Over the two centuries before 1789 political life was abolished; no way remained in which the ordinary people of France could participate in public affairs. As for the aristocracy, they retained their privileges (exemption from tax), lost much of their wealth and practically all of their power. Power was sucked entirely into the state: i.e. the king, operating a bureaucracy so centralised and all-pervasive that De T calls it ‘in effect socialist’ (not a good word in his vocabulary); the state we associate with modern France (and later the Soviet Union) was in fact completely in place before the revolution; only the class structure changed.
So: a population with no political or civic experience within the memory of several generations, and no political debate or discourse except the highly abstract, rarified, reason-driven disquisitions of the politically naive, inexperience and irresponsible philosophes with their all-or-nothing, everything-by-reason, clean-slate, rebuild-human-nature ideas -- which one way and another got through to the rural and urban poor and, in the absence of the moral inhibition and sense of proportion that come with living in communities that regulate themselves, licensed the ruthless implementation of abstract schemes in the revolution and, during the Terror, the unrestrained indulgence of the most savage impulses.
What was established thereby, De T says, was a new régime in which equality was the watchword -- equality as subjects of the state -- and liberty featured not at all, having been ignored as by all the 18th century treatises (the philosophes had only contempt for the idea of popular participation in government). And we ended up with the revival in a new guise of the absolutist state, equally unchallengeable and equally oppressive.
Discuss.
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Monday, 22 November 2010
Scum of the Earth
Just read Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler, 1941 -- nice edition by Eland, 1991. Can’t quite remember why I decided to get it - I think Koestler was in the papers recently, was it a new biography, him screwing the wives of lots of famous people? Anyway, it’s the Fall of France, an episode that interests me, and he just got out of it by the skin of his teeth having been arrested, though Hungarian, before hostilities started, along with many other exiles, including from Germany -- the French ruling class, as he calls them, preparing to do what Hitler wanted before he even attacked.
So, first imprisoned and throughout in diplomatic and bureaucratic limbo, Koestler joined the Foreign Legion hoping to be posted to Africa, was re-arrested and shipped to Le Vernet, a horrific French concentration camp in the Pyrenees, already full of survivors, now reduced to the state of typical camp inmates, from the International Brigade -- fighters who’d escaped from Spain. This was in undefeated France still, note.
The Germans easily knock out the French army, refugees from the north jam the roads to the south, the country is divided into occupied and Vichy, led by the ancient Pétain for whom Koestler expresses unmitigated contempt)... Koestler in the end he escapes via Marseilles and ‘two African ports’ (he’s revealing no secrets -- in 1940-41 when he was writing others might be trying to use the same route) to Lisbon (‘the last open gate of a concentration camp extending over the greater part of the Continent’s surface’ - 242) and finally England where he’s interned in Pentonville and then joins the Pioneer Corps. Meanwhile the democratic German exiles who were his friends, including his Paris neighbour Walter Benjamin, commit suicide or are handed over the the Gestapo and killed.
Most shocking is the near connivance of the French ruling classes, even before the defeat, in the takeover by Hitler.
The ruling class, Koestler said, scared by the coming to power of the Popular Front in 1936, had decided that ‘the barbarians’ (Germans) ‘had begun to develop truly civilised ideas: the abolition of trade unions, the dissolution of the Left-wing parties. Hitler’s only fault was that he was a German. Otherwise he would be a better “guarantee or security” for vested interests than an unruly French people in arms’ (239). And the bureaucracy reflected that position.
With their concentration camps -- not as murderous as the German ones but brutal and sadistic nevertheless -- they (certain politicians and the bureaucracy) were more or less anticipating the Nazi regime.
Those who prepared the way for Vichy had put these men in camps....For every ignominy they made the, prisoners suffer, they comforted them with the argument that the ignominies of the Gestapo would be worse; and when the cock had crowed thrice, they delivered them properly and solemnly into the Gestapo's hands.
In the days of the French collapse there was a last chance of saving those martyred men by shipping them to North Africa or, if that was too much to ask, by giving them a chance to escape. They refused. They left them in their barbed-wire trap, to hand them over complete, all accounts properly made out, all confidential records of their past (given trustingly to the French authorities) neatly filed. What a find for Himmler's black-clothed men ! Three hundred thousand pounds of democratic flesh, all labelled, alive, and only slightly damaged. (140)
Also very interesting on the communists with their virtues and blind adherence to the party line, right or wrong, which left them in a hopeless state when Stalin suddenly became Hitler’s ally (Koestler had been a communist but had left).
And on the chaos of the desperate escape from the north of France to the south: ‘It was a particular sadistic irony of Fate, to have turned the most petit-bourgeoise, fussy, stay-at-home people in the world into a nation of tramps’ (165) -- and then the adverts in the papers, thousands each day, from families seeking news of their children: Paris-Soir ‘Says there are thousands of “globe-trotters aged six and eight on the roads of France”’ (225); ‘André Roure, who disappeared June 17th near Azay-le-Rideau, please communicate with parents via Le Temps Clermont-Ferrand.’
Despite the rush in which he says he wrote the book, the writing is often terrific and moving. On leaving Marseilles and France finally on a ship: ‘The lighthouses emerging from the black water, with slowly turning green and red beams of light, were the last outposts of Continental France, sleeping under the stars in her enormous, dishonoured nakedness, humiliated, wretched and beloved’ (235-6).
That theme of sexual humiliation -- interesting in view of what that biography reported -- is deployed to powerful effect in his summing up of the state of a France that has put a psychological ‘Chinese Wall’ around itself, refusing to acknowledge the new reality of Europe:
Inside, on a brittle Louis XIV chair, sat an elderly, sharp-faced Marianne, her once lovely chestnut hair replaced by a toupet. Scared to death by the noise of the people Outside the Wall, she waited for the barbarian prince to save her. She knew, of course, what price she would have to pay; and while trying to convince herself that he would behave like a gentleman, she waited with a shame-faced curiosity for her dishonour. And when it had happened, and the saviour had knocked off her Phrygian helmet and her wig, she looked into the mirror with horror, and the world looked with horror at her face. (240)
So, first imprisoned and throughout in diplomatic and bureaucratic limbo, Koestler joined the Foreign Legion hoping to be posted to Africa, was re-arrested and shipped to Le Vernet, a horrific French concentration camp in the Pyrenees, already full of survivors, now reduced to the state of typical camp inmates, from the International Brigade -- fighters who’d escaped from Spain. This was in undefeated France still, note.
The Germans easily knock out the French army, refugees from the north jam the roads to the south, the country is divided into occupied and Vichy, led by the ancient Pétain for whom Koestler expresses unmitigated contempt)... Koestler in the end he escapes via Marseilles and ‘two African ports’ (he’s revealing no secrets -- in 1940-41 when he was writing others might be trying to use the same route) to Lisbon (‘the last open gate of a concentration camp extending over the greater part of the Continent’s surface’ - 242) and finally England where he’s interned in Pentonville and then joins the Pioneer Corps. Meanwhile the democratic German exiles who were his friends, including his Paris neighbour Walter Benjamin, commit suicide or are handed over the the Gestapo and killed.
Most shocking is the near connivance of the French ruling classes, even before the defeat, in the takeover by Hitler.
The ruling class, Koestler said, scared by the coming to power of the Popular Front in 1936, had decided that ‘the barbarians’ (Germans) ‘had begun to develop truly civilised ideas: the abolition of trade unions, the dissolution of the Left-wing parties. Hitler’s only fault was that he was a German. Otherwise he would be a better “guarantee or security” for vested interests than an unruly French people in arms’ (239). And the bureaucracy reflected that position.
With their concentration camps -- not as murderous as the German ones but brutal and sadistic nevertheless -- they (certain politicians and the bureaucracy) were more or less anticipating the Nazi regime.
Those who prepared the way for Vichy had put these men in camps....For every ignominy they made the, prisoners suffer, they comforted them with the argument that the ignominies of the Gestapo would be worse; and when the cock had crowed thrice, they delivered them properly and solemnly into the Gestapo's hands.
In the days of the French collapse there was a last chance of saving those martyred men by shipping them to North Africa or, if that was too much to ask, by giving them a chance to escape. They refused. They left them in their barbed-wire trap, to hand them over complete, all accounts properly made out, all confidential records of their past (given trustingly to the French authorities) neatly filed. What a find for Himmler's black-clothed men ! Three hundred thousand pounds of democratic flesh, all labelled, alive, and only slightly damaged. (140)
Also very interesting on the communists with their virtues and blind adherence to the party line, right or wrong, which left them in a hopeless state when Stalin suddenly became Hitler’s ally (Koestler had been a communist but had left).
And on the chaos of the desperate escape from the north of France to the south: ‘It was a particular sadistic irony of Fate, to have turned the most petit-bourgeoise, fussy, stay-at-home people in the world into a nation of tramps’ (165) -- and then the adverts in the papers, thousands each day, from families seeking news of their children: Paris-Soir ‘Says there are thousands of “globe-trotters aged six and eight on the roads of France”’ (225); ‘André Roure, who disappeared June 17th near Azay-le-Rideau, please communicate with parents via Le Temps Clermont-Ferrand.’
Despite the rush in which he says he wrote the book, the writing is often terrific and moving. On leaving Marseilles and France finally on a ship: ‘The lighthouses emerging from the black water, with slowly turning green and red beams of light, were the last outposts of Continental France, sleeping under the stars in her enormous, dishonoured nakedness, humiliated, wretched and beloved’ (235-6).
