Richard holmes and the First american Civil War

My my own view of war, most wars is that they stem from those who wish to control money and trade and obviously the means of production and the profits made from it. in wars like the american revolt and the italian wars of independence we have a feeling that the people interested in a war were not the ordinary people but those who would make the most from independence in terms of profit . here is richard holmes and his viewpoint which i consider very precise and important. If the British were to win then a Tarleton was needed as their leader instead of the Howes of this world. steve weston

It was a war that interested the British crown very little and please remember that everything had changed since the war in canada so superbly won against the french army, if the british had defeated the french in canada why couldn't they defeat the british in america? The key to the question is to study British politics and its prime minister in the Canadian victory and then look at the conditions during the first American civil war.timpo

The first four metal below are from Garrison

The War of Independence by richard holmes
The war  plays such an important part in American popular ideology that references to it are especially prone to exaggeration and oversimplification. And two uncomfortable truths about it - the fact that it was a civil war (perhaps 100,000 loyalists fled abroad at its end), and that it was also a world war (the Americans could scarcely have won without French help) - are often forgotten.






The War of Independence plays such an important part in American popular ideology...tarleton's legion by atkm

Here, however, I have done my best to describe this long and complex war in terms that people will find readily comprehensible, but that avoid some of the Hollywood-style simplifications and inaccuracies that have gained so much currency over the years.



And although as I write this piece, the second Gulf War has only recently ended, and although the Vietnam analogy comes to mind often, I have deliberately avoided reflecting too much on recent American politics. No: what I have tried to do is to give readers the most balanced and objective view I can of a war that has done much, as my television screen reminds me as I write, to shape the world we live in.

30mm



Boston 'Tea Party', 16 December 1773  In one sense it was always a war between cousins, and the long and tangled history of the 'special relationship' between Britain and America, as well as the notion of the unbreakable connections between both, bear witness to a link that at one time was very close indeed.


sabre and sabre


In one sense it was always a war between cousins...

The war often known in Europe as the Seven Years War was known in North America as the French and Indian War. It involved several countries, with France and Britain on opposing sides, and North America was one of its many theatres of operations. It was ended by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, by which the French ceded territory to Britain in North America and elsewhere. In addition to this success, James Wolfe's victory at Quebec had helped secure Canada for the British Crown, and the 13 British colonies further south seemed safe from any threat that might once have been posed by the French and their Native American allies. Britain and her American colonies at this time seemed very close, both culturally and politically - and it is remarkable how this rosy picture changed so quickly.



In part the deterioration of relations between Britain and her American colonies - which eventually led to the War of Independence - stemmed from a logical British attempt to make the colonies contribute more to the cost of their own defence. It was also partly the result of the desire of some successful merchants in the colonies to break free of controls imposed by the pro-British elite, and from British political miscalculations that saw foreign policy oscillate between harshness and surrender. Another factor was the work of radical politicians and propagandists - such as Sam Adams and Paul Revere - who envisaged a break with Britain when many of their countrymen still hoped that it might be avoided.
unknown unknown castings of the era and that below


The descent into armed conflict between patriot (anti-British) and loyalist (pro-British) sympathisers was gradual. Events like the Boston 'Massacre' of 1770, when British troops fired on a mob that had attacked a British sentry outside Boston's State House, and the Boston 'tea-party' of 1773, when British-taxed tea was thrown into the harbour, marked the downward steps. Less obvious was the take-over of the colonial militias - which had initially been formed to provide local defence against the French and the Native Americans - by officers in sympathy the the American patrios/rebels, rather than by those in sympathy with pro-British loyalists/Tories.



As all these elements of conflict came into play, the British commander in chief in North America was Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. He had long experience of the American continent, and had a beautiful and intelligent American wife, but he was under pressure from London to lance what seemed to be a painful boil.

above are the Accurate plastic figures, the only ones that in my opinion are better than CTA(Upnaway)

The outset of war

 In April 1775 Gage sent a small force to seize patriot militia weapons and gunpowder at Concord, not far from Boston, but his soldiers became involved in a brief firefight on Lexington Green on their way there. This event was reported far and wide, and the first shot fired there has ever since been described as 'the shot heard round the world'.



There was a bigger clash at Concord, and then a fighting retreat, in which the British force was roughly handled. The militias then closed in and blockaded the British in Boston. Although newly arrived British reinforcements, under General William Howe, who was soon to replace Gage, won a costly battle at Bunker Hill, outside Boston, they could not break the siege.





