Oh Give Me a Home....

Where the buffalo roam!
And the parrots and crocodiles plaaaaaay....

Chateaubriand's North America is one which may not exactly correspond with the real North America. You know, the one where New Orleans is geographically distinct from Niagara Falls.

Chateaubriand is a French Romantic and aristocrat who wisely decided to go on a voyage of exploration in America just as the French Revolution broke out. He thus uses America as the setting for many of his novels. Some passages, such as the one that describes Niagara Falls, are so famous that they are still the subject of analytic essays in French high schools the world over. Others, such as the beginning of Atala, where Chateaubriand lovingly describes the palm trees that adorn the banks of the upper Mississippi, and the crocodiles that apparently wander over the state of Kentucky, are not quite so famous.

One can tell quite easily where Chateaubriand actually visited, and where he made things up because his French audience didn't know what, if anything, lived in Kentucky.

Well That Was Dumb

As most people with some familiarity with European history know, the French Revolution was, in part, caused by unequal representation in taxation. France was divided up into three estates: the aristocracy, the clergy and the Third Estate.

Now, what is the Third Estate? "Everyone Else Who Isn't Noble or In the Church" or, according to Abbé Sieyes, it's everything! It's the nation!

Well, "the nation" excluding women, servants, vagrants, homeless people, people in the aristocracy and people in the church. Other than that it's everyone.

At any rate, the Third Estate was paying a lot of taxes to the state when the other two estates were not. However, the king could not raise taxes on any of the estates without the consent of the estates themselves. So, the question then arises, why was the Third Estate alone paying taxes?

Because during the Hundred Years War, the Third Estate consented to their current taxes (which mind you, were paying for a LARGE WAR) indefinitely.

Yeah.

Good job Third Estate, good job.

I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud of Opium Fumes

Gentle Readers, please be forewarned that this was an actual, serious tourism video for the Lake Countries of England. Why they decided that a giant squirrel named "MC Nuts" rapping Wordsworth would be the best testament to their attractiveness as a tourist destination is somewhat puzzling. However, as Ponpon from ArmJoe a few days ago taught us, nothing improves 19th century literature like a random animal doing anachronistic things.

Les Misérables: Letting the Disenfranchised Hit Back. In Green Minis, Apparently.

The Amateur Historian makes no secret of the fact that her favorite novel is Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, an epically long novel that at once presents the serious social problems of 19th century France and mythologizes them. Les Misérables has many interpretations (i.e. the musical, the multiple films and TV series) but the Amateur Historian finds that the Japanese have created by far the most absurd.

The Japanese company Takase has created a free downloadable 2D fighting game based on Les Miserables called ArmJoe, after the novel's Japanese title, Aa Mujou (ああ無情). The game features most of Victor Hugo's major characters, such as Jean Valjean, Enjolras (spelled Enjorlas, for whatever reason), Marius, Cosette, Éponine, Thénardier, and Javert, but also adds the characters Hugo was so negligent as to forget to include in his manuscript. These new additions consist of a policeman, a robotic clone of Valjean called RoboJean, an embodiment of Judgement, and, the Amateur Historian's personal favorite, a tea-drinking rabbit named Ponpon.

Enjoy, Gentle Readers. Everyone should have the experience of letting a tea-drinking rabbit run over Inspector Javert in a green Mini.

Really brilliant plan, there.

Shortly after Napoleon arrived in Elba, he decided that he did not like exile and would much prefer to be Emperor of the French again. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Napoleon took advantage of the total incompetence of Louis XVIII, the new Bourbon monarch, and marched on France. Louis XVIII, who had decided to keep fiercely Napoleonic military units together, to stew in their rage and to declare undying oaths to their emperor and who had further decided to completely disband half the military without giving them adequate compensation.

It was no wonder that someone of Louis XVIII's genius had an equally brilliant plan for dealing with Napoleon's return, and the defection of all the armies from Louis XVIII to Napoleon. Led by several advisers, including Chateaubriand, the Romantic of the time, Louis XVIII actually decided that his best plan was to stay in Paris and, with the Chambers of Peers and deputies on back-up, shame Napoleon into withdrawing.

Needless to say, Louis XVIII abandoned this plan in favor of running off to Switzerland instead.

Cato Street Conspirators: Thoroughly Impressive Idiocy

In the 1820s, the British government was still knee-jerk reactionary towards any sign of political radicalism. Napoleon had been defeated yes, but Ireland was still engulfed in various stages of repression and revolt, the Luddites were smashing machines, the vetrans of the Napoleonic wars were getting restless, the Peterloo Massacre had happened, rotten boroughs were beginning to smell and George III went off the deep end and told everyone he was related to a tree.

Thus, it does not come as a surprise to learn that a group of Spencean Philanthropists, so called because they followed the philosophy of the British radical Thomas Spence, tried to foment revolution and that the British government sentenced them all to death or deportation. However, this seems like something of an overreaction, given that, even in a time period full of constant revolt, riot and revolution that often did not operate along normal lines of logic, these Spenesan Philanthropists displayed the collective common sense of a box of hair and did not actually manage to be a threat to anything but themselves.

Their brilliant plan to overthrow the government was:
1. Kill Lord Liverpool and all his ministers at a dinner party.

That was it.

Technically, they had vague plans to form some sort of committee of public safety to oversee the radical revolution sure to follow, and who's to say it wouldn't've worked had there actually been a dinner party of all cabinet ministers to attack?

As the marichino cherry on top of thie sundae of fail!planing, the entire plot was created by none other than a police informant.

Good show gentlemen, good show.