Yet another annoying Guardian article

[estellacat]

So I just read this article which I have several problems with. Don't get me wrong; I see where the author is coming from. He's pointing out the difference between mistakes and intentional changes to the historical record in history. This is an important distinction to make. However, I must differ with his idea that this is the fundamental

Comments

Re: Fascinating

[estellacat]

Of course, you often also see equally anachronistic hand-waves of certain regressive positions being "of their time" when in reality they were already controversial. I'll excuse a late-18th century person as being of their time for not advocating for women's rights, but the same doesn't go for advocates of slavery from the same period. The notion that history is linear progress and therefore the further back in time you go the more backward people are by some kind of mathematical formula leads as much to blanket acceptance as blanket condemnation.

I think there is an element of corruption is more interesting - and more "human" for that matter - in a portrayal like Mantel's. But it seems to me that there's also an equally insidious message of discouraging people from having strong convictions and fighting for them because you'll inevitably become a fanatic and worse than whatever you were fighting. Mantel's flavor of this is admittedly a variant on the trope in that she doesn't give Robespierre much agency in the matter and rather implies that he just associated with the wrong pople and was essentially manipulated. (I nearly added, "by those more fanatical than him", but I realized that while this is implied for Saint-Just, Élisabeth in particular is never given any believable motivation for what she does.) But it strikes me as a kind of trite and unhelpful just-so story about the dangers of revolutions - if it's not just a resurgence of the even older trope of the folly of trying to reform an inherently corrupt humanity.