#tissot

From A New World Begins by Jeremy D. Popkin, Epilogue (@ 21:48:00 in the audiobook):

"...one story that has particularly intrigued me is that of Jean Marie Goujon, the Prairial martyr whose name has appeared often in this book, and his friend Pierre François Tissot, who survived him by more than half a century. Their letters and writings helped me understand the enthusiasm that powered the Revolution. As an apostle of liberty and equality, Goujon tried to reach out to the common people and inspire them. In the critical years of the Revolution, he went beyond preaching and devoted himself to the urgent matter of making sure the population had food to eat. He was fortunate in that he did not join the National Convention until after the bloody purges of the Girondins, the Hébertists, and the Indulgents; and he was absent from Paris on 9 Thermidor Year II, July 27, 1794, which spared him from having to take sides for or against Robespierre.

There is every reason to believe that as he and his fellow defendants argued at their trial after the Prairial uprising, he supported some of the crowds demands in a sincere effort to prevent blood shed and preserve some of the Convention's authority. A casualty of the passions of the Revolution, Goujon was just 29 when he died. Contrasting his life with that his friend Tissot, who did so much to preserve Gujon's memory, is a thought-provoking exercise.

The two were both seized by emotion of the Festival of Federation in 1790. At the same time that Goujon married in 1793 in a Republican ceremony, Tissot married his friend's sister. Tissot lacked Goujon's charisma and speaking ability, but as Goujon's political career took off, Goujon was able to employ Tissot in various administrative posts. On the fateful day of 1 Prairial Year III, May 20th, 1795, while Goujon was at his post at the Convention, Tissot was in the gallery with the demonstrators where he successfully avoided arrest.

For some years after Gujon's execution, Tissot remained involved with the radical left. He participated in the Babeuf Conspiracy and under the Consulate, was on the list of former Montagnards scheduled for deportation after the December 1800 assassination attempt against Napoleon. Some of his friends, however, convinced the First Council to spare him.

After 1800, Tissot abandoned his radicalism. To support not only his own family but also Gujon's widow and  his younger brothers, he went into business, opening a factory to make lanterns in Paris's Faubourg Saint-Antoine. As a manufacturer, he made his small contribution to the movement of technological progress, a  movement that would eventually allow the world to escape from the poverty that had made the ideals of the French Revolution so hard to realize in the 1790s. Tissot also embarked on a literary career, obtaining a reputation for his translations of Latin poetry. Gradually he embraced Napoleon's regime. He was rewarded with a teaching post at the Collège de France in 1813, shortly before the Empire fell. Under the Bourbon Restoration, he was active in the moderate liberal opposition. And when that regime was overthrown in 1830, he reached the pinnacle of glory by being elected to the Academé Française, French Academy.

Author of one of the first histories of the French Revolution, Tissot lived long enough to become one of the few participants in the movement of 1789 who was still alive to witness the proclamation of France's Second Republic in 1848.

Two young men seized with the spirit of liberty in 1789. Two young men who followed the revolutionary movement's shift toward ever more radical positions until 1794. Two men who kept the republican faith even after Robespierre's overthrow and whose destinies diverged only because one spoke up at the Convention during the Prairial Uprising and the other escaped unnoticed.

Which of the two best epitomizes the true meaning of the Revolution? Goujon who sacrificed his life rather than abandon the ideals he had embraced? Or Tissot, who eventually accommodated himself to the sober realities of life after 1800? Without idealists like Goujon, the Revolution never would have imprinted itself on the minds of its contemporaries and of posterity. Without pragmatists like Tissot, its principles might have been completely repudiated.

I brought another watch back to life today after a long slumber - a Tissot T-Race MotoGP Limited Edition from 2009.