IV.4. HAVE THE KINGS BECOME SUBVERSIVE?

4.3. Have the kings become subversive?

THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES, APOGEE OF THE GRAND AXIS, 

COULD PROPEL A SUBLIME MODERNITY  

But globalized commerce has taken over "the world's most beautiful avenue"and changed its message:

     Automobile centenary / Claude Abron

In brief

• The Champs-Élysées, challenged majesty

• A new society creeps in

• Goddesses loom over the city

• Kings and globalization

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Next,

The Champs-Élysées, challenged majesty

THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES, CHALLENGED MAJESTY

THE "GREAT WHEEL OF PARIS," NOW DEFUNCT, HERALDED 

A GENERAL EVOLUTION

Installed at place de la Concorde from the 1980's to 2018

in itself it was spectacular...

But the booths at its foot blocked Louis XIV's groundbreaking perspective...

While the theme song on its web site was so triumphantly insignificant — "Les CHAMPS!!! Élysées" — that it insulted the Avenue's grandeur. 

# # #

In 2014 the City refused to renew the lease. A bland composition 

replaced the pop tune. 

Joyful music from the Sun King's court

would have emphasized the avenue's grandeur.

Instead the authorities allowed the insipid.

Were those changes a compromise,

refusing the small stalls

but not confronting the multinationals

whose wares dominate the avenue now?   

*     *     *

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A new society creeps in

A NEW SOCIETY CREEPS IN

MIXING CULTURE WITH COMMERCE WOULD HAVE SEEMED VULGAR A GENERATION AGO. BUT NOW... 

Brands take over the historic center, the medieval rampart under the Louvre vanishes under an installation that leads to a McDonald's,x a tablet to rent replaces Marie-Antoinette's cell, x chain stores or shops without personality replace businesses that had a soul, as here and here and a brand takes over Napoleon's tomb:

In museums and monuments, merch can be impossible to avoid... 

• A barrier at the Conciergerie forces visitors to pass the boutique when they leave:

 

• At the Opéra, visitors must pass through three levels of shops before reaching the exit:

• At the Louvre, to view Raft and Liberty one must pass this room...

While another boutique covers the wall of the exit to the wing: 

PHOTO

 # # #

Triviality, consumerism and erasing the past —  is there a connection ?

*     *     * 

 

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Goddesses loom over the city

GODDESSES LOOM OVER THE CITY

COINCIDING WITH THOSE CHANGES, GIANT ADS

(FIRST REMARKED IN 2011)

Richard Nahem

 Such ads on famous monuments 

announce that they help finance renovations.

They do not say what percentage

 of renting the walls goes for that purpose.

*     *     * 

Next, Kings and globalization

KINGS AND GLOBALIZATION

THE CRACKS AROUND THIS PAINTING WERE FINALLY REPAIRED... 

(IN 2023)

Louis XIII Bows Before a Crucifix, church of Saint-Paul Saint-Louis, 4th

But though people stop there to meditate or light candles, I have never seen anyone contemplate the giant painting of homage to the king, in a church built to honor monarchy.

That past has been forgotten.

# # #

Compare that work with images like this one: The gorgeous, colossal, invincible queen does not say what she is selling, still less why it should be bought...

Ad on the summit of the Hôtel Lutétia, 6th

She looms over the public like Big Brother, in hommage not to a product but to a brand, whose purchase is an order.

To fall for such bait a public must be submissive, credulous and have no conflicting frame of reference: The monarchs' majesty

stands in the way of such annihilation.

As well, they have left a legacy 

of artistic and architectural grandeur

that makes consumption-ism insignificant.

One does not reject it — one ignores it.

Pamela Spurdon

Louis XIV in the courtyard of the Louvre

The kings re-enter history when we notice
 the majesty they transmit.

End of Part III.

*      *      * 

The other great reason for Paris's beauty,
the fear that insurrections inspired,
is as suppressed as are the kings.

Part IV addresses that gap.

 V.
Cradle of upheaval

V. CRADLE OF UPHEAVAL

 5. MENU: Cradle of upheaval

PARIS IS CALLED "THE CITY OF LOVE," BUT ITS UPRISINGS TELL ANOTHER STORY 

Ad on the Louvre

The painting made a generation after the city's last 19th-century insurrection comes from records of adversaries that viewed the rebels with grudging respect. 

