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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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"Open" "AI" isn’t

Tomorrow (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "open source," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code transparency, reusability and extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. The point of software freedom was technological self-determination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement. The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "Free as in Beer" when really it means "Free as in Speech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous – and more instrumental – package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis – it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

Thus, by dribs and drabs, the freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves – they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

In the Big Tech internet, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn't be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.

But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "OpenAI," which is a particularly egregious openwasher).

The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.

Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals.

"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not… a technical term of art, but more … marketing and a signifier of aspirations." Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.

That's how you get Meta claiming that LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.

But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements. This isn't the fault of the AI industry – the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice – but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas. At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that rely on existing products, rather than displacing them.

The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation. In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations have been proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.

For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies – such as requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior – wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric systems that we see as superior alternatives to Big Tech. This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.

The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free, and now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.

But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization – all things that "open AI" fails to deliver. The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on – but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training. And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd/

Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.

One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to iOS and vice versa.

Another example: MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.

The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies. Zuckerberg boasts about how PyTorch ropes developers into Meta's stack, "when there are opportunities to make integrations with products, [so] it’s much easier to make sure that developers and other folks are compatible with the things that we need in the way that our systems work."

Tooling is a relatively obscure issue, primarily debated by developers. A much broader debate has raged over training data – how it is acquired, labeled, sorted and used. Many of the biggest "open AI" companies are totally opaque when it comes to training data. Google and OpenAI won't even say how many pieces of data went into their models' training – let alone which data they used.

Other "open AI" companies use publicly available datasets like the Pile and CommonCrawl. But you can't replicate their models by shoveling these datasets into an algorithm. Each one has to be groomed – labeled, sorted, de-duplicated, and otherwise filtered. Many "open" models merge these datasets with other, proprietary sets, in varying (and secret) proportions.

Quality filtering and labeling for training data is incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and involves some of the most exploitative and traumatizing clickwork in the world, as poorly paid workers in the Global South make pennies for reviewing data that includes graphic violence, rape, and gore.

Not only is the product of this "data pipeline" kept a secret by "open" companies, the very nature of the pipeline is likewise cloaked in mystery, in order to obscure the exploitative labor relations it embodies (the joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians" comes out of the South Asian clickwork industry).

The most common "open" in "open AI" is a model that arrives built and trained, which is "open" in the sense that end-users can "fine-tune" it – usually while running it on the manufacturer's own proprietary cloud hardware, under that company's supervision and surveillance. These tunable models are undocumented blobs, not the rigorously peer-reviewed transparent tools celebrated by the open source movement.

If "open" was a way to transform "free software" from an ethical proposition to an efficient methodology for developing high-quality software; then "open AI" is a way to transform "open source" into a rent-extracting black box.

Some "open AI" has slipped out of the corporate silo. Meta's LLaMa was leaked by early testers, republished on 4chan, and is now in the wild. Some exciting stuff has emerged from this, but despite this work happening outside of Meta's control, it is not without benefits to Meta. As an infamous leaked Google memo explains:

Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/leaked-google-memo-admits-defeat-by-open-source-ai/486290/

Thus, "open AI" is best understood as "as free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses, and whose work product is guaranteed to be compatible with the giants' own systems.

The instrumental story about the virtues of "open" often invoke auditability: the fact that anyone can look at the source code makes it easier for bugs to be identified. But as open source projects have learned the hard way, the fact that anyone can audit your widely used, high-stakes code doesn't mean that anyone will.

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL was a wake-up call for the open source movement – a bug that endangered every secure webserver connection in the world, which had hidden in plain sight for years. The result was an admirable and successful effort to build institutions whose job it is to actually make use of open source transparency to conduct regular, deep, systemic audits.

In other words, "open" is a necessary, but insufficient, precondition for auditing. But when the "open AI" movement touts its "safety" thanks to its "auditability," it fails to describe any steps it is taking to replicate these auditing institutions – how they'll be constituted, funded and directed. The story starts and ends with "transparency" and then makes the unjustifiable leap to "safety," without any intermediate steps about how the one will turn into the other.

It's a Magic Underpants Gnome story, in other words:

Step One: Transparency

Step Two: ??

