Colin's 19th Century France Primer
May. 13th, 2009 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleurdeliseebckp...or Proof #102 that I have no life
(If the text is gray, try clicking it, it may be a link. There are a lot of them through the text. Usually it's names.)
[I switch from past to present with no respect for Grammar and I'm sorry for that...]
So, let's begin.
We're talking about this country.
I'm going to go over the first half of the XIXth Century quickly because I know you won't use it, but later on I'll need to refer to events that happened then.
Politics (I'll try to make as easy to understand as possible. It's really complicated.)
The first main event I will briefly explain is the French Revolution of 1789. The people got tired of being controlled by a small elite and the King. They were starving and poor, yet the State kept asking of them to pay more and more taxes. It reached the breaking point when France helped the Thirteen Colonies to gain their independence from Great Britain to become the United States. Encouraged by artists and bourgeois, the people decided to get the King out of the throne and install a democracy. Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette were beheaded in 1793 in Paris and it meant the end of the Bourbon dynasty as well as the monarchy in France (or so they thought...)
[Then they went on a beheading spree, killing everyone who seemed richer than others. It ended when the leader of this movement, Robespierre, was beheaded by his followers who just got sick of him.]
The first republic of France was declared in September 1792.
During this first republic that lasted from 1792 to 1804, a man began gaining importance.
The general Napoléon Bonaparte.
On the eight year of the Republic [they became kind of weird at this time and created a new calendar... I'll spare you the details about the weird new months and all that], so in 1800, he did a coup d'état against the five leaders of the Republic and named himself First Consul of France. During that time he does a bunch of things that are more or less relevant for you. He does recreates the links with the Roman Church and kind of befriend the Pope Pie XVII.
In 1804, he names himself Emperor of France, with the support of the Pope. He also, in a way I'm not quite sure of, is the King of Italy at the same time. Russia, Poland, Great Britain, Spain, Austria and Prussia try to get rid of him, and most of them fail. Russia does manage to get him out of its lands by burning everything around him so he's stuck on ashes.
When Prussia and Austria get together, they manage to get rid of him and there ends the Empire of France in April 1814.
The alliance of Prussia and Austria doesn't stop there and they decides to split Poland between themselves and Russia, but I'm getting away from our main matter.
England and France want to bring monarchy back so they put Louis XVIII on the throne. Napoléon, who is a stubborn fucker, comes back and kicks the King out. He stays in power for a hundred days, Les Cent jours. England beats him in June 1815 in Waterloo and he's sent in exile on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where he dies in 1821.
Then comes La Restauration. They bring back the monarchy, with Louis XVIII and then Charles X. The bourgeoisie really grows during these years, the bourgeois being the ones who beheaded Louis XVI in 1793.
In 1830 they kick Charles X out and put Louis-Philippe 1st, at the same time than France entered the industrial revolution. In 1848, a workers' revolution [this will come back later] kicks Louis-Philippe out and signs the definite end of monarchy in France.
In 1848 the Second Republic is proclaimed. The President is...
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. His nephew. Something was wrong in this family.
In 1851 he does a coup d'état (against himself, sort of. Idiot) and names himself Napoléon III (I don't know where Napoléon II went...) and begins the Second Empire of France that will last from 1852 to 1870.
1870 is the French-Prussic war. Napoléon III get his ass seriously kicked (verbatim from the notes I took in class...). It means the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic that will go from 1870 to 1940. (Now with Sarkozy France entered in their Seventh Republic.
So, you survived the boring part about politics? I swear I had to talk about it, but now it will get interesting because I am entering the subject of...
Arts and Literature
The first movement we'll be speaking of doesn't concern you, but it does. It scarred (no, really) the entire century and even at the end they are still reacting against it. I'm talking about...
The Romanticism
It sounds all great and fluffy like this, flowers and candles on tables, walks on the beach at sunset and yes, you get my point. You know what romanticism is.
But in literature, it's another story.
It all began with a few German artists.
A composer and a writer, actually.
Wagner influenced classical music and changed it.
(on a random note, he was Hitler's favorite... I kind of see why...)
Because of him, the French composer Berlioz was inspired and this happened, as well as Chopin, who is considered as the perfect Romanticist. (I love Chopin so, so much)
Other Romantic composers, to name only them : Tchaikovsky (I'm five right now as I listen to this, omg I always get shivers), Mozart and Beethoven.
The Romantic movement in music lasted until 1900, so no more composers to talk about.
