In no way, the death of Louis XVI is an important date as
for the French Revolution, simply because when he was executed, he
wasn't in charge for quite a long time already.
Thanks for your correction and for your criticisms above this
statement, as to the ending date of the French Revolution. I think them
to be on point, and I assure you they are well-taken. Thanks also for
your perceptive analyses: your analysis #3 is the one I find the
most convincing on a quick reading.
Nevertheless, I will quibble with you a bit.
Given the extraordinarily vast literature that exists on the
subject of the French Revolution I doubt that your list of analyses
totally exhausts the possibilities. You seem to leave out for example an
analysis such as that of Furet, which I would freely admit is probably
rather too subtle for someone with my experience ever to grasp fully,
but which I believe divides the age of revolution into two parts, one
consisting of an egalitarian movement (roughly 1789-1793) possibly
lasting up to the end of the Jacobin Republic, depending on one's
position on the Danton vs Robespierre controversy and the extent to
which one can rationalize to oneself the Terror, and the other
consisting of an authoritarian counter-revolutionary movement, which
ultimately quashed most of the aims of the first period.
Based on such a hypothetical dichotomy, I would tend to place the end
of the revolution rather later, I think, than your analysis #3 allows
for: I would put it probably sometime after the downfall of
Napoleon. But to do so would surely underemphasize the importance
of the events of 1789 and the years immediately subsequent. In
addition, 1793 (possibly better: summer 1792) seems to be a
significant if a somewhat arbitrary dividing point.
In the end certainly there emerged a stable Republic, and certainly
the French experience was central in modern European history, and the
French involvement in America was absolutely critical in the success
of the American Revolution. One only has to remember names such as the
Marquis de La Fayette and the Comte de Rochembeau, to understand
just how critical French involvement was for the Americans. For its
part the French monarchy seems to have viewed the support given to the
American cause mainly as a useful tactic in the war against England.
For France to support the Americans against the English I think really
must be seen as a colossal miscalculation on the part of Louis and the
aristocrats of the ancien regime. They cannot have seen what the
stakes really were in that decision. They cannot have seen that the
war which was to come for France was not only over territory, not only
with their aristocratic rivals in the rest of Europe and in the
British Isles. They cannot have seen that the war was going to be over
ideas. Or, if they did see and they knew these things, they must have
imagined that their ideas and intellects were superior and that they
would be able to triumph, possibly even by divine will. It seems that
they misunderstood, and greatly underestimated their enemies, and they
failed to draw the correct lesson from the English experience in 1688 which
seems to me at least possibly to be an understandable blind spot.
The cost to France of the war, over the five years of the American
Revolution, became on the order of 1 billion livres: it was a serious
drain on the treasury. Following the capitulation of the British
expeditionary force at Yorktown, triumphant anti-royalists and their
ideas flowed into France. There was less money to keep up the system
of payments on the basis of which the regime had been maintained.
Among those forming the core of the French Revolution were many
of those who had supported the American cause.
I disagree with your statement that the execution of Louis XVI is an
event of no importance in the revolution, even as I completely agree
that Louis was not in any sense in charge at the time of his
death. When his head fell in the Place de la Revolution, certainly no
one rose up to fight against any perceived injustice to an anointed
monarch, though of course he was then a deposed, despised and disgraced
one, and a proven traitor.
It seems as though in many French minds, the idea of the monarchy had
been already dead, and the king himself an enemy: after his trial also
a proven collaborator with the enemies of the nation. But if one
limits oneself to these considerations one ignores that the Convention
in addition to declaring a Republic, in one of its significant initial
actions declared the Year I of the Liberty to be 1793, when this year
should have been the Year IV. In other words: the assembly adopted
language that reset the calendar, reclassifying the events of 1789
and following to have happened during the ancien regime.
Why such a strange piece of legislation? Why was there any need for
the Convention to devote itself to carrying out a carefully arranged
and meticulously prosecuted trial of Louis? In fact, Robespierre
appears to have opposed the trial initially. His question was along
the lines: `If Louis could be found innocent could the Republic be
found guilty?' One might even imagine that he favoured just killing
the man and being done with it. But that man's motives are for me very
hard to discern. In the end the Convention voted to try Louis and they
appointed a Commission to that end. The king was with the Commune. The
commission was still considering how it might proceed, when some of
the king's papers, containing his personal correspondence were
`accidentally' discovered in a secret cupboard in the Tuileries, or so
the story continues. With these letters they had the needed evidence
to convict Louis. But it must have been obvious to all parties what
the desire of the king was in any case: it was the complete opposite
of that of the republicans and Louis attempts to encourage war must
have been well known.
I just think that the case is that the question of what to do with the
king was one that too greatly vexed the Convention for it to be said
that his execution had no importance.
The date of the king's death, the fact that he was executed, must have
at the least a symbolic significance for the French
Revolution. Perhaps it simply had to be done, because by voting for
his trial and execution the Conventionelles took an utterly
irrevocable step, their lives being unquestionably forfeit if any
monarch was ever restored to the throne.
Michelet put the significance of the execution in a very striking way,
I'll quote a fragment from Furet's short volume (The French Revolution
1770-1814):
It was necessary to expose to the light that ridiculous
mystery which barbaric humanity had for so long turned into a
religion, the mystery of royal incarnation, that bizarre
fiction which imagines the wisdom of a great people concentrated
in an imbecile... Royalty had to be dragged into the daylight,
exposed before and behind, opened up, so that the inside of his
worm-eaten idol could be clearly seen, full of insects and worms,
giving the lie to his beautiful guilded head.
Perhaps too much on that...
