections, the latter being actually republican. In Toulon, it was originally a federalist revolt that was later taken over by royalists; for the other cities and regions in revolts - Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Normandie, all these regions saw federalist insurrections, but as OS doesn't introduce the federalist revolts (to sum it up briefly, a violent reaction of certain departements to the eviction of tne Girondins) them and just paint France in two colors, we're left misguided.
31 errors.
"The republic sent a relatively unknown young captain by the name of Napoléon Bonaparte (of course his face is comically ugly, why do you even ask, it's the French Revolution, all of its protagonists were ugly !) to help stage the siege of the city."
Not really. The Republic sent general Carteaux, and latter Dugommier; Bonaparte was only their subordinate and not the commander-in-chief.
32 errors.
"General Jean-Baptiste Carrier committed brutal atrocities. [...] [He] was later found guily of war crimes."
He was not a general, but a civilian; specifically, a
Représentant en Mission, aka an envoy of the Convention whose task is to apply the Convention's laws in the regions. As for him being
found guilty of war crimes, that's stricltly impossible since war crimes became a legal charge more than a century afterwards, as conferences, such as the Hague's and Geneva's set up rules for warfare. So this is an anachronism.
34 errors. Otherwise, yeah, the repression in Vendée was indeed gruesome.
Back to Paris, where OS butchers the complete story of the Girondin's expulsion from the Convention. His chain of events is :
the government is increasingly unpopular -> Marat calls for the elimination of the traitors in the Convention and his put on trial -> Robespierre calls to insurrection.
Both the timeline and the facts are thrown in the trash : Marat was indeed tried, but in april, and he was acquitted on the 24th of that month, more than a month before the eviction of the Girondins. Many other events made them unpopular : they had created a commission to investigate the Paris Commune, that they suspected of treason, which logically didn't please the sans-culottes who hold the Commune. They were also holding to their old motto that property and economic liberalism were both sacred, even though food was still very costly and many sans-culottes demanded price fixing. What really lit the fuses though is that on may 25th, feeling that there might be an insurrection, Isnard, the girondin president of the Convention, threatens to have the entire city razed to the ground - really, I'm not making that up. That's exactly like the Brunswick manifesto. That's why Robespierre indeed called for an insurrection a few days later : he feared that a violent purge coming from the right may happen soon, and while it is easy to dismiss it as sheer paranoia, remember that all these men had lived through the Champ-de-Mars massacre, during which two men who were considered as heroes, Lafayette and Bailly (the guy who prononced the Tennis Court Oath first and the National Assembly's first president, it's him you see standing above everyone else in David's painting of the event) odered the National Guard to fire on the crowd. When even supposedly dedicated revolutionaries betray you, it's easy to think that others might do the same. I also want to add that the Girondin were not instantly executed : they were merely placed under house arrest, allowing many to flee Paris for province, where they would spark the federalist revolts I mentioned earlier.
Anyway, one error for all this.
34 errors.
"Robespierre and his radicals would be in almost total control of the government."
Good thing you said almost, because it's not the case. Even in the most dire moments of the French Revolution, the government, or the Committee of Public Safety that more or less acts as a government
needs the approval of the Convention to pass any decree. This is no governmental dictatorship.
35 errors.
"In death, he became an even more powerful inspiration for the extreme levels of violence that were about to rip throughout the new republic".
While this is true, OS' heavy insistance about how horrifically violent the Revolution was falls under the paragraphs I've written above about the violence of the Revolution. But indeed, Marat's assassination confirmed the suspicions many had about traitors within their ranks. I want though to heavily insist myself on one point, and OS is going to introduce it for me.