Goethe is epic. That's all I can say about him, seriously. Maybe you've read him? I have. He is not considered as a romanticist but he influenced it greatly. I've read The Sorrows of Young Werther. It caused a wave of suicides. It was banned of Denmark.
I'm gonna say right now, I'm far from a fan of the Romantic movement. This book is a classic of literature, I know all this, and I'm not here to give my opinion but to relate facts and only factsbut I hated it.
The perfect romantic character is a lonely dreamer or an egocentric who's tormented by remorse and guilt. Everything revolves around passion and emotions. Nature has a really important place, one even bigger than the characters'. Fall was their favorite season, because of what it represents, the death of things to come back new and washed after the winter...
They were a bunch of emo kids. I don't want to offend anyone with this statement but it's the easiest conclusion you can get out of studying Romanticism.
Romanticism is also called the “Counter-Enlightenment”, a reaction against the Enlightenment of the XVIIIth century.
The first Romantic author in France was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though he wasn't one officially. He started the movement. Now I'll name a bunch of them and after I'll give out excerpt of their works so you get an idea of what it looks like : François René de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand (a woman), Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas fils (not the one who wrote The Three Musketeers, his son).
I'm doing this briefly because they are too early in the century for you.
And fuck it, I can't find excerpts in English. Let's move on.
In reaction against the lyricism and constant sorrow of Romanticism was born...
The Realism.
It began around 1857, when the first official Realist novel, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, was published. The key to understand Realism at its beginning is that it features Romantic characters evolving in a realistic world. Everything is described as it is, no embellishment of any kind. The three main writers of this movement are Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac (ugh I loathe him) and Guy de Maupassant. They analyzed the society and the common human behaviors.
What Realist writers tried to do was to represent things as they would be if they weren't there. The realist writer always tried to erase himself from the writing, to disappear behind it to be completely forgotten by the reader.
[Quickly dropping him in, I won't go on about painters, but one Realist painter that you know about without even knowing you know him (erm) is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The hysterical dwarf in Moulin Rouge. :P]
As the movement evolved, a sort of denunciation appeared. A critique of society, of the problems the Industrial Revolution brought; people leaving countrysides to live in cities and work 70 hours a week in horrible conditions, all of this.
This lead to the birth of our next movement...
The Naturalism.
There's only one Naturalist author really known, but he's one of the most important author of French literature.
Émile Zola.
He pushed Realism to the extreme, analyzing every details and reproducing the “real” as much as he could and then more. I really want to find you an excerpt of Zola...
Ah ah!
And in fact, the cage, banded with sheet iron and covered by a fine-meshed screen, was waiting for them, resting on its catches. Maheu, Zacherie, Levaque, and Catherine slid into a cart at the back; and since it was supposed to hold five people, Étienne got in as well; but all the good places were taken and he had to squeeze in beside the young girl, whose elbow poked into his belly. His lamp got in his way; he was advised to hang it from a buttonhole of his jacket. He didn't hear this advice and kept it awkwardly in his hand. The loading continued, above and below, a jumbled load of cattle. Couldn't they get going? What was happening? It seemed as if he'd been waiting for a long time. Finally a jolt shook him and everything fell away, the objects around him seemed to fly past while he felt a nervous dizziness that churned his guts. This lasted as long as he was in the daylight, passing the two landing levels, surrounded by the wheeling flight of the timbers. Then, falling into the blackness of the pit, he remained stunned, no longer able to interpret his feelings.
This is an excerpt of Germinal, one of his masterpiece (and by master, I mean in every sense, with around 900 pages. I never read him. I don't have the courage to).
Germinal is about the workers' revolution (I told you it would come back), minors revolting against the bourgeois controlling the mine and living in wealth when they can barely feed their children. (the movie about this book is really epic, and as every French movie goes, it stars Gérard Depardieu...)
[I wish I had been able to find you the epic scene when this old woman bites off this dead guy's dick.]
Another genre that already existed evolved and changed with the apparition of Naturalism.
The Fantastic
In the past, fantastic novels were gothic, dark, they involved vampires and things like this. Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to name only them. They all happened in gloomy, retired castles, and therefore it didn't really shook people.
The new Fantastic genre plays on the fear of this “second” part of the human, the subconscious. The best example is Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant. The complete text in English is available here. It's not that long, 20 pages maybe and it's quite good.
[If I had to place Oscar Wilde somewhere, it would be here. For The Picture of Dorian Grey at least. Don't stone me if I'm wrong I don't know shit about English literature!]