Now as for Copyright. It was invented in Anne Stuart's
act in 1710, in a very light way, to protect authors. But the
protection was very thin, and short in time (two periods of 14
years). This law was therefore present in the "American Colonies", and
the US Congress passed it as a US law, in the Constitution on 17th
September 1790.
This is more or less as I stated my understanding of it above, as well
as in a more lengthy post on the subject that you might have missed.
The statute appears to have been occasioned, in part, by the Union of
England and Scotland in 1707. I certainly do not believe that Anne
Stuart cared a whit about copyright law. The Statute of Anne, as it's
called, dealt with the question of how the printing trade was to be
regulated in the new political situation.
I don't really disagree with your characterisation as to the `lightness'
of the law or the thin nature of the protection for authors that
resulted. In fact, I might go further and disagree that the main
motive was to protect authors, though the text of the statute
explicitly includes language stating in effect that the protection of
authors' rights, that they be rewarded for their original efforts would
be a public good, and it does so at the head of the
text. Substantively authors are given copyright for 14 years,
renewable for another 14 years by application to the Stationers'
Company. Both the favourable language and the arrangement of the text
cannot have been accidental, there would have been argument about it,
and it follows that there were those in parliament who believed it the
correct thing to do.
But, after that, the French Revolution "improved" it a
lot. In 1777, Beaumarchais created the first association of authors,
as a lobby to negociate prices of author's work for every use of it
being done, not only in printing, but also for instance playing
theatre (so not only pure copy right, but more widely author
right). This paved the way for a law, much larger than the 1710
English one.
In 1789, Declaration of Human Rights recognizes
implicitely Authors Rights (Articles 11 and 17), though not
explicitely. The law was passed by the Assembly on 19th January 1791,
and improved again in 1793.
Thanks very much for providing this account of the early history of
copyright law from the French side. It was enlightening for me.
So, you would agree then that the French statute post-dates the
US federal statute, though just by a hair?
So as a whole, absolutely nothing is clear in that. The
principle was invented as a law, a thin one, in England in 1710,
though the idea of it as always been known (Platon, the Greek
philosopher, asks for it 4 centuries BC).
I agree. I also was tempted, upon being told that copyright law
originated when the Emperor intervened on the artist's side in a
contretemps between Albrecht Duerer and some Italian printers, to
mention that Greek and Roman authors also raised the issue more than a
thousand years earlier. But so far as I had been aware, there was
never anything explicit in Roman law or any other written law before
1710. I remain open to hearing about a counterexample on this
point, of course.
And the French Revolution, a few years later, improves it
a lot.
Yes, but it was quite a few years later, if you meant a few years
after Plato;->
Do you mean a few years after the Statute of Anne? I think it was more
than 80 years, using your dates. So we should have to consider subsequent
developments in England and in America as well.
Considering Beaumarchais action, it's pretty clear that,
at least in France, the aim was really to protect
authors.
You make a good case that the aim of the law in France was to protect
authors. But I can argue in an exactly similar way that significant
improvements were made in the law on the American side of the
Atlantic, and I think can do so perhaps more strongly, since 12 of the
13 states had passed Copyright Acts well before the final ratification
of the constitution and the federal Copyright act of 1790. Essentially
all of these acts included in their titles that they were intended
to protect the rights of authors and innovators. And all of these statutes
predate the French ones from the egalitarian period of the revolution
of which you spoke.
However, this kind of discussion can very easily degenerate into a silly
nationalistic argument. I have no interest in such, if that perhaps
may not not clear to you.
I think that it is actually more rational to see the American and
French Revolutions as part and parcel of the same basically
anti-authoritarian movement. They are in fact inseparable from
each other. Both were offshoots of intellectual developments in the Age
of Enlightenment. But the American revolution occurred first and it is
undeniable that the French Patriots took inspiration from it, as it is
also undeniable that the Americans took material aid and inspiration
from the French.
I think it really might make sense for people to consider the
extensive cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas that occurred
during this period between leaders of the French and American
revolutionary movements, particularly in this context of copyright.
At the very least it would be well to remember that the American
Revolution was over before the French Revolution began.
Finally, there were also Englishmen who played a very significant part
in both revolutions. Indirectly and directly, the fallout from the
glorious revolution of 1688 made itself felt in America. Most notably
there is Thomas Paine. You are certainly not unaware that he was both
a father of the American revolution and a member of the Convention. He
was one who voted against the execution of Louis XVI on principle.
He was later imprisoned by Robespierre on this excuse, and while in
prison wrote the `Age of Reason.'
Paine was a Quaker, a deist and a freethinker, in my opinion a humanist
of the highest order and a truly great man. I can make no better
compliment for him than to quote you John Adams insult on reading
the Age of Reason:
I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do
[he wrote at an unmellowed seventy one to a friend], and would not
object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality,
Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from
the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not
whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants
and affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no
severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy,
begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age
of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run
through such a career of mischief. Call it the Age of Paine.
STOP it now. Several posters pointed out that you have no
clue about history.
Well, as they say: `Those who live in glass houses...'
USA was the LAST country of the western civilisation to put
up copy right laws. ALL OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES allready HAD them.
The American colonies inherited copyright law from pre-existing
English statute. The USA of course could not really make new law
before the new government of the USA and its constitution existed.
Canada, I believe is one of the nations in `western civilisation' and
it was not independent of England until 1867.
I do not confuse copyright with royalities, I made only an example.
Of course censorship came along with copyright. But censorship
allready existed before that. A book printer never was allowed to
print with out the granted right by the governmental or church
authorities.
If the French revolution had anything to do with copyright, it was
after the American constitution anyways.
Probably.
No. Unfortunately for your argument, I would say that this is
pretty definite. The constitution was mostly written by 1789, though
not yet ratified by all the states until that year. The US Copyright
Act was passed by congress in 1790.