That theme of sexual humiliation -- interesting in view of what that biography reported -- is deployed to powerful effect in his summing up of the state of a France that has put a psychological ‘Chinese Wall’ around itself, refusing to acknowledge the new reality of Europe:
Inside, on a brittle Louis XIV chair, sat an elderly, sharp-faced Marianne, her once lovely chestnut hair replaced by a toupet. Scared to death by the noise of the people Outside the Wall, she waited for the barbarian prince to save her. She knew, of course, what price she would have to pay; and while trying to convince herself that he would behave like a gentleman, she waited with a shame-faced curiosity for her dishonour. And when it had happened, and the saviour had knocked off her Phrygian helmet and her wig, she looked into the mirror with horror, and the world looked with horror at her face. (240)
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Do animals think like us?
Les animaux pensent-ils comme nous? is tomorrow’s topic at the Café Philo in Bondy (I presume that’s a town) for children, 3:30 to 5:00. (Then at 7:00 for adults there’s ‘Is there no happiness but in the moment?’.)
I like the idea of kids nipping down the philosophy caff after school.
Meanwhile in Le Havre there are ‘Philopop’ sessions, the first on ‘Education and Childhood’: ‘What are the reasons why education is necessary? what should its aim be?’’
These from the notices at the end of Philosophie magazine, which I still take (see label philosophy) down the side though rarely read much of -- there’s more than I could manage monthly even if it were in English -- 98 pages this month -- and even though there are lots of witty coloured pictures. Contents include: ‘What is life?’ ‘How could Aristotle justify slavery?’ and the monthly question this issue (‘Vos Questions’) is from ‘Nicolas, 6 ans’ who asks: ‘Clocks tell us the time but they don’t give a damn about the time. (...mais le temps elles s’en fichent). Is there a time for clocks? (or, Do clocks have a time?)’
Apparently there was an hors-série issue (?special issue) on ‘Tintin in the land of the philosophers’, about which some readers have written in with learned points arising from their great ‘intérêt tintinologique’. Perhaps I'll get it.
Debates on Obama are in this issue and topics that in this country would hardly count as philosophical, but also an article and pull-out on Voltaire, stuff on dreams and on night, interviews with philosophers, an article on Locke, book reviews (a Houellebecq novel, book by Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody attacking European ethnocentrism and a reissue of Sartre’s Sketch of a theory of the emotions).
One gets the sense that philosophy in France is broad and capacious and that the spirit it expresses is widely distributed in French society. Striking how many of the authors are teachers not in universities but in schools.
I like the idea of kids nipping down the philosophy caff after school.
Meanwhile in Le Havre there are ‘Philopop’ sessions, the first on ‘Education and Childhood’: ‘What are the reasons why education is necessary? what should its aim be?’’
These from the notices at the end of Philosophie magazine, which I still take (see label philosophy) down the side though rarely read much of -- there’s more than I could manage monthly even if it were in English -- 98 pages this month -- and even though there are lots of witty coloured pictures. Contents include: ‘What is life?’ ‘How could Aristotle justify slavery?’ and the monthly question this issue (‘Vos Questions’) is from ‘Nicolas, 6 ans’ who asks: ‘Clocks tell us the time but they don’t give a damn about the time. (...mais le temps elles s’en fichent). Is there a time for clocks? (or, Do clocks have a time?)’
Apparently there was an hors-série issue (?special issue) on ‘Tintin in the land of the philosophers’, about which some readers have written in with learned points arising from their great ‘intérêt tintinologique’. Perhaps I'll get it.
Debates on Obama are in this issue and topics that in this country would hardly count as philosophical, but also an article and pull-out on Voltaire, stuff on dreams and on night, interviews with philosophers, an article on Locke, book reviews (a Houellebecq novel, book by Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody attacking European ethnocentrism and a reissue of Sartre’s Sketch of a theory of the emotions).
One gets the sense that philosophy in France is broad and capacious and that the spirit it expresses is widely distributed in French society. Striking how many of the authors are teachers not in universities but in schools.
Monday, 30 March 2009
The differentness of France: Philosophie
Sad how France, which when I was young seemed a completely independent, excitingly different culture parallel with and equal to our own, now seems marginalised in the more global scene, just one subculture in a Europe that seems less significant by the day in comparison with the Anglophone world and the emerging giants in the east.
But Philosophie Magazine [click on the philosophy label in the right margin] stays as distinctive as ever, with no English equivalent that I know of. As I've said, if I were an English teacher now there’s stuff in it I'd be using.
March issue: cover theme: Pourquoi fait-on des enfants? Good question, good answers, good pics.
And how about this: in silence, write 600 words on ‘Silence’. We might once have had to in an O Level English Language exam, and we can imagine the sort of light, knowing, belles-lettristical whimsy we might have churned out. But which of us would have come up with this?
…. Silence has no need of silence to make itself heard. On the contrary. Whenever we mute a sound we testify to it. Every sentence acknowledges, in hidden words, the empire of the silence that bounds it. The word chatters, says Ionesco. The word is literature. The word is an escape. The word prevents silence from speaking. Silence is the last word of gabble, the unspoken of all speculation. Before its function in communication, speech represents a tacit pact amongst human beings who want to furnish the silence like an empty room, and then gag it. A wasted effort…. What is it that silence whispers? The solitude of humanity in the midst of things, and their contingent necessity to be just what they are. If the world wasn’t silent, we wouldn’t ask it so many questions. Confirming chance and disavowing reason, silence hallucinates exhalations of reality as the desert produces mirages of an oasis. No one would have a taste for hidden truths nor a worry about keeping ourselves amused without some direct intuition of an incurable silence. Silence is the father of God.
(These bits are from the middle. Some of my translation is just guessing.)
How French, how over-the-top ridiculous, how seductive. As with so much French writing, one wants to ask, exactly what sort of claims are these? Empirical? Universal? Necessary or a priori? How does he know? What would it be to argue against them? And I recall reading that French philosophy owes as much to rhetoric as to logic. How different…
The author is Raphäel Enthoven who we’re told has a programme on the Arte channel called Philosophie, Sundays at 1:00. If I could I'd watch it. Meanwhile, I love reading this stuff in which there’s just enough that isn’t nonsense.
Elsewhere there’s a conversation between the ‘Christian agnostic’ Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and the ‘Muslim existentialist’ Abdennour Bidar. Both rejected their upbringing and education, that of Schmitt atheistic and then (under Derrida) deconstructionist, Bidar’s ‘Muslim intellectual’ and then Sufi. Schmitt finds rationality lacking, Bidar mysticism without rationality. Weaned on the idea of the absurdity of the universe and, as a result having dried up as a writer, Schmitt turns to the mystical and aesthetic:
‘In western modernity, man isn’t God’s inheritor, he takes his place. He takes himself to be the source of meaning. In itself the world is absurd and meaningless, and it’s human consciousness that gives rise to the universe of meanings. ‘Absurdism’ comes from an immoderate pride, but in practice leads only to anguish. I increasingly detached myself from it to make contact again with mystery, the idea that there’s a meaning of which I'm not necessarily the source.’ Meanwhile, Bidar rewrites Islam to make it compatible with reason while resisting ‘absurdism’.
Plus: an ‘author dossier’ on Aristotle; an interview with Stanley Cavell, the American philosopher who writes about Shakespeare and cinema as well as the standard topics; a discussion of Marx and Engels’ claim that ‘philosophy is to the study of the real world as masturbation is to sexual love’; something on Deleuze; some Japanesse stuff; Montaigne…. I realise I'm only half way through and already April’s issue has arrived.
But Philosophie Magazine [click on the philosophy label in the right margin] stays as distinctive as ever, with no English equivalent that I know of. As I've said, if I were an English teacher now there’s stuff in it I'd be using.
March issue: cover theme: Pourquoi fait-on des enfants? Good question, good answers, good pics.
And how about this: in silence, write 600 words on ‘Silence’. We might once have had to in an O Level English Language exam, and we can imagine the sort of light, knowing, belles-lettristical whimsy we might have churned out. But which of us would have come up with this?…. Silence has no need of silence to make itself heard. On the contrary. Whenever we mute a sound we testify to it. Every sentence acknowledges, in hidden words, the empire of the silence that bounds it. The word chatters, says Ionesco. The word is literature. The word is an escape. The word prevents silence from speaking. Silence is the last word of gabble, the unspoken of all speculation. Before its function in communication, speech represents a tacit pact amongst human beings who want to furnish the silence like an empty room, and then gag it. A wasted effort…. What is it that silence whispers? The solitude of humanity in the midst of things, and their contingent necessity to be just what they are. If the world wasn’t silent, we wouldn’t ask it so many questions. Confirming chance and disavowing reason, silence hallucinates exhalations of reality as the desert produces mirages of an oasis. No one would have a taste for hidden truths nor a worry about keeping ourselves amused without some direct intuition of an incurable silence. Silence is the father of God.
(These bits are from the middle. Some of my translation is just guessing.)