Our next literary movement is the last one [and my favorite].
The Symbolism
The main figures of this movement are called Les Poètes maudits (the Accursed poets, according to Wikipedia), or the Decadents.
These ones concern you as they lived around 1880. They lived against society, in a world of drugs and prostitution. They would meet in cafés in Place Pigalle and Montmartre (Moulin Rouge area!) and drink absinthe or smoke opium until they wrote their weirdass poems no one agrees on the meaning still today. Not only poets thought. Picasso, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Matisse, Renoir and Van Gogh all lived there as well. You get the vibe that was there? They would also gather in Le Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir (then and now, two cabarets that are still emblematic of this era nowadays (and no longer brothels...)
So, basically, the whole bohemian way of life you find in Moulin Rouge is exactly what was going on in the 1880's-1890's. They all wanted to get rid of the rigidity and severe lifestyle imposed by the previous decades, all because of Louis XIV's freakish rules about religion.
Let's go back to literature, quickly.
The greatest one of this movement, if not one of the greatest French poet ever, is Charles Baudelaire (I LOVE HIM)
He's fucked up, seriously. He's a genius, but a fucked up one. He was put on the List of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum or the Index) until it was abolished in 1966 and I see why. We don't study him in high school. Or if we do, the teachers avoid the poems explicitly about sex.
"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."
"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil' -- and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."
He is the one who translated Edgar Allan Poe's work to French. His masterpiece are The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal).
The one I always give as an example of Baudelaire is this one:
A Carcass
My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,
Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.
The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined;
And the sky was watching that superb cadaver
Blossom like a flower.
So frightful was the stench that you believed
You'd faint away upon the grass.
The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.
All this was descending and rising like a wave,
Or poured out with a crackling sound;
One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,
Lived by multiplication.
And this world gave forth singular music,
Like running water or the wind,
Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion
Shake in their winnowing baskets.
The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,
A sketch that slowly falls
Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist
Completes from memory alone.
Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog
Watched us with angry eye,
Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass
The morsel he had left.
— And yet you will be like this corruption,
Like this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being,
You, my angel and my passion!
Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.
Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!
You can find all of the poems from The Flowers of Evil in French and with several English translations here.
The two other poètes maudits left are intimately linked.
And by intimately, I mean they dated.
Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud (do not read it Rambo like my friend did...)
Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from the poet Arthur Rimbaud. By 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new male lover.[3] Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.
Rimbaud and Verlaine began a short and torrid affair. Whereas Verlaine had likely engaged in prior homosexual experiences, it remains uncertain whether the relationship with Verlaine was Rimbaud's first. During their time together they led a wild, vagabond-like life spiced by absinthe and hashish.[29] They scandalized the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behavior of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly visionary verse. The stormy relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine eventually brought them to London in September 1872, a period of which Rimbaud would later express regret. During this time, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son (both of whom he had abused in his alcoholic rages). Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in considerable poverty, in Bloomsbury and in Camden Town, scraping a living mostly from teaching, in addition to an allowance from Verlaine's mother. Rimbaud spent his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum where "heating, lighting, pens and ink were free."
Rimbaud wrote all of his poems between the ages of 16 and 18. After that he disappeared and never wrote anything again.
A good example of why he was put on the Index.
In summary, Symbolism is about emotions, just like Romanticism, but instead of crying their hearts out boldly, they use symbols and synesthesia, which means mixing senses, like when Baudelaire says that the scents were as soft as babies' flesh and as green as forests. This is a direct reaction against Romanticism, just like Realism.
Soooo we've reached the end of the century. What does all of this rambling means to you in fic terms?
Ryan will be in a France of revolution of thoughts and actions. The minds are changing, the lifestyles are inching towards debauchery. Arts are the center of everything, art is everything but means nothing at the same time. If arts has a meaning, it loses its deep meaning, of being beautiful and beautiful only (and bizarre, according to Baudelaire). It's also a time of poor conditions, people get sick, catch tuberculosis or typhus, syphilis and cancers but the medecine isn't developed enough to cure them. More and more people live in cities that are not yet designed to have so many people, so everything is too full. To quote Süskind in The Perfume:
“In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.”
Paris is the center of this revolution, with the gatherings of painters and writers. The French culture is still universally renowned and praised, though the world is slowly turning its attention to the English culture. But for the era we're speaking of, the world is fascinated by the can-can skirts and the courtesans.
