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Tag Archives: A Tale of Two Cities

Death, Within 24 Hours

30 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Uncategorized

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A Tale of Two Cities, All the Year Round, Anthony Andrews, Baroness Orczy, Bastille, British Navy, Charles Dickens, Citizen Chauvelin, Citizen King, Committee of Public Safety, Corvee, Culotte, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, French Revolution, Garde Francaise, guillotine, Ian McKellen, Impots, Leslie Howard, liberty cap, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Maximilien Robespierre, Sir Percy Blakeney, Taille, The Reign of Terror, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Three Estates, Thomas Carlyle, Vernet

As always, dear readers, welcome—and please forgive the rather forbidding title!

It’s just that, recently, we’ve been rereading Charles Dickens’ (1812-1870)

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novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which first appeared in serial form in Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round

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before being published in book form the same year.

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Dickens was inspired in part by Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881)

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three-volume History of the French Revolution (1837, second edition 1857).

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What Carlyle wrote about and Dickens novelized was a very complex event.  France, before the beginning of the Revolution in 1789, was in desperate straits, beginning with its social system.  All of French society was divided into three “estates”.  Here’s a “nice” picture of them.

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Here’s a chart to show you what these divisions meant in terms of the economic structure.

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And it’s easy to see, from this, why such caricatures as these typified, at the time, the truth of how the estates system worked for the benefit of the top two and very much against that of the third.

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(The labeling of the rock in this last image points to some of the elements of the heavy financial burden on the Third Estate.  Taille is a land tax levied upon all land-holding non-nobles.  Impots might be translated as “income tax”, but more complicated (if possible!).  Corvee went back to feudal times and was a system of unpaid labor for a certain number of days per year, to the state and to lords who rented land to tenants.)

This meant that a great deal of the Third Estate, both in towns and in the country, was desperately poor and often on the edge of starvation.

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A major problem was that such a tax base, though broad, was always being squeezed beyond its limits, meaning that the royal government (in 1789, this meant Louis XVI–1754-1793) was always struggling to find the money both to pay off back debts and to keep itself in funds in the present.  Then, when there were added expenses—such as the American War for Independence (1775-1783), in which the French played a major role from 1778 to the end—

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new loans and new debts were created.

And the expenses didn’t stop there as the French, anxious about the power of the British Navy

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and the closeness of many of its ports to Britain,

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embarked upon a building campaign to further strengthen its harbor defenses.

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(We’ve cheated a little with this last image—it and the previous one are actually from a series of paintings of the major ports of France by Claude-Joseph Vernet—1714-1789–commissioned by Louis XV, the grandfather of Louis XVI, and done between 1753 and 1765, but it gives you the idea of busy French ports in the 18th century.)

(And an interesting little sidelight—if you read us regularly, you know we can never resist these—this Vernet may be a direct ancestor of Sherlock Holmes, who tells Watson in “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”–1893 —“My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”)

Finally, in the 1780s, the whole system began to collapse.  Louis’ government (meaning the King and its ministers—there was no elected element in the royal government) tried to call a meeting of representatives of the Three Estates, the Estates General, in the late spring/summer, 1789,

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but it was a flop.  Louis had the Third Estate locked out and, instead of going home, they, with a few members of the First and Second, went down the street to an indoor tennis court and founded their own government, the National Assembly.

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They soon produced a document, entitled “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”,

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their second step towards changing the whole government and social structure of France.

Meanwhile, the people of Paris carried out their own form of changing things, assaulting the King’s fortress on the eastern side of Paris’ defenses, the Bastille.

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You can tell that things are really crumbling when you realize that the men in blue coats and fuzzy hats in the center are actually members of the one of the units of the King’s bodyguard, the Garde Francaise.

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Events quickly begin to speed up:  the King gradually lost his royal powers and became “Citizen King”,

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wearing the “liberty cap” patriots wore

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and drinking toasts straight out of the bottle—like any good “Sans-culotte”.  Culottes were the knee britches worn by people on the rise—

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whereas “honest men” wore workman’s clothes with long trousers and, if they could obtain one, that red cap.

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As time roared by, it became clearer and clearer that the previous administration was gone for good and that the Third Estate was now in charge.

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Louis, terrified, tried to run away with his family, but was caught,

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brought back to Paris basically under arrest and, before he knew it, on trial for his life.