The Reign of Terror. I want to introduce to you a new theory that has emerged at least in french academic research : the idea that the Republic basically became a totally centralised and dictatorial regime officially promoting Terror at this point is... wrong. More on that later. But first let me dump the inaccuracies that OS put in his account : the Committee of Public Safety was established on april 6th 1793, and the Revolutionary Tribunal was established on march 10th 1793; both were established as the Girondins were still firmly sitting in the Convention and government. Now the factual inaccuracies : the CPS (if you allow the abbreviation) was not a dictatorship, and Robespierre was not at its head. It needed the approval of the Convention to pass anything, and it couldn't force his will on all the other committees. Because it was not alone. There was a committee of finances, a committee of public education, a committee of the navy and the colonies, etc. The CPS simply led and coordinated the whole thing.
Internally speaking, its 12 members were strictly equal. Robespierre was not at its head - there was no "head of the committtee" and decisions needed to be approved by the majority of its members. If Robespierre is in the minority, he is powerless. So he was not, I repeat he was NOT a dictator; he has never been more than
one of the 12 members of
one of the executive branch, albeit the main branch. And he needed, like all the members of the CPS,
to be reelected each month to keep his seat. So OS' heavy insistance on what Robespierre wanted is completely off the mark since Robespierre's personal desire don't matter that much.
Now onto the Revolutionary tribunal. Contrary to what OS depicts, and to a popular conception of it, the Revolutionary Tribunal was a real tribunal, not a sham : there were procedures, attorneys, exhibits, and half,
half of the people who passed before it were acquitted. In total, that already makes five more errors : we're already at
40.
But now we get onto the interesting part. OS claims that Terror was proclaimed to be the order of the day. What does that mean exactly ? It means that in early september, after hearing of the betrayal of the admirals who gave Toulon to the Coalition forces, a group of sans-culottes entered the Convention and demanded that Terror be the order of the day. And by that, I mean the order of the day of the Convention, the official topic of today's debate in the assembly. And yet... it never happened. Historians such as Jean-Clément Martin dug into the Convention's (rigorously organised) archives and found
no trace of the word Terror in the Convention's order of the day on september 5th 1793, nor in any other day of the French Revolution. That's right : there has never been any official reign of Terror. When Terror was indeed applied, it was largely the result of local iniatives that the Convention couldn't control, such as some Representatives in mission's crimes (Fouché in Lyon, Carrier, in Nantes, Barras and Fréron in Toulon), or the results of political moves to eliminate rivals and please the radical part of the public opinion. The conclusion that Martin and others like Michel Biard draw is that far from being a hyper-centralised and bloodthirsty dictatorship, France during the "Terror" was actually in a state of anarchy, to put it bluntly; the decisions the Republic then took in terms of internal traitors hunt ought not to be compared with, say, the USSR, as it is commonly depicted,
but to the decisions France took again during WW1, when deserters where being shot, the press' freedom was being suppressed and the opposition parties were forced into a Sacred Union for the sake of maintaining a unified and efficient war effort. This is, according to Martin, and I'm firmly inclined to believe him, a far better comparison than François Furet's old song about the Revolution being the mother of totalitarianism, a theory that is nowadays out of favor. So OS now has
41 errors. To be specific, when the sans-culottes asked for Terror to be the order of the day, Thuriot, President of the Convention, answered "you're right :
justice is the order of the day"
2. The central government never claimed to rule with Terror during the actual "Reign of Terror"; even Robespierre's famous speech about Virtue and Terror is not enough to prove the contrary, as Robespierre here is simply defining the principles of the Revolutionary Government in times of crisis : remember that he and the rest of the Conventionnels were dedicated republicans who had advocated for more liberty and equality during the days of the Constitutional Monarchy; their hands were forced by a one of the most dire crisis of French history, with civil war and external war in which France was alone and on the verge of collapse, but they were all clearly saying that laws like the suspect laws were
exception laws, and that they would be removed once the dust would have settled. Terror was rarely mentioned by those members of the Revolutionary Government, and when it was, it was either to condemn it or to call it a necessary evil. None of these men were "bloodthirsty" : we don't live in a fairy tale with bad guys rubbing their hands and preparing plans to dominate the world. It was after the Terror supposedly ended that the Thermidorians, men such as Fouché and Barras who had defintely ruled with Terror in their proconsulships, absolved themselves of all their crimes by creating this false narrative of an almighty and bloodthirsty Robespierre overseeing mass executions all across France. OS is blindly listening to these sympathetic men when he says :
"Fear had become an official government policy."