Washington could also do nothing to deny the enormous advantage that command of the sea conferred on the British.
upnaway
In mid-1775, patriot representatives of the 13 colonies of America, meeting in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress, appointed George Washington, a well-to-do Virginia landowner, as commander in chief of its military forces. Washington, who thought militias fundamentally unreliable, set about raising a regular force, the Continental Army, and as the initial skirmishes between the patriots on the one hand and the British and their loyalist supporters on the other turned into a full-scale war, both sides were to use a mixture of regular troops, militias and other irregulars.



Washington's early fortunes were mixed. He forced the British to evacuate Boston by sea, when heavy guns taken from Fort Ticonderoga in upper New York State were hauled by patriot forces across a winter landscape and emplaced so as to fire down onto the city. But a patriot attempt to invade Canada failed miserably.

hobby bunker


 In the summer of 1776 General Howe, his army of 30,000 men carried in ships commanded by his brother Richard, landed near New York and duly captured the city, inflicting several sharp defeats on the patriots.

this a tremendously useful figure by marx , it can be made into any period really up until the modern one

These are maybe the best plastic soldiers of the epoch made certainly better than Marx. My Dad on seeing these who was an ex-Britains man said that they were like Britains in form and style but only much better

The widening theatre of war (below Upnaway). The British infantry here by Call to Arms are maybe the best ever done in plastic, confront them with the Marx below. My Dad who worked for Britains said "They look like Britains in form and scale but much better".

Washington, fearing that his cause would inevitably collapse as short-term enlistment into the Continental Army expired, launched a risky attack on the little town of Trenton, held by a brigade of Hessians (German troops in British service) on Boxing Day 1776. He won this battle, and although the victory was small in tactical terms, it had a wider strategic impact, showing that the patriots were still in the fight.

hobby bunker



The American war was now a world war, which meant that British resources could no longer be concentrated on North America alone.

In 1777 Howe took Philadelphia for the British, and had rather the better of fighting in the central theatre of war. But an ill-judged British attempt to invade from Canada, thrusting down the Hudson Valley towards New York and cutting off the rebellious New England, went badly wrong, and Lieutenant General John Burgoyne was forced to surrender with his entire army at Saratoga in October.
burgoynes london home


Defeat at Saratoga was not necessarily a military cataclysm for the British, but it encouraged the French, anxious to obtain revenge for the humiliations of the Seven Years War, to go beyond the covert support they had offered the patriots thus far, and join the war. Spain and Holland were to follow suit, and in 1780 a wider League of Armed Neutrality was formed, to resist British attempts to stop and search merchant shipping. The American war was now a world war, which meant that British resources could no longer be concentrated on North America alone.

upnaway


Saratoga did not improve Washington's position instantly, however, and his army spent a miserable winter at Valley Forge. But in the spring of 1777 Howe's replacement, General Sir Henry Clinton, withdrew from Philadelphia (American Continentals fought creditably when they took on his rearguard at Monmouth), retaining New York as his base in the central theatre, and switching his main effort elsewhere.

upnaway


There had already been fighting in the south. The British had failed in an attack on Charleston, although from Savannah they had repulsed a powerful French force, sent by sea from the West Indies. In spring 1780, Clinton reopened the campaign in the south, moving by sea to take Charleston in the biggest British victory of the war. He then returned to New York and left Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis in charge.



Formidable adversaries

In August Major General Horatio Gates, patriot victor of Saratoga, was roundly defeated by Cornwallis at Camden. British regulars now had an impressive combination of discipline and tactical skill, which made them formidable adversaries even in the difficult country of the south. But their loyalist allies fared less well. That September Major Patrick Ferguson, with a well-organised loyalist force was routed at King's Mountain, and in January the following year the dashing and controversial Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton ('Bloody Ban' to his enemies) was badly beaten by the unconventional Daniel Morgan at Cowpens.




the real problem with ATS plastics are the design idea, it seems we always have these splayed legs hence long long bases that don't work if you want unison.Another thing  I wonder why someone doesn't make boxes of just firing figures
Washington was badly rattled by the Arnold affair, and he still faced unrest amongst his tired soldiers.

Cornwallis, although his army was now in tatters, was still a doughty adversary. In March 1781 he won a magnificent victory over Nathanael Greene, Gates's successor, at Guilford Courthouse. But like so many British victories it was won at disproportionate cost, and Cornwallis could not mint strategic currency from tactical success. Exhausted, he fell back towards the coast, and eventually established himself at Yorktown, to the south of the Chesapeake Bay, where he hoped to be supplied or, if the worst came to the worst, to be evacuated, by sea.
courthouse


In the New York area there had been no developments of real military significance. However, the ambitious Major General Benedict Arnold, one of the patriot heroes of Saratoga, had become embittered, and entered into secret negotiations with Clinton to betray the fort at West Point on the Hudson.

the moore house where cornwallis surrended


The scheme failed at the last moment and Arnold escaped to enter British service: Major John André, Clinton's adjutant-general, was captured in civilian clothes carrying letters to Arnold, and Washington had him hanged. Washington was badly rattled by the Arnold affair, and he still faced unrest amongst his tired soldiers. And although a substantial French force under the Comte de Rochambeau had landed in Rhode Island, it was hard to see how the war could be won.