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The trial lasted most of December, 1792, and the King was executed in January, 1793,

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followed by his wife, Marie Antoinette

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in October.

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But this was only the beginning of a wave of government bloodshed, now called “The Reign of Terror”, (“La Terreur” in French), in which a part of the state—the “Committee of Public Safety”, under Maximilien Robespierre,

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sent thousands of people to their deaths, mainly but not entirely by guillotine, a medieval invention revived and used across France.

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People who had done nothing or, at most, had made a passing remark critical of the Revolution could be swept up into a court

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in which there was little or no defense and the usual sentence, if arrested, was “Death within twenty-four hours”.

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One can see that, in England, with its Parliament and increasing wealth and stability, what went on in France, which many in England originally saw in its first—non-violent—stages as a positive thing, soon became nothing but a hideous cannibal feast.

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And it’s into this world that Dickens, in the latter part of his novel, moves his main characters, in a story of family revenge entangled in the bloody days of the Terror.

Dickens is not alone in seeing this as a great opportunity for a novelist.  A long time ago, we wrote a post which included the Baroness Orczy (1865-1947)—say that OR-tsee–

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who, beginning with a short story, and then a play (1903)

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and then the first of a whole series of novels, beginning in 1905,

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created the first wimp-who’s-really-a-superhero in Sir Percy Blakeney, AKA, “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.  In London, Sir Percy is an overdressed, drawling clown, but, in France, he is a daring rescuer of endangered noblefolk.  As early film gradually became more sophisticated, the first Pimpernel version appeared in 1917,

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followed by what many believe was the classic version in 1934, starring Leslie Howard.

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Although we enjoy that one, our particular favorite may be the 1982 version, with Anthony Andrews as the Pimpernel.

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The casting for this film actually takes us back to Tolkien in a funny way.  The villain is an agent of the Terror, named “Citizen Chauvelin”.

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Put a long white beard on him and age him many years and who is he?

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Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

If you would like to know more about the French Revolution, we can’t recommend highly enough Simon Schama’s Citizens (1990).

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It’s a fat book full of all kinds of histories—cultural, political, social—and, with this volume in hand, you can quickly get a good basic grasp of a very large and complicated—and endlessly fascinating—subject.  (And, if you enjoy history, it’s a page-turner.)

pps

And, if you’d like to know more about the Pimpernel, here’s a LINK to the website.

Prizes

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Imaginary History, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A Tale of Two Cities, Achilles, Admetus, Alcestis, Ancient Greece, Aphrodite, Archery, Atalanta, Baroness Orczy, chariots, Charles Dickens, Constantinople, contests, footrace, French Revolution, Greek, Heracles, Hippomenes, Icarius, Jacques-Louis David, King Oenomaus, King of Pherae, Lord Leighton Frederick, Odysseus, Olympia, Pelops, Penelope, The Death of Marat, The Odyssey, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Trojan War, Zeus