Step Three: Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has gone on record as objecting to "burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits" as an impediment to "innovation" – all the while arguing that these "burdensome mechanisms" should be mandatory for rival offerings that are more advanced than its own. To call this a "transparent ruse" is to do violence to good, hardworking transparent ruses all the world over:

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Some "open AI" is much more open than the industry dominating offerings. There's EleutherAI, a donor-supported nonprofit whose model comes with documentation and code, licensed Apache 2.0. There are also some smaller academic offerings: Vicuna (UCSD/CMU/Berkeley); Koala (Berkeley) and Alpaca (Stanford).

These are indeed more open (though Alpaca – which ran on a laptop – had to be withdrawn because it "hallucinated" so profusely). But to the extent that the "open AI" movement invokes (or cares about) these projects, it is in order to brandish them before hostile policymakers and say, "Won't someone please think of the academics?" These are the poster children for proposals like exempting AI from antitrust enforcement, but they're not significant players in the "open AI" industry, nor are they likely to be for so long as the largest companies are running the show:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4493900

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #llama-2 #meta #openwashing #floss #free software #open ai #open source #osi #open source initiative #osd #open source definition #code is speech

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sieclesetcieux · 1 day

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Saint-Just's letter to Camille Desmoulins in (May?) 1790

He mentions the Assemblée de Chauny, which took place in May 1790 according to this site.

ORIGINAL FRENCH

Monsieur,

Si vous étiez moins occupé, j'entrerais dans quelques détails sur l'Assemblée de Chauny, où se sont trouvés des hommes de toutes trempes et de tout calibre. Malgré ma minorité, j'ai été reçu. Le sieur Gellé, notre confrère au bailliage de Vermandois, m'avait dénoncé. On l'a chassé par les épaules. Nous avons vu là vos compatriotes MM. Saulce, Violette et autres, dont j'ai reçu beaucoup de politesse. Il est inutile de vous dire (car vous n'aimez pas la sotte louange) que votre pays s'enorgueillit de vous.

Vous avez su avant moi que le département était définitivement à Laon. Est-ce un bien, est-ce un mal pour l'une ou l'autre ville ? Il me semble que ce n'est qu'un point d'honneur entre les deux villes, et les points d'honneur sont très peu de chose presqu'en tout genre.

Je suis monté à la tribune, j'ai travaillé dans le dessein de porter le jour dans la question du chef-lieu : mais je ne suivis rien ; je suis parti chargé de compliments comme l'âne de reliques, ayant cependant cette confiance qu'à la prochaine législature je pourrai être des vôtres à l'Assemblée nationale.

Vous m'aviez promis de m'écrire, mais je prévois bien que vous n'en aurez pas eu le loisir. Je suis libre à l'heure qu’il est. Retournerai-je auprès de vous ou resterai-je parmi les sots aristocrates de ce pays-ci ?

Les paysans de mon canton étaient venus, alors de mon retour de Chauny, me chercher à Manicamp. Le comte de Lauraguais fut fort étonné de cette cérémonie rusti-patriotique. Je les conduisis tous chez lui pour le visiter. On nous dit qu'il est aux champs et moi cependant je fis comme Tarquin ; j'avais une baguette avec laquelle je coupai la tête à une fougère qui se trouva près de moi, sous les fenêtres du château, et sans mot dire nous fines volte-face.

Adieu, mon cher Desmoulins. Si vous avez besoin de moi, écrivez-moi. Vos derniers numéros sont pleins d'excellentes choses. Apollon et Minerve ne vous ont point encore abandonné, ne vous en déplaise. Si vous avez quelque chose à faire dire à vos gens de Guise, je les reverrai dans les huit jours à Laon où j'irai faire un tour pour affaires particulières.

Adieu encore, gloire, paix, et rage patriotique. Saint-Just.

Je vous lirai ce soir, car je ne vous parle de vos derniers numéros que par ouï-dire.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

I found a translation here, which I used as a basis for mine, but there are some mistakes I corrected and I made some stylistic changes.

Monsieur,

If you were less busy, I would give you more details about the Assembly of Chauny, where one can find men of considerable calibre and quality. I was received in spite of my minority. Sieur Gellé, our compatriot from the bailliage of Vermandois had denounced me. He was grabbed by the shoulders and thrown out. We saw your compatriots, M. Saulce, M. Violette and others, by whom I was received with great courtesy. There is no point telling you (because you don't like foolish praise) that your region is proud of you.