...and now you probably think I'm an History freak so I'll stop there.
(If the text is gray, try clicking it, it may be a link. There are a lot of them through the text. Usually it's names.)
[I switch from past to present with no respect for Grammar and I'm sorry for that...]
So, let's begin.
We're talking about this country.
I'm going to go over the first half of the XIXth Century quickly because I know you won't use it, but later on I'll need to refer to events that happened then.
Politics (I'll try to make as easy to understand as possible. It's really complicated.)
The first main event I will briefly explain is the French Revolution of 1789. The people got tired of being controlled by a small elite and the King. They were starving and poor, yet the State kept asking of them to pay more and more taxes. It reached the breaking point when France helped the Thirteen Colonies to gain their independence from Great Britain to become the United States. Encouraged by artists and bourgeois, the people decided to get the King out of the throne and install a democracy. Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette were beheaded in 1793 in Paris and it meant the end of the Bourbon dynasty as well as the monarchy in France (or so they thought...)
[Then they went on a beheading spree, killing everyone who seemed richer than others. It ended when the leader of this movement, Robespierre, was beheaded by his followers who just got sick of him.]
The first republic of France was declared in September 1792.
During this first republic that lasted from 1792 to 1804, a man began gaining importance.
The general Napoléon Bonaparte.
On the eight year of the Republic [they became kind of weird at this time and created a new calendar... I'll spare you the details about the weird new months and all that], so in 1800, he did a coup d'état against the five leaders of the Republic and named himself First Consul of France. During that time he does a bunch of things that are more or less relevant for you. He does recreates the links with the Roman Church and kind of befriend the Pope Pie XVII.
In 1804, he names himself Emperor of France, with the support of the Pope. He also, in a way I'm not quite sure of, is the King of Italy at the same time. Russia, Poland, Great Britain, Spain, Austria and Prussia try to get rid of him, and most of them fail. Russia does manage to get him out of its lands by burning everything around him so he's stuck on ashes.
When Prussia and Austria get together, they manage to get rid of him and there ends the Empire of France in April 1814.
The alliance of Prussia and Austria doesn't stop there and they decides to split Poland between themselves and Russia, but I'm getting away from our main matter.
England and France want to bring monarchy back so they put Louis XVIII on the throne. Napoléon, who is a stubborn fucker, comes back and kicks the King out. He stays in power for a hundred days, Les Cent jours. England beats him in June 1815 in Waterloo and he's sent in exile on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where he dies in 1821.
Then comes La Restauration. They bring back the monarchy, with Louis XVIII and then Charles X. The bourgeoisie really grows during these years, the bourgeois being the ones who beheaded Louis XVI in 1793.
In 1830 they kick Charles X out and put Louis-Philippe 1st, at the same time than France entered the industrial revolution. In 1848, a workers' revolution [this will come back later] kicks Louis-Philippe out and signs the definite end of monarchy in France.
In 1848 the Second Republic is proclaimed. The President is...
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. His nephew. Something was wrong in this family.
In 1851 he does a coup d'état (against himself, sort of. Idiot) and names himself Napoléon III (I don't know where Napoléon II went...) and begins the Second Empire of France that will last from 1852 to 1870.
1870 is the French-Prussic war. Napoléon III get his ass seriously kicked (verbatim from the notes I took in class...). It means the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic that will go from 1870 to 1940. (Now with Sarkozy France entered in their Seventh Republic.
So, you survived the boring part about politics? I swear I had to talk about it, but now it will get interesting because I am entering the subject of...
Arts and Literature
The first movement we'll be speaking of doesn't concern you, but it does. It scarred (no, really) the entire century and even at the end they are still reacting against it. I'm talking about...
The Romanticism
It sounds all great and fluffy like this, flowers and candles on tables, walks on the beach at sunset and yes, you get my point. You know what romanticism is.
But in literature, it's another story.
It all began with a few German artists.
A composer and a writer, actually.
Wagner influenced classical music and changed it.
(on a random note, he was Hitler's favorite... I kind of see why...)
Because of him, the French composer Berlioz was inspired and this happened, as well as Chopin, who is considered as the perfect Romanticist. (I love Chopin so, so much)
Other Romantic composers, to name only them : Tchaikovsky (I'm five right now as I listen to this, omg I always get shivers), Mozart and Beethoven.
The Romantic movement in music lasted until 1900, so no more composers to talk about.
