Since there’s so many dudes confused about how to ask out women…. if you’re a decent man & you want to ask a woman you don’t know out on a date in a non threatening manner, let me help you with literally the easiest way that most women will appreciate (this honestly stands true for if you’re a person who wants to ask a person you don’t know out, but like men especially).
Give her yournumber.
That’s it, that’s the whole trick. No Houdini. No weird conman games! Just walk up to her and say “hi I’m a person with a name, and I can’t help noticing how beautiful/kind/adjective you are. This is my phone number, if you’re free sometime I would love to take you out for coffee”. Then leave. And leave it at that. Compliment: given. Phone number: given. Interaction: complete.
I literally promise you, for a majority of single women, the most cool thing is a compliment & being hit on & being left alone all in one interaction. like trust me on this.
Okay, I’ve watched some reaction videos to ofmd (yes, I’m at that sad stage of hyperfixation, what can I do), specifically two reactions by straight guys, and I’m fascinated.
I know how important this series is for a lot of queer people, cause, well, I watched it, and also my best friend, and I’m also on tumblr. Seeing yourself represented on screen, having your story treated with love and respect, all that. But only after watching those people react am I starting to understand how important it is in general. It’s also very interesting to me seeing their realization about the way the queerness in the show progresses vs. the usual tumblr user realization. Let me try to put this into words .
I work in a profession which has, let’s be honest, a pretty poor history with LGBT+ issues. When I was starting to think about my transition, I was blessed with some hugely supportive, helpful, understanding colleagues and peers. They told me all sorts of things about how I’d be supported, welcomed, protected. How the process could be handled, how they’d provide the right balance of authority and autonomy, how they’d help defend my privacy. And I believed them; I trusted them; it helped, but… I was still very nervous, very anxious, and deep down, very convinced that I was soon to make a decision which would part me from a profession and a lifestyle I loved very, very much; because the two were simply incompatible - because the complexities and peculiarities involved in gender transition could simply not coexist with my profession. Because, no matter how good the chain of command could talk the talk, the profession, at large, would simply not walk the walk.
Then one day I sat in a big lecture hall full of other people in similar clothes, and a trans lady - about my age, about my seniority, who’d been through the same terrifying process I was staring down the loaded barrel of - stood up on stage. She spoke for about half an hour, and said a number of hugely helpful things, most of them targeted at the predominantly cisgender audience, about how to positively handle the challenges involved in commanding, leading and managing trans people in our profession. But one thing she said, right near the start of the talk, dropped my fucking jaw and left me feeling like someone just switched off the gravity.
She said “It wasn’t a big deal.”
She told the story of her coming out, in broad brushstrokes; the sort of preparations she’d made, a bit of personal history, the command climate, who knew and who didn’t. But that one line, and the context around me, was like the fucking sun coming up.
It wasn’t a big deal.
She could have been staring me right in the eye and speaking directly to my soul. I am like you; I am one of you; I have done the scary, intimidating, complex thing you’re about to do. It wasn’t a big deal. It went fine. You, LARPHacks, are going to be just fine. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. My own personal Julian of Norwich, standing up on stage with saint’s halo, a big cheesy grin and a photo of her in Afghanistan five years ago with an adam’s apple and stubble.
Any number of my cisgender colleagues and commanders could have told me the same thing, and I would have nodded politely and thanked them for the sentiment but deep down not believed them. And that is why representation is vital.
You can see a lot of really positive comments in the thread captured in the image above, from simple expressions of welcome and acceptance to helpful, practical advice about gendered ablutions. But the line that, I guarantee you, will have put a big fucking grin on the OP’s face and made them feel like yes, yes, this game is for me too! is the very simple and straightforward:
“I’m trans. I write for Empire.”
In those six words, @alchymistryandcoldsteelhas put a spike in the tyre of every gnawing little anxiety that a trans potential-new-player might have about trying this LARP. She speaks with the voice of Authority; she is Established; and she is one of us, where the OP wasn’t even sure there was an “us” in this game.
There’s so much subtext in those six words - she’s conveying not only that she’s trans and in an authority position at the game, but that she is out publicly, and moreover, so comfortable in that position that she’s willing to tell people so on the internet; she frames it as a simple statement of fact; later in the post, she’s realistic, which helps convey trust and investment in her sentiments… it’s brilliant. It’s a game-changer.