You have known before I did that the département is definitely fixed at Laon. Is that good or is that bad for one or other of the towns? It seems to me that it is no more than a point of honour between the two towns and points of honour are of little importance.

I took the tribune; I worked with the intention of carrying the [order of the] day on the question of the chef-lieu: but I did not follow on; I left, weighed down with compliments like the donkey burdened with relics (1), having however the confidence that at the next legislature I could be among you at the National Assembly.

You had promised to write to me, but I can well anticipate that you had no such leisure. I am free as of now. Should I return to you or remain amongst the foolish aristocrats in this part of the country?

The peasants from my canton came, when I returned from Chauny, to look for me at Manicamp. The Comte de Lauraguais was greatly astonished by this rustico-patriotic ceremony. I led them all to his home for a visit. They said that he was out in the fields and I, however, did like Tarquin, I had a cane [baguette (2)] with which I cut off the head of a nearby fern, beneath the windows of the castle, and without a word we left and returned.

Farewell, my dear Desmoulins. If you have need of me, write to me. Your latest issues are full of excellent things. Apollo and Minerva have not yet abandoned you, whether you like it or not. If you have anything to say to your people in Guise, I will be seeing them again within the next eight days in Laon where I will be going for particular matters.

Farewell again, glory, peace and patriotic rage.

Saint-Just

I will read you this evening, since I only tell you about your recent issues from hearsay.

(1) This is a reference to a fable by La Fontaine.

(2) The baguette (direct translation: stick - the word existed before the bread style!) was a very thin cane, very fashionable to carry at the time. You can see some examples here. I'm not sure how he managed to cut a plant with it though... I've never tried to do that lol. So I don't know if it implies it was a sword-cane or if it was thin enough to do it on its own.

He compares his gesture to that of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus who, according to Livy, silently cut off the heads of the tallest poppies as a demonstration to what his son had to do.

(This is, by the way, the scene we see reproduced at the beginning of Saint-Just et la force des choses, and why they changed the fern to poppies - so the allusion would be clearer.)

#louis antoine saint just #saint just #camille desmoulins

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armatofu · 6 months

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¿CONOCIAS LA HISTORIA DE “LA CAOBA”? EL ESCÁNDALO DE LA DICTADURA DE PRIMO DE RIVERA

Al comienzo de los años 20 del siglo XX, (1924) la cocaína y la morfina eran de consumo habitual en cabarets y locales nocturnos de ciudades como Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia. Francia parecía ejercer una perniciosa influencia sobre nuestras fronteras. Se temía un contagio de una modernidad sobre la que poco se sabía realmente.

Sexo y droga, una combinación difícil de superar, ni siquiera para el dictador Miguel Primo de Rivera que no supo librarse de sus embrujos y fue capaz de destituir a un juez que detuvo a su amante favorita, una prostituta andaluza conocida como La “Caoba” que además mercadeaba con la cocaína.

La “Caoba” frecuentaba el tablao flamenco, Villa Rosa, que nació de la mano de dos banderilleros y un picador como freiduría de” pescaito” y finos, entre la calle Gorguera y el callejón Álvarez Gato en 1911, y que en 1924 contaba con buenos cantaores como Antonio Chacón. En los reservados del Villa Rosa solían perderse la elite política, militar, burgueses y el rey Alfonso XIII.

Pero el protagonista del escándalo fue el general Miguel Primo de Rivera, que sirvió en Marruecos, Cuba y Filipinas, estuvo seis años casado y tuvo seis hijos, su esposa Casilda Saenz de Heredia murió precisamente de parto. En su viudez, el general se convirtió en asiduo de casas de juego,cabarés, music halls, se rodeó de numerosas amantes como la cupletista Raquel Meller, prostitutas, sobre todo, de la ya nombrada, la “Caoba” que fue detenida y procesada por tráfico de drogas y chantaje a un empresario.

Fue procesada por el juez, don José Prendes Pando. Es entonces cuando el dictador Primo de Rivera indica al magistrado que deje libre a su amante, aduciendo que él era protector de jóvenes alegres. No cejó hasta que el juez fue enviado a Albacete, expulsado de la carrera judicial y el presidente del Tribunal Supremo, don Buenaventura Muñoz, que respaldó al magistrado, fue jubilado anticipadamente.

