Category: History

Baudelaire’s Phone Pic

Posted on by dwells12014

“Rubbing the parched roadway with his webbed feet, he went trailing his white wings on the rough ground. Beside a dried-up gutter the poor creature, with gaping beak, was frantically bathing his wings in the dust, and with his heart full of longing for his native land, cried out….” (The Swan – Charles Baudelaire)


What would you fo if you saw a swan flapping helplessly on a building site. Presumably you’d try and help it. Also, probably, you might take a photo with your phone. Why would you do this? I think it would be to do with the incongruity of such a graceful bird in a concrete desert.
Charles Baudelaire did just that in Paris in the 1850s. Only of course, he didn’t take a photo; he wrote a poem – Le Cygne, perhaps his best known poem in the collection “Les Fleurs du Mal”. The swan had escaped from a menagerie near the Louvre and wandered onto the huge building site that was central Paris at that time as it was being transformed into the Paris we know today. With his Realist roots Baudelaire couldn’t fail to record what he saw.
But Baudelaire also wrote on the cusp of the Symbolist movement. The swan represented us, dislocated, alienated by the changing modern city. Huge numbers of prople were uprooted by the rebuilding of Paris and relocated to the suburbs, uprooted psychologically as well as physically. Soon sociologists would give this a name – anomie – the kind of alienation that leads to despair, something not unknown in the suburbs of Paris today.
But more than this, Baudelaire also saw a mysterious kind of beauty in the strange placing of a swan in the rubble – a flower, indeed, among the evil. It’s what modern urban photographers look for today, strange but eye-catching juxtapositions amongst the decay. But Baudelaire did it first. Over 150 years ago. Without a phone.

The Final Solution

Posted on by dwells12014

In 1978 Bob Dylan played a concert at the Zeppelinfeld in Nürembergfeld in Germany, the stadium where Adolf Hitler held his rallies. Dylan insisted that the stage was placed at the other end, so that when he performed the audience had its back to where Hitler spoke as they watched and appreciated the much loved, little Jewish guy playing Masters of War.

Horse Power

Posted on by dwells12014

During the 1760s the Collège de Plessis in Paris once asked its pupils to write an essay about the perfect horse. One boy described a horse that, when whipped, would buck and unseat its rider. For this, he was flogged.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, he had touched on a raw nerve. Horses were there to be controlled by their riders. Particularly when it was a King who was in the saddle, as exemplified by many paintings down the centuries showing kings on horseback. Mastery of the by nature unruly horse represented the king’s mastery over his people. Horsemanship equated with statesmanship.

The boy grew up to be known as the Marquis de Lafayette. The flogging didn’t work. He continued to favour the underdog, those suffering at the hands of their masters. He fought in America on the side of those rebelling against the British in the American Revolution. He became a major political figure on the Republican side during the French Revolution, during which the King was unseated, fatally so.

Without knowing it, as a boy Lafayette had been part of a social change which became known as the cult of Sensibility, influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: freedom over discipline, liberty over authority, heart over head.

They didn’t know it but the masters at the Collège de Plessis were swimming against the tide. Every dog has its day, they say. Lafayette would have added, even the underdog.

The Drill Bit Castle

Posted on by dwells12014

I live in a South Northumberland mining town that once had at least four pits. My flat is part of what was originally a Mechanics Institute, a cultural haven for miners. For many years I worked in the town’s High School, which was built on land reclaimed from one of the local pits. The school faced a park formed round a landscaped pit heap. Opposite my flat is a cemetery containing the grave of two miners who, along with 202 others, died in the New Hartley Pit Disaster, 160 years ago, three miles from here.
This week I walked around a nearby nature reserve created on the site of Weetslade colliery. The park has a monument to the mining community, an art installation caled “The Drill Bits”. It reminded me of the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, 30 miles up the coast, which I visited a few days ago. I saw them from a distance, both perched on a hill. The teeth of the drills look like the crenellations of a fort, and the drill bits stand like the turrets of a ruined castle.
Normally, when you think of historic Northumberland, you call to mind its many splendid castles. Weetslade, however, reminds you of another important heritage, a working class one, a heritage happily still being honoured and preserved.

What do we do now?

Posted on by dwells12014

There was always a moment in Spike Milligan’s long-running TV comedy series Q when he liked to break the fourth wall. To end a sketch he would face the camera and declare he had run out of lines and didn’t know how to get off stage. His arms would slump by his side as if his puppet strings had been cut and, incapable of action without his script, he would forlornly declare “What do we do now?”.

