People will build entire arguments on the French Revolution based on inaccuracies or lies and then whine that we're being "elitist" for correcting them.
Your argument basically rests on saying the historical equivalent of "1+1=3" and when corrected you deflect with "well not anyone's an expert and tbh this is elitist maybe 1+1 does equal 3 did you consider that?"
I know history isn't a "hard science" like math (lol) but it's still a science, it still has rules, and you can't argue that, say, Olympe de Gouges was arrested for "speaking out against the Terror" when what we identify as the period of "the Terror" didn't exist yet.
This. Like I rambled in that other post, I assume it comes from the way things are taught and as an educator, it scares me. Yes, a university course is too short to cover all the complexities but we are talking about inaccuracies, not just simplifications.
I know the Terror is a difficult to define term and nobody agrees when it actually started, but "anarchist beheadings" were not a thing at the time de Gouges wrote her essay, so it could not be the context behind it. Yes, one has to know the whole history of Girondin vs Montagnard conflict to understand what she was talking about, which can be too complex for one university course, but why provide an incorrect explanation is ??? to me.
And yes, history is treated as a "reading about what happened from a random source you can find", and not as a discipline that requires specific training to master (starting from "how do we interpret a source" and many other things that I don't know because while being an expert in one discipline, I am not a historian so I don't know!)
And yes, there is a lot to say about the accessibility of university education and academia (btw, another very leftist topic - free education and why it's an absolute must). But there are free sources available, and people here are more than happy to offer them and share things. One does not need a PhD in history to be interested in history and to learn about common misconceptions about the French revolution or another topic. But I feel it's basic logic to understand that people who study the discipline know more, because they spent years studying and researching this stuff.
Yeah and tagging onto this i find the « oh u so elitist » argument rather ignorant as well. Some assume you have to learn these knowledge thru a university/academic trajectory by paying insane tuition, but I myself never studied French Revoltuion at university level and learned thru reading from libraries and browsing free online archives myself.
When u look at frevblr as an example too, most of us arent pursuing history as our major and learned thru what each other shared.
I dont know if this applies on a bigger spectrum, but my experience is unless the university program reeeeally specializes in French Revolution history (this applies to other subjects as well), its….likely not taught well. The only French Revolution relevant class taught in my college is not good lol (now provided it is an art school). When I got a preview of SciencePo’s bachelor curricular on the Revolution, it is also very surface level too.
So I think the aggravating trait here is complacency. Developing expertise takes time rummaging thru loads of information. You cant assume you know all about a subject just because you took one class or because you listened to a podcast or read a single book. They might be a good start but it is not enough. If anything, frev made me realize the more I read, the less I know about something… It is truly impossible to exhaust studying it, and honestly thats what makes this passion so long-lasting. and thats why furet is wrong (sorry tangent)