Hubo quien se atrevió a criticar abiertamente al dictador, como El Colegio de Abogados de Madrid, quien en junta general alzaron sus voces enérgicas y condenaron la intromisión del Dictador, emitiendo una nota de protesta. También se criticó en los círculos intelectuales alrededor del Ateneo de Madrid. Así lo hicieron su presidente, don Rodrigo Soriano y un miembro tan destacado como don Miguel de Unamuno, entonces vicerrector de la Universidad de Salamanca.

La “Caoba” salió de la cárcel y a ambos ateneístas la crítica les costó el destierro a Fuerteventura. Dicen que la última frase del catedrático en su clase de la Universidad de Salamanca fue: “Para el día próximo, lección siguiente”. El Ateneo fue clausurado.

El Heraldo de Madrid, habló tambien sobre el tema, pero para evitar represalias contó que el suceso se había producido en Bulgaria y el protagonista era el primer ministro de este país.

Unamuno al año del exilio publicó De Fuerteventura a París. Diario íntimo de confinamiento y destierro vertido en sonetos por Unamuno, una colección de textos y referencias a una España que se le negaba. También habló de La Caoba :

«Famoso se hizo el caso de la ramera, vendedora de drogas prohibidas por la ley y conocida por La Caoba, a la que un juez de Madrid hizo detener para registrar su casa y el Dictador le obligó a que la soltase y renunciara a procesarla por salir fiador de ella.

Cuando el caso se hizo público y el Rey, según parece, le llamó sobre ello la atención, se le revolvió la ingénita botaratería, perdió los estribos — no la cabeza, que no la tiene — y procedió contra el juez tratando de defenderse en unas notas en que se declaraba protector de las jóvenes alegres.

Aquellas notas han sido uno de los baldones más bochornosos que se han echado sobre España, a la que el Dictador ha tratado como a otra ramera de las que ha conocido en los burdeles. Se ha complacido en mostrar sus vergüenzas y en sobárselas delante de ella«.

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anotherhumaninthisworld · 2 years

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Some primary sources

I plan to add more whenever I find more.

Historie Parlamentaire de la Révolution Française ou Journal des Assemblées Nationales, depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815

Volume 1 (May 1789) Volume 2 (June-September 1789) Volume 3 (September-December 1789) Volume 4 (December 1789-March 1790) Volume 5 (March-May 1790) Volume 6 (May-August 1790) Volume 7? Volume 8 (November 1790-February 1791) Volume 9 (February-May 1791) Volume 10 (May-July 1791) Volume 11 (July-September 1791) Volume 12 (September-December 1791) Volume 13 (January-March 1792) Volume 14 (April-June 1792) Volume 15 (June-July 1792) Volume 16 (July-August 1792) Volume 17 (August-September 1792) Volume 18 (September 1792) Volume 19 (September-October 1792) Volume 20 (October-November 1792) Volume 21 (November-December 1792) Volume 22 (December 1792-January 1793) Volume 23 (January 1793) Volume 24 (February-March 1793) Volume 25 (March-April 1793) Volume 26 (April-May 1793) Volume 27 (May 1793) Volume 28 (July-August 1793) Volume 29 (September-October 1793) Volume 30 (October-December 1793) Volume 31 (November 1793-March 1794) Volume 32 (March-May 1794) Volume 33 (May-July 1794) Volume 34 (July-August 1794)

Recueil des actes du comité de salut public Volume 1 (August 12 1792-January 21 1793) Volume 2 (January 22-March 31 1793) Volume 3 (April 1-May 5 1793) Volume 4 (6 May-18 June 1793) Volume 5 (19 June-15 August 1793) Volume 6 (15 August-21 September 1793) Volume 7 (22 September-24 October 1793) Volume 8 (25 October-26 November 1793) Volume 9 (27 November-31 December 1793) Volume 10 (1 January-8 February 1794) Volume 11 (9 February-15 March 1794) Volume 12 (16 March-22 April 1794) Volume 13 (23 April-28 May 1794) Volume 14 (29 May-7 July 1794) Volume 15 (8 July-9 August 1794)

Recueil de documents pour l’histoire du club des Jacobins de Paris Volume 1 (1789-1790) Volume 2 (January-July 1791) Volume 3 (July 1791-June 1792) Volume 4 (June 1792-January 1793) Volume 5 (January 1793-March 1794) Volume 6 (March-November 1794)

Histoire du tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris: avec le journal de ses actes. Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5

Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan etc Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3

Oeuvres complètes de Robespierre Volume 1 (Robespierre à Arras) Volume 2 (Les œuvres judiciaires) Volume 3 is the correspondence, listed below Volume 4 (Le defenseur de la Constitution) Volume 5 (lettres à ses comettras) Volume 6 (speeches 1789-1790) Volume 7 (speeches January-September 1791) Volume 8 (speeches October 1791-September 1792) Volume 9 (speeches September 1792-June 27 1793) Volume 10 (speeches June 27 1793-July 27 1794)

Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre (not the same as Oeuvres completés) Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3

Oeuvres de Jerome Pétion Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4

Oeuvres complètes de Saint-Just Volume 1 Volume 2

Oeuvres littéraires de Hérault de Séchelles (1907)

Oeuvres de Danton (1866)

Discours de Danton (1910) by André Fribourg

Works by Desmoulins

La France Libre (1789)

Discours de la Lanterne aux Parisiens (1789)

Révolutions de France et de Brabant (1789-1791) Volume 1 (number 1-13) Volume 2 (number 14-26) Volume 3 (number 27-39) Volume 4 (number 40-52) Volume 5 (number 53-65) Volume 6 (number 66-79) Volume 7 (number 80-86)

La Tribune des Patriots (1792) (all numbers)

Le Vieux Cordelier (1793-1794) (all numbers)

Jean Pierre Brissot démasqué (1792)

Histoire des Brissotins (1793)

Correspondences

Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre (1926)

Correspondance de George Couthon (1872)

Correspondance inédit de Camille Desmoulins (1836)

Correspondance inédite de Marie-Antoinette (1864)

Billuad-Varennes — mémoires et correspondance

Correspondance de Brissot

Lettres de Louis XVI: correspondance inédite, discours, maximes, pensées, observations etc (1862)

Lettres de Madame Roland (1900) Volume 1 Volume 2

Correspondance inédite de Mlle Théophile Fernig (1873)

Journal d’une bourgeoise pendant la Révolution 1791-1793 by Rosalie Jullien (1881)

Memoirs

Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4

Memoirs of Élisabeth Lebas In French In English

Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1835) In French In English

Memoirs of Joseph Fouché Volume 1 (English) Volume 2 (French)

Mémoires de Brissot (1877)

Mémoires inédits de Pétion et mémoires de Buzot et Barbaroux (1866)

Memoirs of Barras — member of the Directorate (1899)

Mémoires inédits de madame la comtesse de Genlis depuis 1756 jusqu’au nos jours Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8 Volume 9 Volume 10

Mémoires de Madame Roland Volume 1 Volume 2

Mémoires de Louvet (1862)

Memoirs of the Duchess de Tourzel: Governess to the Children of France During the Years 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793 and 1795 Volume 1 Volume 2

Révélations puisées dans les cartons des comités de salut public et de sûreté générale, ou Mémoires (inédits) de Sénart, agent du gouvernement révolutionnaire (1824)

Free books

Danton (1978) by Norman Hampson (borrowable for an hour, renewable every hour)

Robespierre (2014) by Hervé Leuwers (borrowable for an hour, renewable every hour)

Collot d’Herbois — légendes noires et Révolution (1995) by Michel Biard

Choosing Terror (2014) by Marisa Linton

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (2015) by Timothy Tackett

Augustin: the younger Robespierre by (2011) by Mary-Young

Journaliste, sans-culotte et thermidorien: le fils de Fréron, 1754-1802, d’après des documents inédits (1909) by Raoul Arnaud

Un Champion de la Royauté au début de la Révolution - François Louis Suleau (1907) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Camille Desmoulins and his wife — passages from the history of the dantonists (1876) by Jules Claretie

Vadier, président du Comité de sûreté générale sous la Terreur d’après des documents inédits (1896) by Albert Tournier

Mémoires historiques et militaires sur Carnot (1824)

Le Puy-de-Dôme en 1793 et le Proconsulat de Couthon (1877) by Francisque Mège

Le procès des Dantonistes, d'après les documents, précédé d'une introduction historique. Recherches pour servir à l'histoire de la révolution française (1879) edited by Dr. Jean François Eugène Robinet

Robert Lindet, député à l'Assemblée législative et à la Convention, membre du Comité de salut public, ministre des finances : notice biographique (1899) by Amand Montier

