IV.8. HAVE THE KINGS BECOME SUBVERSIVE?

4.8. HVE KNGS BECME SUBVERSVE?

A NEW KIND OF DIVINITY REPLACES THEM

 Sun King image on the gate of Versailles / YouTube

 The ruler lights up his kingdom as the sun lights up the world.

Perfume ad at the summit of the Hôtel Lutetia, 7th, 2015

An invincible goddess hovers over Sèvres-Babylon crossroad on the elegant left bank.

In brief

• A new society creeps in

• Goddesses loom over the city

• Kings and globalization

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Next,

4.8.1.

A new society creeps in

4.8.1. 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, a tablet to rent replaces Marie-Antoinette's cell, chain stores or shops without personality replace businesses that had a soul, as here and here.

• A brand even takes over Napoleon's tomb:

Claude Abron

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 pass through three levels of shops before reaching the exit:

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

• While another boutique covers the exit's wall: 

PHOTO

 # # #

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

*     *     * 

 

Next,

4.8.2.

Goddesses loom over the city

4.8.2. GODDESSES LOOM OVER THE CITY

COINCIDING WITH THAT EVOLUTION, GIANT ADS

(SINCE 2011)  

Place des Victoires, 2015

       Opéra, 2015

    Departent store, 2016

Commercial street in the wealthy 16th, 2017

                                                                                                                     Opéra facade, 2023

For their underlying message

please click and scroll down. 

*     *     *  

Next, 

4.8.3.

Kings and globalization

4.8.3. 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 colossal figure looms over town like Big Brother, in hommage to a brand for which purchase has no reason. In an economy based on consumerism, buying is an order.

And all else, as these pages show, is left out.

The pont d'Arcole in central Paris

To fall for that one must be submissive, credulous and have no conflicting frame of reference: The monarchs' majesty

stands in the way of such annihilation.

As well, it has 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 IV.

*      *      * 

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

Part IV addresses that gap.

 V.
Cradle of upheaval

V. CRADLE OF UPHEAVAL

 5. MENU: Cradle of upheaval

DREAD OF INSURRECTION BECOMES THE SECOND REASON FOR THE CITY'S BEAUTY WHEN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME EXTENDS ROYAL INNOVATIONS TO FACILITATE REPRESSION

The "City of Love" is a commercial invention. The"City of Insurrection" that inspired the whole Continent is skipped.

     Ad on the Louvre

     Barricade in Ménilmontant when La Commune broke out / zoom, musée Carnavalet

Not exhibited 

These pages address that gap.

• Setting the past in its tangible context 

• 1830: the people fooled

• 1848: fooled again

• The first mass working-class insurrection brings modern Europe's first mass massacre

• The historical museum and the insurrections

• Fear, unlikely promoter of urban grandeur

• Remaking the city

• Gifts of the repression

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Next,
5.1.

Setting the past in its tangible context

5.1. HISTORY'S TANGIBLE BASE

 MENU: 5.1. HISTORY'S TANGIBLE BASE

MOST ACCOUNTS ARE POLITICAL NARRATIVES THAT STRESS IDEAS OR INDIVIDUALS — NOT THE UNDERLYING ECONOMY AND WHOM IT FAVORS 

Neglecting that base makes the past due to chance or simply incomprehensible. That approach makes our world seem so too.

These pages start with history

as a schoolbook tells it,

then suggest an alternative.

• An account that makes no sense

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

• The Revolution of 1830: capitalism's neglected triumph 

*    *    *

Next:

5.1.1.

An account that makes no sense

V.1.2. "LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY" LETS CAPITALISM TAKE WING

IN PRACTICE...

• Liberty means free enterprise. 

• Equality ends the nobles' privileges that limit business growth. 

• Fraternity calls up the masses to blow those privileges away.

This account of the French Revolution explains it as due to absolutism and the poor having no voice. Others mention 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. 

One of the web's explanations 

Causes: Inequality / The poor have no power / Absolutism / Hunger

Not said: that economic growth made conflict between hereditary landowners and nascent capitalists inevitable, and that the latter had to call up the street to win.  

Painting gone from the web.

Middle-class leader, popular striking force: But only the man with the blue head scarf at the bottom right appears to work with his hands.

