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Started by scarface, February 01, 2015, 05:10 PM

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humbert

Quote from: scarface on December 25, 2022, 09:37 AMThe Bastille Was destroyed in Paris indeed, But there is another fortress known as the Bastille in Grenoble.

As you know, I'm fascinated by history. So let me ask: was the Bastille prison destroyed the very day the crowd forcibly entered looking for bread (14/7/1789), or did that happen later?

scarface

Quote from: humbert on December 26, 2022, 05:06 AM
Quote from: scarface on December 25, 2022, 09:37 AMThe Bastille Was destroyed in Paris indeed, But there is another fortress known as the Bastille in Grenoble.

As you know, I'm fascinated by history. So let me ask: was the Bastille prison destroyed the very day the crowd forcibly entered looking for bread (14/7/1789), or did that happen later?
On July 15, 1789, the day after Bastille was captured by the angry Parisian crowd, its demolition was decided and entrusted to the contractor Pierre-François Palloy. Its demolition took 2 years.

humbert

Quote from: scarface on December 28, 2022, 11:42 PMOn July 15, 1789, the day after Bastille was captured by the angry Parisian crowd, its demolition was decided and entrusted to the contractor Pierre-François Palloy. Its demolition took 2 years.

Who hired (and paid) Pierre-François Palloy to demolish the Bastille? As I recall the King wasn't overthrown until some 2 years later. AFAIK almost nobody in France had the money. Just curious.

scarface

Quote from: humbert on December 30, 2022, 05:46 AM
Quote from: scarface on December 28, 2022, 11:42 PMOn July 15, 1789, the day after Bastille was captured by the angry Parisian crowd, its demolition was decided and entrusted to the contractor Pierre-François Palloy. Its demolition took 2 years.

Who hired (and paid) Pierre-François Palloy to demolish the Bastille? As I recall the King wasn't overthrown until some 2 years later. AFAIK almost nobody in France had the money. Just curious.
Actually, before the bastille was seized, the demonstrators were initially gathered at the Hotel de Ville as they wanted arms, but eventually they attacked the Hotel des Invalides for arms, gunpowder and guns, then continued on to the Bastille prison for the same reason.

The governor of the prison produced a note for a ceasefire, but this was refused and eventually, he opened the gates to the inner courtyard and the Bastille fortress and prison was liberated.
Ironically, there were only seven prisoners still being held at the prison, but the governor Launay was stabbed to death and then his head was put on a spike and carried through the streets, so hence the French Revolution had begun.

A building contractor and entrepreneur known as Pierre-Francois Palloy embarked on being able to demolish this building and he managed to secure a license for the demolition only a matter of days after the Storming of the Bastille.
He was in complete control of the project along with his team of workers, that was nearing on 1000 men, but being an entrepreneur, he had visions of this being a paid attraction, which is when he started to sell bits of stone, rubble and other items as souvenirs, with each piece being accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Models were also made at this time, and some of these are now on display within the Musee Carnavalet in Paris.

humbert

Thanks for the explanation regarding the Bastille.

You explained that Palloy secured a license for the Bastille's demolition? Who issued it? The King was still in power at the time. Did his government do that?

scarface

Quote from: humbert on January 14, 2023, 05:18 AMThanks for the explanation regarding the Bastille.

You explained that Palloy secured a license for the Bastille's demolition? Who issued it? The King was still in power at the time. Did his government do that?
Well, I don't know. I just know that he obtained a license for the demolition only a matter of days after the Storming of the Bastille.

scarface

Today, I'm going to hold a conference about the industrial revolution, illustrated with images.
Maybe some of you already heard of this concept.


A New View of European Industrialization.

According to the standard or traditional interpretation, the industrialization of Europe and the world began with an "industrial revolution" in England (or Great Britain) which other nations subsequently imitated. The interpretation has a long and venerable history. Indeed, it can be traced to Karl Marx who, looking upon Britain in the 186os, at the peak of its industrial supremacy, wrote: "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future". For long a standard feature of textbooks on European economic history, this interpretation has been enshrined in the prestigious Cambridge Economic History of Europe and in David Landes's Unbound Prometheus, an extended version of his chapter in the Cambridge series. Although expressed in novel form, Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth actually represents a reinforcement of the traditional interpretation. That interpretation has recently been reasserted clearly and concisely by Sidney Pollard, who wrote: "The process started in Britain and the industrialization of Europe took place on the British model; it was, as far as the Continent was concerned, purely and deliberately an imitative process".
The term "révolution industrielle" was first used by Frenchmen in the early years of the nineteenth century to emphasize the importance of the mechanization of French industry, then in progress, by comparing it with the revolution of 1789. Karl Marx used the term casually in Das Kapital (though not in the Communist Manifesto), but it acquired currency in English only with the publication, in 1884, of Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England. Toynbee was a social reformer, not a scholar. His principal interest was in remedying what he believed to be the moral degradation of the British working classes. Invited to lecture at Oxford, he devoted his lectures to the interrelation of economic events and economic policy, especially to the emergence of laissez-faire policies, which he regarded as a disaster for the workers. Despite scholarly objections, the expression caught the public's fancy and was eventually incorporated into historical terminology.



By analogy with Great Britain, the term industrial revolution has also been applied to the onset of industrialization in other countries, although without general agreement on dates. For example, the American historian, A. L. Dunham, assigned 1815 and 1848 as the inclusive dates of his study of the "industrial revolution" in France, but admitted that the period marked "the infancy and the beginning of the adolescence of the industrial revolution, but not its maturity, which was not attained until after 186o". In a critique of this work the French historian Claude Fohlen remarked, "The industrial revolution in France . . . covers a period of approximately a century, from 1750 or 1770 to 1870 ....The term revolution is ill-suited to a phenomenon that occurred over such a long period of time." By assigning specific dates for "take-off" in various countries (as, for example, 1830-186o for France and 1833-186o for Belgium) Rostow implied a specious accuracy for his analysis, but in almost every case his dates have been disputed-even when his terminology was accepted-by scholars familiar with the detailed history of their countries. The economist Jean Marczewski wrote: "If this precise phase of economic development is to be called take- off, then take-off in France occurred around the middle of the eighteenth century, or, at the latest, towards 1799.