Prieur de la Côte-d'Or (1900) by Paul Gaffarel

Un épicurien sous la Terreur; Hérault de Séchelles (1759-1794); d'après des documents inédits (1907) by Emile Dard

Twelve Who Ruled (1941) by R. R. Palmer (borrowable for an hour, renewable every hour)

Bertrand Barère: A Reluctant Terrorist (1963) by Leo Gershoy (borrowable for an hour, renewable every hour)

Saint-Just : sa politique et ses missions (1976) by Jean-Pierre Gross (borrowable for an hour, renewable every hour)

The Glided Youth of Thermidor (1993) by François Gendron

Pauline Léon, une républicaine révolutionnaire by Claude Guillon

Billaud-Varenne: Géant de la Révolution (1989) by Arthur Conte

When the King Took Flight (2003) by Timothy Tackett (borrowable for an hour, renewable every hour)

Joseph Le Bon, 1765-1795; la terreur à la frontière (1932) by Louis Jacob Volume 1 Volume 2

Resources shared by other tumblr users (thank you all very much!!!)

Resources shared by @iadorepigeons

Resources shared by @georgesdamnton

Resources shared by @rbzpr:

Fabre d’Eglantine resources shared by @edgysaintjust

Saint-Just resources shared by @sieclesetcieux

Saint-Just resources shared by @orpheusmori

Marat resources shared by @orpheusmori

My own translations

Lucile Desmoulins’ diary (1788, 1789, 1790, 1792-1793)

Charlotte Robespierre et ses amis (1961)

Laponneraye on the life of Charlotte Robespierre (1835)

Abbé Proyart on the childhood of Robespierre (1795)

Regulations for the internal exercises of the College of Louis-le-Grand (1769)

Regulations for law students at Louis-le-Grand (1782)

Belongings left by Danton, Fabre and Desmoulins after their arrest

Letters from Robespierre’s father

Robespierre family timeline

#frev resources #frev #french revolution #maximilen robespierre #augustin robespierre #robespierre #george couthon #couthon #camille desmoulins #desmoulins #joseph fouché #fouché #charlotte robespierre #elisabeth lebas #elisabeth duplay #billaud-varennes #jerome Pétion #jacques-pierre brissot #saint-just

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satinea · 4 months

Text

AU POÈTE

(Sonnet)

Poète, ne fais pas cas de l’amour populaire ! Le bruit momentané des louanges enthousiastes passera ; tu entendras le jugement du sot et le rire de la froide multitude ; mais toi, reste ferme, tranquille, farouche.

Tu es un roi : vis seul. Par un libre chemin, va où t’entraîne ton libre esprit, perfectionnant sans cesse les fruits de tes pensées favorites, ne demandant pas de récompense pour ton noble exploit.

Elles sont en toi-même : tu es toi-même ton plus haut tribunal ; plus sévèrement que tout autre tu peux apprécier ton travail. En es-tu content, toi, artiste exigeant ?

Tu es content ? Alors laisse la foule le vilipender, laisse-la cracher sur l’autel où ton feu brûle, et avec une pétulance enfantine secouer ton trépied.

Alexandre Pouchkine

(Пу��кин Александр Сергеевич)

1799 — 1837

Traduction d’Ivan Tourgueniev et Gustave Flaubert, parue dans La République des Lettres, 1876, reprise dans Isaac Pavlovsky, Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff, Paris, Savine, 1887.

#@satinea #original photographers #original photography #doubs #franche comté

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sous-le-saule · 10 months

Text

Crieront-ils mon nom ?

- Ah, Cléon, si tu savais comme je l’aime.

Après avoir poussé un lourd soupir, il détourna les yeux de la tribune d’honneur et vint me rejoindre dans l’ombre de l’hypogée pour que j’ajuste les sangles de sa légère armure de cuir.

- C’est pas de l’amour, ça, gamin. Tu la connais pas. Tu lui as même jamais adressé la parole – non que ça risque d’arriver, d’ailleurs. Tu la trouves juste agréable à regarder. C’est pas pareil.

- Qu’est-ce que t’en sais, grand-père ? rétorqua-t-il avec la cruauté de la jeunesse. T’as jamais eu de femme et t’es trop vieux pour te souvenir de ce que c’est, d’être amoureux.