It was some time after the
French revolution before Napoleonic Code was even in effect, much less
before it became settled law. Among certain other circumstances, this
probably made the situation in Napoleon's Empire regarding copyright
law somewhat uncertain...
Code Napoleon first in effect: 1804
On the other hand:
Declaration of the Rights of Man: 1789.
Final Ratification of the US Constitution by Rhode Island: May 29, 1790.
(The others of the original 13 states all ratified the constitution
earlier.)
US Copyright Act passed by Congress: 1790.
Major revisions thereof: 1831, 1870, 1909 and 1976.
But the declaration of independency and the french revolution where
in the same year.
No, sorry, that's wrong, too: the Declaration of Independence and the
French Revolution were not `in the same year.'
Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776.
Second Continental Congress: May, 1775.
Revolutionary War begins: April 19, 1775.
Battle for Bunker Hill: June 17, 1775.
Battle of Yorktown, War Ends: October 19, 1781.
I thought the french revolution was first
But you were wrong:
French Revolution: 1789-1793
... hu hom... I also thought the copyright paragraph in
the constitution was added later.
I don't really think it that important to find out exactly when the
paragraph was added, since Congress passed the Copyright Act in 1790,
three years before the end of the French Revolution, which is usually
said to end with the execution of the King in January 1793. Of course,
right after that was that enjoyable little period during which
Robespierre was cheerily lopping off heads he didn't approcve of in
Paris, I don't imagine les citoyens were worrying too much about
copyright law then!
As you are the US guy you should check that and
point me wrong, I'm to lazy to look up if the constitution got
changed or not.
>Copyright dates back to about 1500 when Albrecht Dürer visited the >Emporer and asked for the privilege that he only is >allowed to exploit and distribut his own work. The case >was that italian copiests copied his work, including >even the AD signature and sold them in hughe quantities >in north italy.
This is an interesting story, which I had never heard. You refer I suppose to Durer's (sorry for the lack of an umlaut, but I'm too lazy to try to figure out how to produce it... ) woodcut prints? It is a little different than the printed word, perhaps.
Can you provide a reference where one can read a bit more about this?
To me though it seems possible that a grant that the emperor gave individually to Durer could have been a one time event. If it was not codified in law or statute, it would have meant very little for most printers and artists. Not all artists could count on gaining the favour and protection of the emperor.
>The Emporer granted him that privilidge and that would extended over >time to the so called copy right and was granted to all authors...
Can you provide a reference to specific common law or statute supporting that claim?
>The actual copyright dates back to the french revolution and the Code >Napoleon which was one of the first fixations of "authors" rights >against the publishers who robbed their work and got rich from it.
The Statute of Anne (1710) predates the French revolution by 70 years. The Napoleonic code surely arose only some time after the fall of the ancien regime. The American Revolution and the Constitutional Congress predate the French revolution and the Napoleonic code, and the often forgotten (here in America at least) English revolution predates both of these. So your discussion seems somewhat anachronistic, unless you want to claim that both the Americans and the English had no copyright law?
As far as the rights of authors it might well be that in practice these rights were eventually better protected under the Napoleonic code, since copyright granted to authors under the Statute of Anne certainly had to be transferred to a publisher if the author wished to profit from his work, so that the copyright did not necessarily amount to very much. But rights are explicitly given to the author in the Statute of Anne, as I had thought, for the first time in codified law. In addition, the duration of those rights was specifically limited, so that works would eventually fall into the public domain. So it seems that the Lords did make an effort to balance public and private interests in drafting the statute.
>As the UK early started in its industrialization also the book >printing "industry" started up.
The printing industries in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland started a very long time before there was any move towards widespread industrialisation. One generally dates the industrial revolution in England, on the continent and in America to the nineteenth century.
>Around 1700 (to tired to search a date for you as YOU ALL can use >google to get facts before you make your opinion) in the UK copyright >laws got introduced.
The date was 1709. The Statute of Anne was enacted by parliament on 10 April 1710. This event followed hard on the Act of Union, and the proximity of the dates would appear to be no accident. Scotland, which was at the time becoming, at least argueably, the greatest center of the Enlightenment, and which had very high literacy rates even among the rural population, far exceeding the literacy rates in England, had by then a thriving publishing and printing industry.
Formerly, Scottish printing houses had been subject to Scottish common law and statute. Scottish and English law are quite different in their antecedents and their philosophy. Upon union of Scotland with England there inevitably arose disputes between Scottish printers and English printers concerning their respective rights.
Before the Statute of Anne disputes over rights to print books had to be resolved under common law in England. The Statute of Anne appears to have been at least in part an attempt to resolve some of the problems arising when Scottish printers came under the authority of the English Crown, and so came into direct conflict with the English printing oligopoly.
In England, the King had tried to regulate the book trade with the Licensing Act of 1662. The licensing act was an attempt to protect printers against piracy, and in addition it was a clear effort to control what was being printed. It established a requirement to centrally register a copy of all books which were to be licensed to be printed, which copy had to be centrally deposited with the Stationers' Company.
The Stationers' Company were also given power to seize any books thought to contain writings hostile to the Crown or the Church. In 1681 the licensing act was repealed, but the Stationers' Company by then had an effective oligopoly. It simply established ownership of books for a few of its members and it continued to act as the de facto regulator of the book trade.
>YES: the copyright was invented to protect authors against >publishers. Not by a governemnt conspiracy as Alan Cox said in his >interview and teh bold poster above supports.
Well, I would say that this is a complicated question, but it seems clear enough that the State, in England, certainly acted to preserve its own interests as far as it could, and it certainly did so when it saw those interests to be threatened by the extreme ease of printing and distributing views contrary to the Crown. At times, it acted very brutally against certain writers on its own behalf. Consider some of the fates of pamphleteers during the revolution of 1688 and at other times.