Not everyone has the resource, the courage, the freedom or the support to be out and proud and to act as a representative; nobody should ever feel pressured to do so. But for those who do, and who have those opportunities, and who want to: please don’t ever be scared that you’re putting yourself forward or “showing off” or making a big deal of your status by simply Existing Publicly While A Trans LARPer (or as a queer LARPer, a LARPer of colour, a disabled LARPer, a female LARPer, etc). You may never know the impact you’ll have on some new young LARPer’s life, when they see you across a field and go oh my god they’re like me, I can be me, I can be me!.
Those simple, deeply courageous acts of quiet, firm representation are like manna from heaven to the uncertain, the nervous, the will-I-be-welcome. And if you’re notin one of those categories, but are in a position to enable or encourage representation - in photos, in blog posts, in setting material - from those who are, fucking do it. Get there now. Your LARP needs you.
(I tore a ligament in my fucking ankle three weeks ago by not following my own goddamn advice at a LARP so I’m crotchety and have opinions on the internet. I shall not apologise. BEHOLD.)
Count Dracula, reclining on a sofa casually reading a railway timetable: I am being so normal right now
My favorite explanations for this moment, in order of how much they make me laugh:
Likely Doylist explanation: Bram Stoker wants you to realize this is weird and feel nervous about the Count because of it.
Likely Watsonian explanation: This is another facet of Dracula’s studying, so that he’ll blend in better once he gets to England.
Unlikely but funny Doylist explanation: Bram Stoker (as will be shown later) thinks this is a reasonable thing to do, in the face of society’s disapproval.
Funnier Watsonian explanation: While Jonathan was fetching paperwork, Dracula ran into the other room, set the table at superspeed, ran back to the library, grabbed the first book his hand fell on, and carefully posed himself to look like he’d been there the whole time. Whereupon he realized that he had picked up the Weirdest Possible Casual Reading Choice but didn’t have time to pick another book and now has to brazen it out. Like a cat, Dracula at all times has to act like He Meant to Do That. He’s studying train timetables - of course he is! That’s a completely reasonable and normal human thing to do in preparation for moving to a new country! Train travel is a vital piece of British infrastructure that he needs to understand!
Jonathan now thinks that Dracula is a train enthusiast.
it must be very odd to run into people on tumblr defending Robespierre saying that calling him a mass murderer is “thermidorian propaganda”. So let’s unpack that.
Thermidorian propaganda is, long story short, a series of made up or distorted facts about the politics of year II (1793/94, like, the terror) and specially about Robespierre. We all know propaganda is supposed to push an agenda, it’s usually financed by an entity. With thermidorian propaganda is hard to tell because the people who had anything to gain from painting Robespierre as a monster are long dead, but somehow it still gets parroted to this day by non-specialists and reproduced in fiction and pop culture.
In this post I’m going to focus on the original thermidorian propaganda that came out immediately after Robespierre’s death. I hope, if real life allows me, this to be the first post of a series. I must clarify I’m not a historian so there will be inacuracies, this is just a casual, funny and quick intro to the subject, so if I succeed in picking your interest, I strongly encourage you to do your own research with real academic sources and draw your own conclusions. Also I’d like to thank @frevandrest and @tierseta for their corrections and suggestions! Also I relied a lot on @rbzpr, specially this post that compiles a lot of primary sources about the propaganda.
Year II (1793-1794) speedrun
Robespierre’s real role during the terror
To understand what even was the terror about, you need to know that there was an external war against all the monarchies of Europe and simultaneously, an internal war against counterrevolutionary forces like vendean revels and federalists. To even have a chance for the republic to survive, the national convention declared that the government would be “revolutionary until peace” which means that there would be a state of emergency, which suspended certain freedoms until peacetime. Some of the emergency measures were the suspension of the constitution of 1793, the infamous law of suspects and general maximum, the limitation of freedom of press and the institution of representatives on mission, deputies of the convention that were sent to the provinces to watch over military operations and had the authority to do whatever they wanted.