Turning point

In the spring of 1781 the picture changed at a stroke. Admiral de Grasse, commanding the French fleet in the West Indies, made a bold attempt to secure control of the sea off the Chesapeake Bay.


upnaway atkm
Immediately Washington heard what was afoot, he moved south with the bulk of his army and Rochambeau's Frenchmen. The British could not prevent de Grasse from entering the Chesapeake Bay, and when they brought him to battle in early September the result was a tactical draw but a strategic victory for the French.





Conversely, the patriots had always been likely to win, provided they struggled on and avoided outright defeat.

They still controlled the bay, and Cornwallis was still trapped in Yorktown. Another French squadron brought in heavy guns from Rhode Island, and the French and Americans mounted a formal siege against the outnumbered and ill-provisioned Cornwallis.
 Although Clinton and the admirals mounted a relief expedition, it arrived too late: Cornwallis had surrendered. When the British prime minister, Lord North, so firmly associated with Britain's war effort, heard the news, he staggered as if shot and cried out: 'Oh God! It is all over'.



Although the war was not formally ended until the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, it was clear after Yorktown that the British, with their world-wide preoccupations, no longer had any realistic chance of winning. There had, however, been some moments that might have led to victory.



Howe, probably hoping to reach a compromise settlement with Washington, showed little killer instinct in his New York campaign. But in this sort of war the British were in any case eventually likely to lose, unless they could strike the patriots such a telling blow as to win the war at a stroke, and it is hard to see how this could have been achieved.



Conversely, the patriots had always been likely to win, provided they struggled on and avoided outright defeat. It is unlikely that George Washington would much like being compared with General Vo Nguyen Giap, who commanded the North Vietnamese army in the Vietnam war. But both shared the same recognition that a militarily-superior opponent with worldwide preoccupations can be beaten by an opponent who avoids outright defeat and remains in the field. It is an old truth, and 21st-century strategists, whatever their political differences, should be well aware of it.

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN


Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:


Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.

Holy-dayes are despis'd, new fashions are devis'd.

Old Christmas is kicked out of Tow

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

The wise men did rejoyce to see our Savior Christs Nativity:

The Angels did good tidings bring, the Sheepheards did rejoyce and sing.

Let all honest men, take example by them.

Why should we from good Laws be bound?

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

Command is given, we must obey, and quite forget old Christmas day:

Kill a thousand men, or a Town regain, we will give thanks and praise amain.

The wine pot shall clinke, we will feast and drinke.

And then strange motions will abound.

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

Our Lords and Knights, and Gentry too, doe mean old fashions to forgoe:

They set a porter at the gate, that none must enter in thereat.

They count it a sin, when poor people come in.

Hospitality it selfe is drown'd.

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

The serving men doe sit and whine, and thinke it long ere dinner time:

The Butler's still out of the way, or else my Lady keeps the key,

The poor old cook, in the larder doth look,

Where is no goodnesse to be found,

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

To conclude, I'le tell you news that's right, Christmas was kil'd at Naseby fight:

Charity was slain at that same time, Jack Tell troth too, a friend of mine,

Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,

Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.



THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN by Arthur Schrader


old kent road londonis this the music?


Since 1881, a story has circulated among some Americans that the British played a march called “The World Turned Upside Down” (hereafter WTUD or Yorktown/WTUD) during their surrender at Yorktown in October 1781. Over the years this story has been accepted by more and more Americans (though without corroboration). After 1940 at least 33 American professional historians accepted the story and published it in their textbooks (still without corroboration). This seems to have encouraged several American novelists and one British poet, Robert Graves, to adopt the story and embroider it for their books.


What are the problems? First: The evidence that this happened is poor by any historical standard but historians haven’t bothered to look. Second: Nearly one hundred years of professional cataloging of early Anglo-American music hasn’t turned up a single eighteenth-century British tune or march called WTUD. (Writers who say there were several English WTUD tunes in the eighteenth-century are guessing from bad extrapolations). (so whats the tune above? -ed)Third: Three different twentieth-century American groups have made strong claims for three different tunes, they call the Yorktown/WTUD but not one of these claims stands up to investigation.



