Everyone loves to talk about Saint-Just’s “Organt” and Robespierre’s shitty poetry, but I’d to shout-out what is objectively one of the funniest career changes of the Revolution: that of Jean-Baptiste Louvet —who is now remembered as one of the most successful Girondin journalists and an important figure of Thermidorian politics— but whose writing career had taken off in 1787 when he published what I can only describe as a Genderbent Rose of Versailles AU.
Like, imagine you are a random deputy in the Convention and this one guy goes to make a speech and- “Oh my Supreme Being, is that my favorite YURI writer?!”
People aren’t engaged enough in the struggle towards progressive legislation? Don’t worry, just a write a romance novel about it! (Has anyone tried doing this with, like, climate change or something? Everyone’s really into romance these days, it could work).
After the fall of the Girondins he fled south where he managed to avoid the scaffold thanks to Teresa Cabarrus, of all people, (I can only imagine she was a fan). This unfortunately meant that he supported Thermidor (understandable, given the circumstances) and also spent a significant part of Year III defending the Gilded Youth; although, to his credit, he seems to have revoked his support once the Youth became overtly royalist. Plus, unlike most of his old friends, he wasn’t executed; he died of tuberculosis at 37, which isn’t all that better.
Extracts from: “The Cercle Social, the Girondins and the French Revolution” (1985) by Gary Kates, pgs. 225-227.
A little beyond the black corner of the alley and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which threw a broad shadow, in which he was himself buried, he perceived a light upon the pavement, a portion of the wineshop, and behind, a lamp twinkling in a kind of shapeless wall, and men crouching down with muskets on their knees. All this was within twenty yards of him. It was the interior of the barricade.
The houses on the right of the alley hid from him the rest of the wine-shop, the great barricade, and the flag.
Marius had but one step more to take.
Then the unhappy young man sat down upon a stone, folded his arms, and thought of his father...
...He saw civil war yawning like an abyss before him, and that in it he was about to fall.
the reason why i think so many alloromantic people outright refuse the idea of "aromantic subtext" being a legitimate thing is that people view aromanticism as inherently shallow. to a lot of queer fandomites, "aromantic" is what they make the side character they don't really care about, so they don't have to bother coming up with actual analysis of their interpersonal relationships. it sucks, because aromantic narratives in fiction, intentional or otherwise, are worth exploring, analysing, and appreciating.
i'm a fan of marius pontmercy from hit 1985 musical les misérables in the sense that he's sweet and has excellent angst potential and i want to give him a hug. i'm a fan of marius pontmercy from hit 1862 novel les misérables in the sense that i want to study him under a microscope like a bug.
Now that we know that basically every nasty/mean/degrading anecdote about Joséphine was fake rumours created by misogynist haters and British newspapers, just imagine the amount of stuff we might need to debunk about Thérésa Cabarrus 🫠🫠
Even if she did all the extravagant stuff they say she did (going naked, have several lovers) the real thing to stop is judging her with the same mentality as then. Use a modern perspective. Same for Joséphine of course.
As a society, we now know how to give space to women's perspectives, so we can see practical need to survive behind forward behaviours in a society where most of the time women had that as a main resource.
Not to mention that she also was invested in political matters, I believe @nesiacha talked about some of her opinions about education. Madame de Staël wasn't the only intellectual.
I have already said this again and again. I do not have a favorable opinion of Joséphine de Beauharnais (though I understand that others may like her—everyone has their own tastes and preferences), but what is frustrating with her and Theresia is that when they are “torn down,” is it because they were corrupt? Because they enriched themselves illegally at a time when Parisians were suffering terribly under the Directory, to the point that entire families took their own lives, even though they themselves lacked nothing?
Some might argue that, while Joséphine was not responsible for the tragic death of Émilie, her mother’s enslaved woman (as I mentioned), nor for the reestablishment of slavery (for which she clearly bears no responsibility), she also did not intervene on behalf of Émilie’s family to ensure they were left in peace—despite having pleaded for others who were more culpable.
No—they are mainly criticized for having lived “loose” lives (while men did the same and faced no criticism) and for wanting a role in politics.