Robespierre in 1793 was elected to the Committee of Public Safety. The CPS was the convention’s executive branch and pretty much a war cabinet with dictatorial powers (in theory, but in practice everything they did had to be approved by the convention). Its purpose was to take measures to win the war against all of Europe, keep everyone fed and crush counterrevolution. They didn’t have a “director” or anything like that, the twelve had equal authority. Besides, the CPS was full of deeply confrontational, clashing personalities that weren’t exactly fond of Robespierre, so it’s not like he could dominate over them. (Twelve who Ruled by R.R. Palmer gives you a good idea of their dynamic and boy did they hate each other)
Despite this, Robespierre was the most famous member; so he became the de facto face of the CPS and it was assumed outside of France that he had control over the republic, which was portrayed by the monarchies as a barbaric mess, and that impression lives on.
I hope to make this very clear: Robespierre wasn’t as powerful and didn’t have as much control of the situation as bad school texts will make us believe. Nobody did, the situation during the terror really was that chaotic. By the summer of 1794, known today as the Great Terror, Robespierre’s popularity and influence on the goverment was weakened compared to that it was before (I’ll elaborate why soon).
The excesses of year II and who made them
The deputies that became the future thermidorians, for the most part, were ultra radicals from the mountain (the far left party that was most influential in the convention and Robespierre himself was a part of) who had been sent to the provinces as representatives in mission to crush counterrevolution or supervise the army. Some of them committed some atrocious war crimes, brutally executing thousands of people. Robespierre was appalled, had them recalled and spent the rest of his life antagonizing them because he didn’t have the authority to bring them to justice.
For example, Collot d’Herbois, fellow CPS member, who shot people with cannons full of shrapnel as a representative on mission in Lyons alongside Joseph Fouché, used his authority to counteract Robespierre’s attempts to hold him or the other representatives on mission accountable. Still Robespierre had them on his radar to punish them as soon as he had the opportunity and they had him on their radar fearing that he would use his popularity against them at any moment. Some of them tried to bootlick him and get on his good side, but their actions were so repulsive to him he refused any kind of compromise.
Other important details
The idea that Robespierre was aspiring for a dictatorship comes from way earlier. In November 1792, a girodin named Louvet accused him of such and wanting to form a triumvirate with Danton and Marat. Robespierre defended himself well and the idea was discredited, only to be recycled during thermidor when the surviving girondins came back to the convention (the girondins another long story lmao)
The idea that Robespierre was some kind of blood drinking monster also started even before the man even did anything wrong. His radical ideals about giving voting rights to minorities like jews and protestants, to men that didn’t own property, to free black people, him speaking out against slavery, against the inviolability of the king, the royal veto, etc… it genuinely pissed off a lot of people
This is a huge tangent but it’s relevant because it’s the origin of Robespierre’s supposed God-complex. So, if you have heard about the decristianization hysteria that was going on during the terror, Robespierre was hostile to it actually, and thought the state needed some kind of religion to hold it together, which is funny since a lot of people nowadays believe he was an atheist. To put a stop to it and reinforce the freedom of cults, he proposed that the French Republic must recognize the cult of “Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul” as a compromise between religion and secular patriotic worship. To clarify, this isn’t some religion Robespierre made up out of nowhere, it was influenced by Rousseau’s deist ideas and civic festivals (More on that in Mathiez essay about The Supreme Being in The Fall of Robespierre). The project was a success at the time, but his militant atheist coworkers couldn’t forgive him for it and went out of their way to use it against him later. Thus the Committee of General Security put together a report (with fabricated evidence and all!) in which they tried to link him to a wacky but harmless and obscure cult that prophesied the coming of a messiah, implying that it was Robespierre, with the purpose to ridicule him.
The infamous Prairial law (here’s a post explaining it better than I ever could). This law, which streamlined processes and executions and centralized them in Paris, removed the deputies immunity which would enable Robespierre to go after the aforementioned war criminals’ heads. However, Robespierre cut ties with the CPS after a fight with the other members and disappeared from the government, leaving the law in the hands of people who abused it, like the Committee of General Security and public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville (who also had beef with Robespierre). In fact you don’t see many arrests signed by Robespierre during this time, that later became considered to be the Great Terror, while his coworkers, like Carnot or Barère, were very trigger happy using this law to say the least.