How French, how over-the-top ridiculous, how seductive. As with so much French writing, one wants to ask, exactly what sort of claims are these? Empirical? Universal? Necessary or a priori? How does he know? What would it be to argue against them? And I recall reading that French philosophy owes as much to rhetoric as to logic. How different…
The author is Raphäel Enthoven who we’re told has a programme on the Arte channel called Philosophie, Sundays at 1:00. If I could I'd watch it. Meanwhile, I love reading this stuff in which there’s just enough that isn’t nonsense.
Elsewhere there’s a conversation between the ‘Christian agnostic’ Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and the ‘Muslim existentialist’ Abdennour Bidar. Both rejected their upbringing and education, that of Schmitt atheistic and then (under Derrida) deconstructionist, Bidar’s ‘Muslim intellectual’ and then Sufi. Schmitt finds rationality lacking, Bidar mysticism without rationality. Weaned on the idea of the absurdity of the universe and, as a result having dried up as a writer, Schmitt turns to the mystical and aesthetic:
‘In western modernity, man isn’t God’s inheritor, he takes his place. He takes himself to be the source of meaning. In itself the world is absurd and meaningless, and it’s human consciousness that gives rise to the universe of meanings. ‘Absurdism’ comes from an immoderate pride, but in practice leads only to anguish. I increasingly detached myself from it to make contact again with mystery, the idea that there’s a meaning of which I'm not necessarily the source.’ Meanwhile, Bidar rewrites Islam to make it compatible with reason while resisting ‘absurdism’.
Plus: an ‘author dossier’ on Aristotle; an interview with Stanley Cavell, the American philosopher who writes about Shakespeare and cinema as well as the standard topics; a discussion of Marx and Engels’ claim that ‘philosophy is to the study of the real world as masturbation is to sexual love’; something on Deleuze; some Japanesse stuff; Montaigne…. I realise I'm only half way through and already April’s issue has arrived.
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Carlyle's French Revolution: 3 Champ-de-Mars
Whistler painted Carlyle, I find:
So now we know Carlyle had a beard and didn’t shave his head. The fact is, painted portraits don't often tell us much.
To our real business. In his set-piece scenes Carlyle’s history is as gripping as a Scott novel -- as he explicitly intended. Here’s one. (As my intention here is mainly to give the flavour of the book with a few selected passages, in the hope of convincing somebody that it’s worth reading, and even reading out in school, I'll print the extract below without comment.) It's from Part II Book I Chapter 12 (p298 in The Modern Library); Chapter 2.1.XII in Gutenberg online.
The background: In an uprush of patriotic fervour, all France is to swear a universal oath of brotherhood on the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, on 14th July 1790, in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars, which superhuman efforts by an enthusiastic populace have prepared for the great event, converting the Field of Mars into an amphitheatre. On the morning of what became known as the Feast of Pikes, cold for July though it is,…
***
Two hundred thousand Patriotic Men; and, twice as good, one hundred thousand Patriotic Women, all decked and glorified as one can fancy, sit waiting in this Champ-de-Mars.
….On the heights of Chaillot are many-coloured undulating groups; round and far on, over all the circling heights that embosom Paris, it is as one more or less peopled Amphitheatre; which the eye grows dim with measuring. Nay heights, as was before hinted, have cannon; and a floating-battery of cannon is on the Seine. When eye fails, ear shall serve; and all France properly is but one Amphitheatre: for in paved town and unpaved hamlet, men walk listening; till the muffled thunder sound audible on their horizon, that they too may begin swearing and firing! (Deux Amis, v. 168.) But now, to streams of music, come Federates enough,—for they have assembled on the Boulevard Saint-Antoine or thereby, and come marching through the City, with their Eighty-three Department Banners, and blessings not loud but deep; comes National Assembly, and takes seat under its Canopy; comes Royalty, and takes seat on a throne beside it. And Lafayette, on white charger, is here, and all the civic Functionaries; and the Federates form dances, till their strictly military evolutions and manoeuvres can begin.
Evolutions and manoeuvres? Task not the pen of mortal to describe them: truant imagination droops;—declares that it is not worth while. There is wheeling and sweeping, to slow, to quick, and double quick-time: Sieur Motier, or Generalissimo Lafayette, for they are one and the same, and he is General of France, in the King's stead, for four-and-twenty hours; Sieur Motier must step forth, with that sublime chivalrous gait of his; solemnly ascend the steps of the Fatherland's Altar, in sight of Heaven and of the scarcely breathing Earth; and, under the creak of those swinging Cassolettes, 'pressing his sword's point firmly there,' pronounce the Oath, To King, to Law, and Nation (not to mention 'grains' with their circulating), in his own name and that of armed France. Whereat there is waving of banners and acclaim sufficient. The National Assembly must swear, standing in its place; the King himself audibly. The King swears; and now be the welkin split with vivats; let citizens enfranchised embrace, each smiting heartily his palm into his fellow's; and armed Federates clang their arms; above all, that floating battery speak! It has spoken,—to the four corners of France. From eminence to eminence, bursts the thunder; faint-heard, loud-repeated. What a stone, cast into what a lake; in circles that do not grow fainter. From Arras to Avignon; from Metz to Bayonne! Over Orleans and Blois it rolls, in cannon-recitative; Puy bellows of it amid his granite mountains; Pau where is the shell-cradle of Great Henri. At far Marseilles, one can think, the ruddy evening witnesses it; over the deep-blue Mediterranean waters, the Castle of If ruddy-tinted darts forth, from every cannon's mouth, its tongue of fire; and all the people shout: Yes, France is free. O glorious France that has burst out so; into universal sound and smoke; and attained—the Phrygian Cap of Liberty! In all Towns, Trees of Liberty also may be planted; with or without advantage. Said we not, it is the highest stretch attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps attainable?
The Thespian Art, unfortunately, one must still call it; for behold there, on this Field of Mars, the National Banners, before there could be any swearing, were to be all blessed. A most proper operation; since surely without Heaven's blessing bestowed, say even, audibly or inaudibly sought, no Earthly banner or contrivance can prove victorious: but now the means of doing it? By what thrice-divine Franklin thunder-rod shall miraculous fire be drawn out of Heaven; and descend gently, life-giving, with health to the souls of men? Alas, by the simplest: by Two Hundred shaven-crowned Individuals, 'in snow-white albs, with tricolor girdles,' arranged on the steps of Fatherland's Altar; and, at their head for spokesman, Soul's Overseer Talleyrand-Perigord! These shall act as miraculous thunder-rod,—to such length as they can. O ye deep azure Heavens, and thou green all-nursing Earth; ye Streams ever-flowing; deciduous Forests that die and are born again, continually, like the sons of men; stone Mountains that die daily with every rain-shower, yet are not dead and levelled for ages of ages, nor born again (it seems) but with new world-explosions, and such tumultuous seething and tumbling, steam half way to the Moon; O thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwellingplace of the UNNAMED; O spirit, lastly, of Man, who mouldest and modellest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see,—is not there a miracle: That some French mortal should, we say not have believed, but pretended to imagine that he believed that Talleyrand and Two Hundred pieces of white Calico could do it!
Here, however, we are to remark with the sorrowing Historians of that day, that suddenly, while Episcopus Talleyrand, long-stoled, with mitre and tricolor belt, was yet but hitching up the Altar-steps, to do his miracle, the material Heaven grew black; a north-wind, moaning cold moisture, began to sing; and there descended a very deluge of rain. Sad to see! The thirty-staired Seats, all round our Amphitheatre, get instantaneously slated with mere umbrellas, fallacious when so thick set: our antique Cassolettes become Water-pots; their incense-smoke gone hissing, in a whiff of muddy vapour. Alas, instead of vivats, there is nothing now but the furious peppering and rattling. From three to four hundred thousand human individuals feel that they have a skin; happily impervious. The General's sash runs water: how all military banners droop; and will not wave, but lazily flap, as if metamorphosed into painted tin-banners! Worse, far worse, these hundred thousand, such is the Historian's testimony, of the fairest of France! Their snowy muslins all splashed and draggled; the ostrich feather shrunk shamefully to the backbone of a feather: all caps are ruined; innermost pasteboard molten into its original pap: Beauty no longer swims decorated in her garniture, like Love-goddess hidden-revealed in her Paphian clouds, but struggles in disastrous imprisonment in it, for 'the shape was noticeable;' and now only sympathetic interjections, titterings, teeheeings, and resolute good-humour will avail. A deluge; an incessant sheet or fluid-column of rain;—such that our Overseer's very mitre must be filled; not a mitre, but a filled and leaky fire-bucket on his reverend head!—Regardless of which, Overseer Talleyrand performs his miracle: the Blessing of Talleyrand, another than that of Jacob, is on all the Eighty-three departmental flags of France; which wave or flap, with such thankfulness as needs. Towards three o'clock, the sun beams out again: the remaining evolutions can be transacted under bright heavens, though with decorations much damaged. (Deux Amis, v. 143-179.)….
