Fans of the French Republican Calendar will note that today is the leap-day, the French Republican equivalent of 29th February, to bring the annual four-year cycle to a close. So it’s quite fittingly known as the Jour de la révolution.
Year 221 starts tomorrow.
The War whoop of anarchy, the Marseillais Hymn, is to my ear, I must confess, independently of all moral association, a most dismal, flat, and unpleasing ditty: and to any ear it is at any rate a long winded and complicated one. In the instance of a melody so mischievous in its application, it is a fortunate incident, if, in itself, it should be doomed neither in point of universality, nor permanence, to gain equal hold on the affections of the people.
Bentham, Essays on the Subject of the Poor Laws, Essay III, in Michael Quinn, ed., Writings on the Poor Laws (Oxford, 2001), vol. 1, p. 136.
Various Philosophical types in my twitterstream are drawing attention to this story in today’s tehgraun about an Italian town that has appointed a municipal Philosopher. What an excellent idea, they say, appointing a municipal Philosopher. And perhaps it is. But when I read the article, my first thought was, my goodness, this is Fénelon’s Salentum, isn’t it?
So what’s that about, and why is this interesting (to me, at least)?
Corigliano d’Otranto is a dinky little town with six thousand inhabitants, right down in the heel of the Italian boot. As the article points out, it’s in a part of Italy called Grecìa Salentina, ‘a stronghold of Italy’s ethnic Greek minority, which has been there since long before Plato put pen to papyrus’. Historically, that’s right, and Greeks have been in that part of the world for a very long time indeed. Mythologically, the story begins with Idomeneus (the subject of Mozart’s opera), who fights at Troy, sacrifices his son when he gets back home to Crete, and as a result goes into exile, winding up in this bit of Italy.
Now (changing direction for the moment), hardly anyone reads Archbishop Fénelon’s book Telemachus these days, written at the close of the seventeenth century, which is a shame, as it’s a cracker. I have a particular reason to remember reading it for the first time five years ago, which is that what I thought was the cramp I report in this old blogpost after the strenuous activity of sitting on the sofa all afternoon reading Fénelon turned out to be a rather painful tear in my rotator cuff (and, incidentally, a clear sign that I had passed into middle age). But happily there’s a lot more to Fénelon’s book than a trivial episode in my medical history, and it’s sometimes said–though I don’t really know on what evidence–that Telemachus was the most popular book in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, other than the Bible. (Given that it was never intended for publication, that’s quite an achievement.)
Fénelon was a royal tutor, in charge of the education of Louis XIV’s grandson, le petit Dauphin. In the end, he never became king of France, because his father, le grand Dauphin, died in 1711, he himself died in 1712, the Sun King kept on going on the throne for 72 years (!), and, when he finally died in 1715, was succeeded by the infant Louis XV, the king’s great-grandson and le petit Dauphin‘s son. Telemachus was written as part of Fénelon’s educational programme for the young prince, and it was important to Fénelon that it not be published, as it contained very sharp criticism of the king’s policies. Indeed, the book presented quite detailed and only somewhat veiled instructions for how a new, virtuous king might rescue France from the disastrous legacy of Louis XIV. The manuscript leaked, the book was published, and Fénelon was banished from the court.
Telemachus was Odysseus’s son (in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus), and the first few books of The Odyssey describe him setting out from Ithaca in search of his father. What Fénelon did was to imagine how his adventures continued, after Homer’s spotlight shifts back onto Odysseus, drawing very heavily on plot devices from Homer and also from Virgil’s Aeneid to tell another story of extensive wandering around the Mediterranean. And just as Odysseus and Aeneas have their divine protectors, so Telemachus is accompanied by Mentor, who is in fact the goddess Minerva in disguise, and Mentor ensures that Telemachus receives, along the way, a thoroughgoing education for future kingship.
Like Aeneas, Telemachus ends up in Italy. He encounters Idomeneus, who has founded the city of Salentum, and joins in the wars in that part of the world. But Salentum has become corrupt, and while Telemachus is off on campaign, Mentor reorganises Salentum in order to purge it of the luxury ‘that poisoned the whole nation’, and to enable it to live in peace with its neighbours. And this is the heart of Telemachus. Unreformed Salentum is a thinly disguised version of Louis XIV’s France, and Reformed Salentum presents Fénelon’s vision of what France might become.
