For me, because I find history fascinating, and can’t imagine anyone not wanting to know more than a little something about it, and for you, I’ve concocted a random list to help out.

History is no indicator of the future. It is a record of the past, a learning tool, and sometimes entertainment, as in “HE DID WHAT”. The French Revolution has something for everyone in this regard.

Books on the French Revolution are comprehensive and necessarily voluminous. I can’t blame the casual reader for shunning volumes of something they feel useless minutia. That attitude might deserve a rethink.

The reasons for the Revolution aren’t minute, or set in stone, but worth noting is that during the Revolution France’s economic and intellectual development was not matched by social and political change, and this should strike a note of familiarity, and with that interest, to anyone living in and aware of what is going on in these equally tenuous times. We’ve been around a long time. there is always a been there done that to reference. To see how things played out, though hopefully not prognostic, is compelling.

If your bored, and consider this kind of thing fun, explore:

Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore, Marie Antoinette, King Lousie XVI, LaFayette, Georges Jacques Danton, Paul Marat, and as influence
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (leftover) Napoleone di Buonaparte.

Other musta busta’s:

The Offense: Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke.

The Defense: The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine

Declaration of the Rights of Man.

For subsequent release from all this man fighting, an indirect result of it:
Mary Wollstonecraft’s, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects [1792].

In case you could care less about “The French”, no matter the significance of their revolution on our history and way of life, here’s some good stuff I’ve read recently:

Something we can’t blame the French for:
XXXL: Why are we so fat?

“We Bring Fear”.

Tonight a film premiering on PBS at 10PM:
The Reckoning: The Battle For The International Criminal Court,by Paco de Onís, Peter Kinoy & Pamela Yates ,PBS Trailer link.

As for me, the city winery here is having a let them eat (good) cheese, crackers, fruit, and drink wine, Bastille Day, happy (almost free) hour. I do anything for (almost) free (good) cheese.

Peace

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The letters in the largest pile were from a friend I went to school with in Tasmania. We became lost friend pen-pals once I moved. The letters were long, and read more like stories than letters, but they always ended with questions meant to be answered by a return letter. I always complied. I couldn’t remember if my return letters were long, though I couldn’t imagine them being short. I’m sure you know what I mean. We stopped writing and started emailing in or around 12th grade. We’ve following each through college and into grad school via the internet. I don’t have copies of her emails throughout the years, they of course got deleted. The real letter was dead, the written record of pieces of one’s life no more.

Her letters were beautifully written records of a time of life. After reading them, and because I was cleaning out things I no longer needed, I decided to place them in an attractive box. I then sent them to her, along with a letter. I thought she’d be glad to have them back, if for no other reason than as a record of that time in her life.

I couldn’t help but have a passing thought about the fate of my letters to her, though I didn’t expect they would have been kept. Who keeps letters unless they are from a lover. Except me of course. I hadn’t heard from her in some time, and had forgotten about the letters more or less.

When I returned home this evening I found a box on the table. The box contained my letters, and a letter.

Some things make you smile.

I sit here now mourning the obsolescent letter.

peace

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