Let’s begin with the basic historical question. What proof is there, that the British at Yorktown played a march that anyone living in the eighteenth-century called WTUD? The Yorktown/WTUD story was first published in Major Alexander Garden’s Anecdotes of the American Revolution . . . (Charleston, S. C., 1828), forty-seven years after Yorktown. Garden quoted a letter from Major William Jackson who described the surrender negotiations as though he had been an eyewitness, but didn’t mention that he was in Europe, not Yorktown at the time.



Apparently, in that same letter, Jackson also stated that a French fleet had sailed from Brest for America early in May 1781 at the instigation of his superior officer, Lt. Col. John Laurens. That French fleet was crucial to the victory at Yorktown, but Laurens was in no way responsible for getting it to America. In fact, that French fleet had sailed late in March before Laurens and his secretary, Major Jackson, arrived at Versailles. This shows that Jackson cannot be trusted for details of past events in which he was closely involved, much less for details of something that allegedly happened at Yorktown while he was 3,000 miles away in Europe.



Lt. Col. Laurens was Washington’s representative at the Yorktown surrender negotiations so he could have written to Jackson and described the Yorktown events, but by the same reasoning Jackson could have reported how he got his information. This he did not do! As published, Jackson’s Yorktown/WTUD story is, at best, a dubious “third-hand account”—Laurens(?) to Jackson to Garden—masquerading as an eyewitness report.



This Yorktown/WTUD story had been ignored for a long time. From 1781 to 1881 not even newspapers or “pop” historians included the WTUD in their Yorktown accounts. Then in 1881, Henry P. Johnston revived the Yorktown/WTUD story from Garden’s book (with credit), for his excellent Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, after which a few Harvard-trained historians repeated the story in the 1880s and 1890s without checking it out or naming their sources. Around that time a few people began to ask about the music so that search has been going on for just over a century.



The first to write that he might have found the WTUD music was John Tasker Howard, a music historian who about 1931 wrote a booklet, The Music of George Washington’s Time for the Bicentennial of Washington’s birth. Howard was a fine scholar who knew a great deal about American classical music and a lot about Stephen Foster’s songs but not much about the other songs of ordinary people and next to nothing about fife and drum music. (This last point is important. The surrender terms specified that the surrendering troops could beat British or German airs. “Beat” applies only to drums.)



Howard’s main problem was that he did not realize that some old songs had different names for their tunes and texts (by Howard’s time, most tunes and texts had the same name). In the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a single well-known tune might have a dozen or more different sets of words having different titles without the tune-name changing. One illustration: Since the Revolution, the “Yankee Doodle” tune has had more than a hundred different sets of words, most with their own text titles, but the “Yankee Doodle” name has stuck to the music all that time. Only occasionally does a tune title change to match a text title. “The Star Spangled Banner” tune-name changes from “Anacreon in Heaven” to “Adams and Liberty” and finally to “The Star Spangled Banner” were an exception, not the rule.



John Tasker Howard learned that a 1642 English Royalist tune, “When the King Enjoys His Own Again” had once had a song text called “The World Turned Upside Down” associated with it (in 1646). He then suggested that this “King Enjoys” tune might also be the as yet undiscovered WTUD music. Howard didn’t know that WTUD text in no way fitted Yorktown.



Unfortumately for Howard’s guesswork, there is only one known period copy of that 1646 WTUD text; no evidence that it ever was sung; and no sign of any later reprint until 1923 when it appeared in Hyder Rollins's Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides Illustrating the Period of the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660! Therefore that 1646 WTUD text did not circulate enough to change the tune name “King Enjoys” to WTUD over the 135 years that passed from 1646 to the 1781 surrender. Remember, the men at Yorktown were soldiers, not antiquarians. Also unfortunately, though Howard was tentative in his notes, his published music copy appeared with a bold face “The World Turned Upside Down” title in his booklet. The result is that unless you read Howard’s text carefully you can easily come away with the false notion that the “King Enjoys” music has been proved to be the WTUD music. In fact, the “King Enjoys” music was never known as WTUD until Howard published it that way in 1932!



“Ancient” Fife and Drum Corps were among the first to add this “King Enjoys”/WTUD to their repertories. Ed Olsen, Archivist of the Company of Fifers & Drummers, has told me that the Charles T. Kirk Corps of Brooklyn was using this tune under the WTUD title when he played with them in the 1940s. (There is an audio tape cassette in the Company archives on which Ed talks about this and plays the music.)