Mainstream accounts mention them as little as possible. These pages address that gap.

In brief

• "Objective history sticks to the facts:" Which facts? 

• The people fooled: 1830

• 1848: fooled again

• Workers' first conscious revolt and modern Europe's first great massacre

• The historical museum and the insurrections

•  Fear, promoter of urban grandeur

• Remaking the city

• Gifts of the repression

*      *      * 

Next,
5.1.

"Objective history sticks to the facts:" Which facts?

5.1. "OBJECTIVE HISTORY STICKS TO THE FACTS:" WHICH FACTS?

 MENU: 5.1. History: which facts?

ALL VIEWS ARE SUBJECTIVE BECAUSE ONE IS OBLIGED TO CHOOSE SOME FACTS AND LEAVE OUT OTHERS  

Choices are based on a point of view, such as identity (Washington crossing the Delaware, Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole) and kinds of society (Lenin mobilizing the Proletariat, Washington at Mount Vernon). The listing of political facts, often brightened up by drama, is also an opinion, though narrators may not be aware of it.

These pages stress the determining role of economic forces, which transforms the meaning of events and gives readers a handle to understanding change. Is that why it is usually omitted? 

Take the French Revolution of 1789-94 and its conclusion in 1830, an upheaval that most foreigners have never heard of and that many French people have forgotten. 

       La Liberté guide le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, 1831 / zoom

France's great iconic painting is about the 1830 Revolution.

In brief

• "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" lets capitalism take wing   

• The Revolution of 1830: capitalism's buried triumph 

• Boring history, a political tool

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"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" lets capitalism take wing

"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY" LETS CAPTALISM TAKE WING

IN PRACTICE...

• Liberty means free enterprise. 

• Equality brings the end the nobles' privileges that limit business growth. 

• Fraternity calls up the rank and file to blow those privileges away.

Image gone from the web

Middle-class leader, underclass striking force

The French Revolution is usually explained as due to archaic systems of land ownership, taxation and government finance, plus exceptionally poor harvests, the cost of aid to American revolutionaries, the extravagance and short-sightedness of the royal court and new ideas. 

Not said: that economic growth made conflict between nascent capitalists and hereditary landowners inevitable — one way or another. 

• When the explorations and discoveries of roughly 1500 bring the unprecedented expansion of chains of production and new sources of income outside the West, more dynamic entrepreneurs threaten the ruling class of hereditary landowners, the nobles. 

That evolution leads in France to stronger monarchy, which contains the new interests; to associating nobles with the gods of mythology; to "Wars of Religion," that pit popular masses against entrepreneurs who challenge traditional protections.  

• Nobles' legal privileges and control of the State hamper but do not stop the growth of those interests. By the 1780's establishments employing hundreds of workers have grown up around Paris:

   Pillage of la Folie-Titon [Réveillon] on Fbg. Saint-Antoine, April 28 1789, anonymous, end 18th century / zoom

A riot at Réveillon, with 200 employees, takes place two months before the taking of the Bastille. By reacting against a rumored reduction of salaries rather than the cost of bread, it announces the struggle between capital and labor. 

Similar establishments: A company with 300 employees in what is now the 13th; several plants north of the Saint-Denis gate, one of which has 800 workers; manufactories in Orleans and Rouen... .

-- In the 13th:

Elements for a History of the Commune in the 13th Dstrict by Gérard Conte, 1981 (in French)

-- In the north:

The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1982

-- In Orleans and Rouen:

The Monarchy's Last Fires by Charles-Eloi Vial, ch. 1, 2016 (in French)

• Those entrepreneurs resent the nobles' privileges that block their expansion, and want political power that fits their economic clout. Nobles, whose revenues come from peasant dues that inflation reduces and whose values and upbringing make them ill-equipped for business, resist. 

The street provides the force that leads to them to hide, flee or be guillotined: "What had been pretension became tragedy."

-- Adolphe Thiers, History of the French Revolution,1834 (in French)

      Illustration in The Great French Revolution by Georges Soria (ed. Bordas) in French, 1988

# # #

Marx's summary:

 "The dykes to capitalism had to be broken. 