In this way, and in such ways, however, has the Feast of Pikes danced itself off; gallant Federates wending homewards, towards every point of the compass, with feverish nerves, heart and head much heated; some of them, indeed, as Dampmartin's elderly respectable friend, from Strasbourg, quite 'burnt out with liquors,' and flickering towards extinction. (Dampmartin, Evénemens, i. 144-184.) The Feast of Pikes has danced itself off, and become defunct, and the ghost of a Feast;—nothing of it now remaining but this vision in men's memory; and the place that knew it (for the slope of that Champ-de-Mars is crumbled to half the original height (Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, viii. 25).) now knowing it no more. Undoubtedly one of the memorablest National Hightides. Never or hardly ever, as we said, was Oath sworn with such heart-effusion, emphasis and expenditure of joyance; and then it was broken irremediably within year and day. Ah, why? When the swearing of it was so heavenly-joyful, bosom clasped to bosom, and Five-and-twenty million hearts all burning together: O ye inexorable Destinies, why?—Partly because it was sworn with such over-joyance; but chiefly, indeed, for an older reason: that Sin had come into the world and Misery by Sin! These Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force over them, to bind and guide; neither in them, more than heretofore, is guiding force, or rule of just living: how then, while they all go rushing at such a pace, on unknown ways, with no bridle, towards no aim, can hurlyburly unutterable fail? For verily not Federation-rosepink is the colour of this Earth and her work: not by outbursts of noble-sentiment, but with far other ammunition, shall a man front the world.
But how wise, in all cases, to 'husband your fire;' to keep it deep down, rather, as genial radical-heat! Explosions, the forciblest, and never so well directed, are questionable; far oftenest futile, always frightfully wasteful: but think of a man, of a Nation of men, spending its whole stock of fire in one artificial Firework! So have we seen fond weddings (for individuals, like Nations, have their Hightides) celebrated with an outburst of triumph and deray, at which the elderly shook their heads. Better had a serious cheerfulness been; for the enterprise was great. Fond pair! the more triumphant ye feel, and victorious over terrestrial evil, which seems all abolished, the wider-eyed will your disappointment be to find terrestrial evil still extant. "And why extant?" will each of you cry: "Because my false mate has played the traitor: evil was abolished; I meant faithfully, and did, or would have done." Whereby the oversweet moon of honey changes itself into long years of vinegar; perhaps divulsive vinegar, like Hannibal's.
Shall we say then, the French Nation has led Royalty, or wooed and teased poor Royalty to lead her, to the hymeneal Fatherland's Altar, in such oversweet manner; and has, most thoughtlessly, to celebrate the nuptials with due shine and demonstration,—burnt her bed?
Carlyle’s comment on all this: It was nothing but empty theatre, ‘the highest stretch attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps attainable?’
‘How true also… is it that no man or Nation of men, conscious of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing, doing other than a small one!’ (286-Chapter 2.1.IX)
He contrasts the meaninglessness of such national theatricals with real historical movements such as the earlier uprising of the women of Paris who had marched to Versailles demanding bread:
‘Pardonable are human theatricalities; nay perhaps touching, like the passionate utterance of a tongue which with sincerity stammers; of a head which with insincerity babbles,—having gone distracted. Yet, in comparison with unpremeditated outbursts of Nature, such as an Insurrection of Women, how foisonless, unedifying, undelightful; like small ale palled, like an effervescence that has effervesced! Such scenes, coming of forethought, were they world-great, and never so cunningly devised, are at bottom mainly pasteboard and paint. But the others are original; emitted from the great everliving heart of Nature herself: what figure they will assume is unspeakably significant. To us, therefore, let the French National Solemn League, and Federation, be the highest recorded triumph of the Thespian Art; triumphant surely, since the whole Pit, which was of Twenty-five Millions, not only claps hands, but does itself spring on the boards and passionately set to playing there. And being such, be it treated as such: with sincere cursory admiration; with wonder from afar. A whole Nation gone mumming deserves so much; but deserves not that loving minuteness a Menadic Insurrection did.’
Unlike real historical developments, the Feast of Pikes, colossal spectacle though it was, meant nothing and had no consequences. Anarchy took its course: 'These Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force over them, to bind and guide' -- the immensity and unprecedented nature of this historical upsurge is one of his great themes.
Carlyle’s other observation worth noting: the fatuity of the artificial religious ritual -- he will have more to say of that later, when the Revolution sets up the Goddess of Reason.
So now we know Carlyle had a beard and didn’t shave his head. The fact is, painted portraits don't often tell us much.
To our real business. In his set-piece scenes Carlyle’s history is as gripping as a Scott novel -- as he explicitly intended. Here’s one. (As my intention here is mainly to give the flavour of the book with a few selected passages, in the hope of convincing somebody that it’s worth reading, and even reading out in school, I'll print the extract below without comment.) It's from Part II Book I Chapter 12 (p298 in The Modern Library); Chapter 2.1.XII in Gutenberg online.
The background: In an uprush of patriotic fervour, all France is to swear a universal oath of brotherhood on the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, on 14th July 1790, in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars, which superhuman efforts by an enthusiastic populace have prepared for the great event, converting the Field of Mars into an amphitheatre. On the morning of what became known as the Feast of Pikes, cold for July though it is,…
***
Two hundred thousand Patriotic Men; and, twice as good, one hundred thousand Patriotic Women, all decked and glorified as one can fancy, sit waiting in this Champ-de-Mars.
….On the heights of Chaillot are many-coloured undulating groups; round and far on, over all the circling heights that embosom Paris, it is as one more or less peopled Amphitheatre; which the eye grows dim with measuring. Nay heights, as was before hinted, have cannon; and a floating-battery of cannon is on the Seine. When eye fails, ear shall serve; and all France properly is but one Amphitheatre: for in paved town and unpaved hamlet, men walk listening; till the muffled thunder sound audible on their horizon, that they too may begin swearing and firing! (Deux Amis, v. 168.) But now, to streams of music, come Federates enough,—for they have assembled on the Boulevard Saint-Antoine or thereby, and come marching through the City, with their Eighty-three Department Banners, and blessings not loud but deep; comes National Assembly, and takes seat under its Canopy; comes Royalty, and takes seat on a throne beside it. And Lafayette, on white charger, is here, and all the civic Functionaries; and the Federates form dances, till their strictly military evolutions and manoeuvres can begin.
Evolutions and manoeuvres? Task not the pen of mortal to describe them: truant imagination droops;—declares that it is not worth while. There is wheeling and sweeping, to slow, to quick, and double quick-time: Sieur Motier, or Generalissimo Lafayette, for they are one and the same, and he is General of France, in the King's stead, for four-and-twenty hours; Sieur Motier must step forth, with that sublime chivalrous gait of his; solemnly ascend the steps of the Fatherland's Altar, in sight of Heaven and of the scarcely breathing Earth; and, under the creak of those swinging Cassolettes, 'pressing his sword's point firmly there,' pronounce the Oath, To King, to Law, and Nation (not to mention 'grains' with their circulating), in his own name and that of armed France. Whereat there is waving of banners and acclaim sufficient. The National Assembly must swear, standing in its place; the King himself audibly. The King swears; and now be the welkin split with vivats; let citizens enfranchised embrace, each smiting heartily his palm into his fellow's; and armed Federates clang their arms; above all, that floating battery speak! It has spoken,—to the four corners of France. From eminence to eminence, bursts the thunder; faint-heard, loud-repeated. What a stone, cast into what a lake; in circles that do not grow fainter. From Arras to Avignon; from Metz to Bayonne! Over Orleans and Blois it rolls, in cannon-recitative; Puy bellows of it amid his granite mountains; Pau where is the shell-cradle of Great Henri. At far Marseilles, one can think, the ruddy evening witnesses it; over the deep-blue Mediterranean waters, the Castle of If ruddy-tinted darts forth, from every cannon's mouth, its tongue of fire; and all the people shout: Yes, France is free. O glorious France that has burst out so; into universal sound and smoke; and attained—the Phrygian Cap of Liberty! In all Towns, Trees of Liberty also may be planted; with or without advantage. Said we not, it is the highest stretch attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps attainable?
The Thespian Art, unfortunately, one must still call it; for behold there, on this Field of Mars, the National Banners, before there could be any swearing, were to be all blessed. A most proper operation; since surely without Heaven's blessing bestowed, say even, audibly or inaudibly sought, no Earthly banner or contrivance can prove victorious: but now the means of doing it? By what thrice-divine Franklin thunder-rod shall miraculous fire be drawn out of Heaven; and descend gently, life-giving, with health to the souls of men? Alas, by the simplest: by Two Hundred shaven-crowned Individuals, 'in snow-white albs, with tricolor girdles,' arranged on the steps of Fatherland's Altar; and, at their head for spokesman, Soul's Overseer Talleyrand-Perigord! These shall act as miraculous thunder-rod,—to such length as they can. O ye deep azure Heavens, and thou green all-nursing Earth; ye Streams ever-flowing; deciduous Forests that die and are born again, continually, like the sons of men; stone Mountains that die daily with every rain-shower, yet are not dead and levelled for ages of ages, nor born again (it seems) but with new world-explosions, and such tumultuous seething and tumbling, steam half way to the Moon; O thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwellingplace of the UNNAMED; O spirit, lastly, of Man, who mouldest and modellest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see,—is not there a miracle: That some French mortal should, we say not have believed, but pretended to imagine that he believed that Talleyrand and Two Hundred pieces of white Calico could do it!