Running an economy devoted to the production and consumption of luxury goods made war more likely, Fénelon argued, as those without access to luxury goods were tempted to use violence to acquire them, and it made that war more dangerous, because ‘these superfluities enervate, intoxicate and torment those who possess them’, making them less able to fight. In Mentor’s reorganisation, much of the urban population is resettled in the countryside, and the economy is recentered on agricultural production, foreign trade is strictly limited, and the profits of agriculture are used to purchase domestically-manufactured armaments, in order to provide military defence.
To a quite remarkable extent, the story of political and economic thought in the eighteenth century in Europe is the story of a series of responses to Fénelon’s blueprint for Reformed Salente, and we can’t really understand what Bernard Mandeville, Jean-François Melon, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, and others were doing without taking seriously the challenge that Fénelon threw down. Those who were attracted by his vision often faced the problem of how-to-get-there-from-here, since Fénelon’s extensive reorganisation certainly required the exercise of absolute power, but absolutism was not an especially attractive prospect in a world in which virtuous monarchs were in pretty short supply. Those who were not so attracted had to explain where Fénelon went wrong in his diagnosis (hence the rest of the luxury debate). But the eighteenth century understood the centrality of Fénelon to its debates, in a way that often we do not: Benjamin Vaughan wrote in 1788, for example, that ‘the seeds of all the sentiments, if not all the doctrines of modern political œconomy’ were to be found in Telemachus, and Fénelon remained a key point of reference throughout the controversies of the French Revolution. (Robespierre is supposed to have whispered to his neighbour after one of the speeches in one of the debates in the Convention on the price of grain, ‘that man is the Fénelon of the Revolution’, and, coming from him, it was meant as a compliment.)
Corigliano d’Otranto, then, is pretty much exactly where the fictional Salentum was supposed to stand. Graziella Lupo is the new municipal Philosopher there, embarking on its Reform. Minerva is a tough act to follow. But I’m sure she is up to the task.
Here’s Severine Dupelloux singing the French national anthem to open the Winter Olympics at Albertville in 1992:
The link popped up in my twitterstream this morning, and I was very pleased to see it, not only because of the (sort of) appropriate Bastille Day / Olympics mash-up effect, but also because this was the legendary performance–a sweet ten-year old French girl from the Savoie singing unaccompanied before the TV cameras of the world–that inspired Danielle Mitterrand and others to embark on their ludicrous campaign (le Comité pour une Marseillaise de la Fraternité, no less) to rewrite the words of the Marseillaise to make them a little less bloodthirsty. Happily, nothing came of it, and the French continue to enjoy the finest national anthem in the world.
Other Stoa Marseillaise links, some possibly still functional, over here.
[It was somewhat appropriate to have a British cyclist win--David Millar--win yesterday's stage of the Tour de France, on the 45th anniversary of Tom Simpson's death on Mont Ventoux. (If you haven't read it already, William Fotheringham's book about Simpson's death, Put Me Back on my Bike, is marvellous.) But today, it should be turn of a Frenchman.]
Here’s Ferdinand, Baron d’Eckstein, addressing the issues that matter:
Mais quelle différence entre les vérités que nous admettons et les dogmes que proclame un industrialisme grossier et trivial, dogmes qui tendent à transformer l’ordre social en une république de castors, de fourmis ou d’abeilles. Méconnaissant la dignité humaine, ce genre d’industrialisme confierait les rènes du gouvernement au seul intérêt privé. C’est lui qui donne pour l’article de foi la maxime suivant, que gagner de l’argent c’est bien mériter de la civilisation, c’est répandre la lumière. C’est dans le sens de cette doctrine que le Constitutionnel immole chaque jour, sur les autels de la classe industrielle, les nobles et les administrateurs. Lancer le moindre sarcasme contre un fabricant, c’est un blasphème! malheur au poète comique, au journaliste ou au député qui se permettrait ce crime contre la seule classe inviolable de toute la société.
