Arguably one of the best historical films ever made. At times it’s as if a news camera is actually there and recording what happened. By comparison, it makes the recent Napoleon film look like a cartoon. Most importantly, it makes the audience familiar with many of the key people and events of the French Revolution, which in the US is a grossly understudied topic. Amazingly, it keeps things interesting and tells an epic story with many relevant lessons for today.
This is a 2-part film in French, with English subtitles. The first part leads up to the calling of the Estates General and goes to the fall of the Tuileries Palace. The second part focuses on the rise and actions of the Committee for Public Safety. For those unfamiliar with French history, this begins a couple years after the American Revolution, and ends a couple years before the rise of Napoleon.
Part 1 “Les Années lumière” (youtube and invidious):
Part 2 “Les Années terribles” (youtube and invidious):
The uploader apparently upscaled the video, and integrated subtitles that they themselves edited.
For more information:
Part two of the upload takes the interesting approach of occasionally displaying subtitles in parentheses, not as translation of dialogue but as commentary about certain historical facts and allegations.
For example, these commentaries shift the brunt of blame for The Terror from Robespierre as lone tyrant, to an out-of-control political inquisition and purge that was abused up and down the country by so many petty brutal assholes drunk on power, with personal axes to grind and things to hide.
Which is not to say that Robespierre wasn’t guilty of mass murder disguised as “law and justice”, but in the end he was used as a scapegoat by others who were just as guilty, to hide behind and wash themselves of their own abhorrent crimes.
The facts are always more complicated than those written by the victors, who wrote the narratives published in newspapers at the time, and later making it to the history books, then films and miniseries, like this one.
Yeah, that’s a good point, there are a couple of parenthetical comments, I think they were made by the uploader. As I remember they were only in 2-3 places so they weren’t that distracting, but they helped to remind the viewer that no matter how objective a film may seem, by selecting the scenes that it shows and constructing the narrative that it does, it suggests an interpretation.
I don’t know much about the Terror and Robespierre, but there was a documentary that I found useful in hearing a couple of different arguments, BBC’s “Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution”:
It mixes re-enactments with discussions by modern historians, and shows how the scholars often disagree.