Jean-Antoine Watteau created his enigmatic painting Pierrot in 1718/19, just three years after the death of the greatest puppet-master of them all, the Sun King, Louis the 14th. For more than 70 years Louis had been the sole arbiter of life in France. France was his stage; he wrote the script and directed his people. He built the finest stage set ever seen, the Palace of Versailles. Now he was no more. Pierrot stands, like Spike, with his puppet strings cut, waiting for direction. He speaks for France “What do we do now?”

Irony and Ideology

Posted on by dwells12014

98325CA0-A5C4-4A35-97DB-B438429AEEAC

Do ideologues understand irony? I doubt it. Not the verbal kind at least. When the words you use express the opposite of the literal meaning. People of conviction don’t mince their words. That’s why you should mistrust ideologues. People who don’t question themselves are blinkered and dangerous.

When Austria became part of the Third Reich in 1938 Sigmund Freud knew it was time to leave Vienna. Himmler was minded not to let him go to America but President Roosevelt arranged for him to get the necessary visa. When the Gestapo delivered it they asked him to sign a document to confirm he had been well treated. Freud did sign but added a sentence – “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone”. This was taken at face value. I like to imagine the Gestapo officers smugly leaving with the apparently glowing recommendation.

German scientists during WW2 were among the best in the world. They  designed the first jet fighter planes, the first guided missiles and came close to producing the first atomic bomb. But they never developed an irony detector.

False Friends

Posted on by dwells12014

C472F790-B2F2-4EF7-A5CE-371E73C3B401

When you start learning French you are always warned about “faux amis”, false friends. Words that look as if they have an obvious meaning but which mean something quite different. So “assister” means to attend, not to help. A teaching colleague of mine, an elderly and unworldly spinster, was unaware that the word “préservatif” was a false friend. Her 6th form students knew that it was French for “condom”, so they enjoyed the lesson in which the word featured and their teacher proceeded to try and explain why the couple in the story they were translating might be in need of jam.

The interesting thing is that a false friend can change the meaning of a phrase. “Ancien” in French means “previous” not “ancient” but this has not prevented the term ”ancien régime”, the political system toppled by the French Revolution, from being wrongly associated in many minds with the words “ancient” or “archaic”. In fact the term was first used in 1790 by the Comte de Mirabeau in a letter to the King. He was simply referring to the previous regime.

So what? Well it can lead to misunderstanding. It is generally believed that the French Revolution came about because the political system was old, out of date and crumbling. This has been partly encouraged by the false friend “ancien régime”. In actual fact it can be argued, as indeed it is in Simon Sharma’s brilliant book Citizens, that the regime collapsed because of the bungled way in which it was trying to modernise in the 1780s.

A similar process seems to operate in the case of the English phrase “the Dark Ages”. The phrase was coined to describe the era in which only limited written evidence has come down to us. The age is dark because little light is shed on it. However, the word “dark” operates as a false friend because it can be associated with words such as sinister, dangerous, savage, uncivilised. And this hides the fact that the limited evidence we have from medieval times points to the existence of poetry, refinement and craftsmanship.

We are well aware of the dangers of false news. We should also recognise that false news is sometimes brought by false friends.

It was alright in the 1870s

Posted on by dwells12014

There is a tv program called “It was alright in the 1970s”. It shows politically incorrect clips from 1970s tv programs to prove how attitudes have changed over the years, the idea being that those attitudes were normal then and so perhaps excusable. This, of course, is the argument made by several ageing celebrities today to excuse behaviour now seen as sexual harassment and abuse.
One of the problems this causes is how one should view the work of writers and artists with similar problematic pasts. The issue becomes even more difficult the further one goes back in time as behaviour and attitudes become even more remote from what is acceptable today.
Consider the case of Victor Hugo. By 1870 Hugo was 68 and one of the most famous men on the planet. He used this fame to attract and seduce huge numbers of women. During the five- month siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 Hugo had approximately  one sexual encounter per day, a total of 40 different partners. They were actresses, prostitutes, fans who came to see him.  We know this because he recorded them, in semi code, in his diary. He often changed their names into male equivalents and used code words to indicate the type of activity. He also recorded what he paid. Hugo was very careful with money. All his life he kept accurate accounts and so felt compelled to record his transactions with women. And here’s the point –  he clearly had a conscience about this. He recorded these payments  with the abbreviation “sec”, i.e. “secours” meaning alms. Hugo saw this as giving alms to the poor. He wanted to believe he was doing these women a favour. In his lifetime this amounted to hundreds, if not thousands, of favours. This is the man who appealed for our sympathy for the abused prostitute Fantine in Les Misérables.

