Talk:Republican marriage

Misogyny quote

I'll have to get the book from my University library, on Tuesday. I can assure you that it is there, and in any event it is hard to dispute that Republican marriages - if they did occur, and if they did involve stripping the clothing off of innocent young women - could very well be characterized as misogynistic. Cheers! bd2412 T 03:19, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Stripping the clothing off innocent young women is actually my favourite passtime, and I consider it a most "philogynic" thing to do... Kidding. Seriously, though:

The whole thing was certainly "misanthropy", but I see no reason to call it misogyny. It's like calling the Holocaust misogynic: both the man and the woman suffered exactly the same fate. It would be misogyny if a woman were executed in this way just because she was a woman - i.e. if the executioners simply seized any woman from the street and tied her to a counter-revolutionary male. Of course, nobody has ever claimed that. In these and similar massacres, the victims of either sex were (mostly falsely) accused of being counter-revolutionaries - which tended to include the wives of the counter-revolutionaries, along with their children. Of course, the truth was that a woman was less likely to be actively involved in counter-revolutionary activities than a man was. But if we should discuss the truth, it was that both men and women were murdered for entirely different reasons than the official charges (robbing them, instilling fear in the population, getting rid of huge numbers of prisoners who needed to be fed and suffered from diseases). Again, these motives have nothing to do with the victims' gender. BTW, the voyeurism part is not obvious either - experienced mass murderers such as myself often undress people before execution in order to preserve the clothes and other usable/valuable possessions (e.g. the Nazis were very systematic in this). That was done in the Noyades as well.

Why am I bothering you with a quote request? All the problems arise from the fact that the book cited is so clearly not about analysing the events of the French revolution as such. It's a book analysing the opinions of a few English observers about the French revolution. The question is not whether the words "misogyny" and "voyeurism" or something similar appear in the book (I absolutely believe you that they do). The question is who uses them and analysing what.

1. If the author quotes 18th century feminist Williams as using these words (not very likely), then the statement should at least be paraphrased to explicitly quote her opinion (as distinct from the opinion of a reliable source in Wikipedian terms). While Williams is not a reliable analyst of the Nantes events from a modern standpoint, I'm inclined to admit that her opinion would be a curious fact which sort of deserves mention - but it should still be made clear that this is not supposed to be taken as a modern, reliable assessment.

2. If the author himself is using the words, it is still possible that with these words, he is analysing Williams' opinion rather than presenting his own. In other words, it's possible that he is expressing what he thinks Williams thinks. This would be pretty natural, because such appears to be the overall thrust of the book. But in this case, strictly speaking, the words can be neither attributed to Williams nor to him, and I think it becomes pretty excessive to add them.

3. So the above two are the alternatives that I can't exclude without access to a quote. Now if they really are excluded, if what the words express is the author's own opinion, then only the original problem remains. It is that the author's own opinion is completely irrelevant for Wikipedia, as he is not a historian or a gender studies specialist (WP:RS) but a literary scholar. His book is not intended to analyse the reality of the French Revolution and specifically whether in reality the mariages républicains displayed misogyny on the part of Carrier and his henchmen. It's none of his business to do so. He only analyses English people's literary texts about this. So in this case, again, the sentence should definitely be removed. Cheers! --Anonymous44 (talk) 22:58, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

• So far as I can tell, this author has written five books on the French Revolution. From a literary angle, yes, but I can not imagine his opinion to be uninformed. Moreover, the Holocaust analogy is inapt. If SS soldiers unnecessarily stripped young women naked as a prelude to their execution, that would be misogynistic. If they happened to stripp men and women naked as a pretense for stripping the women, that would still be misogynistic (although certainly intent would be difficult to demonstrate). If, at Nantes, Jacobins apprehended and executed men believed to be guilty of some offense, and in the course of so doing stripped and then killed women not thought to be guilty of any offense, that properly raises the inference of a general contempt for the women.
  
  By the way, thanks for your contributions to the article, you have challenged my preconceptions and substantially improved it. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:31, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for thanking me, I'm glad you don't feel I've ruined your article or something.:)

1.According to his official biography, the author of the book is an "associate professor of English at Blakemore, Associate Professor of English, Florida Atlantic University" who "has published on a variety of topics in English and American literature", and the books involving the French revolution are listed as one of these "topics in English and American literature".[1] He certainly stretched the notion of literature a bit, but that's his problem: I just don't see this as a reliable source for the history itself. True, he has to be assumed to possess some knowledge of the historical events that are pertinent to his topic as well, but we are not talking about some basic knowledge here, but rather about rather specific details and interpretations. Questions such as "were the Jacobins misogynic", or, more correctly, "was Carrier being misogynic in Nantes", or, more likely, "Were Carrier's executioners being misogynic" - are questions for historians and perhaps gender scholars, not for literary critics.

2.You say "If they happened to stripp men and women naked as a pretense for stripping the women, that would still be misogynistic (although certainly intent would be difficult to demonstrate)."

First of all, I think such an interpretation of their motives would be very far-fetched. It may be difficult to believe in our sex-crazed time, but still, as I said above, fine elegant upper-class clothes can't be used if you have chopped the person in them to death, or if you have shot the person, or if you have drowned the person in a river. Undressing a corpse is also a bloody nuisance - that's the point of presenting the gas chambers as "bathrooms", too.

Even if the actual point is to humiliate people, you're still humiliating both sexes in the same way. And even if an additional secret motive is to visually enjoy the beauties of the woman, I still don't think that necessarily means any special "hate or contempt for women" (misogyny), it just means that you are: 1. morally, a f***ing bastard and 2. biologically, heterosexual. I see I can't convince you, but I hope I've at least made my point that it is not immediately obvious that it is misogynistic. (If it is, why write it anyway, the reader can figure it out for herself, right?)

3.You say "If, at Nantes, Jacobins apprehended and executed men believed to be guilty of some offense, and in the course of so doing stripped and then killed women not thought to be guilty of any offense..."

This "if" is irrelevant, because, as I said above, no source says they did such a thing. Just like the men, the women in the noyades were mostly taken from the Nantes prisons (one of the points being precisely to empty these prisons), they were supposed to be guilty of something. Greetings! --Anonymous44 (talk) 15:52, 27 January 2009 (UTC)