This is a myth. Don't get me wrong though : it is neither the actual violence, nor the death toll I'm questioning (though the death toll will always be a complex question), it's the way violence was implemented.
42 errors.
So what does OS have to say about what's coming ?
The usual story of Robespierre being a psychopath who personally oversaw the spying and executions, even though he was neither a dictator, nor even a member of the Committee that actually took charge of the spying : the Committee of General Security, whose president Vadier, hated Robespierre and played a key role in his elimination.
43 errors. Also, the 40 thousands execution OS quote still leaves me skeptical, but as I couldn't find a death toll that was both more precise and more convincing, I'll go with it. I'll be happy to hear a more recent calculation though.
OS then arrives to Marie-Antoinette, and that allows me to jump on another topic : remember that quote from Danton ? "We must be terribe so the people don't have to" ? Well that was the spirit behind the infamous "loi des suspects", the law of suspects, that allowed the government to imprison anyone deemed suspect; if we don't take such decisions, there will be new September massacres : that's the logic behind it. It's a way of institutionalising a practice that would otherwise happen illegally, thus more violently, at the expense of the government's image. It is also to please the sans-culottes that the revolutionary tribunal launched a wave of executions of celebrities now labelled as traitors in october and november 1793 : Marie-Antoinette of course, but also Bailly, the Girondins, former conservative member of the Constituant Assembly such as Barnave, royal princes such as Philippe Egalité, who happened to be the king's cousin and the father of a deserter, and even Louis XV's last mistress, madame du Barry !
The idea behind these trials (those one being indeed show trials, unlike the trials faced by non-celebrities) was to satisfy the radical's demands for harsh punitive measures while also eliminating old enemies, or simply people whose death doesn't cost much to the Convention. They were, to put it bluntly, feeding the popular movement with heads they could afford to chop.
"Robespierre had saved the Revolution through Terror."
Wrong on both accounts. The revolutionary government as a whole managed to save the French republic from collapsing, Robespierre again wasn't alone in the government, nor was he at its head. Just for the anecdote, Furet calculated that the members of the CPS worked between 16 and 18 hours a day. The guys spent gigantic quantities of energy on reorganising the nation's whole war effort for victory. At least, OS somewhat acknowledges that. Still,
45 errors. We arleady adressed the question of Terror.
"Even the french military has got to act together again and pummeled the Allies at the Battle of Fleurus. For Danton and his followers, the time was right to try to normalize the French Republic."
This is probably the most scandalous timeline inaccuracy of te whole videos, since OS presents Danton's demand for clemency as a consequence of the Battle of Fleurus. However,
Danton was executed in early April, and Fleurus was won in late June. You see how distorted the chronology is here ? That's seriously an hallucinating inaccuracy, doing
ten seconds of actual research would have prevented it. What's even more infuriating is that OS twists the timeline seemingly only because he wants to show Robespierre was a bloodthirsty monster. This passage is one of the worst of the entire videos, OS, tell me, how the hell did you arrived at such a catastrophically inaccurate result ?
46 errors.
So apparently Robespierre alone decided to sent the Dantonists to the guillotine because he wanted the war and the Terror to continue. Robespierre was advocating for a quick end to the war; that's even what led Carnot, fellow member of the CPS partially in charge of the military matters, to actively take part in Thermidor, because Carnot was all for a war of conquest - and plundering I should add. So the war point doesn't stand. I'll repeat it : at this point, peace was not an option, unless France was to surrender to the Coalition.
47 errors. And as we saw, Robespierre was not the almighty dictator OS' seems to think he is :
48 errors.