Likewise, a more honest woman (in the sense of being financially incorruptible) such as Sophie Momoro, widow of Antoine-François Momoro, would likely receive the same misogynistic treatment—for having had a lover during her second marriage and for having publicly supported her husband’s career (notably by playing the role of the Goddess of Reason).
Furthermore, Theresia is sometimes wrongly portrayed as having mistreated Tallien or abandoned him, whereas in reality, although separated from him, she often helped him financially. (Yes, there are even writings defending Tallien by portraying him as an incorruptible man of great ideals who was supposedly abandoned by an ungrateful Theresia—I am not joking. Yet anyone with even minimal knowledge of Tallien knows that the word “incorruptible” is utterly incompatible with him.)
Strangely, Germaine de Staël—who also had lovers (although that was entirely her private affair), was opportunistic, and involved herself heavily in political life—has largely been given a free pass. I personally find her greatly overrated, and she was certainly not “the only opponent who refused to submit to Bonaparte,” contrary to what hagiographic portrayals suggest. In fact, to me, she was one of the weaker female opponents of Napoleon compared to other women who resisted him from the very beginning and sometimes paid for that opposition with their lives, despite being forgotten today, as you can see here: https://www.tumblr.com/nesiacha/798948052816838656/germaine-de-sta%C3%ABl-an-essay-in-demythologization?source=share
But Theresia and Joséphine are unfortunately far from the only women to have been demonized in history. Many other women of the French Revolution have suffered the same fate: Éléonore Duplay and Élisabeth Le Bas are wrongly portrayed as “brainless groupies” ( in a lot of movies); Élisabeth Le Bon, widow of Joseph Le Bon, has been burdened with a dark legend portraying her as the “hyena of Arras”; Sylvie Audouin, daughter of Jean-Nicolas Pache, was labeled a girl “of loose morals”(which was false) by certain historians who merely repeated the accusations of her detractors (which is even more disgusting considering how young she was at the time); Marie-Anne Babeuf is depicted in some accounts as a simple-minded woman; Henriette Simonin (Chaumette’s widow) as an unsuitable woman; Bonne-Jeanne Fouché as a woman supposedly embodying every possible flaw,etc...
Even Madame Royale, during her childhood, has been described on certain forums I have read as an inherently “bad” person from birth because she displayed behavioral problems as a child—as though that were not common among children in general. Worse still, I have read writings claiming that the women who demanded the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were merely “women of loose virtue thirsty for blood,” as though they had no legitimate reasons to resent the royal couple—especially Louis XVI. But we know the saying: no matter how many reasons people may have to resent a highly protected and glorified historical figure, it is always the critics who are portrayed as being at fault.
In short, much work still needs to be done to combat all these sexist clichés. For now, only Marie-Antoinette has truly been rehabilitated from that perspective (although sometimes excessively so, since some people wrongly believe she was executed merely for being queen and had nothing to reproach herself for, despite the fact that she did commit acts of high treason; though at times, conversely, Louis XVI’s faults are unfairly shifted onto her in order to absolve her husband). We are still waiting for the same reconsideration to extend to other women.
The other day I decided to watch the Spanish dub of “The black book” (1949), as the original is a guilty pleasure of mine in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way, and I need to talk about the one change they made beacuse it made the film infinitely funnier. So, in the original version the main “good guy” revolutionaries, Barras and Tallien, spend the entire film conspiring to stop Robespierre from appointing himself dictator, right? Well, all that still happens, but it is no longer Barras and Tallien who conspire as they instead became:
Marat (originally Barras), I guess the afterlife turned him into a moderate. They do call him “François” at the begging of the film, so I suppose it’s meant to be a different Marat? I like to think it’s his evil twin. And Talleyrand (originally Tallien), slightly less egregious than the last one since instead of another metaphysical plane, Talleyrand was just in another continent during Thermidor. (He also gets described as an “honest man”, which was the comedic highlight of film.)
The writer’s room:
Also, every single voice actor pronounces Fouché, Saint-Just and Talleyrand completely differently and not one of them gets it right.
"It is not true that property can ever stand in opposition to human subsistence."
"What is the primary object of society? It is to uphold the inalienable rights of man. What is the foremost of these rights? The right to exist.
