> As always, the country known for its human rights (or so they advertise themselves as)

As someone who wasn't aware of this association, I'm curious where do they advertise themselves for human rights?

"Tell me what you boast of, and I'll tell you what you lack." - Old Hispanic proverb

There’s this old quote from Surcouf (a French privateer from the late 18th and early 19th century). When an English captain told him “you Frenchmen fight merely for money. Whereas us Englishmen fight for Honour”, he answered “well, everyone fights for what he lacks”.

Their justification for colonizing countries was that France had a "civilizing mission." Maybe you've heard of that? I realize that's not necessarily identical to "human rights."

I think that has more to do with Christianity - that political narrative of "civilising" people was a common binding thread between all the imperialists. It was thus common for Christian missionaries to be some of the first settlers in any new colony.

Funnily enough that was a very left wing view too

This refers to the Declararation of Rights of Man dated August 1789. It's still nowadays the foreword to the French Constitution.

Hence the idea that France is the home of the human rights, which is deeply rooted in the representation of many French of themselves as a country.

Obviously, there is a huge gap with reality - but that can be opposed to any idealistic set of principles.

> deeply rooted in the representation of many French of themselves as a country.

I wouldn't say that, I've never experiences it that way, neither in school nor in day to day life, it's more of an historical factoid.

Kind of the same with America's "land of the free", sounds good on paper but not many people take it seriously.

Always first on the start, and always arriving late.

Well the first thing France did after first adopting human rights is to set up a guillotine and start mass murdering political opponents...

You mean the oppressive aristocracy? Calling them merely "political opponents" seems a little disingenuous

Anyone in a position to be sent to prison isn’t currently being oppressive.

The Terror (1793-1794) really was more about political opponents than addressing past oppression. Approximately 2% of the population was arrested and about 1/8th of them where executed including many aristocrats but also a high percentage being clergy etc. Basically anyone labeled as counter-revolutionary was killed off, a classic culling of political opponents after a revolution.

If they were able to be guillotined they could have been imprisoned.

They didn’t have enough space in prisons. Also the Guillotine was reserved for political opponents ordinary people were loaded on to rafts which were sunk in the middle of a river..

Do you even Wikipedia? Just going through the list: 1. Notable figure of the French Revolution 2. Duchess 3. Politician, member of the French Convention 4. Officer 5. Aristocrat, lawyer, public official 6. Noblewoman, court official 7. Hairdresser

The most oppressive is hairdresser I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:French_people_execute...

> Do you even Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is not the Truth. That list is incomplete and selective. Seriously, there are much better sources that paint a much better picture of the grandeur, glory, and absurdity of the French Revolution. I would start with the Revolution podcast, which is itself imperfect but still presents a lot of the nuance missing in this sort of discussions.

No. The started with the aristocrats (though most of them ran away to Austria before mass murder even started), then they started killing other radicals like the Girondins, mass exterminating peasants and too moderate Jacobins (and random people in general). Finally Robespierre and his ilk got their own heads chopped off. Then you had the Thermidorian reaction where conservative liberals were killing the more radical ones (it wasn’t as extreme as the res terror though).

> seems a little disingenuous

No.

That is a very selective and incomplete view of history. They were more than one faction and “France” was far from being of one mind. Several of the liberals responsible for the Declaration were the ones being guillotined.

The people who wrote the declaration were monarchists or (later) Bonapartists. Obviously they were quite liberal compared to the Count of Artois. But to me they seem much closer to modern centre-right/conservatives (obviously Liberal conservatism is a thing..)

Yes, I mostly agree. But they were constitutional monarchists, not absolutists. And usually their fascination for Bonaparte ended when he actually took power. They wanted something like Elizabeth II, not Louis XIV.

They were liberal in the sense that they supported individual freedoms, and they called themselves liberals. It makes no sense to call them otherwise. They were on the left because the original left-right divide was about individual rights, not socialism. Though the Overton window moved fast and radicals one day often ended up moderates the next week without having changed their ideas.

But they were not conservatives at all; even though their constitution kept a king, it had pretty much nothing to do with how the ancien régime worked. Nowadays they would be centre-right more or less like the UK’s Liberal Democrats or the French centrist parties.

What’s interesting is that the American use of “liberal” to mean “radical” is at odds with the historical meaning of the word, and how it is used in some other languages. That’s why some people are confused with neo-liberalism being a right-wing ideology.

Times were different, it's hard to understand how people really felt unless you have been subjected to something similar under similar circumstances.

But since you brought it up, do you think that the way the French behaved back then, is in any way still indicative of their behavior today? Is the same culture so to speak, still relevant, breathing and alive? What survives of the peoples zeitgeist through centuries? What is relevant to bring up, and what is just history?

France is also known for an extremely strong state.