skip to main |
skip to sidebar
We had an interesting discussion in my French class this week about the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. We started by talking about Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, but then New Guy raised an issue that kicked off a deb
ate I seem to be having on a regular basis lately. New Guy – who is a lawyer and struck me as rather right wing and conservative (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”) – suggested that Europe after the Enlightenment and Revolution was much more violent than it had been under the ancien régime. Therefore, he implied, these movements had been generally bad things, which had led to 20th century nightmares like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I’m well aware that the 19th century in Europe was heinously violent, with revolution after revolution in Germany and elsewhere, but I don’t know enough to make any intelligent comment on the causal connections between those events and the rise of a Hitler or a Stalin. Nor am I trying to downplay the scale of the wars and atrocities that have scarred the world over the last century.
But I do know enough to say that the world before the 18th century was no picnic, either. I think there is a certain romanticism about the distant past – especially our ‘own’ past – that precludes many people from seeing and engaging with its less palatable aspects. The History Channel and Hollywood have a lot to answer for here, with their relentless spectacles of ‘merrie olde Englande’ and the romance of medieval chivalry. But life in general was brutish, particularly if you were female, young or poor.
When people talk about the world being more violent today, I suspect they’re only considering the carnage they’re seeing on the news every night. They’re not considering that in places like England and France, public torture and judicial murder used to be an entertaining day out for the family. (Can Grand Theft Auto really compare to seeing your neighbour being hung, drawn and quartered or burned to death as a witch or heretic?) And while domestic violence is a huge problem in our society, men no longer have the unquestioned legal right to beat their servants, wives and children. (Let’s not forget that masters could beat their apprentices, too, a form of ‘workplace bargaining’ that draconian bosses would probably love to revive.) People who say society is more violent today are also forgetting the completely arbitrary nature of justice a few hundred years ago, when a starving peasant who killed a rabbit for the pot could find himself following it to oblivion at his lord’s pleasure.
And then there’s the Renaissance, which is often portrayed as a sort of golden age when everyone sat around marvelling at the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel. It was also a period when the countries
of Europe were almost constantly at war with each other and with themselves. I heard a podcast a while ago in which Thomas Laqueur was talking about the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre of August, 1572. Over three days, something like 3000 people were killed in the city of Paris – at that time a city of perhaps 100,000 souls. Think about the impact of violent death on that scale on a population that size. If you live in an average-sized town, imagine what would happen if that many of your fellow residents were suddenly victims of the most extreme and nasty murders. There can have been very few, if any, people who weren’t directly affected by a slaughter that had the streets of Paris literally running ankle-deep in blood.
I don’t know, what do you think? Did the democratic revolutions of the 19th century bring more bad than good? Is the media making us paranoid by feeding us a constant diet of death and destruction (fear sells, after all)? Or is the world truly a more violent place now than it was a few hundred years ago?
* The illustration is a 15th century woodcut of the Dance of Death, an extremely common subject of late medieval art.
** The photo is of the Château d’Amboise. In 1560, a political plot to kidnap the young king François II was exposed here. Between 1200 and 1500 conspirators were executed and their bodies strung up from the château’s walls.
Mais oui, it is Bastille Day and as usual, I’m raising glass of champagne in honour of liberté, égalité and fraternité and looking forward to the traditional French win in today’s Tour de France stage.
I’ve always been quite stirred by this celebration of reason and enlightenment, but I was just a wee bit disillusioned to find out how undemocratic France’s shift towards democracy really was. Sure, you could have your liberty, your equality and your brotherhood – just as long as you were, well, a ‘brother’. A property-owning male, in other words.
The early days of the French Revolution had carried heady promise for women intent on carving out an active role for themselves in the political governance of the emerging Republic. The sans-culotte women of Paris are famed for their role in forcing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to leave Versailles for house arrest in Paris, while smart, fiery and passionate women took leading roles in political organisations like the Jacobin Club and even formed their own short-lived Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Théroigne de Méricourt, swaggering through Paris dressed in her riding habit, took up arms to fight for the radical changes she wanted to see in society. And Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Women decried the absence of women from the visionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and argued for full suffrage as well as for women to be allowed to be elected to the parlements and to act as magistrates. Olympe paid the ultimate price for her temerity, being guillotined during the Terror.
Many of the early gains these women made in the Revolution were too fragile to survive Napoléon’s ultra-conservative social reforms. But their enduring inspiration fired up generations of feminists who came after them, and who fought and continue to fight for women's rights to full citizenship and full humanity. So today, I’ll raise my glass in memory of Olympe, Théroigne and all the thousands of nameless women who were brave enough to write and campaign and stand side-by-side with men at the barricades, fighting for a more just world.