Just on reading the Statute of Anne, I get the feeling that the conflict between the rather less centrally regulated Scottish printing industry and the English printing oligopoly led to some good effects. In practice the rights that the authors got perhaps did not amount to very much, but the limitation on the term of copyright seems to be very much in the public interest.
I had thought that this statute was actually the first law in the world to combine these two elements... can you provide a specific law that predates it on the continent?
>Before copy rights existed everybody who could print could just print >everything, without paying any royalities to the author. You could >even ask someone, write for me, and after you got his work: thanx and >kick him(without paying). > >The United states book industrie started by printing european books >without honoring copy rights. I believe the copyright stuff in the >american constitution came pretty late... but I never checked >that. Enlight me:-)
I don't really know much about the history of the American printing industry, but what you say doesn't sound very likely. American printers would certainly have printed European books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but so far as I know only English books would have been under copyright and only in the eigteenth century. America rather quickly became, for many intents and purposes an English colony. English common law and statute were the laws of the land. (Though I do know that it's quite a bit more complicated than that.) Of course, it was hard for the English Crown to really enforce all of its wishes in the American colonies, but the King still had a strong influence in pre-revolutionary times. Even during the War of Independence about 1/3 of the population were still Royalist.
The earliest American copyright law dates, I think, to about 1790, just after the constitution was finally drafted, but copyright was certainly discussed before this during the constitutional conventions.
>I realy hate that people start more and more to bring up false >statements in discussions which are far to important to mess them up >by sacrisfying credibility.
Can you maybe enlighten me a bit by providing a specific reference to the European copyright law that you say predates the Statute of Anne? I'ld be most interested to learn more about it.
Maybe I'm missing something from the article, but I don't think that "constants" like alpha changing is a new idea (though it is very cool if alpha changing over time can be directly observed like this).
You're right, it's not a new idea. The first physicist to suggest time variation of basic constants seriously was P.A.M. Dirac. His reasoning was a bit fanciful. He calculated certain dimensionless numbers by appropriately combining various dimensionful basic constants of physics and found that he got very large numbers.
Since the numbers were very large, and one knows that the universe is very old, Dirac proposed that the great age of the universe was the reason the dimensionless combinations were large numbers: it was related to the large age of the universe.
If this was true, it then followed that the fundamental constants had to be varying with time and would have been different in the very early universe.. This is called Dirac's `large numbers hypothesis' for obvious reasons.
It's a wild, but a very imaginative suggestion.
Changing coupling "constants" is already a part of the established "Standard Model" of physics, and is an essential feature of Grand Unified Theories.
Yes, but the kind of change of alpha being discussed in the article is most definitely not a part of the established standard model.
Strictly speaking the standard model is only
partially unified: the electroweak part or
SU(2)xU(1) is unified and matches well with experiment, but the strong interaction SU(3) is
not so easy to unify with SU(2)xU(1). The simplest
GUT to accomplish the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) unification
was the minimal SU(5) GUT, but it predicted decay of the proton at a rate which was experimentally ruled out
some years ago by direct measurements.
The best bet for grand unification of strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions at the moment would be some form of what's called the minimal supersymmetric standard model. This theory is beyond the standard model because it predicts supersymmetric particles, which are so far unobserved.
But this theory is, like the standard model, basically
a theory of particle physics alone. It doesn't even
address gravity, much less the possible time variation
over long times of fundamental constants evaluated at a *fixed* energy scale. Such a time variation breaks the
Lorentz invariance of all of these theories.
For that matter, such a variation breaks the general
coordinate invariance of general relativity. If what is being said is true, and it is a very big if, it requires a radical change in the accepted theories.
Grand Unified Theories rely on all of the interaction strengths for all known forces (Strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and sometimes gravity) becoming the same at some energy scale earlier on during the formation of the Universe.
Well, true, but you conflate several ideas here.
There are so-called running coupling constants in the standard model and in the various grand unified models (excluding gravity for now). So for example, if two electrons smash into eachother at very high energy, say 100 GeV or so, then the appropriate value of alpha to use in calculating their interactions is more like 1/127 than 1/137.
This running of the coupling strengths is well tested and is predicted by quantum field theory. If the strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces are actually part of a GUT, and the big bang theory is correct, then at some early time in the history of the universe, the average energy of interactions of electrons would have been 100 GeV for example.
At that time it would make sense, on average to use a value of alpha which is 1/127, but that in no way means that this larger value of alpha should be used at that time for two electrons which collide with much lower energy. If they collide with very low energy, the appropriate value of alpha is still 1/137 if the standard model is correct. You see the distinction?
The observations in question are actually of
atomic transitions in very distant gas clouds, so
they involve very low energy interactions of
electrons with positively charged nuclei. So
the running of the electromagnetic coupling, alpha,
is not relevant to these measurements, and if
any real deviation in the observed atomic transitions can be shown from what is observed at the present
day, then it means atomic structure has changed.
That would mean the laws of physics are really
varying as the universe ages. It's quite radical.
It means throwing away the standard model and
general relativity.
In the present Universe, the strong force that holds quarks together is much stronger than the electromagnetic force, but if GUTs hold true then they were much closer earlier on.
Yes, this is an effect of the running coupling constant
in GUTs, together with the big bang theory. At high
temperatures, like existed in the early universe, all
of the couplings would have looked the same.
See here [innerx.net] for a graph illustrating this effect, or rather its failure for one particular GUT theory. This is the first I found using a quick google search for "GUT" and "coupling constant"; it is a common plot shown for papers on GUTs in general.
