| Summary: | (from the official Website) The French Revolution is a two-hour documentary that introduces viewers to the key figures of the Revolution, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who ruled unaware of the depth of anger of their subjects; Maximillian Robespierre, the lawyer turned revolutionary who resorted to violence to preserve the new Republic; Georges Danton, Robespierre's ally, whose calls for ending the violence would lead to his own violent end; Jean-Paul Marat, the newspaperman who fanned the flames of the Revolution and would be turned into a martyr after he was murdered; and Charlotte Corday, the woman who murdered Marat, hoping his death would put an end to the violence. |
| Comment by AS: | The problem with this documentary is that it is conceived almost like a stage play. Only the King and Queen, Robespierre, Danton, Marat and Necker are mentioned. It is exactly this simplification that makes the documentary shallow. It would have been better if they reduced the pompous dramatization using music and re-enacted scenes and introduced more characters. Since a lot of scenes get shown several times, it can be assumed that there was a commercial break in between in the original TV programme. This continous self-advertising for the topic is just wasted on a DVD, because the viewer doesn't zap to another channel anyway. |