The primary social law is, therefore, the one that guarantees to all
members of society the means of existence; all others are subordinate to this one; property was instituted or guaranteed solely to cement this right; it is, first and foremost, to live that one possesses property. It is not true that property can ever stand in opposition to human subsistence.
The foodstuffs necessary for man are as sacred as life itself. Everything indispensable for its preservation is property held in common by the entire society. Only the surplus constitutes individual property, and is left to the enterprise of merchants. Any mercantile speculation undertaken at the expense of he life of one's fellow man is not commerce; it is brigandage and fratricide...
...Does the public sustenance truly circulate when greedy speculators hoard it, piled high within their granaries? Does it circulate when it is accumulated in the hands of a small number of millionaires who withdraw it from the channels of commerce to render it more precious and rare, who coldly calculate how many families must perish before the commodity reaches the price point dictated by their atrocious avarice? Does it circulate when it merely passes through the very lands that produced it, before the eyes of destitute citizens enduring the torment of Tantalus, only to be swallowed up in the unknown maw of some profiteer of public scarcity? Does it truly circulate when, amidst the most abundant harvests, the destitute citizen languishes for want of the means to offer a gold coin, or a scrap of paper precious enough, to obtain even a morsel?
...What surer means exists to encourage avarice, and to release it from every conceivable restraint, than to establish as a principle that the law lacks even the right to monitor it, or to impose upon it the slightest check? To assert that the sole rule prescribed to it is the power to dare anything with absolute impunity? Nay, I go further: such is the degree of perfection to which this theory has been refined that it is now all but established that hoarders are infallible; that monopolists are benefactors of humanity; and that, in any dispute arising between them and the people, it is invariably the people who are in the wrong.
...I deprive them of no honest profit, no legitimate property;
I deprive them only of the right to encroach upon the property of others. I do not destroy commerce, but rather the brigandage of the monopolist; I condemn them only to the obligation of allowing their fellow human beings to live.
...do not forget that the source of order is justice; that the surest guarantee of public tranquility is the happiness of citizens, and that the
long convulsions that tear states apart are nothing but the struggle of
prejudice against principles, of selfishness against the general interest; of the pride and passions of powerful men against the rights and
against the needs of the weak."
Maximilien Robespierre, from the December 2, 1792 speech on subsistence
It is almost impossible to find only a few quotes to pick out of this speech; the whole thing is quite stunning.
A phrase to start a story. A history, a reminiscence. A choice, often. A survival, by definition.
You were there when. When there were not enough hours in the day and not enough ink in the entire Convention to rush the grain to Paris; and people were hungry, and people were worried, in the middle of a war, two fronts, three fronts, you were there when – and what did you do?
I fed the people, you could say. I was there to feed the people.
You were there in that mad, exhausted spring when hope itself seemed to have faded beyond the horizon, when accusations were falling like apple blossoms and treacheries sprouting like leaves, when you were asked to sign a decree,
I am here to feed the people, and not to kill revolutionaries, you said.
(You will not sign another decree either, in Thermidor; you will choose silence again; after all, the people were still one missed delivery of grain away from starvation. We will never know if that was the explanation you gave yourself; we will never know if you wished you’d have chosen differently, condemned yourself, spared yourself from surviving.)
We will wonder if you smiled when you heard the slogan, years later, hungry, empty, broken years later; bread and the Constitution, if you thought it as something that had been yours, as something you’d been trying to give the people for years. You were there when –
and once again, you have survived, a veteran of that forgotten army that had been wielding pens, not swords, watching the dawn rise outside their windows, over the endless stacks of orders and accounts, laws and reforms, trying to keep your republic together until a republic was no more.
You did not live to see the next one, and that perhaps was the greatest tragedy of all. But such is the cost of civil service; forging what future we may, one line and one sleepless night and one inevitable defeat at a time; there is little honor and remembrance in it; but the people can only hope to build a better republic if they are alive, if they had been fed, if they have someone else’s legacy to follow, and we are here now, because you were there then.