# # #

When the explorations and discoveries of the end of the 15th century bring major new revenues, an unprecedented expansion of chains of production lets new entrepreneurs challenge the overclass of hereditary landowners, the nobles.

In France early results of that transformation are:

• Stronger monarchy, which contains the new interests.

• Arts that buttress the nobles by associating them with the gods of mythology.

• "Wars of Religion," that pit popular masses against entrepreneurs who challenge traditional protections.  

Nobles' legal privileges and control of the State hampers economic growth and for two centuries the struggle between nobles and gradually enriched capitalists is latent. Yet by the 1780's establishments employing hundreds of workers have sprung up around Paris:

   Pillage de a Folie-Titon [Réveillon] au Fbg. Saint-Antoine, April 28 1789, anonymous, end 18th century / zoom

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

A company with 300 employees in what is now the 13th, plants north of the Saint-Denis gate, one of which has 800 worker and manufactories in Orleans and Rouen are other such establishments.

-- In the 13th:

Éléments pour une history de la Commune dans le 13e arrondissement by Gérard Conte, 1981

-- In the north:

The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1959

-- In Orleans and Rouen:

Les derniers feux [fires]de la monarchie by Charles-Eloi Vial, ch. 1, 2016

Entrepreneurs resent the nobles' privileges that block their expansion and want political power that fits their economic clout. Nobles resist because they usually have neither the resources nor the upbringing to equip them for business: for more, please click and scroll down.

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

-- Adolphe Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française,1834

 

      Illustration in La Grande Révolution française by Georges Soria (ed. Bordas), 1988

# # #

Marx's summary of the French Revolution: "The dykes to capitalism had to be broken. They were broken."

But not quite.

*     *     *

Next,

 5.1.3.

The 1830 Revolution:

Capitalists' neglected triumph

V.1.4. THE REVOLUTION OF 1830: CAPITALISM'S FORGOTTEN TRIUMPH

COMPARE WITH THE TEXTBOOK

This painting evokes the Revolution of 1830, which finished what the French Revolution began: shatter nobles' control of the State, which let capitalism take off.

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

Background:

• The conflict between nascent capitalists and hereditary landowners, brewing since the 16th century, comes to a head with the French Revolution (1789-1794). Nobles lose their legal privileges and those who emigrate, their lands. A business-friendly society replaces that based on hereditary rank. 

• Then Napoleon's wars absorb capital and energies (1800-1815). His defeat leads foreign monarchies to impose a government by which noble survivors, weakened though they are, take power again (in 1815-1830). 

Those events 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 made from it, begin.  

-- Mon Canal Saint-Martin by Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, 1984

Postcard, end of the 19th century / zoom

• The cemetery of the Holy Innocents undergoes a similar evolution. The project to make it a marketplace only, launched just before the Revolution, is completed in the early 1820's.

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

     Zoom

# # #

Businessmen's pressure on the government grows.

• When king Charles X loses elections he "throws the monarchy from the towers of Notre Dame"* by suppressing voting power and press. That is the essence of the Ordonnances the textbook mentions.

*René de Chateaubriand, royalist writer. This account is based on his memoir, Souvenirs d'outre-tombe, 1848.

• Street fighting breaks out. 

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

The assailants are shown as middle-class, though in fact they were largely plebeian: more later.

• Believing that the Virgin Mary has promised her help, the king plays cards in his château across the river. He does not even supply his troops. The famished soldiers do not defend the bridge and thousands of Parisians threaten to attack. He abdicates.

• 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  by Horace Vernet / zoom

# # #

The upheaval completes the transformation that the French Revolution began : 

• The deposed king and returned nobles are inseparable from the Church and the past, that is, from economic immobility: Here the authority figure is the clergyman, who is larger than the other personnages and dominates them.

               La Mort [death] de Charles X, print, 1836 / zoom

Héros of the Ancien Régime welcome the king to Paradise.

• The gaze of this newspaper editor and pillar of the new regime exudes the power that economic dynamism brings.

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

The seat emphasizes domination and the fingers look like claws.

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

Calling the insurgency "The Three Glorious Days" shows capitalists' jubilation at taking power at last. 

# # #

Skip the rhetoric of philosophies or slogans.

What are their practical effects? 

End of this section.

*    *    *

The next section, 

5.3.

The people fooled