Thoughts on the Manifesto

This is the third time I have read The Communist Manifesto, and each time I have read it I’ve taken something new. The first time I read it, it was a struggle just to figure out what Marx was talking about. The second time I began to pick apart the properties of communism as presented by Marx and Engels, but still I didn’t see the applicability of it. This time around I was interested in what I found to be a dichotomy between the positivity of the outlook in the Manifesto verses the complete hell communism has proven to be in practice.
At times they write in philosophical jargon that I think could be phrased more succinctly and clearly, but behind this veil of academia the book almost seems like a fairy tale. When I think communism, I can’t help but think of Nazi concentration camps. I suppose I could see an abuse of this structure if it was completely used as an end to power and control, but in its intentions, the Manifesto presents a progressive and hopeful scenario. The abolishment of the class system, and thus equality among the masses, the stripping of the social class character from property, such that everyone has a right to their own land, public education for children: these sound like good ideas on paper. In fact, most everything in the Manifesto sounds good in theory, except maybe the new connotations surrounding the family, which while in a way I get, I still don’t care for it.
So if communism sounds so good on paper, why hasn’t it worked? Could it ever work? I know I couldn’t answer those questions here, but at least in dealing with the problem of this rift between what communism should be in theory and what it has been in execution, I think the answer is not too hard to find. Humans are fallible. Some tend to crave power, and even if communism as put forth by Marx and Engels is a benevolent idea, there are always individuals and groups willing to misconstrue something that was originally intended for the betterment of mankind as a whole in favor of bettering their individual existences (as they perhaps see it) with money, power, reputation, and so on. I like the ideas presented by Marx and Engels for the most part, I just don’t see how the system could ever get around power-hungry would be emperors.

Napoleon and Popular Opinion

Although I realize we exhausted much of the Anti-Napoleon material in class Thursday, in reviewing the points covered in the past week, these pictures still especially stood out to me. However redundant it might be, I have to go back to this stuff. The easiest observation one might make is that the caricatures offer a glimpse into the mental landscape of the time--the opinions, fears, and complaints of the common people.
In looking through these little windows into the thoughts of general people at the time, I find myself wondering how these caricatures change my opinion of Napoleon, how they alter my preconceptions I might have brought with me from previous contact with him and the time period in other classes. I think this question might have been posed in class Thursday, actually.
What I find interesting is that for the most part, the caricatures really do not change my thoughts. Through lecture and discussion in class, I know more than I did before about Napoleon now, but the general ideas I had about the guy still hold--they are reinforced by the caricatures even. This is a little disappointing for me. It makes me feel as though I am not digging deep enough, that I am only on the surface. But then I think of the span of time that separates us and Revolutionary France. There has been plenty of time for the world to get a good idea of what a terrible person Napoleon was. So at least to that extent, it makes sense that the caricatures would not alter my opinions, only reinforce them.
I am more interested in how common people during this time would have reacted to seeing such pictures. There is probably a good chance that the images were representative of a large chunk of people’s silenced opinions, and that when they saw them they had to suppress a smile. But surely there were also people that completely ate up the façade Napoleon put up. Surely there were people that did think him a grand military leader, a potential savior for a country in trouble everywhere one turned.
Public opinion today is such a different beast. Newspapers, broadcasts on television, radio news programs, the INTERNET--it is almost impossible for us to hear of anything in popular or political culture without quickly having dozens of different things telling us how we should process what’s going on, where we should align our opinions. In revolutionary France, I am genuinely curious as to what kind of effect these caricatures (and obviously there were many) had collectively on the people. Time has magnified Napoleon’s reputation as a “bad guy,” but in his particular time period, did such caricatures make any difference? If so how and to what end? Or were they beside the point, taken in and then disregarded by the populace with little thought of any implications? Maybe I am asking questions that do not especially matter at the end of the day, but curiosity compels me to wonder.

11 June 2010

The Nobility and the Grand Jours: Some Questions

In reading “Reforming the Provinces: The Grand Jours d’Auvergne,” two things plague me: historical credibility and modern perspective. I have neither the time nor desire to go into these things in any kind of broad sense that could be applied to any area of academia. Rather, I would like to point to why this is a problem for me with this particular area of history we are studying.

When I speak of historical credibility, I mean just that. I became aware that Flechier’s excerpts could have had a biased bent from the start when he mocked the people of the countryside and suggested the women found in these parts were homely at best. I knew from the outset I was reading at least semi-subjective material. The framing argument around the Flechier pieces, however is the main thing that perturbs me. Specifically, I am interested in the statistics that while 87 members of the nobility were tried, 574 commoners were tried as well. I would not have assumed such a ratio while reading Flechier. His focus is specifically on nobles and gives the impression that they alone were the focal point of the Grand Jours. Clearly this was not the case. Primary and secondary sources are always of vital use in researching a particular event, but in this case I find Flechier’s input to be more confusing than beneficial to my understanding of this court. I understand that the point was to make tangible again the hand of Louis XIV that was not being felt in the countryside and remoter areas. I also understand that class distinction aside, commoner or noble, all people are fallible and capable of criminal activities and should suffer the consequences of such activities. The main problem for me arises when historical sources such as Flechier skew things in such a way that it is difficult to make out the big picture, which leads to my question of modern perspective.

From the vantage point of several centuries into the future, historical sources are all one has to go on in many cases. While there are many questions that are of interest from a scholarly stand point, the most basic so far as the Grand Jours goes, is ascertaining exactly what the point of it was. If Louis XIV was interested in making his power felt where it was dwindling in the conscious of the people, it makes sense that he would go for the nobility: they were the powerhouses of such areas, exerted the most influence, and had the best leverage for misconduct. A source such as Flechier backs this up, but the statistics that follow bring his pieces into question for me. Objectively, I want to know how the nobility fit into Louis XIV’s plans for the Grand Jours and why the statistics for the commoners was so much higher (regular criminality aside, that is still a significantly higher number of common people than nobles). From a modern perspective, at least from these pages, I find myself unable to piece these numbers with a motive that satisfactorily matches them.