Goethe is epic. That's all I can say about him, seriously. Maybe you've read him? I have. He is not considered as a romanticist but he influenced it greatly. I've read The Sorrows of Young Werther. It caused a wave of suicides. It was banned of Denmark.
I'm gonna say right now, I'm far from a fan of the Romantic movement. This book is a classic of literature, I know all this, and I'm not here to give my opinion but to relate facts and only facts
The perfect romantic character is a lonely dreamer or an egocentric who's tormented by remorse and guilt. Everything revolves around passion and emotions. Nature has a really important place, one even bigger than the characters'. Fall was their favorite season, because of what it represents, the death of things to come back new and washed after the winter...
They were a bunch of emo kids. I don't want to offend anyone with this statement but it's the easiest conclusion you can get out of studying Romanticism.
Romanticism is also called the “Counter-Enlightenment”, a reaction against the Enlightenment of the XVIIIth century.
The first Romantic author in France was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though he wasn't one officially. He started the movement. Now I'll name a bunch of them and after I'll give out excerpt of their works so you get an idea of what it looks like : François René de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand (a woman), Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas fils (not the one who wrote The Three Musketeers, his son).
I'm doing this briefly because they are too early in the century for you.
And fuck it, I can't find excerpts in English. Let's move on.
In reaction against the lyricism and constant sorrow of Romanticism was born...
The Realism.
It began around 1857, when the first official Realist novel, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, was published. The key to understand Realism at its beginning is that it features Romantic characters evolving in a realistic world. Everything is described as it is, no embellishment of any kind. The three main writers of this movement are Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac (ugh I loathe him) and Guy de Maupassant. They analyzed the society and the common human behaviors.
What Realist writers tried to do was to represent things as they would be if they weren't there. The realist writer always tried to erase himself from the writing, to disappear behind it to be completely forgotten by the reader.
[Quickly dropping him in, I won't go on about painters, but one Realist painter that you know about without even knowing you know him (erm) is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The hysterical dwarf in Moulin Rouge. :P]
As the movement evolved, a sort of denunciation appeared. A critique of society, of the problems the Industrial Revolution brought; people leaving countrysides to live in cities and work 70 hours a week in horrible conditions, all of this.
This lead to the birth of our next movement...
The Naturalism.
There's only one Naturalist author really known, but he's one of the most important author of French literature.
Émile Zola.
He pushed Realism to the extreme, analyzing every details and reproducing the “real” as much as he could and then more. I really want to find you an excerpt of Zola...
Ah ah!
And in fact, the cage, banded with sheet iron and covered by a fine-meshed screen, was waiting for them, resting on its catches. Maheu, Zacherie, Levaque, and Catherine slid into a cart at the back; and since it was supposed to hold five people, Étienne got in as well; but all the good places were taken and he had to squeeze in beside the young girl, whose elbow poked into his belly. His lamp got in his way; he was advised to hang it from a buttonhole of his jacket. He didn't hear this advice and kept it awkwardly in his hand. The loading continued, above and below, a jumbled load of cattle. Couldn't they get going? What was happening? It seemed as if he'd been waiting for a long time. Finally a jolt shook him and everything fell away, the objects around him seemed to fly past while he felt a nervous dizziness that churned his guts. This lasted as long as he was in the daylight, passing the two landing levels, surrounded by the wheeling flight of the timbers. Then, falling into the blackness of the pit, he remained stunned, no longer able to interpret his feelings.
This is an excerpt of Germinal, one of his masterpiece (and by master, I mean in every sense, with around 900 pages. I never read him. I don't have the courage to).
Germinal is about the workers' revolution (I told you it would come back), minors revolting against the bourgeois controlling the mine and living in wealth when they can barely feed their children. (the movie about this book is really epic, and as every French movie goes, it stars Gérard Depardieu...)
[I wish I had been able to find you the epic scene when this old woman bites off this dead guy's dick.]
Another genre that already existed evolved and changed with the apparition of Naturalism.
The Fantastic
In the past, fantastic novels were gothic, dark, they involved vampires and things like this. Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to name only them. They all happened in gloomy, retired castles, and therefore it didn't really shook people.
The new Fantastic genre plays on the fear of this “second” part of the human, the subconscious. The best example is Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant. The complete text in English is available here. It's not that long, 20 pages maybe and it's quite good.
[If I had to place Oscar Wilde somewhere, it would be here. For The Picture of Dorian Grey at least. Don't stone me if I'm wrong I don't know shit about English literature!]