When Marius returns to his grandfather’s house after the barricades, he finds Gillenormand a frail old man who seems on the verge of death and, apparently, willing to tone down his rampant royalism in order to keep his grandson beside him. Thus, Marius is faced with a very interesting question “Should I abandon my grandfather to die alone for merely political reasons?”(1) Marius decides against this and starts living in the Rue-des-Filles-du-Calvaire again, effectively, both men agree to compromise their own beliefs for the good of the household.
A few months later, Jean Valjean confesses his past to Marius, and he is again faced with the choice “Should I abandon my father-in-law to die alone for merely political reasons?”(2). This time, however, Marius does exactly that. So why would he treat Gillenormand (an awful person all around) worse than Valjean? Because it is what society demanded of him. And also because Marius is a very selfish character at times but that is story for another post.
The society of the 1830s was born out of compromise. At this point, France had been through: an absolute monarchy, a very bloody revolution, several civil wars, a massive (repressive) empire, an absolute monarchy (again) and, finally, a liberal constitutional monarchy. This, however, was not what most people wanted, since (with the exception of a few people who were Orleandist from the start) most Frenchmen were either absolute monarchists, bonapartists or republicans. They accepted Louis-Philippe because, while everyone had their own individual opinions on which form of government was best, almost everyone could agree on the fact that they didn’t want to start a(nother) war about it. The proper thing to do under a government built upon compromise is, indeed, compromise — but this privilege is not afforded to everyone.
When Marius comes back to his grandfather’s house the social dynamic in the house parallels the social dynamic of France itself: Marius tones down his previous radicalism and assimilates into proper bourgeois society, and Gillenormand compromises accordingly toning down his own royalism.
However, when the same situation happens with Valjean, Marius is not willing to compromise, because he is not meant to do that. Jean Valjean, as an ex-convict, exists fundamentally outside of society, and you are only really meant to compromise with those people who society has deemed respectable and worthy of understanding. Valjean isn’t one of those people, but Gillenormand is, despite him being shown to be significantly more dangerous than the ex-convict. Indeed, Gillenormand, when faced with the choice of abandoning his own son-in-law to die alone for political reasons, does exactly that (Pontmercy senior and Valjean die effectively the same death).
In a similar vein, the Amis — by breaking the compromise through advocating for revolution — put themselves outside proper society and lost the benefit of compromise. So it’s okay to masacre them.
Thus, Victor Hugo shows that this idea of compromise is an illusion and that it only applies to those who are already considered proper members of society. It is a fragile arrangement that harms those who fall outside of it, and it clearly didn’t even work because 1848 still happened.
(1): Obviously Gillenormand still had his daughter but honestly it seems like he doesn’t even like her, so for our purposes he is still “dying alone”.
(2): Marius isolating Valjean because of his status as a convict is indeed a political matter, wether Marius realised it or not. It is not only that, as he also assumed Valjean had stolen Cosette’s dowry and maybe murdered Javert out of revenge. However, there is no evidence of either of those crimes and Marius only starts associating them with Valjean after he confessed to having stolen some bread 20 years back.
The Silt Verses does such interesting things with its criticism and commentary on amatonormativity. It’s no coincidence that the main character is an aromantic woman out of step with the expectations of her society in more ways than one—or that we learn about her aromanticism in the same episode as we see a woman honeypot her boyfriend into being sacrificed. Love as a weapon; later, we see the weaponization of love-saints—love isn’t special, love can destroy you just like anything else. Love as a threat: Shrue maybe having a spouse and family made up as a tool to hold over their head.
The parallels between Carpenter and the Promised Bride. The Promised Bride story as a reflection on choice and control and becoming, and the Promised Bride story later getting twisted into an amatonormtive story of romance to make for better government propaganda. Paige rebranding herself the Widow of Wounds in a similar way, inventing a story of a dead lover, to spread the Many Below’s message in a way that’s easier to swallow than a principled political stance (sparked by the death of a friend). Amatonormativity as comforting and familiar and following expected narratives that make for easier propaganda.
Amatonormativity in Roemont’s comment that they should give Faulkner a dramatic deathbed love declaration to sell the story when they get rid of him. The whole motel episode raising the question of why we’re primed to feel that romantic love makes someone more “deserving” of a happy ending. There’s a LOT going on in The Silt Verses and amatonormativity is just one of the things but oh boy is TSV interested in it in a way I so rarely see!
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