Welcome, as always, dear readers.
In our last posting, our second about archers, we talked about the archery contest which Penelope
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arranged, as a way of finally ridding her house of a gang of mooching suitors. It was, in reality, a two-part contest:
1. the contestants were required to string Odysseus’ bow
2. then fire an arrow through—but the story as told in the Odyssey is a little confusing here—through a series of axe heads? Through the rings on the axe heads? Through rings on the shafts of the axes? The following illustrations will show you that there are all sorts of possibilities!
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Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, is the only one who can string the bow and fire it,
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and then goes on to begin picking off Penelope’s obnoxious suitors with it.
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Prizes and women seem to be a not-uncommon theme in Greek mythology. When we were discussing Penelope and the archery contest, we also mentioned that there was an ancient story that Odysseus had actually won Penelope from her father, Icarius, in a footrace.
In general, Odysseus was regarded in Greece as neither a bowman nor a runner, but as the supreme trickster (he even has his own adjective, in fact polumetis, which we might translate “multiplotter”) but he is recorded in Book 23 of the Iliad as a runner, when he competes (and wins) in a footrace as part of the funeral games for Achilles’ beloved companion, Patroclus.
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(This amazing piece, from 1778, is by the “painter of the French Revolution”, Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825. In his earlier career, David had painted grand, florid things like this, often with a classical theme. When the Revolution came, David became an enthusiast, as well as one of its visual recorders, his most dramatic painting being “The Death of Marat”, commemorating the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a major revolutionary, killed in his bath in 1793.
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The era of the French Revolution has been a favorite of ours for years, probably originally because we grew up with Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, 1859,
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and the Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1903-05.
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We plan to write about the Pimpernel in a later posting—he’s a very important figure for 20th-century images of heroes with double-identities, being, it would seem, the original.)
It is worth wondering whether, in the choice of the bow and the archery contest, Penelope was actually indicating that she already knew the identity of the beggar. Certainly it put a deadly weapon into the hands of someone who immediately used it to rid her of the suitors. If that’s true, then offering herself as a prize was not a kind of passive surrender, but the beginning of an attack on the occupiers. This would give us a Penelope who was the very opposite of the girl offered as a prize in her father’s footrace. But that footrace reminded us of an earlier one, in which the prize stated the terms—and then enforced them.
Several generations before the Trojan War, Atalanta was a princess and huntress,
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who was pressed by her father to marry. She agreed—but only on the condition that a suitor would have to join in a footrace with her and, if she beat him, she would kill him. A number of suitors tried and failed and paid the price before Hippomenes, brighter than the rest, knowing that he couldn’t outrace her, outthought her, praying to Aphrodite for help. The goddess gave him three golden apples and, as the two raced and Hippomenes was being outrun, he tossed one of the apples to the side. Atalanta was distracted and thus slowed until, after the third apple, Hippomenes won the race—and Atalanta.
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The pattern of winning brides by races is repeated not only on foot, however. In another pre-Trojan-War story, King Oenomaus took fright from a prophecy that he would be killed by his son-in-law. When suitors came for his daughter, Hippodamia, he demanded that they join him in a chariot contest: they would race, but it was more a race for life than a sport, as, if Oenomaus caught up with the suitor, he would kill him.
So far, Oenomaus had managed to polish off eighteen suitors before Pelops, son of King Tantalus, appeared. Like Hippomenes, he was not the most scrupulous of competitors. (In one version of the story, Oenomaus displayed the heads of the unsuccessful suitors on the pillars of his palace—this might have proved a strong incentive to cheat!) In Pelops’ case, he persuaded Oenomaus’ charioteer to replace the bronze lynchpins (the pins which hold the chariot wheels on the axles) with ones made of wax and, in the (literal) heat of the contest, they melted and Oenomaus was dragged to his death. (And so the death-by-son-in-law prophecy came true!) Pelops then betrayed and murdered the charioteer, who, dying, put a curse upon Pelops and his descendants.
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Supposedly, the chariot race which formed a central part of the Olympic games in later centuries
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was either in commemoration of the death of Oenomaus or a celebration of the victory of Pelops. In fact, we have, on the eastern pediment (that’s the big triangular bit just below the roof) of the temple of Zeus at Olympia
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the main characters in the story depicted.
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This was a very grand temple and contained one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a giant seated statue of Zeus, made of ivory and gold.
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The statue didn’t survive the eastern Roman government’s attacks on pre-Christian culture, however, either being destroyed in a fire in the temple in 426AD, or in a fire at the eastern capital of Constantinople in 475AD.
In fact, the temple at Olympia itself was badly damaged in that fire of 426 and its whole structure was tumbled in earthquakes in 551 and 552AD, its columns collapsing onto the ground into lines of column drums like piles of stacked coins.
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Seeing that fallen building, we wonder whether Oenomaus’ charioteer’s curse extended to the site of the famous (and deadly) race!
To all of this mayhem around women as prizes at athletic events, we would add one happy occasion. Among the stories about Heracles, there was that of his wrestling match with death. This was not done to win a prize for himself, but to rescue Alcestis, the heroic wife of Admetus, King of Pherae, who had given her life to save her husband. (In fact, Admetus had won Alcestis in a challenge—but that’s a story for another posting!) Having brought her back, Heracles, to tease Admetus, says, truthfully, that Alcestis was a woman he had won in a contest—but neglects to say with whom he’d wrestled!
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(This, by the way, is a painting by Frederick, Lord Leighton, 1830-1896, who built much of his reputation on his reconstructions of the Greek classical and mythological world. We plan a future posting on him and on other classical myth-painters—among whom, in fact, was David, whom we mentioned above.)
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD

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