Robespierre’s fall
So, Robespierre goes rogue against the CPS and disappears from the government for more than a month. There was an attempt at reconciliation that Robespierre completely rejected when the 8th thermidor he returns and causes a commotion with an emotional and disjointed speech in which he expresses his despair about the gory state of the revolution and vagues the violent deputies, but refuses to give their names. The speech is definitely not his best and you can tell he’s not ok, but it has some raw, revealing lines like:
“Anyway, voilà within less than six weeks that my dictatorship is expired, and that I didn’t have any kind of influence on the government. Has patriotism been more protected? the factions more timid, the patrie happier? I would wish so”
Or my personal favorite:
“They call me tyrant… If I would be one, they would crawl at my feet, I would stuff them with gold, I would ensure them the right to commit all the crimes, and they would be grateful.”
Fouché and others took advantage of his vagueness to convince half of the convention that he was targeting them and aspiring for a power grab.
Jean Lambert Tallien, a young deputy who had participated in bloody repressions in Bordeaux, conspired with his then girlfriend Thérese Cabarrus who was in prison, starts the reaction the next day by interrupting SJ’s speech trying to mitigate the mess Robespierre caused the previous day. Later Tallien becomes instrumental in building the narrative to justify Robespierre’s murder and create the concept of the Reign of Terror.
The first batch of Thermidorian propaganda
The accusations against Robespierre were vague and contradictory… and calling them accusations is kind of generous because they were mostly people yelling vague grievances against him, nothing official or legal. The ultra radicals accused Robespierre of not being enough of a terrorist. The moderates of being too much of a terrorist. The funniest example of this dichotomy was when Billaud-Varenne (CPS member) accused him of, I shit you not, protesting against arresting Danton and another guy shouting “the blood of Danton chokes you” during the session. Anyway, Robespierre was declared an outlaw and executed with no trial and at least a hundred of his followers were dragged with him to the scaffold. Ironically, the day after Robespierre’s death saw the highest number of people guillotined in a single day in all of the terror. I need to empathize that he was guillotined without a trial, because while the revolutionary tribunal could be a kangaroo court sometimes, at least they kept registries of what someone was being accused of, Robespierre didn’t even go through it so his imputed crimes remained very vague and open to add shit later. So the next day Barére showed up with a report and fabricated evidence about how Robespierre was conspiring with his close supporters to crown himself king.
Some time later Tallien came up to the convention with a speech about how what had happened the past year had been a Reign Of Terror, that Robespierre bullied a congress of 700 something men into doing whatever he wanted, that every single bad thing that happened, all the unnecessary bloodshed was exclusively Robespierre’s fault. Boohoo, Robespierre poisoned our water supply, burned our crops and delivered a plague upon the republic and he did all himself.
The thermidorian convention, with the press of the time, made sure to run the robespierrists’ names through the mud and scapegoat them of their own excesses. A massive amount of libelous pamphlets against Robespierre were circulating circa 1795-1799, portraying him as some kind of gangster-sultan-pimp tyrant monster with a secret castle and lots of money and chicks, which is hilarious in hindsight since all his stuff sold for like… 300 francs, but at the time people ate it up.
Here’s some of my personal favorites because original thermidorian propaganda was seriously wacky (and let’s make it fun by rating it)
✨highlights✨
Apparently, Robespierre wished to marry Louis’ eldest child to crown himself king. I’d rate it higher for the creativity but she was a literal teenager ewww. 3/10
Courtois report: Courtois was in charge of going through the robespierrists papers and of course he suppressed and twisted a lot of evidence. He collected his “findings” in a report for the convention. Thanks to this guy most of Robespierre’s correspondence is lost. -4563456435/10
La vie de Robespierre: I haven’t read this one so what I know comes from secondary sources, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s one of the first biographies of Robespierre ever written, by his own school teacher, the abbot Proyart, who became a royalist émigré during the revolution. It’s such a mess, he makes normal things children do sound malignant when little Maximilien did them. He’s also the source of the legend that Robespierre read a poem for Louis XVI as a kid, which Hervé Leuwers debunked in his Robespierre bio. 5/10 because apparently his beef with Robespierre (besides the whole revolution thing) was that he wouldn’t say hi to him during vacations. Petty as hell.