Here, however, we are to remark with the sorrowing Historians of that day, that suddenly, while Episcopus Talleyrand, long-stoled, with mitre and tricolor belt, was yet but hitching up the Altar-steps, to do his miracle, the material Heaven grew black; a north-wind, moaning cold moisture, began to sing; and there descended a very deluge of rain. Sad to see! The thirty-staired Seats, all round our Amphitheatre, get instantaneously slated with mere umbrellas, fallacious when so thick set: our antique Cassolettes become Water-pots; their incense-smoke gone hissing, in a whiff of muddy vapour. Alas, instead of vivats, there is nothing now but the furious peppering and rattling. From three to four hundred thousand human individuals feel that they have a skin; happily impervious. The General's sash runs water: how all military banners droop; and will not wave, but lazily flap, as if metamorphosed into painted tin-banners! Worse, far worse, these hundred thousand, such is the Historian's testimony, of the fairest of France! Their snowy muslins all splashed and draggled; the ostrich feather shrunk shamefully to the backbone of a feather: all caps are ruined; innermost pasteboard molten into its original pap: Beauty no longer swims decorated in her garniture, like Love-goddess hidden-revealed in her Paphian clouds, but struggles in disastrous imprisonment in it, for 'the shape was noticeable;' and now only sympathetic interjections, titterings, teeheeings, and resolute good-humour will avail. A deluge; an incessant sheet or fluid-column of rain;—such that our Overseer's very mitre must be filled; not a mitre, but a filled and leaky fire-bucket on his reverend head!—Regardless of which, Overseer Talleyrand performs his miracle: the Blessing of Talleyrand, another than that of Jacob, is on all the Eighty-three departmental flags of France; which wave or flap, with such thankfulness as needs. Towards three o'clock, the sun beams out again: the remaining evolutions can be transacted under bright heavens, though with decorations much damaged. (Deux Amis, v. 143-179.)….
In this way, and in such ways, however, has the Feast of Pikes danced itself off; gallant Federates wending homewards, towards every point of the compass, with feverish nerves, heart and head much heated; some of them, indeed, as Dampmartin's elderly respectable friend, from Strasbourg, quite 'burnt out with liquors,' and flickering towards extinction. (Dampmartin, Evénemens, i. 144-184.) The Feast of Pikes has danced itself off, and become defunct, and the ghost of a Feast;—nothing of it now remaining but this vision in men's memory; and the place that knew it (for the slope of that Champ-de-Mars is crumbled to half the original height (Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, viii. 25).) now knowing it no more. Undoubtedly one of the memorablest National Hightides. Never or hardly ever, as we said, was Oath sworn with such heart-effusion, emphasis and expenditure of joyance; and then it was broken irremediably within year and day. Ah, why? When the swearing of it was so heavenly-joyful, bosom clasped to bosom, and Five-and-twenty million hearts all burning together: O ye inexorable Destinies, why?—Partly because it was sworn with such over-joyance; but chiefly, indeed, for an older reason: that Sin had come into the world and Misery by Sin! These Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force over them, to bind and guide; neither in them, more than heretofore, is guiding force, or rule of just living: how then, while they all go rushing at such a pace, on unknown ways, with no bridle, towards no aim, can hurlyburly unutterable fail? For verily not Federation-rosepink is the colour of this Earth and her work: not by outbursts of noble-sentiment, but with far other ammunition, shall a man front the world.
But how wise, in all cases, to 'husband your fire;' to keep it deep down, rather, as genial radical-heat! Explosions, the forciblest, and never so well directed, are questionable; far oftenest futile, always frightfully wasteful: but think of a man, of a Nation of men, spending its whole stock of fire in one artificial Firework! So have we seen fond weddings (for individuals, like Nations, have their Hightides) celebrated with an outburst of triumph and deray, at which the elderly shook their heads. Better had a serious cheerfulness been; for the enterprise was great. Fond pair! the more triumphant ye feel, and victorious over terrestrial evil, which seems all abolished, the wider-eyed will your disappointment be to find terrestrial evil still extant. "And why extant?" will each of you cry: "Because my false mate has played the traitor: evil was abolished; I meant faithfully, and did, or would have done." Whereby the oversweet moon of honey changes itself into long years of vinegar; perhaps divulsive vinegar, like Hannibal's.
Shall we say then, the French Nation has led Royalty, or wooed and teased poor Royalty to lead her, to the hymeneal Fatherland's Altar, in such oversweet manner; and has, most thoughtlessly, to celebrate the nuptials with due shine and demonstration,—burnt her bed?
Carlyle’s comment on all this: It was nothing but empty theatre, ‘the highest stretch attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps attainable?’
‘How true also… is it that no man or Nation of men, conscious of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing, doing other than a small one!’ (286-Chapter 2.1.IX)
He contrasts the meaninglessness of such national theatricals with real historical movements such as the earlier uprising of the women of Paris who had marched to Versailles demanding bread:
‘Pardonable are human theatricalities; nay perhaps touching, like the passionate utterance of a tongue which with sincerity stammers; of a head which with insincerity babbles,—having gone distracted. Yet, in comparison with unpremeditated outbursts of Nature, such as an Insurrection of Women, how foisonless, unedifying, undelightful; like small ale palled, like an effervescence that has effervesced! Such scenes, coming of forethought, were they world-great, and never so cunningly devised, are at bottom mainly pasteboard and paint. But the others are original; emitted from the great everliving heart of Nature herself: what figure they will assume is unspeakably significant. To us, therefore, let the French National Solemn League, and Federation, be the highest recorded triumph of the Thespian Art; triumphant surely, since the whole Pit, which was of Twenty-five Millions, not only claps hands, but does itself spring on the boards and passionately set to playing there. And being such, be it treated as such: with sincere cursory admiration; with wonder from afar. A whole Nation gone mumming deserves so much; but deserves not that loving minuteness a Menadic Insurrection did.’
Unlike real historical developments, the Feast of Pikes, colossal spectacle though it was, meant nothing and had no consequences. Anarchy took its course: 'These Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force over them, to bind and guide' -- the immensity and unprecedented nature of this historical upsurge is one of his great themes.
Carlyle’s other observation worth noting: the fatuity of the artificial religious ritual -- he will have more to say of that later, when the Revolution sets up the Goddess of Reason.
Sunday, 3 August 2008
Windmills in Brittany
My inner jury’s out on the aesthetics of windmills in landscapes. France is the place to see them, where they’re called Eoliennes, after Aeolus, the God of the Winds.I suspect their impact depends more on the state of the sky than that of the land.
If the scene is a bit boring and not pretty, windmills are a definite enhancement.
Up closer, I love their size. Aptly, a friend commented that they recall Triffids -- but he may have meant those other tripod-like creatures in some other John Christopher novel.
Monday, 28 July 2008
In France’s Cornwall
I've been on holiday for a whole month in a single place, a rented house in Finistère, Brittany, in a region actually called Cornouaille.
For part of the time I was on my own, for part people came and stayed and it worked well. I took my laptop and a writing task, on the principle that it’s no good going somewhere just to visit; you need to be there with something engrossing to do, and get to know the place just incidentally, by virtue of being there, when not working. Next year I'll take that principle more seriously: I'll really tell myself I'm working away from home, with the delights of the place there as a refreshing change for in between times.
A month somewhere is long enough to begin to feel you’re living there. It was long enough to watch an improvement job on the village street almost from start to finish, including the commune masons building low dry-stone walls for utility (to deny parking) and aesthetics (some retained flower beds; all would eventually have flowers like fuschias climbing over them; and they were beautiful things in themselves).
(I might do a separate blog on how they do pavements.)
I started to recognise the same cheese stall on markets in different towns, to meet the man with the dog on the green at the top of the hill several times
to get to talk (as my feeble French allowed) to the man who’d built his house in the next hamlet and was busy making a wall (the local speciality) for his garden. It turned out he was the same age as me, though his life had been rather different: born in the tiny house next door, he’d worn clogs and his grandmother had talked to him in Breton; then he’d been in the navy till he retired. He showed me round. There was one spacious downstairs room with a kitchen separated by a bar where he could sit ‘pour regarder ma femme pendant qu’elle fait la vaiselle’.
Finistère seems as if it’s largely gone back to nature: bracken, gorse, thorn-bushes, broom, ivy, honeysuckle, willow; rabbits, deer. Much of it may always have been that way. They call the terrain les landes which is translated ‘moors’; but moors for me are upland stretches, which these weren’t; coastal, rather, and not a particular higher type of zone but the whole cape.
There’s a coastal path (sentier côtiale) very like Pembrokeshire’s but less frequented and more colourful (heather, broom and lots more) with bird life that wasn’t familiar to me: yellowhammers and choughs, I thought I saw. Ten minutes drive away was a handsome estuary town, Audierne, still a serious fishing port, with old 3-4-storey houses along the quayside.
Ten minutes walk away was Plogoff, a large village that is the centre of the commune; and everywhere, where most of the population must once have lived from the land and fishing, there were hamlets connected by footpaths that were almost roads, wide enough to admit mowers and hedge-trimmers and clearly maintained by the assiduous Plogoff commune (which also provides summer jobs, e.g. as car park attendants, for all young people of 15 and over who want them in the school holiday). These paths provided endless scope for wandering, and each hamlet arrived at offered a fresh combination of stone buildings, blue shutters and a profusion of flowers. Viewed from a distance from high points, the houses were so loosely clustered into settlements than they looked more like scattered crofts in the Hebrides than organised hamlets.