Now a complex question must be asked. Why were the Dantonists tried (in what was clearly a show trial) and executed ? The popular explanation is that Robespierre was a mad psycho and that he killed them all by sheer sadism or lust for power. An explanation more accurate is the one given by Martin. It is essential to know that before the Indulgents/Dantonists, another group had been elminated : the Exagérés/Hébertistes, who were actually further left than most of the CPS, including Robespierre. These two groups both criticized the government for opposite reasons : the Hébertistes wanted more heads and less churches, and the Dantonists advocated for the abolition of the "exception laws" and the release of all prisoners - while the situation was still dire, because France could not be considered safe from invasion until the victory at Fleurus in late June. Here, it is extremely important to remember that Robespierre was no dictator and that decisions didn't come from him alone. He was indeed in agreement with the rest of the CPS that both groups needed to be eliminated; the most right-wing members of the committee, like Carnot and Barère opposed Hébert's atheism and revolutionary zeal, while the most left-wing, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois, opposed Danton's penchant for corruption and leniency. It also didn't helped that Danton refused to disscoiate from fis close friend Fabre d'Eglantine, whose reputation had just been badly marred by the East India Company scandal. Robespierre was not the driving force here, and McPhee even argues that he seems to have been "cajoled" into signing Danton and co's arrest wanrrants. So it was decided that both groups would be eliminated one after the other : first the Hébertistes, and then to reassure the sans-culottes who loved Hébert and might feel betrayed, the Dantonist soon followed. It's as simple as that : the CPS wanted to eliminate two potential rival (or even insurrection callers) from both sides of the political spectrum in order to maintain a central position and please everyone - because again, the government aimed at forming a "Sacred Union"
avant la lettre. In this regard, the elimination of the Dantonists can be compared to the Bonnet Rouge trial : in 1918, Clémenceau had a bunch of journalist and politicians advocating for a compromise with Germany arrested, tried and condemned, for the sake of maintaining a "Sacred Union" that would be hell-bent on winning no matter what. The Great War with Indy Neidell had some
episodes about that trial.
"Robespierre went "a bit mental"."
Classic old song about Robespierre being a bloodthirsty and almighty psychopath. It's still egregiously wrong, but OS' is still clinging to it, probably because it was more difficult to do actual research than to produce dumb memes. I have already said it, and anybody who has the patience and the willingness to read a good biography of Robespierre, such as Hervé Leuwers' or Peter McPhee's :
Robespierre was neither a bloodthirsty psycho nor an almighty tyrant. 49 errors. But what about the Cult of the Suprem Being ? Clearly that was Robespierre creating a crazy cult because he was a megalomaniac madman ! Well, not really. First let's remember one thing : deism, Robespierre's spiritual belief, was vastly widespread in the 18th century. Several american Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson and Thomas Paine (and possibly Washington), as well as several philosophers of the Enlightenment era such as Voltaire and Diderot were deist. To sum it up very briefly, it means believing in a super-human entity from which the universe is originated, but all the dogma and rites of Christianity are swept aside (that's really an oversimplification though). There was no darwinist theory of Evolution, no Plate Tectonics theory, no Big Bang Theory (no, not the series !). So being deist made sense, and it was not Robespierre's personal sect. Now what about the festival ? First, Robespierre presided it... because he was President of the Convention at this moment. That doesn't give him any special powers, and besides the presidency of the Convention changed every three or two weeks. He sure pushed for the thing, but the initiative came from the Committe of public instruction, not from him, and it was NOT, as OS' ridiculously portrays, a cult to Robespierre. This passage is one of the most blatantly and wholly inaccuracte passage of the videos, and yet there is some serious competition, as I think now is pretty clear since we're already at
50 errors ! What exactly was this cult ? It was three things :
- a new civic form of spiritualism that didn't include any rite or clergy, so it was NOT a religion; its goal was to make principles of equality, liberty and fraternity truly
sacred.
- an appeal to the still catholic peasantry who can see in this "catholicism with extra steps" and forgive the Republic about the harsh treatment of the refractory clergy.
- a pretext to organize great national festivities to unite the people of France as they had been united by the Fête de la Fédération organized by the Constitutional monarchy on July 14st 1790. What's that ? Ah, yes, OS didn't even mention it back then, even though it was a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution.