– ‘De l’industrialisme’, in Le Catholique, vol. 5 (1827), p. 241
Also of interest at the Virtual Stoa is the way that the Baron goes on to call Johann Gottlieb Fichte a Stoic just a few pages later (p. 239) — but, right now, we’re focused on the beavers.
When you start looking for it, the Republic of Beavers is everywhere!
Goethe called Venice the “Biberrepublik” in his Italian Journey (27 September 1786), and the identification was picked up by the Comte Pierre-Antoine-Noël-Bruno Daru in his 1819 Histoire de la république de Venise, vol. 5. There’s even an article on ‘The Republic of Beavers: An American Utopia’ by Arnold L. Kerson in the 2000 volume of Utopian Studies!
Daru says that it was Montesquieu who first called Venice the R of the Bs, but I don’t know what the original source is supposed to be. So I now find myself leaning towards the thought that the original for all of this is Voltaire, who in the entry on ‘laws’ in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764) shrewdly notes that ‘The republic of the beavers is still superior to that of the ants, at least if we judge by their masonry work.’
[thanks! IN]
Pierre Hadot, born 21 February 1922, died 24 April 2010.
UPDATE [28.4]: Le Monde.
Asterix, series pictographica in toto orbe terrarum nota, mense Octobri exeunte quinquaginta annos complevit. Quod iubilaeum in Francogallia variis expositionibus, concentibus aliisque eventibus institutis, quin etiam propria tessera epistulari edita, publice celebrabatur. Ad honorem anniversarii semisaecularis etiam novus libellus pictus et divulgatus est, qui inscribitur: ‘Dies natalis Asterigis et Obeligis – Liber aureus’.
From Nuntii Latini [obviously]
Do note, by the way, that today is the French Republican Calendrical equivalent of 29 February — it’s the leap-day that comes round in order to complete the quadrennial cycle, hence its magnificently appropriate name.
I’ve long thought that the EU got things the wrong way around when it mandated use of the (French Revolutionary) metric system and stuck to the old Gregorian Calendar. My offer to Mr Brown’s Government is that if they legislate to implement the French Republican Calendar in this country, I shall drop my opposition to the creation of British Values Day — especially if it gets held on the Jour de la révolution, which would mean not only that it’ll only come around every four years, but also that it’ll tacitly, or not-so-tacitly, identify British Values with French Republican Values, which would be a significant improvement on what’s otherwise likely to be on offer.
Year CCXVII kicks off tomorrow…
As everyone should know by now, today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so please feel free to Talk Like A Pirate in the comments box here, or, indeed, elsewhere. Suggestions over here. Ah, Jim lad.
It’s also the Jour de la raison, according to the version of the French Republican Calendar installed at this site, one of the holidays that brings the old year to a close — and it is appropriate, I think, that a day celebrating human reason should fall on International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Le Monde, in one of its summer retrospective thingummies, over here.
A very strange clip here combining the Stoa’s interest in Monday Marseillaise Blogging, and Lego…
Here’s the French football team and the better part of a hundred thousand fans singing the Marseillaise before the start of the 1998 World Cup Final. (Starts at 5 minutes in; jump forwards to 5.48 or so for Jacques Chirac in full-throated song.)
Haven’t had any of this for a while. Here’s a bit of film from 1907:
David Bordwell writes, of a recent screening:
“There were many early attempts to record synchronous sound, though all too often the accompanying discs have been lost even if the image track survives. The 1907 films contained a few such, but one, La Marseillaise, had its singer’s original voice, remarkably clear and perfectly synchronized. The result was an unusually poignant and vivid sense of a link to a hundred-year-old performance, an immediacy that went beyond what most silent films can convey, wonderful though they might be.
Coming out of the monkey-house at the ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes here in Paris yesterday, we read a notice about the orang-utans, which said, among other things, that
“Sa mère Wattana rejoindra prochainement un groupe de femelles élevant leurs petits à Appeldoorn, en Hollande, afin de compléter l’entraînement qu’elle a suivi à la Ménagerie pour recouvrer un comportement maternel.”