Yes, interestingly enough, such plots showing how
the electromagnetic, weak and strong couplings
run to the same value at a given, fixed energy were
actually used early on to argue that grand unification of the SU(5) type probably was occurring. There were errors in the original calculations though, and it
turns out that the couplings don't actually become
the same, they miss as shown in the plot you
reference. That's one of the reasons why supersymmetric unification is proposed: you
have more parameters and you can make the three
couplings meet... it's not really a very good
argument if you think about it a bit!
Its been a couple of years since I studied this stuff. I'd be interested to know if this article is pointing to something new theoretically.
Yes it is certainly pointing to something new, if the result is correct. But there are many problems with it.
There is the obvious unpleasantness that you don't
really see a clean result: you can't really say that we see that spectral line X in atom Y was different at such and such a time and place than it is now. Instead you must look at a statistical analysis of many lines over many gas clouds, and extract a best guess on the value of alpha as a function of time (actually, redshift) in the universe, using a theoretical calculation of how atomic lines should depend on alpha. It has to be said that such a calculation is far from trivial to do for complex multi-electron atoms, and in fact can't even
be done all that accurately.
Indeed, people who did the same kind of observations
previously, concentrated on alkali metal doublets which are produced in (effectively) simple single electron atoms, for which one has a much better hope of understanding the theory well. These observations
produce a null result for the variation of alpha,
it's only when you add in the more complex metals
as these researchers do, that you see a non-zero effect.
My feeling is that it is very interesting, but it's most
likely that when a more extended analysis and more observations are done, there will probably be nothing left of the effect, except possibly a better null result than one had with the alkali doublets.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for your correction and for your criticisms above this statement, as to the ending date of the French Revolution. I think them to be on point, and I assure you they are well-taken. Thanks also for your perceptive analyses: your analysis #3 is the one I find the most convincing on a quick reading.
Nevertheless, I will quibble with you a bit.
Given the extraordinarily vast literature that exists on the subject of the French Revolution I doubt that your list of analyses totally exhausts the possibilities. You seem to leave out for example an analysis such as that of Furet, which I would freely admit is probably rather too subtle for someone with my experience ever to grasp fully, but which I believe divides the age of revolution into two parts, one consisting of an egalitarian movement (roughly 1789-1793) possibly lasting up to the end of the Jacobin Republic, depending on one's position on the Danton vs Robespierre controversy and the extent to which one can rationalize to oneself the Terror, and the other consisting of an authoritarian counter-revolutionary movement, which ultimately quashed most of the aims of the first period.
Based on such a hypothetical dichotomy, I would tend to place the end of the revolution rather later, I think, than your analysis #3 allows for: I would put it probably sometime after the downfall of Napoleon. But to do so would surely underemphasize the importance of the events of 1789 and the years immediately subsequent. In addition, 1793 (possibly better: summer 1792) seems to be a significant if a somewhat arbitrary dividing point.
In the end certainly there emerged a stable Republic, and certainly the French experience was central in modern European history, and the French involvement in America was absolutely critical in the success of the American Revolution. One only has to remember names such as the Marquis de La Fayette and the Comte de Rochembeau, to understand just how critical French involvement was for the Americans. For its part the French monarchy seems to have viewed the support given to the American cause mainly as a useful tactic in the war against England.
For France to support the Americans against the English I think really must be seen as a colossal miscalculation on the part of Louis and the aristocrats of the ancien regime. They cannot have seen what the stakes really were in that decision. They cannot have seen that the war which was to come for France was not only over territory, not only with their aristocratic rivals in the rest of Europe and in the British Isles. They cannot have seen that the war was going to be over ideas. Or, if they did see and they knew these things, they must have imagined that their ideas and intellects were superior and that they would be able to triumph, possibly even by divine will. It seems that they misunderstood, and greatly underestimated their enemies, and they failed to draw the correct lesson from the English experience in 1688 which seems to me at least possibly to be an understandable blind spot.
The cost to France of the war, over the five years of the American Revolution, became on the order of 1 billion livres: it was a serious drain on the treasury. Following the capitulation of the British expeditionary force at Yorktown, triumphant anti-royalists and their ideas flowed into France. There was less money to keep up the system of payments on the basis of which the regime had been maintained.
Among those forming the core of the French Revolution were many of those who had supported the American cause.
I disagree with your statement that the execution of Louis XVI is an event of no importance in the revolution, even as I completely agree that Louis was not in any sense in charge at the time of his death. When his head fell in the Place de la Revolution, certainly no one rose up to fight against any perceived injustice to an anointed monarch, though of course he was then a deposed, despised and disgraced one, and a proven traitor.
It seems as though in many French minds, the idea of the monarchy had been already dead, and the king himself an enemy: after his trial also a proven collaborator with the enemies of the nation. But if one limits oneself to these considerations one ignores that the Convention in addition to declaring a Republic, in one of its significant initial actions declared the Year I of the Liberty to be 1793, when this year should have been the Year IV. In other words: the assembly adopted language that reset the calendar, reclassifying the events of 1789 and following to have happened during the ancien regime.
Why such a strange piece of legislation? Why was there any need for the Convention to devote itself to carrying out a carefully arranged and meticulously prosecuted trial of Louis? In fact, Robespierre appears to have opposed the trial initially. His question was along the lines: `If Louis could be found innocent could the Republic be found guilty?' One might even imagine that he favoured just killing the man and being done with it. But that man's motives are for me very hard to discern. In the end the Convention voted to try Louis and they appointed a Commission to that end. The king was with the Commune. The commission was still considering how it might proceed, when some of the king's papers, containing his personal correspondence were `accidentally' discovered in a secret cupboard in the Tuileries, or so the story continues. With these letters they had the needed evidence to convict Louis. But it must have been obvious to all parties what the desire of the king was in any case: it was the complete opposite of that of the republicans and Louis attempts to encourage war must have been well known.