Wandering up every day to the disused sailors’ chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Voyage, whose 19-year-old summer warden, Gleran (a Breton name, like that of his brother, Gwen) again on a commune work scheme, told me about getting the results of his bac and how les jeunes know at any time where all four of the cape’s gendarmes are; and then along the path through the bracken and gorse down to to join the coast path along the top of the cliffs was a restful daily routine. I found myself paying more attention to rocks, plants and birds and also to the music on my iPod, and in the third week when I drove to the département capital of Quimper the art I saw there--the cathedral and its glass, the Pont Aven School and other Breton paintings, had a more than usual impact on me, as if I'd built up a thirst.
I wish I'd taken more photographs. I was put off by looking at my early ones on the laptop, which gave me the impression they were no good. Now I look at them on my 21” monitor back home some don’t look so bad.
I'd like to have been on the internet, not for email--no way--but for looking things up (e.g. birdsong) and for the British news. And next time I'll take a radio that can get Radio 4 long wave. (I did not develop a taste for French broadcasting, even when I could understand it; or for their pop music.)
For part of the time I was on my own, for part people came and stayed and it worked well. I took my laptop and a writing task, on the principle that it’s no good going somewhere just to visit; you need to be there with something engrossing to do, and get to know the place just incidentally, by virtue of being there, when not working. Next year I'll take that principle more seriously: I'll really tell myself I'm working away from home, with the delights of the place there as a refreshing change for in between times.
A month somewhere is long enough to begin to feel you’re living there. It was long enough to watch an improvement job on the village street almost from start to finish, including the commune masons building low dry-stone walls for utility (to deny parking) and aesthetics (some retained flower beds; all would eventually have flowers like fuschias climbing over them; and they were beautiful things in themselves).
(I might do a separate blog on how they do pavements.)
I started to recognise the same cheese stall on markets in different towns, to meet the man with the dog on the green at the top of the hill several times
to get to talk (as my feeble French allowed) to the man who’d built his house in the next hamlet and was busy making a wall (the local speciality) for his garden. It turned out he was the same age as me, though his life had been rather different: born in the tiny house next door, he’d worn clogs and his grandmother had talked to him in Breton; then he’d been in the navy till he retired. He showed me round. There was one spacious downstairs room with a kitchen separated by a bar where he could sit ‘pour regarder ma femme pendant qu’elle fait la vaiselle’.
Finistère seems as if it’s largely gone back to nature: bracken, gorse, thorn-bushes, broom, ivy, honeysuckle, willow; rabbits, deer. Much of it may always have been that way. They call the terrain les landes which is translated ‘moors’; but moors for me are upland stretches, which these weren’t; coastal, rather, and not a particular higher type of zone but the whole cape.
There’s a coastal path (sentier côtiale) very like Pembrokeshire’s but less frequented and more colourful (heather, broom and lots more) with bird life that wasn’t familiar to me: yellowhammers and choughs, I thought I saw. Ten minutes drive away was a handsome estuary town, Audierne, still a serious fishing port, with old 3-4-storey houses along the quayside.
Ten minutes walk away was Plogoff, a large village that is the centre of the commune; and everywhere, where most of the population must once have lived from the land and fishing, there were hamlets connected by footpaths that were almost roads, wide enough to admit mowers and hedge-trimmers and clearly maintained by the assiduous Plogoff commune (which also provides summer jobs, e.g. as car park attendants, for all young people of 15 and over who want them in the school holiday). These paths provided endless scope for wandering, and each hamlet arrived at offered a fresh combination of stone buildings, blue shutters and a profusion of flowers. Viewed from a distance from high points, the houses were so loosely clustered into settlements than they looked more like scattered crofts in the Hebrides than organised hamlets.
Wandering up every day to the disused sailors’ chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Voyage, whose 19-year-old summer warden, Gleran (a Breton name, like that of his brother, Gwen) again on a commune work scheme, told me about getting the results of his bac and how les jeunes know at any time where all four of the cape’s gendarmes are; and then along the path through the bracken and gorse down to to join the coast path along the top of the cliffs was a restful daily routine. I found myself paying more attention to rocks, plants and birds and also to the music on my iPod, and in the third week when I drove to the département capital of Quimper the art I saw there--the cathedral and its glass, the Pont Aven School and other Breton paintings, had a more than usual impact on me, as if I'd built up a thirst.
I wish I'd taken more photographs. I was put off by looking at my early ones on the laptop, which gave me the impression they were no good. Now I look at them on my 21” monitor back home some don’t look so bad.
I'd like to have been on the internet, not for email--no way--but for looking things up (e.g. birdsong) and for the British news. And next time I'll take a radio that can get Radio 4 long wave. (I did not develop a taste for French broadcasting, even when I could understand it; or for their pop music.)
Sunday, 11 May 2008
What should general education be about? The case of philosophy
What do you think of these as questions for the final school exams at 18?
Can the question ‘Who am I?’ be answered clearly?
Can the value of a culture be judged objectively?
What do we gain by working?
Can desire be satisfied by reality?
Does truth depend on us?
Can liberty be defined as the power to say no?
Do we desire only things we consider good?
Are works of art like other realities?
They’re all from le bac philo.
OK. In Paris the other day I saw this on a newsstand
and bought it. I already knew that the French school-leaving exam was the baccalauréat or bac and had a vague idea that philosophy was a main subject in France, part of general education, and not, as here, a recent minority one.
How could philosophy work as a mass subject, equivalent, perhaps, to English here? Wouldn’t it be far too difficult? Too abstract and cerebral? Perhaps this would tell me.
Well, it did, to an extent, taken with various other things found on the internet. Le bac philo is the final exam in philosophy, taken at A level/A2 stage. (I worked out that hors-série was ‘outside the series’, or a special issue of the magazine.)
In the lycée (the last three years of secondary) students specialise in arts and science (L – for Littéraire, I think), in science (S), or in social and economic science (ES). But they all take philosophy, though not for the same number of hours. (For students specialising in hôtellerie et danse, ‘la philo n’est pas souvent un priorité’. That I can believe.)
Why am I interested?
English is more my thing. What’s the issue?
The issue is, do I approve? Is this an idea we should copy? Or—since this sort of thing hasn’t been our style—are we right to prefer our style?
I'll say a bit more about the course before offering my thoughts.
Since I'm most interested in the arts/humanities side I looked at what the ‘L’ students do – which is eight hours of philosophy a week! (This from a good little New York Times article: LINK) ( A-level students taking only three subjects don’t get that amount of time for any of them.)
The exam
In the exam at the end of the final year candidates have four hours to write either an essay (dissertation) or an explication de texte, a commentary on a provided passage (my magazine has less about this option). For the dissertation there’s a choice of three topics, of which I put a sample at the top of this.
Here’s a fuller list of dissertation subjects set in recent years: LINK
The topics
The topics are great. The magazine groups them into five themes; the websites of different lycées have different arrangement, but the content is essentially the same, prescribed as it is by the government: LINK
This school site has schemes of work, lesson plans – the lot: LINK
It’s not clear to me how much the students are expected to read, but here, from the same lycée, is the prescribed list of authors, about whom the student should presumably know something and from whom they will have considered extracts:
Platon, Aristote, Épicure, Lucrèce, Sénèque, Cicéron, Épictète, Marc Aurèle, Plotin, Augustin, Averroès, Thomas d’Aquin, Ockham. Machiavel, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Vico, Berkeley, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Comte, Cournot, Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Bergson, Alain, Russel, Bachelard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Popper, Sartre, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty.
(Those who know about these things will note a relative absence of recent Anglo-Saxon philosophers, and the inclusion of French writers who’d be unlikely to make it onto a UK curriculum.)
So what do I think?
My initial reaction was, and largely still is, what a great course: it’s about interesting ideas, it’s intellectually demanding and doesn’t underestimate what older adolescents are capable of; adolescence is the stage when, if all goes well, thinking is transformed by the capacity to handle abstraction – this gives that capability full rein. It demands an ability to write expository or argumentative prose; it takes seriously the idea that education is about reason. The topics are capable of being handled not just through the study of philosophical texts but through the sort of discussion that should be accessible to most students. In terms of humanities education, it involves the history of ideas from the Greeks to Sartre. The course seems capable of providing a broad cultural initiation, broader perhaps than anything our students get.
There can be no accusation here of the dumbing-down or anti-intellectualism that is so often attributed to English education. In France it’s unambiguously fine to be clever; and cleverness is what the philosophy bac is about.
In Britain we’re less sure what we feel about cleverness; and what it is we’re unsure about is well illustrated by what gets the high marks in the bac philo. (Samples from essays are included at the end of this entry.) Consider what’s involved in the essay or *dissertation.
Writing the Dissertation
Here’s (if your French is up to it) how you’re advised to use the four hours you get for your dissertation:
And here’s how you begin to tackle your chosen subject. You imagine you’re a little man [sic] and you literally get inside your subject: ‘With your little arms you join the terms that go together with a green rope, and you stretch a red rope between those that seem incompatible. With your little feet you give the different terms a kick to see how they react when they bump against their neighbours.’
Suppose your subject is, “Must we respect all cultures?” Then this is how you proceed:
(Note your little bonhomme at the bottom.) You tease out the contradictions and tensions until you get two alternative answers to the question: that’s your problématique. That gives you your first two main parts, which you then have to somehow resolve. Then, as you write the essay you’ll fill out the basic argument with arguments, facts, anecdotes, sayings of the philosophers etc.
What it amounts to then, so it seems to me, is performing operations on words and concepts. Given the discourse (the words and concepts from the question and from the course), you don’t need to go outside it, to experience, to common sense or indeed to your own actual reflections.