Je le laissai dire. Depuis que j’étais trop âgé pour combattre, je m’étais occupé d’assez de jeunots dans son genre pour savoir que le mieux était encore de laisser courir. Ca lui passerait.

- Son père est là aussi. Peut-être qu’elle pourrait le convaincre de m’acheter ? Hein ? Et comme ça, on pourrait se voir tous les jours ?

Il était en train de s’exciter tout seul, le môme, et moi je le voulais concentré. C’était une sale journée pour se battre. Le soleil tapait sans pitié et l’air était lourd. Probable qu’on allait avoir de l’orage d’ici quelques heures. Le genre d’atmosphère qui rend les combattants impatients et imprudents. Sans doute que ça me rendait irritable aussi parce que, au lieu de laisser pisser, je décidai de lui rabattre son caquet.

- Et alors ? Tu t’imagines qu’il va laisser un esclave fricoter avec sa fille ? Tu rêves tout éveillé si tu crois seulement que cette gamine de la noblesse pourrait s’intéresser à toi. Elle connait même pas ton nom, fiston, redescends sur terre.

- T’as raison. T’as raison, c’est la première étape. Faut qu’elle sache mon nom. Si je fais un bon combat… non, un combat extraordinaire… les spectateurs scanderont mon nom, hein ?

- Peut-être bien, fis-je, prudent.

Les riches, on sait jamais trop comment ça va réagir. En plus, j’avais observé la foule quelques instants plus tôt et, comme je le craignais par cette chaleur, le public était apathique, plus préoccupé par les rafraichissements servis que par les combats. Celui du petit allait être le dernier de la matinée, les gens étaient déjà blasés, et ils commençaient à avoir faim.

Je lui tendis son épée courte et mis la main sur son épaule pour le ramener dans le monde réel.

- Hé, Jorn, n’en fais pas trop, hein ? Tu sais qu’il y a que deux façons de sortir d’ici…

- Libre et debout, ou les pieds devant. Tu me l’as déjà dit cent fois. A moins que je finisse comme toi, me fit-il avec un clin d’œil.

Moi, j’étais jamais sorti. Trop chanceux pour mourir, pas assez malin pour parvenir à convaincre mon maitre de me vendre ma liberté. Enfin, il y avait pire sort que le mien, et je m’en accommodais. Par la force des choses, j’étais devenu entraineur, soigneur, et confident plus souvent qu’à mon tour. Je m’étais donné pour mission que le plus possible de mes gars quittent l’arène rapidement, et sur leurs deux pieds. Je me débrouillais pas trop mal.

Jorn sautilla sur place, ébaucha quelques mouvements d’épée, puis me lança un sourire désarmant.

- T’en fais pas, je sais ce que je fais.

Et il s’engouffra dans la lumière au son d’applaudissements mous.

Il était agile, il fallait lui reconnaitre ça. Il enchaina les esquives spectaculaires et son adversaire commençait à fatiguer nettement, dégoulinant de sueur à force d’essayer d’embrocher le freluquet avec sa lance. Il était plus massif et avait aussi opté pour une armure plus lourde. J’avais bon espoir.

D’une attaque audacieuse, le gamin parvint à s’approcher assez pour lui entailler le bras, mais l’autre broncha à peine. Les passes d’armes s’enchainèrent, sans qu’aucun parvienne à toucher l’autre.

Puis, tout à coup, Jorn eut un moment d’inattention. Une seconde, il détourna les yeux, sans doute pour vérifier si la fille le regardait, ce petit imbécile, et ce fut suffisant pour que son opposant le transperce de sa lance. Vu l’air surpris du lancier, j’aurais dit qu’il n’avait pas compté y aller aussi fort, ou qu’il avait cru que Jorn esquiverait encore. La plupart du temps, les combattants ne visaient pas la mort de l’adversaire, juste une blessure suffisante pour mettre fin à l’affrontement. Personne n’avait intérêt, au prix où était l’esclave, à ce que chaque combat se termine en mise à mort.

Il restait planté là, ce grand échalas, à me chercher du regard, et je me précipitai parce que, s’il n’achevait pas le petit, c’était peut-être qu’il y avait une chance que je puisse le rafistoler.

Je sus tout de suite que non, au son que faisait sa respiration et aux bulles ensanglantées qui perlaient à sa bouche. Le poumon était perforé.