I just think that the case is that the question of what to do with the king was one that too greatly vexed the Convention for it to be said that his execution had no importance.
The date of the king's death, the fact that he was executed, must have at the least a symbolic significance for the French Revolution. Perhaps it simply had to be done, because by voting for his trial and execution the Conventionelles took an utterly irrevocable step, their lives being unquestionably forfeit if any monarch was ever restored to the throne.
Michelet put the significance of the execution in a very striking way, I'll quote a fragment from Furet's short volume (The French Revolution 1770-1814):
It was necessary to expose to the light that ridiculous mystery which barbaric humanity had for so long turned into a religion, the mystery of royal incarnation, that bizarre fiction which imagines the wisdom of a great people concentrated in an imbecile ... Royalty had to be dragged into the daylight,
exposed before and behind, opened up, so that the inside of his
worm-eaten idol could be clearly seen, full of insects and worms,
giving the lie to his beautiful guilded head.
Perhaps too much on that ...
This is more or less as I stated my understanding of it above, as well as in a more lengthy post on the subject that you might have missed.
The statute appears to have been occasioned, in part, by the Union of England and Scotland in 1707. I certainly do not believe that Anne Stuart cared a whit about copyright law. The Statute of Anne, as it's called, dealt with the question of how the printing trade was to be regulated in the new political situation.
I don't really disagree with your characterisation as to the `lightness' of the law or the thin nature of the protection for authors that resulted. In fact, I might go further and disagree that the main motive was to protect authors, though the text of the statute explicitly includes language stating in effect that the protection of authors' rights, that they be rewarded for their original efforts would be a public good, and it does so at the head of the text. Substantively authors are given copyright for 14 years, renewable for another 14 years by application to the Stationers' Company. Both the favourable language and the arrangement of the text cannot have been accidental, there would have been argument about it, and it follows that there were those in parliament who believed it the correct thing to do.
Thanks very much for providing this account of the early history of copyright law from the French side. It was enlightening for me.
So, you would agree then that the French statute post-dates the US federal statute, though just by a hair?
I agree. I also was tempted, upon being told that copyright law originated when the Emperor intervened on the artist's side in a contretemps between Albrecht Duerer and some Italian printers, to mention that Greek and Roman authors also raised the issue more than a thousand years earlier. But so far as I had been aware, there was never anything explicit in Roman law or any other written law before 1710. I remain open to hearing about a counterexample on this point, of course.
Yes, but it was quite a few years later, if you meant a few years after Plato ;->
Do you mean a few years after the Statute of Anne? I think it was more than 80 years, using your dates. So we should have to consider subsequent developments in England and in America as well.
You make a good case that the aim of the law in France was to protect authors. But I can argue in an exactly similar way that significant improvements were made in the law on the American side of the Atlantic, and I think can do so perhaps more strongly, since 12 of the 13 states had passed Copyright Acts well before the final ratification of the constitution and the federal Copyright act of 1790. Essentially all of these acts included in their titles that they were intended to protect the rights of authors and innovators. And all of these statutes predate the French ones from the egalitarian period of the revolution of which you spoke.
However, this kind of discussion can very easily degenerate into a silly nationalistic argument. I have no interest in such, if that perhaps may not not clear to you.
I think that it is actually more rational to see the American and French Revolutions as part and parcel of the same basically anti-authoritarian movement. They are in fact inseparable from each other. Both were offshoots of intellectual developments in the Age of Enlightenment. But the American revolution occurred first and it is undeniable that the French Patriots took inspiration from it, as it is also undeniable that the Americans took material aid and inspiration from the French.
I think it really might make sense for people to consider the extensive cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas that occurred during this period between leaders of the French and American revolutionary movements, particularly in this context of copyright. At the very least it would be well to remember that the American Revolution was over before the French Revolution began.
Finally, there were also Englishmen who played a very significant part in both revolutions. Indirectly and directly, the fallout from the glorious revolution of 1688 made itself felt in America. Most notably there is Thomas Paine. You are certainly not unaware that he was both a father of the American revolution and a member of the Convention. He was one who voted against the execution of Louis XVI on principle. He was later imprisoned by Robespierre on this excuse, and while in prison wrote the `Age of Reason.'
Paine was a Quaker, a deist and a freethinker, in my opinion a humanist of the highest order and a truly great man. I can make no better compliment for him than to quote you John Adams insult on reading the Age of Reason:
I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do [he wrote at an unmellowed seventy one to a friend], and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants and affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it the Age of Paine.
From `Paine,' David Freeman Hawke.
cheers!
Well, as they say: `Those who live in glass houses ...'
The American colonies inherited copyright law from pre-existing English statute. The USA of course could not really make new law before the new government of the USA and its constitution existed. Canada, I believe is one of the nations in `western civilisation' and it was not independent of England until 1867.
No. Unfortunately for your argument, I would say that this is pretty definite. The constitution was mostly written by 1789, though not yet ratified by all the states until that year. The US Copyright Act was passed by congress in 1790.
It was some time after the French revolution before Napoleonic Code was even in effect, much less before it became settled law. Among certain other circumstances, this probably made the situation in Napoleon's Empire regarding copyright law somewhat uncertain ...
Code Napoleon first in effect: 1804
On the other hand:
Declaration of the Rights of Man: 1789. Final Ratification of the US Constitution by Rhode Island: May 29, 1790.
(The others of the original 13 states all ratified the constitution earlier.)
US Copyright Act passed by Congress: 1790. Major revisions thereof: 1831, 1870, 1909 and 1976.