It’s as if arguments are purely structures (of words and definable ideas) that exist in their own special space and don’t have any necessary connection to your actual puzzling, agonising, living, experience and wondering.
This is to say, then, that the dissertation seems a purely rhetorical exercise, a business, in the old distinction, of dealing with words, not things (or reality). Doing well is a matter of being good with words and ideas. The advice above reminds me of nothing so much as the old rhetoric handbooks that taught you a vast array of clever ways to, well, chop logic, producing discourse by sheer manipulation of the language of the topic.
In this respect the bac philo seems a suitable preparation rather for lawyers and diplomats than the rest of us. What makes us particularly uneasy as English onlookers is perhaps that you could write a perfectly good argument and not believe a word of it. Hardly a democratic education for good citizens. Yet all citizens have to take the course.
The bac essay has this detached, disembodied character even though the topics of the course include ones that some students actually experience in their own lives as urgent and personal, ones about identity, freedom, work and relationships, for instance. For students who are struggling to find meaning in the universe, does not the bac essay seem offputtingly arid? Is this not an esoteric and artificial genre that has no existence outside the exam room? If they resemble anything at all, the model essays remind me of encyclopedia entries or textbook sections: is that what students are best learning to write? Or, if students are grappling with issues that are in part philosophical, and education is there to provide ways by which they can grapple to better effect, is this particular essay genre really the best medium we can find for them to work things out?
Not that I know what the right medium would be; though if it’s some sort of essay we have in mind, wouldn’t Hazlitt be a better model than, say, Russell (from the list of prescribed authors above)? I'm not sure what they should write, but what strikes me most forcibly is the huge gap between two sorts of student engagement: the student tackling a bac essay (pulling the terms apart, seeking contradictions etc), and the adolescent reading Camus’s L’Etranger (The Stranger or The Outsider); and I think how English teachers work to present literature not as an isolated self-contained world but as dealing, implicitly, with us and our lives.
I've recently seen Control (twice) about Ian Curtis and his late 70s Manchester group Joy Division. Curtis was a troubled, clever adolescent who read (see Jon Savage on him in yesterday’s Guardian: ‘Controlled Chaos’ – can’t find it on the website). In so far as the help he needed could have been had from education (if he’d stayed on), would the *bac philo have done the job? Well, there’s no knowing – he had intellectual tastes as well as powerful emotional thirsts – but I suspect he would have found most of it dryly academic and irrelevant.
That’s not quite true. He read Nietzsche and would probably have got a lot out of Sartre and some of the moderns, in terms of relevance to his own situation. But would the form of the bac essay given him the possibility of working through what these books and ideas meant to him? Or just of using them as the material from which to construct a judicious, elegant argument?
I'm genuinely not sure about this. Curtis might well have engaged in a serious and academically valid way with, say, Kant; and who knows how many kids in Britain might not be thirsting for an educational experience that’s so thrillingly cerebral and so little demanding of self-expression, sincerity and personal response.
I certainly have a lot more time for an education in rhetoric than I ever did as an English teacher, and I think there’s much to be said for including courses that are, precisely, detached and impersonal. (I'm very much in favour, too, of everyone who can benefit having an introduction to philosophy.) Education isn’t only, or perhaps primarily, for the sake of making personal sense of the world; it’s also about the knowledge and intellectual skills needed for functioning in the world, and ones that a person might choose to inhabit as a satisfying domain having little to do with the rest of one’s ‘real life’.
I'd like to know the bac philo works in reality, across the range of students. Can it really be a central element in a broad education for all 17-18-year-olds?
Examples of student dissertations
The magazine prints some model answers and some actual student essays, with comments. I think the approach both of the students and the markers reflects how I've characterised this exercise.
First, two pages (not sequential) from a model essay
Then an actual, less praised essay – again, not the whole thing:
Student videos about the bac philo
Google ‘bac philo’ and you’ll come up with any amount of stuff, including course guides and videos made by students. For instance, some at LINK, e.g. LINK
Other links
Some of this basic stuff about the French education system comes from a site on classics teaching: LINK
Link to
Can the question ‘Who am I?’ be answered clearly?
Can the value of a culture be judged objectively?
What do we gain by working?
Can desire be satisfied by reality?
Does truth depend on us?
Can liberty be defined as the power to say no?
Do we desire only things we consider good?
Are works of art like other realities?
They’re all from le bac philo.
OK. In Paris the other day I saw this on a newsstand
and bought it. I already knew that the French school-leaving exam was the baccalauréat or bac and had a vague idea that philosophy was a main subject in France, part of general education, and not, as here, a recent minority one.How could philosophy work as a mass subject, equivalent, perhaps, to English here? Wouldn’t it be far too difficult? Too abstract and cerebral? Perhaps this would tell me.
Well, it did, to an extent, taken with various other things found on the internet. Le bac philo is the final exam in philosophy, taken at A level/A2 stage. (I worked out that hors-série was ‘outside the series’, or a special issue of the magazine.)
In the lycée (the last three years of secondary) students specialise in arts and science (L – for Littéraire, I think), in science (S), or in social and economic science (ES). But they all take philosophy, though not for the same number of hours. (For students specialising in hôtellerie et danse, ‘la philo n’est pas souvent un priorité’. That I can believe.)
Why am I interested?
English is more my thing. What’s the issue?
The issue is, do I approve? Is this an idea we should copy? Or—since this sort of thing hasn’t been our style—are we right to prefer our style?
I'll say a bit more about the course before offering my thoughts.
Since I'm most interested in the arts/humanities side I looked at what the ‘L’ students do – which is eight hours of philosophy a week! (This from a good little New York Times article: LINK) ( A-level students taking only three subjects don’t get that amount of time for any of them.)
The exam
In the exam at the end of the final year candidates have four hours to write either an essay (dissertation) or an explication de texte, a commentary on a provided passage (my magazine has less about this option). For the dissertation there’s a choice of three topics, of which I put a sample at the top of this.
Here’s a fuller list of dissertation subjects set in recent years: LINK
The topics
The topics are great. The magazine groups them into five themes; the websites of different lycées have different arrangement, but the content is essentially the same, prescribed as it is by the government: LINK
This school site has schemes of work, lesson plans – the lot: LINK
It’s not clear to me how much the students are expected to read, but here, from the same lycée, is the prescribed list of authors, about whom the student should presumably know something and from whom they will have considered extracts:
Platon, Aristote, Épicure, Lucrèce, Sénèque, Cicéron, Épictète, Marc Aurèle, Plotin, Augustin, Averroès, Thomas d’Aquin, Ockham. Machiavel, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Vico, Berkeley, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Comte, Cournot, Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Bergson, Alain, Russel, Bachelard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Popper, Sartre, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty.
(Those who know about these things will note a relative absence of recent Anglo-Saxon philosophers, and the inclusion of French writers who’d be unlikely to make it onto a UK curriculum.)
So what do I think?
My initial reaction was, and largely still is, what a great course: it’s about interesting ideas, it’s intellectually demanding and doesn’t underestimate what older adolescents are capable of; adolescence is the stage when, if all goes well, thinking is transformed by the capacity to handle abstraction – this gives that capability full rein. It demands an ability to write expository or argumentative prose; it takes seriously the idea that education is about reason. The topics are capable of being handled not just through the study of philosophical texts but through the sort of discussion that should be accessible to most students. In terms of humanities education, it involves the history of ideas from the Greeks to Sartre. The course seems capable of providing a broad cultural initiation, broader perhaps than anything our students get.
There can be no accusation here of the dumbing-down or anti-intellectualism that is so often attributed to English education. In France it’s unambiguously fine to be clever; and cleverness is what the philosophy bac is about.
In Britain we’re less sure what we feel about cleverness; and what it is we’re unsure about is well illustrated by what gets the high marks in the bac philo. (Samples from essays are included at the end of this entry.) Consider what’s involved in the essay or *dissertation.
Writing the Dissertation
Here’s (if your French is up to it) how you’re advised to use the four hours you get for your dissertation:
And here’s how you begin to tackle your chosen subject. You imagine you’re a little man [sic] and you literally get inside your subject: ‘With your little arms you join the terms that go together with a green rope, and you stretch a red rope between those that seem incompatible. With your little feet you give the different terms a kick to see how they react when they bump against their neighbours.’Suppose your subject is, “Must we respect all cultures?” Then this is how you proceed:
(Note your little bonhomme at the bottom.) You tease out the contradictions and tensions until you get two alternative answers to the question: that’s your problématique. That gives you your first two main parts, which you then have to somehow resolve. Then, as you write the essay you’ll fill out the basic argument with arguments, facts, anecdotes, sayings of the philosophers etc.
What it amounts to then, so it seems to me, is performing operations on words and concepts. Given the discourse (the words and concepts from the question and from the course), you don’t need to go outside it, to experience, to common sense or indeed to your own actual reflections.
It’s as if arguments are purely structures (of words and definable ideas) that exist in their own special space and don’t have any necessary connection to your actual puzzling, agonising, living, experience and wondering.
This is to say, then, that the dissertation seems a purely rhetorical exercise, a business, in the old distinction, of dealing with words, not things (or reality). Doing well is a matter of being good with words and ideas. The advice above reminds me of nothing so much as the old rhetoric handbooks that taught you a vast array of clever ways to, well, chop logic, producing discourse by sheer manipulation of the language of the topic.