The second twentieth-century claim for a (quite different) Yorktown/WTUD tune appeared in 1942 in Frank Luther’s book Americans and Their Songs. Luther was a Country and Western singer and composer. His book offers a good sample of the songs of ordinary people for a period of several centuries but his historical notes are frequently ridiculous. Luther was the first person I know of to publish the alleged Yorktown/WTUD song I call “Buttercups” because the first line begins “If buttercups buzzed, after the bees.” A couple of historians and some folk singers (for example, Burl Ives), adopted “Buttercups” as their notion of the music the British played during their surrender, but there is no evidence in their books, or anywhere else, to support their claim.



The third twentieth-century claim to have found the words (and the music) of the Yorktown/WTUD came from three major American historians, Henry Commager, Richard Morris and Samuel Eliot Morison. Their WTUD text appeared (bowdlerized) in Commager and Morris’s The Spirit of Seventy-Six. Later, Morison printed a “Derry Down” tune under a WTUD title in his Oxford History of the American People. Their WTUD text which I call “Goody Bull” because its first line is “Goody Bull and her daughter together fell out,” was intended to be sung to “Derry Down” in 1766, but so were more than a hundred other texts by the beginning of the Revolution. No one hearing fifes and drums playing the “Derry Down” melody would have known what text/title was intended.



If the British had “beat” the “Derry Down” tune the Americans wouldn’t have called it WTUD. They would only have wondered why the British were “beating” such an unmilitary tune as “The Bishop of Canterbury” or “A Cobbler There Was,” which were two of the best known eighteenth-century song texts to the tune. And such an odd tune choice certainly would have “made” the newspapers!

Richard Holmes is professor of military and security studies at Cranfield University. His books include The Little Field Marshal: Sir John French and Riding the Retreat, and he is general editor of The Oxford Companion to Military History. He enlisted into the Territorial Army in 1965 and rose to the rank of brigadier. He was the first reservist to hold the post of Director of Reserve Forces and Cadets in the Ministry of Defence, until he retired in 2000.

PLASTIC IN ITALY

It is many years since I started taking an interest and collecting toy soldiers, animals, civilian and manger figurines, but besides getting keen on collecting as much as possible, I have  tried to get as much information as possible about the story of the Italian firms producing the objects we longed for. It has been a hard task to find news and documentary evidence on paper about the production and marketing of the italians.




During the fifties and the sixties, contrary to what happened in other countries like Great Britain or France where the toy-manufactorers edited every year, with outmost care, up-to-date catalogues, in Italy there was a scarce diffusion of catalogues, magazines or other materials for agents, relative to this kind of toys. The news we collected are the result of an exchange of information among collectioners, flea-markets and epoch toys exchange hunting, and lately, Internet searching.



Books of great interest have already been published about the famous Italian marks of toy soldiers like C.C.Confalonieri, Chialù,






Books of great interest have already been published about the famous Italian  toy soldiers like C.C.Confalonieri, Chialù, Salpa, Figir etc. These production are mostly in composition of various materials like plaster, kaolin, glue etc, surely nobler than plastic and PVC, but more difficult to conserve.



A special note is to be made for the glorious mark Landi-Xiloplasto which put on the market a huge and very beautiful series of toy soldiers both in composition and PVC, and would deserve a special publication for the variety and vastness of its production.



For the same reason we omitted the well known Atlantic mark, whose production has been so extended that one needs a book all of its own, a specific treatment. I considered interesting filling a gap and extend research about the so-called “ lesser marks”, which are perhaps less known but surely amusing and made for the play of thousands of children, at a much more reasonable price than their rich relatives! I point out with pleasure some specially original subjects, of singular charm. For instance:



• Fratelli Nardi, the series of magnificent didactic albums, realized with semiflat animals in composition



• Rovella Porro, the characters inspired by the Disney comics



• ISAS, the mythical and very rare lattex astronauts



• COMA, hard plastic Selenites, a kid’s dream, who hoped to find them into the mythical Tide boxes



remember these, together with other marks such as Torgano, Fontanini, Dulcop, Texas-APS, POLITOYS, Canè, Tibidabo, and probably it shall be possible to discover many more. In the next months I shall publish posts  with photos, documents and catalogues of these marks if I can find them. Please notify me of  the existence of any interesting material on the subject. The book “Italian toy soldiers” by  Franco Paoletti, is dedicated to the children of 40-50 years ago who still remember the battles fought among plastic armies on the cold home floor, …   This  production are mostly in composition of various materials like plaster, kaolin, glue etc, surely nobler than plastic and PVC, but more difficult to conserve.



