Out of fourteen students, the best we could do (besides the student who asserted that the American revolution had been inspired by the French one!) was that one had read Hannah Arendt's discussion of the French revolution in On Revolution, and another had seen Sophia Coppola's film "Marie Antoinette." How embarrassing. Worse, what most of my students now know about the French revolution comes from an Evangelical textbook which sees all the evils of the 19th and 20th centuries coming out of it!!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Liberté, égalité, huh?
Bit of a shock in class today. We'd read the account of the French revolution in Noll's Turning Points, and I expected that everyone would have something to say about it. But that would have required that they knew something about the French revolution! 
Out of fourteen students, the best we could do (besides the student who asserted that the American revolution had been inspired by the French one!) was that one had read Hannah Arendt's discussion of the French revolution in On Revolution, and another had seen Sophia Coppola's film "Marie Antoinette." How embarrassing. Worse, what most of my students now know about the French revolution comes from an Evangelical textbook which sees all the evils of the 19th and 20th centuries coming out of it!!
Out of fourteen students, the best we could do (besides the student who asserted that the American revolution had been inspired by the French one!) was that one had read Hannah Arendt's discussion of the French revolution in On Revolution, and another had seen Sophia Coppola's film "Marie Antoinette." How embarrassing. Worse, what most of my students now know about the French revolution comes from an Evangelical textbook which sees all the evils of the 19th and 20th centuries coming out of it!!
