Make Poverty History

I think we've all become a very cynical generation on the internet, and I think about when there's something about being young where, you know, you just are, um, rose-tinted glasses, optimistic about the world.

Um, I just think about when I was, like, in high school and how cool it was to wear, like, Make Poverty History shirts, and we'd all, like, volunteer for-

[laughs]

... whatever, like Oxfam and, like, you know, new or the lo- like, local Big Issue guys when we were in high school.

[gasps]

... for Make Poverty History.

Oh, get out.

A Make Poverty History T-shirt.

And remember-

Wow

Remember, you've just had appalling street violence in Paris, not so much in the February Revolution, which toppled the king, but in, in the June days, which happens a few months afterwards, where three thousand Parisians are killed on the barricades, and they're demanding sort of very, what, if you were a stolid bourgeois Frenchman would say, very dangerous policies for national workshops and welfare and things like that.

On the other hand, if you are one of those Parisians who's been out fighting for these sort of socialist ideas, you can go into Na- Louis Napoleon's writings and find things like the extinction of pauperism, which today you'd probably translate with the more sexy title of Make Poverty History.

But this is his, his, his completely impractical, but nonetheless a quite interesting idea about how you would solve poverty in France.

The French peasantry, of course, as I've said, there's this nostalgia for the, for the uncle, but also a yearning for stability, and Napoleon speaks to that.