And what was the matter with her comportement maternel, we wondered?
The internet, as ever, comes to the rescue. This page starts with a disussion of La grande erreur de Rousseau, but eventually gets to the ape in question:
“Des observations récentes, en milieu artificiel, suggèrent même que les grands primates sont susceptibles d’apprendre la culture et les comportements d’une espèce voisine, y compris en ce qui concerne des éléments aussi sensibles à la sélection que les comportements sexuels. L’exemple de Watana, célèbre jeune femelle orang-outan de la ménagerie du Jardin des plantes à Paris, qui reçut des éléments de culture sexuelle bonobo au zoo de Stuttgart et se retrouva plus tard rejetée brutalement en milieu orang-outan, est à cet égard particulièrement édifiant!”
Regular readers of Popbitch can probably guess what’s going on here — the giveaway phrase, culture sexuelle bonobo, will be setting off the alarm bells. But there’s also this page which gives a few more details:
“Le second exemple concerne une amie orang- outan, Wattana. Elle appartenait, de naissance, à cette espèce solitaire dont les comportements sexuels, dans la nature, sont rares, pendant le court oestrus des femelles et plutôt calmes. Les hasards de la gestion des parcs zoologiques l’ont fait élever parmi des bonobos, chimpanzés bien connus pour leurs performances sexuelles permanentes et variées, nombreuses et brèves, entre partenaires de toutes combinaisons de sexes. Eduquée par ce groupe, Wattana fût ensuite “mariée” à un orang mâle qui, d’abord, prit si mal ses grimaces provocatrices et propositions sexuelles explicites qu’il fallut les séparer ! Dans un deuxième temps, introduite dans un groupe familial, Wattana fût acceptée par son fiancé, dont elle modifia culture et comportements, ainsi que ceux des autres membres du groupe!”
Grimaces provocatrices! Anyway, this seems to be the deep background to help explain why she’s now off in Holland to recover her comportement maternel. The scientists seem to be interested in the case, as it’s a good example of the extent to which sexual behaviour is learned, rather than innate. (There’s also an academic article out there about Wattana’s talents with knots.)
And for more on the culture sexuelle bonobo, you might start here.
(What follows is pretty trivial, so I really don’t recommend you read it.)
One of the things I come across from time to time is people – especially young people – using the word “refute” to mean “disagree with”, “oppose” or “deny” rather than, as the OED neatly puts it, “to disprove, overthrow by argument, prove to be false.” (Indeed, the OED notes the incorrect usage, and labels it incorrect, with a series of examples that I’ve placed over the fold.) (I’m sure there’s someone out there who thinks that postmodernism is something to do with this, but that’s a conversation for another occasion.)
Anyway, this Summer, Le Monde has a daily feature revisiting past controversies that have beset what it calls the “intelligentsia hexagonale“. So this week we’ve had discussions of the bicentenaire, Heidegger, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and today (i.e., the issue dated vendredi) we’ve had the affaire du foulard in its original 1989 incarnation. And it’s in this last piece that we find this:
Dès le 24 octobre, Guy Coq, membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Esprit, pousse un premier cri d’alarme dans les colonnes du Monde. Il réfute l’argument de la différence culturelle à respecter. C’est le maintien même de la tolérance qui “périrait si les diverses communautés religieuses entraient en compétition pour s’emparer de l’espace laïque de l’école, pour en briser l’unité, pour y manifester non pas l’esprit d’accueil pour chaque individu en lui-même, comme simple humain, mais le signe de la clôture de chaque communauté contre les autres”.
Now unless my French is even worse than I think it is (which is wholly possible), that looks suspiciously like using “réfuter” to mean “deny”, i.e., following the incorrect English usage of “refute”. So is this because the French verb has a broader meaning than its English equivalent, ranging all the way from “deny” to “disprove”, or is the same bad habit that the Anglophones have developed shared by Francophones? And, if so, has it spread from England to France or vice versa, or is it properly autochthonous in both linguistic communities (if that’s not too pretentious an expression to use)?
I may just be barking up the wrong tree, or just barking. But any thoughts are more than welcome.
