according to Wen Yiduo, 左翼 is not "left wing", but "brilliantly dancing wings".

(from the 4th book of the Complete Works of Wen Yiduo)

hence 鴛鴦在梁 戢其左翼 translates to "the Yellow ducks are on the bridge, their dancing wings they fold"

birds not dancing, not hunting for fish, etc, were seen throughout the Classic of Poetry as metaphor for a person not doing their due. this could be a prince not taking good advice, or it could be a young lover departing and not returning to the beloved.

(from the 3rd book of the Complete Works of Wen Yiduo, Hubei People's Press, 1993)

how are these also called "mandarin ducks". how. they do not even have webbed feet.

Come out, illustrator Jun Hosoi, answer for your crimes. /j

by the Yuan dynasty the birds that bore the same name looked like this.

curtesy of Shanghai Museum.

Come out, illustrator Zhang Zhong, answer for your capable crimes. /j

the same Zhang Zhong painted more of them:

curtesy of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

Come out, etc, etc. /j

so. maybe nobody mistook anything. the birds just decided to grow webbed feet and become a water fowl.

how are these also called "mandarin ducks". how. they do not even have webbed feet.

Come out, illustrator Jun Hosoi, answer for your crimes. /j

The Yellow ducks are on the dams, With their left wings gathered up. That man is bad, Ever varying in his conduct.

-- Bai Hua.

The Yellow ducks are on the dam, With their left wings gathered up. May our sovereign live for ten thousand years, Enjoying the happiness and wealth which are his due!

-- Yuan Yang.

if we trust James Legge and say that these birds really should be called "yellow ducks", then it would be reductive to say "yellow ducks just being there is a sign of virtue" or "yellow ducks just being there is a sign of vice".

how are these also called "mandarin ducks". how. they do not even have webbed feet.

Come out, illustrator Jun Hosoi, answer for your crimes. /j

just popping on here to inform everyone that there exists a musical album of a few of roro's poems!

enjoy!! because i certainly will!

happiness is when finding out about mcphee's inaccuracy in number of livres and lives alike

happiness is when historians as old as baszkiewicz and meller and as young as mcphee forgot to source their marat quotes and therefore it is up to the reader (me) to find the source

how are these also called "mandarin ducks". how. they do not even have webbed feet.

Come out, illustrator Jun Hosoi, answer for your crimes. /j

happiness is when historians as old as baszkiewicz and meller and as young as mcphee forgot to source their marat quotes and therefore it is up to the reader (me) to find the source

My attempt to translate Voltaire's The Divine Émilie into Czech because I just love it so much.

I don't think anyone who speaks Czech will actually see this, so you'll have to trust me that I tried my best to keep the rhymes.

who names their dog 'brount' bruh

Given the fact that, up until the Revolution, the vast majority of our heads of state for hundreds of years were all named 'Louis Capet,' I think it's good that at least the pets are getting some variety.

The Paris Jacobin Club has asked us to pass along the reminder that opera glasses have an aristocratic and flippant connotation when used in conjunction with governmental and political debates and matters, no matter how entertaining said debates may be. The same goes for bags of popcorn.

The Mail on Sunday in printing shit shocker (sarcasm).

After the failure of the highly clipped Gideon Falter sh*t-stirring video to successfully weaponise accusations of antisemitism (see previous posts), and the Met Police's refusal to yield to the accompanying manufactured media outcry, I suspect some elements of the media are going after the Met Commissioner for not playing ball. But this headline may represent an interesting development. Even hopeful. It may, I hope, betray a level of desperation on the part of those who back Israel's genocide in Gaza (eg. the Government and its press controllers / attack dogs). They know that, as things stand, they're not winning the fight for public opinion, so they'll start picking fights left right and centre, including with other members of the 'establishment'.

And it's always good to see the various powers-that-be going at one another's throats.

FREE PALESTINE.

this was why carnot's brother may have sat in the same patriotic club in dijon as c-a prieur did in 1789.

Second in the Mapping the CPS series: a map of Ancien Regime France with the places of birth of our notorious third CPS. On the side, you can see a timeline with the date of birth of each of the members.

Some fun facts:

The average age of the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793 was 37, with Lindet being the oldest at 47 and Saint-Just the youngest at 25.

Couthon and Prieur (Cote d'Or) share a birthday on the 22 of December.

Three of the members (Lindet, Robespierre and Carnot) were born in May (so the CPS has 3 birthdays coming up!)

The only deputy of Paris that was actually born in Paris was Collot.

I'm surprised Billaud-Varenne wasn't sent on mission to the West (instead of Prieur de Marne and Saint-André) since he was born in La Rochelle, had family there and lived there until he was 26.

Saint-André shares a birthplace with Olympe de Gouges (a rather small town called Montauban)

Where all the members were born:

Robert Lindet: Bernay

Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois: Paris

André Jeanbon Saint-André: Montauban

Lazare Carnot: Nolay

Bertrand Barère:Tarbes

Georges Couthon: Orcet

Jacques Billaud-Varenne: La Rochelle

Pierre-Louis Prieur de la Marne: Sommesous 

Maximilien Robespierre: Arras

Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles: Paris

Claude-Antoine Prieur de la Côte-d’Or: Auxonne

Louis Antoine Saint-Just: Decize

Émilie du Châtelet is the best and most correct French philosopher

The Committee of Public Safety is a governmental body that deals with matters pertaining to national safety, foreign threats, and administrative duties, based in Paris and under the supervision of the National Convention.

Any questions, topics of interest, or other commentary can be sent in using the Inquiries button. If you require a notice posted, use the Notices button. Remember, by submitting material you are opening yourself to any applicable legal action that such statements could bring you.