A special note is to be made for the glorious mark Landi-Xiloplasto which put on the market a huge and very beautiful series of toy soldiers both in composition and PVC, and would deserve a special publication for the variety and vastness of its production.





nardi
Religous plastic figures are still available everywhere made in plastic






• COMA, hard plastic Selenites, a kid’s dream, who hoped to find them into the mythical Tide boxes

starlux st.just

It was in  calais at the newsagents in the ferry port that i bought this 54mm figure of st just.

The tradition of popular characters in clay, porcelain, wood, and lead goes  far back in time, collecting them is perhaps not so old but  children had their soldiers lead and parents stored their statues on the shelf or the Office. It is clear that this kind of applied art does not claim very faithful representation of the model, the resemblance is often limited to simple name.

st just by mokarex





As is known, one of the ways to retain customers and to promote a product is to launch a collectors gift for the sold product, whether it's a mini-jouet, a magnet for the fridge, a calender or … a figurine. For the complete series, the consumer is obliged to continue to buy the same product. Thus the brand of coffee Mokarex had very long ago an idea to equip their packets of coffee figurines of characters from the revolution. The idea was so successful it took  several series of figurines and on different themes. Coffee Mokarex is active no longer, but its figures continue to supply the auction market

starlux st just

In 2002, on the occasion of the victory of Jacques Chirac ,  Starlux  marketed  their series of 35 figurines "great characters of the revolution", to celebrate the "continuity of Republican traditions" . You could choose between Robespierre and Saint-just, Marat and Charlotte Corday, Louis XVI and Madam, alongside simple sansculottes and soldiers of the Revolutionary Army.

Son of  Louis Jean, Knight of St. Louis and ex-Marshal of the gendarmerie, and from the thirty-year-old Marie Anne Robinot, daughter of a notary, he moved with his family, even before  a year to Nampcel, in Oise and, October 16, 1776, in the small village of Blérancourt, where his father bought a House; the father's death, on 8 September 1777, is sent to study in College codde of Saint-Nicolas in Soissons.

above family home

He graduated in 1785, the year after a relationship with Thérèse Sigrade-Gellé, the daughter of the notary of Blérancourt, who denies his consent to the wedding; It seems that this refusal, and subsequent marriage of the girl, has been the cause of his sudden departure, on 9 September 1786, for Paris, where was arrested on 6 October following the complaint of the mother , stolen the silverware.

After a time in the House of Madame de Sainte-Colombe, in rue de Picpus, 7 March 1787 he can return home, with his mother and her two sisters, Louise and Marie Françoise, and is  as trainee in the study of a lawyer of Soissons.
In October he enrolled at the Faculty of law at the University of Reims, where he graduated in less than a year, on 15 April 1788.Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (French pronunciation: 25 August 1767 – 28 July 1794), usually known as Saint-Just, was a French revolutionary and military leader. Closely allied with Robespierre, he served with him on the Committee of Public Safety, becoming heavily involved in the Reign of Terror and was executed with him after the events of 9 Thermidor at the age of twenty-six.In May 1789, he published twenty cantos of licentious verse (after the fashion of the time) under the title of Organt au Vatican. The poem was strongly critical of the monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church.




He was elected lieutenant-colonel of the National Guard of the Aisne, and sought to become a member of his district’s electoral assembly.



In 1790, he wrote to Maximilien Robespierre for the first time, asking him to consider a local petition. The letter was filled with praise, beginning: “You, who uphold our tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I know, as I know God, only through his miracles—it is to you, Monsieur, that I address myself. Through their correspondence, the two became friends. With Robespierre's support, Saint-Just became deputy of the département of Aisne to the National Convention. He gave his first speech, a condemnation of Louis XVI, on 13 November 1792. This gained him attention, and he soon became a prominent figure of The Mountain. His close friendship with Robespierre became known to the Convention, the Jacobin Club, and the people, and he was dubbed the "St. John of the Messiah of the People" (saint Jean du Messie du peuple).