They were broken." 

But not quite.

*     *     *

Next,

The 1830 Revolution: capitalists' buried triumph

THE REVOLUTION OF 1830, CAPITALISTS' BURIED TRIUMPH

ITS THREE DAYS OF STREET FIGHTING ACCOMPLISHED THE GOAL OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BY ELIMINATING THE POLITICAL HOLD OF THE NOBILITY FOREVER

That's not said. This schoolbook of 1966 presents a list of political facts that have no link with underlying issues.* 

*A translation appears at the end of the page.

Instead of a struggle between emerging capitalists and nobles weakened by economic growth, students learn of a political struggle that has no tangible base.  

Recent textbooks split the same facts into themes that are exclusively political. The economy appears in an unconnected chapter.  

# # #

An economic approach:

The conflict between nascent capitalists and hereditary landowners, which has been gathering steam since the 16th century, comes to a head over five years of drama: the French Revolution (1789-1794). Nobles lose their legal privileges and if they leave, their lands. A business-friendly society replaces that based on hereditary rank. 

But Napoleon's wars absorb capital and energies (from roughly 1800 to 1815). Then the victorious foreign monarchies impose a government run by surviving nobles (the Restoration, 1815-1830). 

# # #

Those developments slow growth but do not stop it:

• The Saint Martin canal, started in 1805 and stopped in 1809, is rebooted with peace in 1815 and finished in 1824: The industrialization of northern Paris, and the fortunes to be made from it, begin.  

Postcard, end of the 19th century / zoom

• The cemetery of the Holy Innocents undergoes a similar evolution. The plan to make it a full-time marketplace, launched just before the Revolution, is completed toward 1824.

• Developers build the maze of covered passages at the same time. "Vero-Dodat," is named after the two butchers who financed it:

Zoom

# # #

Capitalists' pressure on the government grows. When the king loses elections he "throws the monarchy from the towers of Notre Dame"* by suppressing their voting power and press. That is the point of the political measures the textbook mentions.

*René de Chateaubriand, a deeply royalist writer and one of the few perceptive members of the king's entourage.

Street fighting breaks out. Believing that the Virgin Mary has promised her help, the king plays cards in his château across the river until his famished troops are pushed back and thousands of Parisians threaten to attack him. He abdicates.

Combat devant l'Hôtel de Ville le 28 juillet 1830 by Jean-Victor Schnetz, official commission, 1830  / zoom  

Bankers make up the only organized force. They offer the throne to Louis-Philippe, head of the Bourbon monarchy's junior branch. 

Louis-Philippe quitte Palais-Royal pour les Tuileries le 31 juillet 1830 ("Louis-Philippe leaves Palais-Royal for the Tuileries July 31, 1830") by Horace Vernet / zoom

The new king is the son of despised Equality Philip, who voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI. Without the legitimacy of heredity or election, he depends on the financiers who have handed him the throne.

# # #

The king is associated with the Church and the past, that is, with economic immobility:

La Mort de Charles X, print, 1836 / zoom

While a newspaper editor and pillar of the new regime expresses authority by his gaze, an armchair that underscores power and fingers that look like claws. That authority lies behind surging economic dynamism.

Portrait de Monsieur Bertin by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1832 / zoom

Calling the insurgency "The Three Glorious Days"

shows capitalists' jubilation at taking power at last.  

# # #

The schoolbook text:

"Did Polignac have to retire?The Charter did not oblige the king to choose his ministers among the Chamber's majority. Rather than cede, Charles X preferred dissolution, but the electors returned a hostile majority. Then the king, by the Four Ordinances pronounced the dissolution of the new Chamber, modified the electoral regime and the regime of the press by his own authority. It was a veritable coup d'état: the Charter did not allow the king to make up the law (July 25, 1830).

Pushed by secret societies where young republicans were numerous, by journalists, by patrons exciting their workers, the people of Paris revolted against the ordinances. The rebels flew the tricolor. After three days of street fighting (the "Three Glorious Days," July 27,28, 29 1830) in which the royal guard was engaged — the rest of the army abstained from fighting — the capital was lost for Charles X."

*    *    *

Next,

 Boring history, a political tool