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Peace...? (1814)

In the summer of 2020, I began the "readin bout boats" phase of my life.  This is the first video to bear fruit from all that reading.  As predicted, boats are mentioned literally zero times.  

Last year I started INHALING books about the 19th century British Navy, and over time this slowly expanded into books about the political history of the 19th century.  Read biographies of Metternich, Bismarck, Gladstone, Napoleon III...just went nuts with it.  And also continued reading bout boats.  And politics.

The Draft 1 placeholder title for this video was "Who Gives a Shit About the 19th century?", and through all of its revisions it still held onto that same idea.  If the video works at all, it should say to people "I know you don't care about the 19th century, but if you look at it through this lens it was actually really really really important."  

That lens is, of course, an anti-war lens.  I make that pretty explicit in the video.  There's that Francois Truffaut quote that's something like... "every film about war ends up being pro-war."  It's a trap that most people fall into, including myself.  It's EXTREMELY easy to glamorize the French Revolution, and I bent over backwards not to do so.  I felt that it was important to put the French Revolution and Napoleon it in the same "category" as World War 1, and to describe all wars of this scale as some type of failure.  The parallels to our own run of 75+ years of peace is also made explicitly in the video.

ANYWAYS!  I intend to have more to say about all of this, and lots more to say about Metternich & Friends.  Antony & Octavian stuff is proceeding as well, I like to have 2 projects "in the works" so that I can jump between subject matter whenever I get stuck.  

...Peace!