If you wish to bring up a topic or dispute surrounding trials, court procedures, or sentencing, please take this matter to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Remember, we are not the ones who decide who gets guillotined!

If you need to report counterrevolutionary propaganda, travel law violations, or falsified papers/passports, please take these matters to the Committee of General Security. If they blow you off (usually saying something along the lines of "let Public Safety deal with it if they're so high and mighty" and/or grumbling about "indirect appointments"), feel free to bring it up in your local section/club meeting and proceed by their advice.

(Please refrain from asking about the "shouts and crashing noises, like things are being thrown" coming from inside our meeting location. It's nothing to worry about. We're dealing with it. We got everybody involved away from the window, it's all under control.)

OOC:

this is an intentionally humorous blog, in the style of other corporate/organization gimmick blogs. historical events that were serious/influential may be discussed flippantly as part of the bit. specific events referenced in posts may or may not have actually occurred in real life as described in the post. if you are unsure whether or not a post is about an actual event, are curious about what it is referencing, or just want to chat french revolution, feel free to hmu at my main @transrevolutions.

there's no fixed timeline for this blog. events and people may be referenced out of order. just don't think too hard about it.

I doubt this needs to be said, but just in case: neither I nor this blog are actually affiliated with the french government. the committee of public safety was disbanded in 1795. as such, any references to legality/arrest warrants/surveillance are tongue-in-cheek.

Prieur on the implementation of the decimal scale in the metric system

The key point, in which Prieur's proposal, aimed to reform the French metric system, differentiates itself from the others, lies in the detailed implementation of the decimal scale for all kind of measures. This is why I thought appropriate to share the following excerpt, taken directly from his work. Its content might sound obvious for many of us, but it's important to remember that, in the 18th century, the scale commonly used in France was the duodecimal one. Prieur was among the scholars of the time to have relised the great advantages that the decimal subdivision would have brought in the fields of calculation and arithmetic, by making the former more straightforward in general and the latter more accessible to everyone, especially to those, who didn't receive an education. Below, under the cut, I also added the transcribed version by Isabelle Dutailly of Prieur's measures conversion table between the standards used during the Ancien Régime in Paris and the new ones, he proposed to use. It gives a general idea about both the tremendous amount of units present just in the capital and how close Prieur's subdivision of measures is compared to our current one.

"[...]Our pied national will be divided into ten pouches, each pouche in ten lignes, each ligne in ten points or primes, so that it will be possible to write each subspecies [of measure] as decimals of the main unit. This method of division is the most proper that we can accept, since it is in accordance with the rules of our numeration and, if it were applied to all the various kind of measures, the study of arithmetic would become much easier and, as a result, more widely practiced. Someone might say that diving by twelve would be convenient when considering the 1/3, 1/4 and their submultiples: this is undeniable. It is also certain that the duodecimal scale could have been used instead of the decimal one for our numeration, but such a change would currently be impractical . On the other hand, the decimal system reveals itself to be convenient for people, who do not know how to write, since it would allow them to represent each ten through their fingers, therefore each hand would be equal to one half of ten, making the count of five parts easier. The introduction of the decimals in all the measures is beneficial in making calculation easier, in that more complex multiplications and divisions are converted to operations similar to those of whole numbers; in that the reduction of each subspecies, from one to another, happens through the simple shift of the decimal point and finally, in that it would allow to increase or decrease the precision of an operation according to our needs. In the majority of cases relative to calculations of our length measurements, there is no need for this operation to go beyond the thousandth, and often the hundredth too, of the main unit."

—C. A. Prieur, Mémoire sur la nécessité et les moyens de rendre uniformes, dans le royaume, toutes les mesures d'étendue et de pesanteur (1790), p.15-16.

Note: Emphases in italics are mine, moreover I didn't translate the units into English, because their corresponding value in said language wouldn't match with the French one, so I believed it wasn't wise.

"Table of comparison between the old units of weights and length used in the city of Paris and the new national ones, which are supposed to replace the former"

Source for the original table.Source for the transcribed version.

There should be a Hornblower type fictional story about the Napoleonic Wars from a British perspective where there's one guy (British) who is like ALWAYS talking about how much he despises Napoleon all of the time every day and eventually someone's like you know just cos he's fighting against England doesn't mean he's the devil incarnate and the guy goes "what? why would I dislike him because of that? I hate him because he betrayed the revolution! vive Robespierre!"

When the media bombard us with those 'humanitarian crises' which seem constantly to pop up all over the world, one should always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. Properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political and economic considerations.

-- Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideway Reflections, Profile Books 2009, page 10

the genocide in gaza has been going on for 6 months and there is rarely a day i don't think about it or post anything on any of my social media accounts.

i can't not post about gaza and bring awareness.

and i can't believe that none of my friends have shared anything, and i'm upset with how little my siblings and mother have.

i've known about isntreal's violent treatment towards palestinians for years. and even back then i was shocked people didn't give a shit or know about it, which wasn't their fault. western media is bullshit propaganda that purposely does not educate... so i was like "ok i can see how you wouldnt know about this."

but now day after day, we are witnessing this ethnic cleansing, while palestininas are living it and for people to say they "don't know much" about it, or they aren't educated enough or blah blah.

you have 0 excuses. people are protesting all over the world, palestinians are sharing what is going on all over social media. students are setting up encampments, people have blocked ships, disrupted political events, set themselves on fire..

you had 0 excuses at the beginning of this and you have even less excuses now at month 6

i am so sick of people being willfully ignorant and playing dumb, just admit you didn't care at the start of this, and you don't care now. your apathy is disgusting. your indifference is vile.

free palestine.