 Involvement in the Revolution

Saint-Just supported the Revolution from its outbreak, and became involved in local political affairs. In his earlier years, he boasted about the current government (constitutional monarchy) and showed great political knowledge beyond that of most young men his age. The treason of the King changed his mind, as it did many others and he was one of the main driving forces which brought the king's death. He proclaimed that the king should be judged, not as a king or even a citizen, but as an enemy who deserves death  He spoke at the Trial of Louis XVI, “As for me I see no middle ground: this man must reign or die! He oppressed a free nation; he declared himself its enemy; he abused the laws: he must die to assure the repose of the people, since it was in his mind to crush the people to assure his own. Did he not, before the fight, pass his troops in review? Did he not take flight instead of preventing them from firing? What did he do to stop the fury of his soldiers?” More importantly, however, his argument changed the fundamental ideology of the revolution by stating that “every king is a rebel and a usurper,”therefore illegitimating all monarchies and monarchs as treasonous. His ideology and argument were closely followed by Robespierre and eventually became the official position of the Jacobin Party.After his maiden speech at the King’s trial, he was elected to the National Convention where he as the youngest member of the Convention,[4] only a few days over the minimum age requirement of twenty-five [5]



When the Girondists (Girondins) were banished from the Convention on 30 May 1793, Saint-Just was elected to the Committee of Public Safety. In the autumn of that same year, he was sent on a mission to oversee the army in the critical area of Alsace. He proved himself a man of decisive action, relentless in demanding results from the generals as well as sympathetic to the complaints of run-of-the mill soldiers. He repressed local opponents of the Revolution but did not agree in the mass executions ordered by some of the other deputies on the mission. Saint-Just succeeded in inspiring the Army of the Rhine and Moselle. Taking a lead role in the fight, he saw the frontier secured and the German Rhineland invaded. Upon his return to the Convention, in year II (1793–1794) of the French Republican Calendar, Saint-Just was elected president. He persuaded the Convention to pass the radical Ventôse Decrees, under which confiscated lands were to be distributed to needy patriots. These were the most revolutionary acts of the French Revolution, because they took from one class for the benefit of another. He returned to Paris in January 1794. Joining with Robespierre, he was instrumental in the downfalls and execution of the Hébertists and the Dantonists. During the same period, Saint-Just drafted Fragments sur les institutions républicaines, proposals far more radical than the constitutions he had helped to frame; this work laid the theoretical groundwork for a communal and egalitarian society. Sent on mission to the army in Belgium, he contributed to the victory of Fleurus on 26 June 1794, which gave France the upper hand against the Austrians. These months were the high point of his career. But his rise to power had wrought a remarkable change in Saint-Just's public personality. He became a cold, almost inhuman fanatic; even more daring and outspoken than his idol Robespierre. “The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood,” Saint-Just once declared to the Convention. He said on another occasion, “You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it.” In this way, Saint-Just saw social passivity to be the real threat to society.



As for the external policy of France, “I know” he said “only one means of resisting Europe: to oppose to her the genius of freedom” (Béraud97). He did not want the military to be made up of slaves, he wanted free men to fight for France. Saint-Just proposed that, through its committees, the National Convention should direct all military movements and all branches of the government (report of 10 October 1793). Under this policy, Saint-Just, along with friend and fellow deputy Philippe Le Bas, was dispatched to Strasbourg to command military operations. Saint-Just's experience with terror in Paris guided him in dealing with suspected treason in Alsace. In Strasbourg, he repressed the excesses of Jean-Georges Schneider, who, as public prosecutor of the revolutionary tribunal of the Lower Rhine, had ruthlessly applied the Terror in Alsace. Schneider was sent to Paris and guillotined. Later, he served with the Army of the North, where he gave generals the choice of victory over their enemies or trial by revolutionary tribunal; he organized a unit specially charged with eliminating deserters. Once more he saw success, and Belgium was successfully occupied by May 1794.



Robespierre and Saint-Just shared the ideals of Enlightenment and some even say that Saint-Just was superior to Robespierre in many ways, political and otherwise. Anything Robespierre wanted to get done, Saint-Just was sent to do it. At the end of May, Robespierre recalled Saint-Just to the capital, but he soon departed again with the army until 28 June. According to Barère, on 23 July Saint-Just proposed dictatorship as the remedy for society’s disorder. This report, however, is highly questionable: as a leader of the Thermidorian Reaction, his testimony is suspect, and it has been argued (Fayard, p. 311) that this alleged policy is not at all typical of Saint-Just. At the famous sitting of 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor), Saint-Just gave his defence of Robespierre. While he tried to present his report as that of the committees of General Security and Public Safety, he had actually refused to show it to them the previous day. He was loudly interrupted by his fellow committee members, and the sitting ended with an order for Robespierre's arrest. The following day, twenty-one men, including Saint-Just and Robespierre, were guillotined.



 Death of Saint-Just

The fate of Saint-Just is inextricably linked to that of Robespierre — his mentor and close personal friend. Robespierre divided and conquered his enemies, denouncing anyone who was or could be a threat to his position as head of the committee for Public Safety which made Robespierre de facto dictator of the revolution. Danton and many other popular leaders in the Convention were removed one by one.



