Talk:Jean-Marie Roland, vicomte de la Platière
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[edit] Name
To follow other similar Wikipedia articles, would Jean-Marie Roland's name for the title of this article be "Jean-Marie Roland, vicomte de la Platière"? Presumably he was a member of the French nobility? (Present categorisation does not include Category:French nobility...) David Kernow 02:13, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] The war on prose continues
I'll admit it: I don't like the kind of transformation in this edit. I've fixed a few things that seem to me to be outright errors, but mostly I feel like this is a flattening down of the prose style. Some of this is probably to the good (the 1911 EB is a bit florid) but still... are we really better off turning "...frequenting the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, and entertaining deputies of the most advanced opinions, especially those who later became the leading Girondists. Madame Roland took an active part in the political discussions in these réunions," into "They frequented the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, entertaining deputies who later became leading Girondists and taking an active part in the political discussions." The one thing arguably good here is the loss of the POV "advanced" but that could have been reworded to "revolutionary" and been unambiguous in this context.
Besides the flattening of prose, and just sticking to this one passage, note the de-emphasis of Madame Roland, a figure who looms larger in the history of the revolution than her husband.
I could give ten similar examples, both of flattened prose and loss of information. I'll stick to one. "After the insurrection of August 10, Roland was recalled to power, one of his colleagues being Georges Danton, but by now he was dismayed by the progress of the Revolution," became "After the insurrection of August 10, Roland was recalled to power but was dismayed by what he saw as the lack of progress made by the Revolution." Besides the loss of the mention of Danton, this seems to be based on the editor's misunderstanding of the meaning of "progress" in the original. It was slightly archaic, and simply meant "course". I think that changing "progress" to "course" would have been good. However, "lack of progress" seems to me to be a solecism, based on the notion that "progress" must mean something good. But in fact, he was dismayed by the course of the revolution, not its lack of progress: if anything, it was "progressing" too much for his taste.
I'm not going to argue for reverting all of this; I am going to suggest that someone more sympathetic to the stylistic change than I am should look carefully through this for non-stylistic issues that it may have introduced. - Jmabel | Talk 05:49, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
