Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...summit. What kind of image will France present? On the surface, at least, that of a united nation celebrating its glorious past with the hoopla of a spectacular Bastille Night parade and sound-and-light show down the Champs Elysees. Already, merchants are hawking underwear decorated with little guillotines. French television is reveling in soap-opera love affairs between 18th century aristocrats and commoners. Villages across France are dressing up their summer festivals in blue, white...
Frenchmen appear ambivalent about their revolutionary forebears. Polls show that the most revered figure of the era is now the Marquis de Lafayette, who ultimately broke with the Jacobins and fled the country. After a televised re- enactment of Louis XVI's trial, only 27% of French viewers favored beheading the hapless King. One French poll even found that 17% of the country wants the return of the monarchy. Seeking new heroes, Mitterrand said last week that he will place in the Pantheon, France's national mausoleum, the remains of the Marquis de Condorcet, an influential leader of the National...
...trouble with this homogenized version of history is that the battles fought during the revolution still resist accommodation 200 years later. Twentieth century French historiography has been dominated by a Marxist school that celebrated the French Revolution and its class struggles as the mother of the Bolshevik Revolution. Regicide was the only way to crush the power of the privileged, and the Terror, like Stalin's purges, was a necessary transition to an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Many French have thought of themselves as different from other Europeans because they broke so violently with their past and started fresh...
...Mazauric in the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanite. "The message of 1789 . . . is to build a society unconstrained by multinational capitalism." SOS-Racisme, a civil rights group, for example, will celebrate with a rally for Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave who led an 18th century Haitian rebellion against French colonialism. A group of prominent Parisian socialists is agitating to rename part of the Rue St.-Honore after Robespierre. "All revolutions have excesses," explains former Health Minister Leon Schwarzenberg, "and any revolution without them must be considered suspect." But so far Robespierre's defenders have had no luck, and even...
...past decade Marxist history has lost its sway as many French intellectuals grew disillusioned with East bloc totalitarianism. A revisionist school, influenced by nonpartisan British and American scholars, presents a more complex picture of the revolution: nobles seeking to weaken royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example; few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from France's current best seller La Revolution...