Le silence régnait dans le public. J’aurais aimé que ce soit un silence respectueux pour l’homme qui avait combattu habilement pour leur amusement. Ou au moins un silence coupable. Mais c’était juste du désintérêt. Certains se levaient déjà pour aller manger.

Heureusement, le gamin était déjà trop parti pour s’en rendre compte. Il agrippa mon avant-bras.

- Est-ce que… est-ce qu’ils crient mon nom ?

- Oui, petit, ils crient ton nom.

- Elle aussi ?

Je jetai un coup d’œil à la tribune d’honneur. La fille riait avec sa dame de compagnie, indifférente à ce qui se passait dans l’arène.

- Oui, elle aussi.

Il mourut le sourire aux lèvres.

#30jourspourécrire #30jourspourecrire #french #français #écriture #my writing #sls's stuff #crieront-ils mon nom?

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profesor-javaloyes · 3 months

Text

En mi “molesta” opinión.- Perdonen que insista.

“Soy marica, puedo hacer lo que quiera” (escuchado en una conversación el mes pasado en un restaurante de Santa Cruz de Tenerife)

La lección de hoy queridos niños se construye en modo de homenaje ponderado a estos/as/es héroes de la lucha “por la igualdad, la libertad, el anticapitalismo, el ecologismo y contra la islamofobia, el sionismo y la entidad sionista genocida (Israel)” que “ha utilizado al colectivo LGTBIQA+ y de las mujeres frente al mundo árabe e islámico, todo ello desde “una perspectiva” Transfeminista “construyendo movimientos de solidaridad con Palestina para frenar a la extrema derecha enfrentándonos a esos discursos y prácticas racistas y misóginas que niegan nuestros deseos, nuestras identidades y nuestros cuerpos”.

Ya lo ven pequeñas criaturas, héroes, sí héroes que se enfrenta valerosamente no desde Gaza, o Beirut en donde mandan los piadosos ayatolás de la República Islámica de Irán (Hamas y Hezbolá mediante) y porque si tomamos por ejemplo el Artículo 104 del Código Penal de Irán: “Lapidación por homosexualidad - <Las piedras deben ser como las palma de la mano, no demasiado grandes para causar la muerte muy rápido y así prolongar el sufrimiento, ni tan pequeñas que no sean consideradas piedras>” sería muy sencillo y nada heroico y efectivo. No, ellos eligen para esa lucha hacerlo - con grave riesgo para sus vidas y libertad - desde las profundas entrañas de la monstruosa bestia de nombre democracia liberal, el demoníaco capitalismo desarrollado y esa aterradora hidra con centenares de cabezas llamado Estado de las libertades. Horrible dictadura ésta en donde pueden manifestarse libremente (incluso en contra de la misma democracia), tomar la calle con cientos de miles de personas para celebrar el Día del Orgullo LGTBIQA+ y que por cierto, el que se celebra en Tel-Aviv - Israel es el más numeroso, libre, diverso y popular del mundo. Regímenes represores que han implantado leyes en contra de discursos de odio y discriminación que les afecten a estos mártires, en donde pueden gestionar su identidad de género apoyados por una ley que les permite percibirse (y obligar a los demás a percibirlos) como hombres, mujeres, no binarios, media y media, cuarto y mitad o buitre leonado por la mañana y lirón careto por la noche. Represoras democracias liberales que colocan la bandera del arco iris junto a la nacional, autónoma, regional o de la ciudad que toque, contraviniendo en muchos casos la Ley en la que el Tribunal Supremo ha establecido en una sentencia firme que sólo las banderas oficiales deben ondear en los edificios de las administraciones públicas españolas.

Mientras tanto “Feliz Ramadán” con luces y mensajes oficiales en todo occidente. ¿Han visto algo similar sobre la Navidad, al año nuevo hindú o chino en alguna nación en donde impere el islam?. Las fiestas judías ni pensarlas porque son anatema. Se han podido ver en estos pasados días grandes grupos de musulmanes que han tomado el centro de Londres o Time Square en Nueva York para sus rezos. Intenten queridos, queridas y querides a rezar un rosario en las calles de Riad (en donde está prohibida la construcción de iglesias cristianas), Kabul o Islamabad. ¡Claro que no!, eso no es luchar por la libertad, la diversidad y la igualdad de las personas ante la ley. Eso para ustedes es… provocación.

#transgender #palestina #islam #profesor javaloyes

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