#les anciens

[cheminer-poesie-cressant]

(petite scène de la ville quotidienne, la vie des villages)

« l’orage de septembre est plus dangereux ; il roule, il ne claque pas comme celui de l’été » ; parole de la doyenne du village relatant ce que disaient ses aïeux ; un orage qui dans son avancée devait donner l’impression d’entrainer avec lui les paysages eux-mêmes jusqu’à un point de chute, un point de non retour ; époque où on écoutait dans le moindre détail le son des éléments naturels pour décrypter leur évolution, leur origine, leur sens, où on écoutait les saisons autant qu’on les voyait ; mais ici dans cette phrase se ressent aussi et surtout la rupture climatique, dans les images convoquées ; les orages de septembre qui sont devenus simplement ceux communs, violents et soudains des étés du premier tiers du XXIème siècle ; l’été météorologique qui déborde désormais largement sur octobre ; et cet allongement de la saison éloigne un peu plus cette phrase dans un passé à jamais révolu qui n’existe plus que dans des fragments de mémoire de personnes sur le point de partir ; et avec leur départ c’est aussi le rythme des saisons qui nous quitte

le temps est devenu une variable du grand changement qui nous poursuit, créant à son tour de la nostalgie là où pourtant, lorsque nous sommes nés, l’immuable rayonnait

.

© Pierre Cressant

(mercredi 14 septembre 2022)

[coquelicoq]

if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.

this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.

incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?

[meerawrites]

Almost done my novel research, I just need to get to the terror and the (justified) trial and execution of Marie Antoinette and Louis le incompetent <- I’m not saying his number he doesn’t deserve that.

Ah yes, the French revolution the most divisive event in history, my beloved.

Also... Robespierre was a saint compared to feudalism, monarchy and what Louis (and every French monarch before him) was doing to Haiti.

Marie Antoinette’s execution (from a French Revolution pamphlet).

Marie Antoinette on the way to her execution (Francois Fleming 1887).

[bizarreauhavre]

Colonies, 1959, (surrealist movie).

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Oil Painting, 1787, French.

By Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Portraying Marie Antoinette in a red velvet dress with black fur trim, with her children.

Château de Versailles.

[les-portes-du-sud]

Un nouveau printemps n'est jamais comme l'ancien, et c'est pourquoi il devient si bon de vivre - avec enthousiasme, dans l'attente de quelque chose de nouveau cette année...

M. Prishvine

[lesmashvi]

Have been doing this bad boy for like 2 months and it's not even nearly done.

[mangontaimi]

a gargoyle crochet tote !! the pattern is originally from le filet ancien VI but i adapted it into a crochet bag~

[soeurdelune]

original character moodboards: Niregi

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

pros of watching doctor who in french: getting to hear 13 refer to herself with he/him pronouns

[vivelareine]

I have rambled about this on Twitter but reading Victor Hugo's poem "Capet, éveille-toi!" (usually printed in English as "King Louis XVIII: An Ode") which was written and published in 1822, and then reading The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light chapter ["I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people"] from Les Miserables, written decades later, is fascinating in a lot of respects.

But especially in terms of analyzing Hugo's personal political and moralistic development. The chapter reads in some ways as a rebuke against himself, with the Bishop standing in for his decades-older self.

[andthesunrisesagain]

Rebecca Ferguson

[little-desi-historian]

OP--turned off reblogs and it is bad tumblr etiquette to try reblog it again, but I am sharing this with two cents cause I have opinions + media criticism credentials + done archivist historian work + my current wip centres largely around this nuance and the nuance of inherent human unreliability. See here, and here. Meaningful citation I am gonna quote a lot… also this is just my opinion having read Das Kapital and worked at a unions museum and being a historical fiction writer + gothic horror writer.

when I say "apologize" for Robespierre I don't mean take away his humanity or complexity. The same applies to Marie Antoinette as much as I don't like at all what she stood for or her irl views, she was still a person, as well Napoleon I Bonaparte (the first 'Liberal' Dictator) are all people, not necessarily 'moral' or 'good' people, and we don't have to erase their humanity to talk about how they were not 'good.'

As competent as Louis XIV nicknamed, Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or Sun King (le Roi Soleil) for his competence and ability to win France's colonial wars (a thing shockingly-- historians of all political leanings agree upon), could've spared France and all of its citizenry a lot of hurt if he just took away the ancien regimes social powers but left them their titles etc. TLDR: if France became a constitutional monarchy none of the French revolution would've happened.

Robespierre was by no means an "avenging angel" but it is important to keep in mind most of what he fought for was warranted and he was the victim of a posthumous smear campaign.

I cannot possibly reiterate enough times just how messed up the ancien regime was, yeah, not all nobility had power or wealth, like country nobility. But, unless you are the bourgeoise new money, titled and wealthy or court nobility. You along with the 99.9% (who is not the clergy or the second estate) might as well be getting by on scraps, Dangerous Liaisons (the book) touches on this conflict a lot.

Historical fiction is by nature fiction it shouldn't be moralized differently from any other fiction.

The French (and by extension European + American) empires never really 'died' they just rebranded themselves a lot.

[lafilledesoie]

Jaillisse l’étincelle Et rougisse la cendre! Nous irons à nos anciens dieux.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, cité par Pierre Vial, Les fêtes païennes des quatre saisons

[bizarreauhavre]

The smell of the heavens, 1962, (surrealist movie).

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Oil Painting, 1782, French.

By Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun.

Portraying the artist in a straw hat and puce dress.

The Nationally Gallery.