51 Errors.
Then comes Thermidor. This post is getting too long by now, so let's make it quick (or as quick as possible) : as insanely frustrating as it is to admit it, OS' account of Thermidor isn't inaccurate. It's thoroughly lacking, but the channel is called Oversimplified after all. He however really misses what happens after Thermidor. Because Thermidor was not the revenge of the moderates against the extremists : it was mainly a new internal purge inside the
Montagne, the left side of the Convention. Not like Danton's and Hébert's elimination, but similar to that of the Girondins : a vague group, the robespierrists, who is partially (only partially, through Robespierre and his allies) in charge of the government, and who is suddenly - and violently (in the 48 following Robespierre's death, more than a hundred people were sent to the guillotine, which is the deadliest moment of the whole period, and it happens AFTER Robespierre's death, so OS' grandiloquent sentence about Robespierre being "the last victim of the moustrous system of Terror he had created" is pure nonsense :
52 errors) by a loose coalition that will soon break away. Indeed, "a more moderate group called the Thermidorian took over the Convention", but it actually took them a few weeks; Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois, the most radical members of the CPS, will not be forced to resign before early September, a full month after Robespierre died. To sum it up very basically, Thermidor was an internal purge within the
Montagne, which left it too weakened to face the increasingly powerful centre-right, especially as the danger of invasion seemed to fade away. Some
montagnards will switch sides, such as Fouché and Barras, and other stayed true to their conviction : they were slowly but steadily eliminated between Thermidor and the creation of the Directory. That's why more than a year passes between Thermidor and the Directory. It was not a sudden turning point.
To add insult to injury, this period saw an gigantic black legend appear, as everyone now charged Robespierre (who couldn't defend hismelf anymore) with every crime he could think of to make evryone forget their own crimes. Vadier, president of the Committee of General Security, even had a false seal with a fleur-de-lys fabricated and hidden in Robespierre's room so that Robespierre could be accused of wanting to marry Louis XVI's daughter to become King, as ludicrous as it sounds. Sadly, this black legend is still the popular conception of Robespierre. I'm not saying he was a saint, but damn, posterity has really been unfair with him, more than with anyone else I can think of, and this kind of video is exactly what allows this black legend -
this complete myth of a bloodthirsty pyscho dictator that doesn't hold any ground - to still thrive.
52 errors.
"[The Directory had] the purpose of preventing power from falling into the hands of a single individual -
again."
For the last time, Robespierre has never been a dictator. I think I made it pretty clear.
55 errors. What actually prompted the thermidorian to adopt such a "careful" constitution was more the fear of seeing monarchy restored through legal means, as royalist were rapidly gaining ground via elections; they won the legislative elections of 1797 and almost restored monarchy. Having five Directors sharing the executive power meant that several sincerely republican directors could nip in the bud any such attempt to restore the monarchy. That's what happened in 1797, during the coup of Fructidor, which led to entire elections being cancelled because people had not voted correctly - which of course spurred a wave of disgust for the Republic in France, understandably so. Ironically, the thermidorian legend succeeded way beyond the thermidorians' expectations, as it ended up tainting the image of the Republic as a whole, which also resulted a decline in republicanism.
[Talking about the crushing of the royalist insurrection of Vendémiaire] "From this moment on, the people of Paris would never again be able to stage a popular uprising and lost their control over the Revolution."
OverSimplified...? Are you even conscious of what is written in your script ? *"*
Never again be able to stage a popular uprising" ? Ever heard of the July 1830 and 1848 Revolutions, of the Paris Commune, and all ? Okay, okay, he's only talking of the French Revolution, and it is true that there was no longer any major insurrection in Paris after that, but then, choose the right words, because "never again" means "never again", not "for the next 35 years".
There is then a whole passage about custom relaxing, and it's true that old religiosity lost some of its grip on everyday life. Suicide and divorce for example became more and more common despite being of course completely condemned by the Church. I guess that "It was social anarchy" is some weird and exaggerated way of seeing things, but frankly, after all the avalanche of nonsense that was the previous part, I'm inclined to be lenient towards
that.