The remaining members of the convention finally joined together and removed Robespierre and his associates including Saint-Just.



At the end of his life, Robespierre gave a famous speech on 26 July 1794 (Thermidor 8): “It has been said too often that the greatest mistake made by Robespierre in his speech of Thermidor 8 was his failure to name any of the men at whom his denunciations were leveled” .



Although Saint-Just remained loyal to his ideals and Robespierre, Robespierre did not. After his arrest, Robespierre attempted suicide, but only succeeded in shattering his jaw. Saint-Just was found beside Robespierre attempting to minister to him. Robespierre, semi-conscious, did not respond. Saint-Just went with his guards in silence and alone.



Robespierre and his fellow ideologues were guillotined the following day, 28 July 1794 (10 Thermidor). Saint-Just accepted his death with resignation.



 Character

In contrast to the manner of early antics such as "Organt au Vatican", Saint-Just assumed a stoical manner throughout his adult life. In combination with his devotion to a "tyrannical and pitilessly thorough" policy, as described by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was a lifelong characteristic. He thought the only way to create a true republic was to rid it of enemies, to enforce the “complete destruction of its opposite,” and to embrace the notion “a nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses.” Saint-Just was repeatedly described by contemporaries as arrogant, believing himself to be a skilled leader and orator as well as having proper revolutionary character. This cocky self-assurance manifested itself in his superiority complex, and he “made it clear…that he considered himself to be in charge and that his will was law.”  Camille Desmoulins once said of Saint-Just: "He carries his head like a Holy Sacrament." "And I," replied Saint-Just, "will make him carry his like a Saint Denis." The threat was not vain: Desmoulins accompanied Danton to the scaffold. Because of his intense ambition and self-assurance, some theorize that Saint-Just aided in Danton’s execution to further his own political career by getting rid of the respected and experienced leader of the Convention.



 Camus and Saint-Just

Saint-Just is discussed extensively in Albert Camus's philosophical essay of 1951, The Rebel. His actions during the course of the Revolution are examined in the context of Camus's analysis of the progression of rebellion and revolution towards enlightenment and freedom throughout history. His fierce advocacy of the execution of Louis XVI and his philosophical treatises on the nature of the Revolution in speeches to the Assembly, are both used by Camus to illustrate how the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy was brought about and from what basis the political ideology of the Revolution grew. Camus claims Saint-Just "introduced Rousseau's ideas into the pages of history" and incorporates Saint-Just and his ideals into his humanist study of the progression of humanity towards enlightened liberalism and democratic pluralism; and the traps and mistakes that have ensnared previous revolutionary attempts towards this goal.



Saint-Just and his fellow Jacobins are lauded as 'Regicides'; with Camus attributing the gradual decline of absolute monarchy that spread throughout Europe following the French Revolution and the resultant growth of popular representation and democracy to the philosophical and political developments initiated and executed by Saint-Just and his fellow Jacobins.



The theological implications of Saint-Just's rhetoric are also discussed by Camus. In successfully arguing for the King's execution, Saint-Just destroyed the façade of monarchical divine right and ensured that kings could never again enjoy such unchecked power as the Bourbons did. Camus identifies Saint-Just's successful advocacy of the execution of Louis XVI as the Nietzschean Twilight of the Idols.



However, Camus also holds Saint-Just as a cautionary parable, a lesson in how revolutions, their ideals, and the idealists that lead them can descend into despotism and tyranny. He discusses how Saint-Just and his fellow Jacobins would not compromise their ideals to accommodate the will of the common people, the sans-culottes, and so brought about the Jacobin Terror and their eventual downfall in the events of the Thermidorian Reaction.

bits

large plastic marines once made in Italy

These Italian soldiers were painted by hand

Anyone know where the unpainted Britains are freely available

I'm selling these off price is 30 pounds the three

bits and pieces

Someone said these are britains, no way. But are they?

These are some of the best Italian plastics ever done,great style and moulding . But there are no St.Johns Knigts take them on. If replicants  could do it then great. I stopped buying them after they got steve weston on board (not my cup of tea) but they do nice stuff for sure. One thing would be that they did so I doldiers all in the same uniform pose like as in Guard attacking with bayonet for instance so then you could buy 20 in the same pose but Replicants are too individual . also weston's prices are too high for buying in bulk. I liked the 1 pound deal which I thought was fair but above that then I don't.

wooden and a bit boring but only divinia Hill does English culloden figures. I got interested in the battle after reading John Prebbles book on the conflict. Did you know kilts are English Victorian inventions? So the next time you see a Psy Yankee going round london in a Kilt then he's most likely a trans.

mokarex