Last month, I wrote about the issue of gendering public space and how tactics used to constrain and silence people in the physical world have emerged in the online world, often in distinctly gendered forms. I had a number of replies, both in the comments here and via email, recounting personal experiences of this. I also received this comment:
For better or for worse, crude sexualised insults are part of the blogosphere's vernacular... The correctness or otherwise of insisting on sanitised discourse is worth pondering.
And ponder I did. Was I being a hopeless idealist? Or simply talking out of my ass? (My commenter, who is an IRL friend, would probably vouch for the latter and then prescribe a calming glass of pinot gris). Perhaps I didn’t make my point clearly enough, leading my commenter to assume I’m advocating some sort of censorship. I’m not. Quite the opposite, in fact. I understand very well that censorship has always been the servant of political, social and cultural oppression. But when people scorn a valid argument or silence the speaker by using humiliation or intimidation, or by wilfully misrepresenting what was said, that is a form of censorship, albeit an informal one. What else can it be called when power is deliberately wielded to deter others from voicing their opinions or beliefs, whether the forum is real or virtual?
Maybe it’s my naturally rebellious side, but I’m also bothered by the notion that just because something exists (crude sexualised insults in the blogosphere) that is the way it must be and we should all just lump it. Crude sexualised insults used to be much more widely accepted as part of normal workplace culture, too. They function as a way to police boundaries and enforce hierarchy, and things only change because people get to the point where they refuse to passively accept it, “like it or not”.
Passive acceptance is what enables a mass media culture (I almost wrote ‘ass media’ there – Freudian slip much??) that is governed by the lowest common denominator, where intellect is openly mocked and political debate is reduced to facile sound bites and vacuous rhetoric. Really, how low does the lowest common denominator need to get before we stop placidly tolerating it? Frankly, I’m with Howard Beale: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
Let me be clear here. I’m not talking about common or garden variety swearing (to object to that would make me a hypocrite of the highest order). Nor am I offended by sexual banter per se: It can be plenty of fun to indulge in when it’s exchanged between people operating on a basis of
equal power and mutual consent. But sexualised language becomes more problematic when it’s used to construct and perpetuate unequal relationships of power. The sexual slur has always played a potent role in political and social discourse because it is so effective at achieving this end. As one demonstration this effectiveness, consider the scandalous, scurrilous and downright pornographic pamphlets produced about Marie Antoinette and other hated representatives of the ancien regime. Their accusations and lurid portrayals were generally ludicrous (and frequently physically impossible except on the part of a contortionist – or maybe I’m just not as flexible as I used to be). But this highly sexualised polemic, particularly that directed against the queen, played a critical strategic role in the French Revolution and, especially, in The Terror of 1793-4*.
All of this is to say that the sexual epithet is rarely transparent or simple. It carries with it a host of deeper claims – often the unconscious products of gender, race and/or class privilege – about who can and cannot hold power.
When we bridle at such usage, either online or in the real world, we’re usually told to let it slide or that we should ‘lighten up’ and ‘get a sense of humour’. Sometimes, ignoring it or walking away is the best course of action, especially when it’s an argument you know you can’t win (cue the old adage about refusing to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent). But not always. Sometimes we need to expose and confront the claims that inhere in sexualised insults, to refuse to brush them off as ‘just jokes’. Sometimes, we need to challenge ourselves to think more deeply about the potency of language to create and define our realities. And then we need to ask ourselves if those are the realities within which we truly want to exist.
* For more on this, check out the excellent book Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen
ate I seem to be having on a regular basis lately. New Guy – who is a lawyer and struck me as rather right wing and conservative (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”) – suggested that Europe after the Enlightenment and Revolution was much more violent than it had been under the ancien régime. Therefore, he implied, these movements had been generally bad things, which had led to 20th century nightmares like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I’m well aware that the 19th century in Europe was heinously violent, with revolution after revolution in Germany and elsewhere, but I don’t know enough to make any intelligent comment on the causal connections between those events and the rise of a Hitler or a Stalin. Nor am I trying to downplay the scale of the wars and atrocities that have scarred the world over the last century.
of Europe were almost constantly at war with each other and with themselves. I heard a podcast a while ago in which Thomas Laqueur was talking about the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre of August, 1572. Over three days, something like 3000 people were killed in the city of Paris – at that time a city of perhaps 100,000 souls. Think about the impact of violent death on that scale on a population that size. If you live in an average-sized town, imagine what would happen if that many of your fellow residents were suddenly victims of the most extreme and nasty murders. There can have been very few, if any, people who weren’t directly affected by a slaughter that had the streets of Paris literally running ankle-deep in blood.
Posts