Here is a passage of the book "La révolution industrielle, 1780-1880" written by Jean-Pierre Rioux.
I translated it in English.

The era of rail.
Launched in the cotton goods sector, driven by technical innovations, the industrial revolution spreads at the beginning of the 19th century. But to give it a new extension and solidity, it was necessary to spread new products effectively, to create new consumer needs, to control and expand markets. That is to say, find a faster rhythm of circulation capable of animating and growing the new economy. Speed reduces costs and depreciation, brings the producer closer to the consumer, gathers profit more nimbly, encourages boldness.
Prudently, capitalism relies first on the traditional means of communication renovated and adapted. The still mediocre road network, despite the new stones and a few rare surfacings before 1860, became denser. Often with tolls in Great Britain, meticulously maintained on the main axes since Napoleon in France, radiating around the capitals, it allows slow rolling, at the pace of the conveyors, for heavy goods and fast journeys, for the post office and men. The good weather for fast stagecoaches, chartered by powerful companies, is coming. It took ten days to reach Edinburgh from London in 1750, three and a half days for Manchester: in stagecoach, the route was reduced respectively in 1830 to 45 and 20 hours, at an average speed of more than 20 km/h. With safe and fast relays, honest comfort, the Laffitte company in France linked Paris and Lyon in 55 hours in 1848 against 100 in 1815. In the United States, the stagecoaches of Majors and Waddel joined the Mississippi to California in 25 days , before the Pony Express reduced the journey to less than 10 days around 1860.
But everywhere the secondary roads are execrable or non-existent: the potential market of the countryside is inaccessible and only intrepid traveling salesmen risk a few expeditions there. The only very dense network, systematically used and extended, is that of the waterways. The beginnings of the industrial revolution, until about 1830, are the age of rivers and canals.



claude monet's gare st lazare - 1877


scarface


scarface

Today, I'm going to open a discussion about a town in Russia which has had several official names. Maybe some of you heard of it.
Over its more than three hundred-year history, St. Petersburg has had three different names. Its current and original name was given to the city in 1703 by its founder Peter the Great in honor of Saint Peter, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ.

On October 1, 1991: Saint Petersburg regains its initial name
Three names for a city. In 1991, the former capital of the Russian Empire was once again called Saint Petersburg. This is the third time that the city has changed its name since its creation in the 18th century. A look back at the birth of the imperial capital and its name changes throughout Russia's tormented history.


View of the Embankment Palace in Saint Petersburg, a Russian city located on the Neva Delta on the banks of the Baltic Sea. Painting painted in 1794 by Fyodor Alekeyev



1703: Saint Petersburg, the crazy creation of Peter I

The city was born from the will of one man, Peter I. This tsar, from the Romanov dynasty, decided to build his new capital at the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, on the Neva delta. He indeed wishes to open the Russian empire to the Baltic Sea and create a port, a "window on Europe".
But the place is improbable: a marshy, inhospitable territory, newly conquered from the Swedes. A madness? A whim? Still, in May 1703 the first stones of the Peter and Paul fortress were laid in a complicated context: in the middle of the Northern War (1700-1721), pitting Russia against Sweden. The monarch chose the plan of Amsterdam as a model for his future city and planned everything: the building of canals, bridges... Many years of sanitation and development work were necessary. But this was not enough and when Peter the Great died in 1725, his capital was far from being completed: it was still a huge construction site. His successors will continue his work, beautifying and transforming the city into an architectural and cultural jewel.


1914: Petrograd, the Russification of the name


Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg, circa 1900. Postcard


In the summer of 1914, Nicholas II, at war against Germany, russified the name of the city, which sounded too Germanic ("Sankt-Peterburg" means the city of Saint-Pierre in German). It therefore takes the name of Petrograd, the city of Peter.

The First World War sounded the death knell for the imperial capital. Indeed, Nicholas II challenged in Russia, chose to throw himself into the conflict, hoping to rally the people behind him. But this strategy precipitated its fall: the tsar was overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And when the Bolsheviks, pretexting the German threat, left Petrograd for Moscow in March 1918, it was the end of two centuries of predominance: the city lost its status as the capital of Russia.


1924: Leningrad, tribute to the father of the Russian revolution

Lenin addressing deputies at the 2nd Congress of Soviets in Petrograd on November 8, 1917


On the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (known as Lenin) in 1924 the city was renamed. In memory of the leader of the October Revolution, it takes his revolutionary nickname. It is a total break with its imperial past, even if the city was the "cradle" of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. This ideological connotation has no impact on its appearance. As there is no desire to build a city with communist architecture, no existing buildings are destroyed.

It was only from 1941 that the new designation really took hold. With the long siege of the city by the Germans, then the intensive bombings, and the famine. Leningrad the martyr, strikes the world with its heroic resistance.


1991: Saint Petersburg, the return to the origins

On June 13, 1991, the inhabitants of Leningrad were consulted by referendum on the restoration of the historical name. The election campaign is tough. The supporters of Lenin and those of Peter the Great clash. Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the U.S.S.R., even intervenes directly on television to convince voters not to "abandon" Leningrad. It was a wasted effort: the population voted 54.86% in favor of Saint Petersburg, turning its back on communism. You have to wait until October 1st for the city to officially regain its original name. History thus resumes its rights, seventy-seven years after the first change of the city's name.