No, sorry, that's wrong, too: the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution were not `in the same year.'
Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776. Second Continental Congress: May, 1775. Revolutionary War begins: April 19, 1775. Battle for Bunker Hill: June 17, 1775. Battle of Yorktown, War Ends: October 19, 1781.
But you were wrong:
French Revolution: 1789-1793
I don't really think it that important to find out exactly when the paragraph was added, since Congress passed the Copyright Act in 1790, three years before the end of the French Revolution, which is usually said to end with the execution of the King in January 1793. Of course, right after that was that enjoyable little period during which Robespierre was cheerily lopping off heads he didn't approcve of in Paris, I don't imagine les citoyens were worrying too much about copyright law then!
That's OK. It's been done for him already!
cheers!
>Copyright dates back to about 1500 when Albrecht Dürer visited the
... ) woodcut prints? It is a
...
... can you provide a specific law
:-)
>Emporer and asked for the privilege that he only is
>allowed to exploit and distribut his own work. The case
>was that italian copiests copied his work, including
>even the AD signature and sold them in hughe quantities
>in north italy.
This is an interesting story, which I had never heard. You refer I
suppose to Durer's (sorry for the lack of an umlaut, but I'm too lazy
to try to figure out how to produce it
little different than the printed word, perhaps.
Can you provide a reference where one can read a bit more about this?
To me though it seems possible that a grant that the emperor gave
individually to Durer could have been a one time event. If it was not
codified in law or statute, it would have meant very little for most
printers and artists. Not all artists could count on gaining the
favour and protection of the emperor.
>The Emporer granted him that privilidge and that would extended over
>time to the so called copy right and was granted to all authors
Can you provide a reference to specific common law or statute
supporting that claim?
>The actual copyright dates back to the french revolution and the Code
>Napoleon which was one of the first fixations of "authors" rights
>against the publishers who robbed their work and got rich from it.
The Statute of Anne (1710) predates the French revolution by 70
years. The Napoleonic code surely arose only some time after the fall
of the ancien regime. The American Revolution and the Constitutional
Congress predate the French revolution and the Napoleonic code, and
the often forgotten (here in America at least) English revolution
predates both of these. So your discussion seems somewhat
anachronistic, unless you want to claim that both the Americans and
the English had no copyright law?
As far as the rights of authors it might well be that in
practice these rights were eventually better protected under the
Napoleonic code, since copyright granted to authors under the Statute
of Anne certainly had to be transferred to a publisher if the author
wished to profit from his work, so that the copyright did not
necessarily amount to very much. But rights are explicitly given to
the author in the Statute of Anne, as I had thought, for the first
time in codified law. In addition, the duration of those rights was
specifically limited, so that works would eventually fall into the
public domain. So it seems that the Lords did make an effort to
balance public and private interests in drafting the statute.
>As the UK early started in its industrialization also the book
>printing "industry" started up.
The printing industries in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland
started a very long time before there was any move towards widespread
industrialisation. One generally dates the industrial revolution in
England, on the continent and in America to the nineteenth century.
>Around 1700 (to tired to search a date for you as YOU ALL can use
>google to get facts before you make your opinion) in the UK copyright
>laws got introduced.
The date was 1709. The Statute of Anne was enacted by parliament on 10
April 1710. This event followed hard on the Act of Union, and the
proximity of the dates would appear to be no accident. Scotland, which
was at the time becoming, at least argueably, the greatest center of
the Enlightenment, and which had very high literacy rates even among
the rural population, far exceeding the literacy rates in England, had
by then a thriving publishing and printing industry.
Formerly, Scottish printing houses had been subject to Scottish common
law and statute. Scottish and English law are quite different in their
antecedents and their philosophy. Upon union of Scotland with England
there inevitably arose disputes between Scottish printers and English
printers concerning their respective rights.
Before the Statute of Anne disputes over rights to print books had to
be resolved under common law in England. The Statute of Anne appears
to have been at least in part an attempt to resolve some of the
problems arising when Scottish printers came under the authority of
the English Crown, and so came into direct conflict with the English
printing oligopoly.
In England, the King had tried to regulate the book trade with the
Licensing Act of 1662. The licensing act was an attempt to protect
printers against piracy, and in addition it was a clear effort to
control what was being printed. It established a requirement to
centrally register a copy of all books which were to be licensed to be
printed, which copy had to be centrally deposited with the Stationers'
Company.
The Stationers' Company were also given power to seize any books
thought to contain writings hostile to the Crown or the Church. In
1681 the licensing act was repealed, but the Stationers' Company by
then had an effective oligopoly. It simply established ownership of
books for a few of its members and it continued to act as the de facto
regulator of the book trade.
>YES: the copyright was invented to protect authors against
>publishers. Not by a governemnt conspiracy as Alan Cox said in his
>interview and teh bold poster above supports.
Well, I would say that this is a complicated question, but it seems
clear enough that the State, in England, certainly acted to preserve
its own interests as far as it could, and it certainly did so when it
saw those interests to be threatened by the extreme ease of printing
and distributing views contrary to the Crown. At times, it acted very
brutally against certain writers on its own behalf. Consider some of
the fates of pamphleteers during the revolution of 1688 and at other
times.
Just on reading the Statute of Anne, I get the feeling that the
conflict between the rather less centrally regulated Scottish printing
industry and the English printing oligopoly led to some good
effects. In practice the rights that the authors got perhaps did not
amount to very much, but the limitation on the term of copyright seems
to be very much in the public interest.
I had thought that this statute was actually the first law in the
world to combine these two elements
that predates it on the continent?
>Before copy rights existed everybody who could print could just print
>everything, without paying any royalities to the author. You could
>even ask someone, write for me, and after you got his work: thanx and
>kick him(without paying).