Le chat-tigre: the description that Robespierre resembled a cat comes from a pamphlet published by Merlin de Thionville. This one is key because it deviates from the common view of the time of Robespierre as a morally corrupt orgy-frequenter, and portrays him as a dull, emotionless incel, which is closer to the way thermidorian propaganda reads like today. It also has this hysterical line: “History will say little about this monster”. Anyway Merlin called Robespierre a catboy unironically so I rate it meow/10
La queue de Robespierre (Robespierre’s tail). This pamphlet by Méhée de la Touché is interesting because it goes after certain thermidorians like Barère, Collot and Billaud, foreshadowing how the whole thing would soon backfire on them. Also the title is a dick joke, so, 10/10.
These two engravings. 760936/10
This whole-ass painting of Robespierre straight up ruling over hell
My absolute favorite: this one is from later when the whole mountain was purged from the convention (so there’s lots of thermidorians here too). There’s so much happening here. The snakes, the bats, the be gay do crimes skeletons, and the whole gang is there, looking like smurfs. It’s beautiful. 1793/10
But why spread so many lies about a dead man? They had to do it, you see, they had to gaslight the entire nation as much as possible, the ultras to avoid accountability and the moderates to discredit the democratic ideals that he represented so they could pass shit like the constitution of year III. This has effects on historiography to this day (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).
Thermidor backfires
With some exceptions, who ended up becoming Napoleon’s ministers, they did not avoid accountability…
Some of the original thermidorians were radicals who believed in the jacobin ideals of year II and just thought, sincerely or not, that Robespierre was aspiring for dictatorship, and the ones who had done war crimes as representatives on mission seemed to genuinely believe they were justified to do so and had to defend themselves when they were used against them.
Some of them weren’t expecting that after purging and persecuting Robespierre’s supporters, the mountain would be weakened and that the national convention would take a turn to the right when they brought back a bunch of girondins. What was left of the mountain wanted to keep the progress towards a more egalitarian society made in year II. Some of the right wingers like Boissy d’Anglas took credit for Robespierre’s fall and influenced the convention to become more reactionary. Some of the montagnards got guillotined for their crimes against humanity, like Carrier (the infamous dude who drowned thousands of people in the Loire - also a massive thermidorian, because of course he was), while most were exiled to Guyana.
Decades later during the Bourbon restoration, former Montagnards and members of the CPS like Billaud and Barère, came to regret bitterly what they did to Robespierre, his memory and the Republic, and admitted to having lied about him.
Conclusion
It’s not a secret to anyone that the French Revolution was extremely brutal and nobody is denying it (and that’s without counting what happened after Robespierre’s death). Donald Greer in The incidence of the terror during the french revolution estimates a death toll of 35.000-40.000, which includes not just people sentenced to death (which he estimates between 16.000-17.000), but people massacred without a trial by these representatives on mission I spoke about, people who died of disease in prisons, etc.
The executions by guillotine, that Robespierre came to represent, were just one aspect of it, an aspect that has become iconic in pop culture and exaggerated to death. The Jacobins weren’t executing people just for being nobles, in fact, there were some former nobles in the government and more commoners were executed than nobles. All those 17k death sentences weren’t signed or approved by Robespierre personally, and while Robespierre was powerful in theory as a member of the committee of public safety, he had very little control of the situation. And it’s not like he was an innocent little angel, he had blood on his hands but so did everyone back then, and his reputation is very disproportionate to what he actually did.
And yet, we’re taught in schools and in media that he was single-handely the supreme authority who did whatever he wanted and we never hear about the people that got him killed, what they were up to during the terror and how they straight up scapegoated this man to escape accountability for their crimes against humanity. But why though? Shouldn’t that be common knowledge by now, more than two centuries later?
Next part, if I can do it, I hope I can cover how thermidorian propaganda evolved to what it is today. Still this is a subject I only have general notions about and haven’t read about extensively so I’ll take a while to write the post, but it should be fun to research as it was fun (and infuriating) to research this.
Salut & fraternité and… happy birthday Robespierre!!! :-) My present is posting about how you got murdered and slandered I guess lmao.
“As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don’t like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”
