Re:Doesn't understand copyright, but politics (Score 1)

[snip]

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.

From `Paine,' David Freeman Hawke.

cheers!