>
>The United states book industrie started by printing european books
>without honoring copy rights. I believe the copyright stuff in the
>american constitution came pretty late... but I never checked
>that. Enlight me
I don't really know much about the history of the American printing
industry, but what you say doesn't sound very likely. American
printers would certainly have printed European books in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but so far as I know only
English books would have been under copyright and only in the
eigteenth century. America rather quickly became, for many intents and
purposes an English colony. English common law and statute were the
laws of the land. (Though I do know that it's quite a bit more
complicated than that.) Of course, it was hard for the English Crown
to really enforce all of its wishes in the American colonies, but the
King still had a strong influence in pre-revolutionary times. Even
during the War of Independence about 1/3 of the population were still
Royalist.
The earliest American copyright law dates, I think, to about 1790,
just after the constitution was finally drafted, but copyright was
certainly discussed before this during the constitutional conventions.
>I realy hate that people start more and more to bring up false
>statements in discussions which are far to important to mess them up
>by sacrisfying credibility.
Can you maybe enlighten me a bit by providing a specific reference to
the European copyright law that you say predates the Statute of Anne? I'ld be most interested to
learn more about it.
cheers!
You're right, it's not a new idea. The first physicist to suggest time variation of basic constants seriously was P.A.M. Dirac. His reasoning was a bit fanciful. He calculated certain dimensionless numbers by appropriately combining various dimensionful basic constants of physics and found that he got very large numbers.
Since the numbers were very large, and one knows that the universe is very old, Dirac proposed that the great age of the universe was the reason the dimensionless combinations were large numbers: it was related to the large age of the universe.
If this was true, it then followed that the fundamental constants had to be varying with time and would have been different in the very early universe.. This is called Dirac's `large numbers hypothesis' for obvious reasons. It's a wild, but a very imaginative suggestion.
Yes, but the kind of change of alpha being discussed in the article is most definitely not a part of the established standard model.
Strictly speaking the standard model is only partially unified: the electroweak part or SU(2)xU(1) is unified and matches well with experiment, but the strong interaction SU(3) is not so easy to unify with SU(2)xU(1). The simplest GUT to accomplish the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) unification was the minimal SU(5) GUT, but it predicted decay of the proton at a rate which was experimentally ruled out some years ago by direct measurements.
The best bet for grand unification of strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions at the moment would be some form of what's called the minimal supersymmetric standard model. This theory is beyond the standard model because it predicts supersymmetric particles, which are so far unobserved.
But this theory is, like the standard model, basically a theory of particle physics alone. It doesn't even address gravity, much less the possible time variation over long times of fundamental constants evaluated at a *fixed* energy scale. Such a time variation breaks the Lorentz invariance of all of these theories. For that matter, such a variation breaks the general coordinate invariance of general relativity. If what is being said is true, and it is a very big if, it requires a radical change in the accepted theories.
Well, true, but you conflate several ideas here.
There are so-called running coupling constants in the standard model and in the various grand unified models (excluding gravity for now). So for example, if two electrons smash into eachother at very high energy, say 100 GeV or so, then the appropriate value of alpha to use in calculating their interactions is more like 1/127 than 1/137.
This running of the coupling strengths is well tested and is predicted by quantum field theory. If the strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces are actually part of a GUT, and the big bang theory is correct, then at some early time in the history of the universe, the average energy of interactions of electrons would have been 100 GeV for example.
At that time it would make sense, on average to use a value of alpha which is 1/127, but that in no way means that this larger value of alpha should be used at that time for two electrons which collide with much lower energy. If they collide with very low energy, the appropriate value of alpha is still 1/137 if the standard model is correct. You see the distinction?
The observations in question are actually of atomic transitions in very distant gas clouds, so they involve very low energy interactions of electrons with positively charged nuclei. So the running of the electromagnetic coupling, alpha, is not relevant to these measurements, and if any real deviation in the observed atomic transitions can be shown from what is observed at the present day, then it means atomic structure has changed. That would mean the laws of physics are really varying as the universe ages. It's quite radical. It means throwing away the standard model and general relativity.
Yes, this is an effect of the running coupling constant in GUTs, together with the big bang theory. At high temperatures, like existed in the early universe, all of the couplings would have looked the same.
Yes, interestingly enough, such plots showing how the electromagnetic, weak and strong couplings run to the same value at a given, fixed energy were actually used early on to argue that grand unification of the SU(5) type probably was occurring. There were errors in the original calculations though, and it turns out that the couplings don't actually become the same, they miss as shown in the plot you reference. That's one of the reasons why supersymmetric unification is proposed: you have more parameters and you can make the three couplings meet ... it's not really a very good
argument if you think about it a bit!
Yes it is certainly pointing to something new, if the result is correct. But there are many problems with it.
There is the obvious unpleasantness that you don't really see a clean result: you can't really say that we see that spectral line X in atom Y was different at such and such a time and place than it is now. Instead you must look at a statistical analysis of many lines over many gas clouds, and extract a best guess on the value of alpha as a function of time (actually, redshift) in the universe, using a theoretical calculation of how atomic lines should depend on alpha. It has to be said that such a calculation is far from trivial to do for complex multi-electron atoms, and in fact can't even be done all that accurately.
Indeed, people who did the same kind of observations previously, concentrated on alkali metal doublets which are produced in (effectively) simple single electron atoms, for which one has a much better hope of understanding the theory well. These observations produce a null result for the variation of alpha, it's only when you add in the more complex metals as these researchers do, that you see a non-zero effect.
My feeling is that it is very interesting, but it's most likely that when a more extended analysis and more observations are done, there will probably be nothing left of the effect, except possibly a better null result than one had with the alkali doublets.