Surprisingly enough, OS then goes on to describe pretty accurately the last years of the Directory, even though it is of course hugely simplified - at least it's not the sheer inaccuracy we saw earlier.
However, OverSimplified eventually claims to take stock of the French Revoluion as a whole, and boy, this is the grande finale :
"The French Revolution ! Born with great promises of liberty and equality. The commone people dared to challenge an oppressive system that had existed for centuries."
For now, all seems alright.
"Before they knew it, they found liberty sidelined by Terror, equality that possibly didn't hit the mark, and an absolute monarchy replaced with an absolute dictator."
It's tiring by now. We get it, it was violent. But I repeat it : it was NOT
exceptionally violent. And what it achieves surpasses what it costed. For all the talks about the revolutionaries being sadistic and bloodthirsty monsters, the guys actually had sane and human programs : the revolutionary government, along with the representatives in mission, even some of the most criminal ones, redistributed the lands of the expelled and executed, sometimes even freely and to the poorest like with Saint-Just's decrees of Ventôse 13th, created taxes directed at the richest ones, rebuilt and reinvigorated the army, not only saving France from invasion but also laying the foundations of Napoléon's Grande Armée, they began implementing free public school as much as they could given the circumstances, before the Directory decided to focus on education for the wealthiest classes, they made the food crisis less severe, they abolished slavery and proclaimed full equality of rights for all citizens, no matter their skin color, on February 4th 1794; the Republic saw France's first elections being held with universal male suffrage, the constitutional monarchy having only accepted census suffrage. While on August 4th 1789 the Constituant assembly had agreed to authorize the peasantry to pay their nobles to get rid of the old feudal dues, in August 1793 the revolutionary government abolished feudalism altogether, without condition. Now of course, not all of this was implemented efficiently : the abolition of slavery for example was impossible to force upon french islands in the Indian ocean who were out of reach, and these measures were often accompanied by a brutal repression. I'm not denying the violence. I'm trying to explain it rather than just patronizingly judge it as the result of dirty savages being bloodthirsty. I'm sick of seeing videos like this that paint the Revolution as little more than a giant bloodbath. It's both egregiously simplistic and reductive, and an inuslt to the generations of historians who worked and are still working to truly understand this incredibly complex event. If you zoom back and include the "respectable" part of the Revolution, going from 1789 to 1792, it is also the final abolition of the three orders and their inequalities, the birth of nationalism, the creation of a modern administration, and in general the creation of a modern France. If the French Revolution is generally considered to be the starting point of a new era, it's not without reasons.
53 errors.
"He (Napoléon) restored the Catholic Church"
For the last time : no, the French Revolution has never abolished the Church. Napoléon didn't "restore" anything, he just gave a new regime for the Church, in the Concordat of 1801.
54 errors.
"and got rid of that crazy calendar."
Laugh all you want a this "crazy calendar"; for many people it had a true sense, and this patronizing attitude does you no credit at all, OS.
55 errors.
And then we have a cliffhanger.
In my final assessment about Oversimplified's videos about the French Revolution, I must conclude that they're neither funny, nor instructive. They manage to be completely wrong on almost every single thing or person they talk about, while indulging in a generally conter-productive, moralizing and patronizing narrative, that doesn't do anything else than strengthening an outdated, ridiculous and completely erroneous vision of the French Revolution. I don't know if it's laziness, ignorance, or even dishonesty, or the three combined that led OverSimplified to produce such
bad videos, but what I'm sure of is that with them, he well earned the nickname of OverFalsified. And since, according to seemingly everyone on this sub, his other videos are good, I beg OverSimplified's team to
do something, anything to repair the damages, even a simple tweet would be welcome : the first part has 19M views, the second one has 14M. Looking at the comments and like/dislike ratio, one has to admit that what is being told in this videos is blindly believed by a majority. Take a little walk at
HistoryMemes and search "French Revolution", "Terror" or "Robespierre": you'll see that this insultingly simplistic take on the French Revolution, that of a mere bloodbath led by a megalomaniac psychopath, is broadly accepted. And this is discouraging to say the least. Thanks, OverSimplified.