Our next literary movement is the last one [and my favorite].
The Symbolism
The main figures of this movement are called Les Poètes maudits (the Accursed poets, according to Wikipedia), or the Decadents.
These ones concern you as they lived around 1880. They lived against society, in a world of drugs and prostitution. They would meet in cafés in Place Pigalle and Montmartre (Moulin Rouge area!) and drink absinthe or smoke opium until they wrote their weirdass poems no one agrees on the meaning still today. Not only poets thought. Picasso, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Matisse, Renoir and Van Gogh all lived there as well. You get the vibe that was there? They would also gather in Le Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir (then and now, two cabarets that are still emblematic of this era nowadays (and no longer brothels...)
So, basically, the whole bohemian way of life you find in Moulin Rouge is exactly what was going on in the 1880's-1890's. They all wanted to get rid of the rigidity and severe lifestyle imposed by the previous decades, all because of Louis XIV's freakish rules about religion.
Let's go back to literature, quickly.
The greatest one of this movement, if not one of the greatest French poet ever, is Charles Baudelaire (I LOVE HIM)
He's fucked up, seriously. He's a genius, but a fucked up one. He was put on the List of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum or the Index) until it was abolished in 1966 and I see why. We don't study him in high school. Or if we do, the teachers avoid the poems explicitly about sex.
"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."
"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil' -- and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."
He is the one who translated Edgar Allan Poe's work to French. His masterpiece are The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal).
The one I always give as an example of Baudelaire is this one:
A Carcass
My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,
Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.
The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined;
And the sky was watching that superb cadaver
Blossom like a flower.
So frightful was the stench that you believed
You'd faint away upon the grass.
The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.
All this was descending and rising like a wave,
Or poured out with a crackling sound;
One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,
Lived by multiplication.
And this world gave forth singular music,
Like running water or the wind,
Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion
Shake in their winnowing baskets.
The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,
A sketch that slowly falls
Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist
Completes from memory alone.
Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog
Watched us with angry eye,
Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass
The morsel he had left.
— And yet you will be like this corruption,
Like this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being,
You, my angel and my passion!
Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.
Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!
You can find all of the poems from The Flowers of Evil in French and with several English translations here.
The two other poètes maudits left are intimately linked.
And by intimately, I mean they dated.
Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud (do not read it Rambo like my friend did...)
Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from the poet Arthur Rimbaud. By 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new male lover.[3] Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.
Rimbaud and Verlaine began a short and torrid affair. Whereas Verlaine had likely engaged in prior homosexual experiences, it remains uncertain whether the relationship with Verlaine was Rimbaud's first. During their time together they led a wild, vagabond-like life spiced by absinthe and hashish.[29] They scandalized the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behavior of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly visionary verse. The stormy relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine eventually brought them to London in September 1872, a period of which Rimbaud would later express regret. During this time, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son (both of whom he had abused in his alcoholic rages). Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in considerable poverty, in Bloomsbury and in Camden Town, scraping a living mostly from teaching, in addition to an allowance from Verlaine's mother. Rimbaud spent his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum where "heating, lighting, pens and ink were free."
Rimbaud wrote all of his poems between the ages of 16 and 18. After that he disappeared and never wrote anything again.
A good example of why he was put on the Index.
In summary, Symbolism is about emotions, just like Romanticism, but instead of crying their hearts out boldly, they use symbols and synesthesia, which means mixing senses, like when Baudelaire says that the scents were as soft as babies' flesh and as green as forests. This is a direct reaction against Romanticism, just like Realism.
Soooo we've reached the end of the century. What does all of this rambling means to you in fic terms?
Ryan will be in a France of revolution of thoughts and actions. The minds are changing, the lifestyles are inching towards debauchery. Arts are the center of everything, art is everything but means nothing at the same time. If arts has a meaning, it loses its deep meaning, of being beautiful and beautiful only (and bizarre, according to Baudelaire). It's also a time of poor conditions, people get sick, catch tuberculosis or typhus, syphilis and cancers but the medecine isn't developed enough to cure them. More and more people live in cities that are not yet designed to have so many people, so everything is too full. To quote Süskind in The Perfume:
“In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.”
Paris is the center of this revolution, with the gatherings of painters and writers. The French culture is still universally renowned and praised, though the world is slowly turning its attention to the English culture. But for the era we're speaking of, the world is fascinated by the can-can skirts and the courtesans.
...and now you probably think I'm an History freak so I'll stop there.