Hugo had a wife and a long-standing mistress who he cheated on with another married woman – a ménage à quatre? The married woman’s husband had them investigated for adultery. She was imprisoned. Hugo was not. He was above the law because he was a French peer.
His diary also reveals that he viewed  his female servants and cooks as another source of sexual gratification. Their plight surely gives cause for concern. What choice did they have? Say yes or look for another job? What is the difference between their situation and that of Harvey Weinstein’s female employees? How many of Hugo’s conquests would have wished to be able to raise their hand and declare “Me too”? Should this influence our judgement of Victor Hugo and his work? Or do we simply shrug our shoulders and think it was alright in the 1870s?

Stranger things happen at sea

Posted on by dwells12014

D86F09E8-D903-4A9D-826D-7CCFFA856820

When I was young one of my comics had a section called Strange but True. This story should have been in it.

In 1898 an American writer, Morgan Robertson,  published a novella called Futility. It described the maiden voyage of a British luxury liner famous for its impressive technology which renders it practically unsinkable. On the fourth night of its journey, travelling at reckless speed, it hits an iceberg and sinks with the loss of many lives due to a shortage of lifeboats. Robertson called his fictional ship Titan – 14 years before the Titanic was named and built.

It is a shame therefore that Robertson’s book did not sell; someone might have taken notice

Selling the Stones

Posted on by dwells12014

Andrew Loog Oldham
Oldham with the Stones
Pierre-Francois Palloy
Palloy’s model of the Bastille

Hype and popular music go hand in hand. The Rolling Stones would probably have made the big time without their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, but his creative use of media manipulation certainly helped. Having previously worked for Brian Epstein and the Beatles he had seen how money could be made by moulding and promoting a band. He didn’t hang about. The moulding stage came first. He sacked their piano player Ian Stewart because his looks did not match the image about to be created. He changed the musical direction of the band by encouraging Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write pop/rock songs to replace the blues covers they were used to performing, at a stroke pushing the Blues purist Brian Jones down the pecking order. Promotion came next. Oldham successfully hyped up the Stones’ “bad boy” image and generated widely quoted headlines such as “Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?” The press lapped it up. His provocative cover notes on their second album encouraged fans to mug a blind beggar for funds to buy the album. Outrage. The  Stones never looked back. Andrew Loog Oldham was 19 years old.

Pierre-François Palloy was an 18th century chancer, always on the lookout for the next big deal. In July 1789, in Paris, there was no bigger deal than the recently ransacked prison the Bastille. So Palloy acquired it, or at least the rights to demolish it and dispose of the debris. He had a grander plan than that, however. He would sell the stones of the Bastille, but more importantly he would sell an idea of the Bastille, an idea that lasts to this day. It was people like Palloy who turned the Bastille into a national symbol of liberated humanity. Others did it for political gain; Palloy did it to increase the value of his stones. Loog Oldham would have been proud. He did the same.

Palloy promoted the cult of the Bastille as a political tourist attraction with guided tours, historical lectures and accounts which hugely exaggerated the horrors of its dungeons, the numbers of its persecuted prisoners and the suffering they had endured. The truth was somewhat different. No 18th century jail was pleasurable, of course, but the Bastille was by no means the worst. Its most famous inmate was the Marquis de Sade. He had a desk, a wardrobe for his dressing gowns and silk breeches, four family portraits, tapestries on his walls, velvet cushions and pillows, mattresses, eau-de-cologne fragrances, and night lamps to help him get through his personal library of 133 books. He moved out a week before the Bastille was stormed. 7 prisoners were found inside, four of them forgers, one an aristocrat, plus two lunatics. No persecuted, tortured victims of the state. Media hype told otherwise. Prints began to emerge in which bits of armour were revealed as fiendish “iron corsets”, and a printing press as a wheel of torture. Palloy Enterprises capitalised on and furthered such fake news. By November 1789 he had completed the demolition of the prison and the reconstruction of its new image was well underway. So Palloy began to sell his product. Out of the stones of the Bastille he had miniature working models made of the prison and 246 chests of souvenirs which he took on the road, touring the French provinces. The chests were full of stone paperweights shaped like small Bastilles, snuffboxes and daggers. So familiar. Both Oldham and Palloy followed the same plan. Find your product, dismantle it, recreate it, invest it with a “bad boy” image, then take it on tour.

Hype did not appear fully-formed in the 20th century. It has a long history. With our modern know-how we like to think of ourselves as superior to previous generations but, let’s face it, there was not much Andrew Loog Oldham could teach Pierre-François Palloy about selling the stones.