And thank you for reading this huge wall of text, I didn't think it would be that long.
Sources :
Nouvelle Histoire de la Révolution Française, Jean-Clément Martin, 2019
La Terreur : Vérités et Légendes, Jean-Clément Martin, 2017
Le Dictionnaire des Révolutionnaires français, Pierre Brasme, 2014
Robespierre, Hervé Leuwers, 2014
Les Sans-Culottes parisiens en l'an II, Albert Soboul, 1958
1:
La Terreur : Vérités et Légendes, p. 23
2: La Terreur :
Vérités et Légendes, p. 27
Has anyone seen or heard of the German miniseries Generation War - widely dubbed as the German equivalent to Band of Brothers? (Which is an insult to Band of Brothers. Band of Brothers is absolutely amazing)
Basically it's about five German friends, none of whom are Nazis or show Nazi sympathies. 2 of them are brothers and are German soldiers, a nurse who joins the brothers, a singer and her lover who is a Jewish man, which is odd considering that by the time the series is set, 1941, such relationships were illegal, it's even more odd that (SPOILERS!) the Jewish man is one of only three survivors at the end.
I had a look at the reviews of it and it is very controversial. One the one hand it is praised by the Germans for depiction of warfare and highlighting some of the war crimes of the Wehrmacht. But at the same time it tries to paint the Germans as the victims.
One the one hand it tries to dispute the myth of the Clean Wehrmacht but it also unintentionally creates a false equivalence between the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and the Polish resistance.
However the series has received much more negative reviews in Poland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel.
The Polish and the Israeli reviewers in particular have pointed out that the series portrays the Red Army and Polish resistance as rampant Antisemites while significantly downplaying or even omitting antisemitism within the Wehrmacht. (of course antisemitism unfortunately existed in Poland and in the Red Army but not to the extent in the Wehrmacht). The show depicts the Armia Krajowa, an Anti-Nazi resistance group as being rampantly antisemitic, while ignoring the fact that Armia Krajowa had Jewish members and even had a branch set up specifically to save Jews or the fact that Poles consist of one quarter of the Righteous Among the Nations. It also omits the Concentration camps and many other aspects of the Holocaust.
British and American reviewers have also noted the series of promoting falsehoods about Nazi Germany. Laurence Zuckerman, an American reviewer for the British based newspaper The Tablet notes that the presentation of Germans as tolerant and free of anti-Semitism was "wildly out of sync" with what scholars have learned from letters, diaries and other primary sources. Zuckerman really puts it best, he correctly writes that in reality "most ordinary Germans at the time held attitudes of casual racism at the very least, and a strong sense of imperial entitlement over Jews, Slavs and other races deemed racially and culturally inferior. The series tries to draw a distinction between Nazis and everyday Germans that simply did not exist in any broad way. The tagline on the movie's poster – 'What happens when the country you love betrays everything you believe?' – is demonstrably false. Most Germans believed in the Nazi agenda."
Alan Posener a British-German journalist also points out that the film oddly gives a realistic view of the dealings of East Germany but plays down it's depiction of Nazi Germany.
It seems that this show was an attempt to try and reveal the human side of German forces in WWII and uncover the truth of it and show that the Germans were just as much "victims" of the war as the Allies were. But it seems that in actuality it promotes the very same myths that it is trying to reveal. The most serious anti-Semitic crimes depicted are committed by people other than the Germans. Safe to say I will probably give this series a miss!
Downfall does a very good job of highlighting both the realism and brutality of Hitler and his men will also making us connect with these evil people. Downfall makes no attempt to tone down or downplay the crimes of Nazi Germany, but this series seems to undo that. It doesn't matter whether it was intentional or not, this sort of thing is dangerous.
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