Nevermind this professor completely dismissed me in an email stating that it is “difficult to diagnose a man who has died 200 to 300 years ago” and doing such a thing “could be seen as disrespectful to someone who has died” 😒
fwiw, there are respected experienced historians out there who think it’s smth that’s worthy of looking into, so your professor isn’t the authority on this. A historian I really admire who’s on here was apparently the first to approach the idea years ago. I talked to Peter Mcfee about this and he was open to the idea and told me of a another historian looking into it. So it’s definately down to personal opinions, and probably down to how much you understand autism as well.
Like for me, the *current* way many historians analyse Robespierre is disrespectful. I’ve read work from some people who, upon being so adament about not analysing someone’s inner feelings/perception, are still very happy to share their conclusion on Robespierre’s personality and choices- except because of their rule about only looking at someone on the surface level, they come out with these wild opinions that make a lot of leaps in logic.
From the perspective of someone who’s an expert on Autism (and I really mean that, my work is used by trainers and hospitals all over the world)- what is more disrespectful? Understanding autism is essentially understanding that for some people, how they’re percieved by others doesn’t match up with how they really feel. It’s understanding that how someone behaves isn’t always a good indicator for their personality/feelings.
When you look at Robespierre through the lens of autism, you’re just looking at his struggles, choices and behaviours from yet another angle. You’re also looking at the contradictions historians always puzzle over with him and say ‘well maybe actually that isnt a contradiction, it makes sense from this angle’.
To me, a description like this…
'He was perceived as cold, probably because he rarely made eye contact and had a strange tone of voice, and remained quiet in social situations. But his speeches and letters show a warmth and compassion for others. This is similar to the autistic experience talked about today. So maybe he wasnt actually cold- this would explain the mismatch between other people’s opinions of him and his actions/letters/friends’ testimonies.’
…is much less disrespectful than the VERY common description I see that generally looks like this:
'His peers described him as being cold, proud and egotistical. Strangely, this doesn’t match up with the compassion in his speeches. We can explain this contradiction by assuming he was just being manipulative/saying what the people wanted to hear so that he could climb up in power. Although stangely, he tried to deny himself power until his last year in politics. But he was simply a strange man. We can assume he started going mad from obsessions over morality/smallpox/power trips’.
Also, how we diagnose autism in modern day is pm how you’d diagnose someone in history…you’d be using the same techniques, cos autism is looked at through a social lense. There are no blood tests or brain scans, it’s vm just looking at a collection of behaviours and inner experiences, and seeing if there’s enough of those to make up a collection, and if that collection then impacts your life. Whether or not Robespierre was autistic, he did have many odd behaviours and these did impact his life. That’s the take away and worth looking at imo, whether you decide to add a label to it or not. Out of anything that could be applied to someone who is no longer with us, I think autism is likely to be easier to apply to people than this rare smallpox-psychosis that some historians contemplated on Robespierre before lol
This is technically just something Robespierre said about leaving one job for another. And yet it feels to me like he’s speaking to us in the future- asking us to judge him on his inner feelings, rather than the chaotic events that will shape him from this night onwards.
He silently agreed that his wife was just an accessory to his life and his dreams and goals and they thought we would just skip right on past that??
She believed that they were equal partners in their marriage. He believed she was his broodmare. Aren’t they both at fault here?
“She believed he saw her as an entire person with human desires and a rich inner life. He believed she existed as a stepping stone to doing whatever he wants. Neither is wrong for how they feel!” and then they use the fact that women initiate more divorces as proof of mens victimhood 💀💀💀
