I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, —from Ginsberg’s Howl
For Marxist and democratic historians, France remains the ‘model’ country for the analysis of class struggles and political revolutions, which overthrew the established order in 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871 (and profoundly threatened the bourgeois order again in 1968). We will examine these successive revolutions chronologically through the eyes of both radical historians and novelists.
Jean Jaurès, who consistently countered the rise of militarism and opposed the war, was assassinated July 31, 1914, by a right-wing fanatic. Days later, World War I began the French socialists supported it.