In this respect the bac philo seems a suitable preparation rather for lawyers and diplomats than the rest of us. What makes us particularly uneasy as English onlookers is perhaps that you could write a perfectly good argument and not believe a word of it. Hardly a democratic education for good citizens. Yet all citizens have to take the course.
The bac essay has this detached, disembodied character even though the topics of the course include ones that some students actually experience in their own lives as urgent and personal, ones about identity, freedom, work and relationships, for instance. For students who are struggling to find meaning in the universe, does not the bac essay seem offputtingly arid? Is this not an esoteric and artificial genre that has no existence outside the exam room? If they resemble anything at all, the model essays remind me of encyclopedia entries or textbook sections: is that what students are best learning to write? Or, if students are grappling with issues that are in part philosophical, and education is there to provide ways by which they can grapple to better effect, is this particular essay genre really the best medium we can find for them to work things out?
Not that I know what the right medium would be; though if it’s some sort of essay we have in mind, wouldn’t Hazlitt be a better model than, say, Russell (from the list of prescribed authors above)? I'm not sure what they should write, but what strikes me most forcibly is the huge gap between two sorts of student engagement: the student tackling a bac essay (pulling the terms apart, seeking contradictions etc), and the adolescent reading Camus’s L’Etranger (The Stranger or The Outsider); and I think how English teachers work to present literature not as an isolated self-contained world but as dealing, implicitly, with us and our lives.
I've recently seen Control (twice) about Ian Curtis and his late 70s Manchester group Joy Division. Curtis was a troubled, clever adolescent who read (see Jon Savage on him in yesterday’s Guardian: ‘Controlled Chaos’ – can’t find it on the website). In so far as the help he needed could have been had from education (if he’d stayed on), would the *bac philo have done the job? Well, there’s no knowing – he had intellectual tastes as well as powerful emotional thirsts – but I suspect he would have found most of it dryly academic and irrelevant.
That’s not quite true. He read Nietzsche and would probably have got a lot out of Sartre and some of the moderns, in terms of relevance to his own situation. But would the form of the bac essay given him the possibility of working through what these books and ideas meant to him? Or just of using them as the material from which to construct a judicious, elegant argument?
I'm genuinely not sure about this. Curtis might well have engaged in a serious and academically valid way with, say, Kant; and who knows how many kids in Britain might not be thirsting for an educational experience that’s so thrillingly cerebral and so little demanding of self-expression, sincerity and personal response.
I certainly have a lot more time for an education in rhetoric than I ever did as an English teacher, and I think there’s much to be said for including courses that are, precisely, detached and impersonal. (I'm very much in favour, too, of everyone who can benefit having an introduction to philosophy.) Education isn’t only, or perhaps primarily, for the sake of making personal sense of the world; it’s also about the knowledge and intellectual skills needed for functioning in the world, and ones that a person might choose to inhabit as a satisfying domain having little to do with the rest of one’s ‘real life’.
I'd like to know the bac philo works in reality, across the range of students. Can it really be a central element in a broad education for all 17-18-year-olds?
Examples of student dissertations
The magazine prints some model answers and some actual student essays, with comments. I think the approach both of the students and the markers reflects how I've characterised this exercise.
First, two pages (not sequential) from a model essay
Then an actual, less praised essay – again, not the whole thing:
Student videos about the bac philo
Google ‘bac philo’ and you’ll come up with any amount of stuff, including course guides and videos made by students. For instance, some at LINK, e.g. LINK
Other links
Some of this basic stuff about the French education system comes from a site on classics teaching: LINK
Link to
Friday, 1 February 2008
Last day in the Loire
The church, seen from the front door of the house.My last full day here is dark, rain-laden and windy. But it’s not cold and it felt invitingly refreshing for a walk—winter as I like it in one of its guises. I crossed our small valley (with a stream and a mill) and walked up the opposite side from yesterday, onto the ridge again—a vast empty prairie of bare fields, occasional spinneys and the odd farm, the ploughed soil full of flints. There’s nothing pretty about this landscape; it’s like Salisbury Plain in Hardy, an abode of starving penniless folk who barely find shelter from rain and sun. The farmhouses here, though, seemed prosperous enough, each with at least one car.
This could almost be part of Dorset, except for the architecture of the farms, the lack of fences and hedges and the lines of poplars across the valley bottom, laden with huge bunches of mistletoe. And if people in the farmhouses want to grow vegetables for themselves they don’t have a garden but dig up a strip along the edge of a field and plant their leeks and broccoli—all there was to be seen at the moment.No life to be seen except one small crop of snowdrops by the road, and small birds. (On my first day I had seen lapwings, of which there used to be hundreds in the ploughed field at the back of our semi in Wibsey, on one of the hills above Bradford. Now I hardly ever see them in England—and the fields we used to walk through are long gone.)
Last night at the hour of white wine tasting --Jim and Nigel’s day’s spoils of samples--we were visited by friends of Jim’s: Michel, a teacher who is one of the three deputy mayors, and his wife Anne-Marie. Michel explained about the commune. There’s a council as well as the mayor and deputies.
All that and a handsome mairie (originally including a school) for 400 people is impressive; it certainly does something for the dignity and self-respect of this most local level of democracy. Once, though, there would have been many more inhabitants. There were 40 or 50 farms; now there are four, Michel says (so I suppose most of the ones I saw were occupied by tenants), and they’re ripping out the vineyards with EU grants because there’s said to be a surplus of French wine. The commune does get money from local taxes, but also, since its credit is good, it can borrow money, especially for buying buildings.Below is the house that the commune bought and converted into two flats for rent:
Saturday, 8 December 2007
So where's the trouble?
This is the Paris public bike scheme: vélib’ (“vélo libre” or “vélo liberté”: free bicycle or bicycle freedom). The photo unfortunately is not by me but from Wikipedia who explain that the bike is free for the first half hour, and then cheap. The chap is I think returning a bike (not necessarily to the same place where he picked it up) or taking one out, using his card. The bikes aren't attractive to steal, and have built in lights that work. I saw loads of them on the street, especially on the plentiful bike lanes. ((http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Velibvelo1.jpg)That's one thing out of several that I really liked about Paris (I'm just back, never having properly visited before). Another is the free rein that's given to creative designers, e.g. of street furniture and Christmas decorations. And architects: the Pompidou Centre is awe-inspiring -- no longer need we think of buildings as being about walls. And there's the exhilarating new Musée du quai Branly, devoted to the indigenous people of other continents.
I'm sorry I didn't take my camera. I'd mistakenly assumed that I'd only end up taking tourist snaps. I'm also sorry I can no longer speak French.
My conclusion (after four days): Paris is better than London. Certainly for someone of my age it is, someone who doesn't want to be marginalised by youth.
The people are nice, the atmosphere in public places civilised, bars friendly. I felt comfortable being out at night on my own. If I didn't want a meal in a restaurant I could go in a bar and have a good home-made snack with my drink - the other night it was smoked salmon 'tartine', i.e. a sort of open sandwich on something like pitta bread.
In London pubs used to be comfortable and welcoming; and pubs, not restaurants, often had the best sites, like by the river. (So in the really nice places all you could do was drink, since Brits didn't go in for eating out.) These days many pubs do food, and it's often ok, but most are run by chains, have nothing local about them (including the staff), are noisy (hard surfaces -- a problem for us deafer ones) and are dominated by youth or sports tv or a lethal combination of both. Not an atmosphere than suits me, and I really don't like London pubs any more. There are pubs near me, but I'm not tempted to make any of them my local.
In Paris, on the other hand, I'm sure I could find myself a local bar (or bar/bistro) where I'd feel comfortable. Many unpretentious restaurants are in good locations like near the river. I spent one evening sitting by the window on a quiet and unheritaged side street (quai de Montebello) by the Seine. I couldn't see the river because an embankment was between us, but the buildings in my view were clearly the other side of it, and the few leaves on the trees this side were silvery with light reflected off Notre Dame. I couldn't think of anywhere as pleasant by the Thames in central London -- you'd have to go out to Hammersmith or Greenwich.
What I don't understand, though, is how Paris manages to be so pleasant. Don't they have teenagers? I hardly saw any, in the whole area I walked over, an hour in each direction from the Opéra. I didn't see hoodies or Croydon Facelifts or track suits in any numbers (or, come to that babies or prams). Or litter from drinks and snacks.
Come to that, I didn't see babies either.
Surely all the bad kids can't be out in the notorious banlieus?
Yet Central Paris (the part inside the Peripherique motorway) is full of apartments. As far as I can tell, people live on the four or so upper floors of most of the standard 19th century buildings. So don't families live in them? If yes, don't their teenage children go out and get together?
Perhaps families do live further out, where accommodation is more affordable. But kids from the outskirts of London nevertheless head into the centre for drinking and clubbing: why not in Paris? (It's true that plenty of teenagers also live in central London in council flats - I don't know if there's the equivalent in central Paris.) Perhaps Paris facilities just aren't geared to teenage congregation and drinking? Or perhaps the city just won't stand for kids behaving unpleasantly. Or perhaps the teenagers are doing their homework.
I don't know the answer. Next time perhaps I'll take the camera and look into this more systematically -- perhaps by walking right across central Paris, on more than one line, and then taking some excursions outside the Peripherique. Or read something about the sociology of Paris.
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