That is however not French victors writing history, it is more of foreign Communists writing history.
The revolution is still a founding moment of the french "identity", and apart from a few late-to-the-party 2020's monarchists, we pretty much all believe that we did the right thing by kicking out the nobility.
There was French Revolution and then was the freedom and happiness, basically.
> is there a good aristocracy
I think that feudalism is fundamentally bad. But, I think that answer to this question is yes, there are non-evil aristocrats. Aristocracy is class you get born into, set of duties and privileges. Aristocracy holds power and have interests opposed to those who live under them. The image where all individuals belonging to that group are basically ugly and evil is not correct. It is not like all the the tortured and executed aristocrats deserved that.
And then there is question of huge amount of non-aristocratic victims of revolution which went completely unmentioned in our version of history.
Are they to blame for the holocaust? Well no, but they help to run it.
Aristocracy might not be made up 100% of evil mustache twirling villains, but they benefit from fruits of other's toils.
Lets consider much much milder version of the problem that we can relate.
Nestle was caught buying chocolate from sources using child labor and child slaves. Currently AFAIK only Kitkat is using fair-trade chocolate as a token gesture. Anything else is using chocolate with some fake symbols set up by PR companies funded by nestle et al.
Are you eating their - non kitkat - chocolate product supporting child slavery? Even though you might have done it fully ignorant of the fact. Are you going to buy their stuff knowing that now?
Is it feasible to live in our society and not buy stuff from corporations that do things like that?
Compared to that, not just that aristocracy is hereditary, but they had duties beyond "kill people". They were backbone of army, yes, but still it is not just that.
I think that making comparison between aristocracy and guards in concentration camps is more of political then actual attempt at reasonale historical analysios.
The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.
That is not honest argument, that is absurd accusation.
> The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.
That was not apparent from your comment. But also, I think that you are using straw idea of aristocracy rather then real societal system as it existed in various periods. The whole thread started with my look at real world historical aristocracy. You used made up nazi guard that was "just doing job" to tilt big picture, but it was not fair comparison.
All this is under article about Marie Antionette who specifically I don't really think was evil.
Direct historical example is the aristocracy of Hungary and Poland. Both undermined and exploited their rulers to extracted privileges and wealth of their respective nations. Resulting in weak states that fall pray to their neighbors.
> All this is under article about Marie Antionette who specifically I don't really think was evil.
I am not arguing she was evil, but that she was guilty of the situation and shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were.
I do not believe in guilt based on your birth circumstances. I also think that you are building flippant strawman in "shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were".
You dont want to judge people on their actions, you want to build enemies to make it easy to judge people. I am not interested in that. You dont care about what who believed, actually tried to push for and why the old system malfunctioned or was impossible to reform.
Nither do I.
Its not about birth but the action you take or not take.
> You dont want to judge people on their actions, you want to build enemies to make it easy to judge people. I am not interested in that. You dont care about what who believed, actually tried to push for and why the old system malfunctioned or was impossible to reform.
You completely mischarectarise what I say. You use formulations that put words into my mouth
> You dont care about
> You dont want to
This is the definition of building straw-man argument that YOU accuse me of. So maybe read what I write and critique what I wrote and not what you think that I think.
> I also think that you are building flippant strawman in "shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were".
This is the definition of judging person by their actions. Just because she was polite and smiling and wrote a tearful letters, it does not make her a good person. I dont care if you believe in Jesus and go to church 3 time a week. If you stab someone to death on the street for giving you 'the look' you should rot in prison.
For the record, I think this is not how one should look at history. We have our current values, but to anachronistically apply these values to whole epochs long gone leads astray IMO.
Personal ethics is another matter, things like greed, dishonesty, callousness, betrayal between equals seem to be held in low regard wherever and whenever we choose to look.
There have been attempts to try and superimpose such personal ethics on grand epochs in history, but it requires a painful shoehorning of personal morals into some square holes where it doesn't belong. It doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny.
Also, people are more likely to knee jerkly defend everything for by past important people and see them as unaware victims of circumstances them to judge them. Maybe except Hitler and Stalin.
Sometimes people do superimpose own values inappropriately, but other times those making judgements just know more about actual acts of those people - even including historical context.
Narcissists and sociopaths and what not are not modern phenomenon never heard about before. And their contemporaties for expressed a lot about them.