Arguably one of the best historical films ever made. At times it’s as if a news camera is actually there and recording what happened. By comparison, it makes the recent Napoleon film look like a cartoon. Most importantly, it makes the audience familiar with many of the key people and events of the French Revolution, which in the US is a grossly understudied topic. Amazingly, it keeps things interesting and tells an epic story with many relevant lessons for today.
This is a 2-part film in French, with English subtitles. The first part leads up to the calling of the Estates General and goes to the fall of the Tuileries Palace. The second part focuses on the rise and actions of the Committee for Public Safety. For those unfamiliar with French history, this begins a couple years after the American Revolution, and ends a couple years before the rise of Napoleon.
Part 1 “Les Années lumière” (youtube and invidious):
Part 2 “Les Années terribles” (youtube and invidious):
The uploader apparently upscaled the video, and integrated subtitles that they themselves edited.
For more information:
Yeah, that’s a good point, there are a couple of parenthetical comments, I think they were made by the uploader. As I remember they were only in 2-3 places so they weren’t that distracting, but they helped to remind the viewer that no matter how objective a film may seem, by selecting the scenes that it shows and constructing the narrative that it does, it suggests an interpretation.
I don’t know much about the Terror and Robespierre, but there was a documentary that I found useful in hearing a couple of different arguments, BBC’s “Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution”:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suZdYkZ_feM
- https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=suZdYkZ_feM
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1468876/
It mixes re-enactments with discussions by modern historians, and shows how the scholars often disagree.