1.2.3-Needsmoreresearch

Quatrevingt-treize 1.2.3: Noblesse et roture mêlées
Look at the parallel structure in that title: England and France mingled, back in 1.2.1, and now nobility and commoners.

People have been pretty well covering the “wow you guys suck” angle in response to these ancien régime guys and how much they suck in their attitudes toward other people. I suppose that to be scrupulous I should question this image of the prejudiced noble as much as I question the image of the ignorant peasant. Buuuuut…well, even if these guys are a strawman, literary figures, they represent a side that really and truly was fighting to re-impose a system based explicitly on hard class inequality. As much as one can critique our Paris soldiers’ insistence on making a patriotic French citizen of Michelle, there’s a little more scope to the role than the Brittany peasant the guys in this chapter imagine.

Strawman/literary device or not, 60+ years later you get this conversation carried on into Renoir’s movie Grand Illusion. It’s WWI and the aristocratic German officer attempts to commiserate with the aristocratic French POW about having to share his officer status with “a Maréchal and a Rosenthal,” Maréchal being formerly a mechanic, and Rosenthal a Jewish financier. “A legacy of your Revolution,” he says.

So, right, there’s my bit of rant for the day. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the tensions in armies of mingled nobles and commoners, that having been A Big Deal.

Commentary
Pilferingapples I am perfectly content that the aristocrats should be given short shrift in their viewpoint expression, since I think if they were given MORE room to explain in this one conversation I might have tried to slap the letters off the page. :P I did not know that about the movie! How is it for general watching?

Needsmoreresearch (reply to Pilferingapples) Aw man Grand Illusion is one of my favorite movies. I’m realizing that the way I worded that description up there was confusing—it’s a movie made in the 30s, set in WWI. We’ve got patriotic defiant group singing of the Marseillaise before Casablanca, we’ve got prison escapes before The Great Escape… The most recent reissue has better subtitles than the old one—just plain more readable, for one thing!—and if you get a chance to see it I think you’d probably enjoy it? It’s just a really well made movie, for one thing: like, the amount that it gets done in terms of characters and plot and themes in a short time without feeling rushed or crowded, is pretty amazing.

…there’s also an Obsessive Pun Guy, a Nerdy Translator Guy, and a discussion of the democratization of syphilis.

I mean, the thematic connection with Ninety-Three is pretty tenuous—but I watched it pretty recently and welp, here we are again having this fictional conversation about how there are non-aristocrats being officers and even though the story is set in the (screen)writer’s past it’s still…a thing that the writer found worth talking about.

Pilferingapples (reply to Needsmoreresearch's reply)


 * 1) also citizenkid wants me to type COMBEFERRE so that’s going in the tags

CITIZENKID IS WONDERFUL, you are raising a true Friend of the Revolution there. XD

And yeah, it does actually sound like the kind of movie I’d enjoy! I’ll have to watch it if ever the chance comes my way.

Montagnarde1793 (reply to Needsmoreresearch's reply) La grande illusion is also one of my favorite movies, so I’m kind of thrilled at the association. Which makes a lot of sense, even if the setting is very different. Especially since, as Losurdo points out - and as everything I seem to read from the period seems to confirm - WWI was very much framed on the French side as a kind of continuation of the revolutionary wars. (Which is ironic when you consider France’s allies in WWI, but regardless…)