Posts Tagged ‘Marie Antoinette’
“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly”*…
An excerpt from Lyndal Roper‘s Cundill Prize-Shortlisted Summer of Fire and Blood…
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. Like a vast contagion it spread from southwest Germany through Württemberg, Swabia, the Allgäu, Franconia, Thuringia, and Saxony to Alsace in what is now France, Austria, and Switzerland. Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellion would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months, they won. Authority and rulership collapsed, and the familiar structures of the Holy Roman Empire were overturned, exposing the fragility of the existing social and religious hierarchies. People even began to dream of a new order.
But this moment did not last. In spring 1525, the ‘Aufruhr,’ or ‘turbulence,’ as contemporaries called it, had reached its height, rolling all before it. By May the tide had turned. The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. That summer of blood, maybe 1 per cent of the population of the area of the war was killed, an enormous loss of life in just over two months.
Despite its enormity, the Peasants’ War and its bloody defeat have been forgotten in recent years. People remember the era for Martin Luther and his Reformation, which split Western Christendom forever between Catholics and those who would eventually be known as Protestants. The Peasants’ War has come to be seen as a diversion, an interlude important mainly for what it tells us about Luther, for this was the moment when Luther came out in support of the princes and against the ‘mad dogs’, the rebelling peasants. From then on, the Reformation in Germany would be conservative. Mainstream reformers would go on to ally with rulers to advance the goals of the Reformation, and when the new church was set up after the war, it would have the backing of those in power.
The Reformation’s possibilities, as well as its limits, cannot be grasped without an understanding of the Peasants’ War as the giant trauma at its center. Equally, the ideas, dreams, and hopes unleashed by the Reformation shaped the Peasants’ War. And the war, in turn, cannot be understood if it has been severed from the heady atmosphere of religious excitement in which it took place.
To understand why such a massive movement mushroomed from such small, apparently isolated beginnings in a distant corner of the empire, we need to listen to what drove the peasants. It is no accident that just three years after Luther defied the emperor and the estates of the empire, the peasants of first one or two lords and abbots decided to down tools and gather in bands.
In 1520 Luther himself had written a short but powerful tract, one of the three great Reformation writings from that year setting out his theology, titled The Freedom of a Christian. The cover of the German edition was emblazoned with the incendiary word ‘freedom.’ It was all very well for Luther’s supporters to argue later that he had meant spiritual freedom, but the fact was that many peasants in the southwest, particularly those ruled by the Catholic monasteries, convents, and abbots Luther was attacking, were serfs, owned by their masters. For them, freedom meant ending serfdom too. Despite Luther’s later condemnation, the Peasants’ War is unthinkable without the ideas he unleashed.
By standing up to the emperor, Charles V, at Worms in 1521, Luther had provided an unforgettable example of resistance. A lone monk in a borrowed cassock before an audience of dignitaries arrayed in all their finery, he had confronted the mightiest power in the land and had said his piece, refusing to recant unless convinced by ‘Holy Scripture.’ Small wonder that the peasants drew on his ideas for their cause. Small wonder they assumed he would support them.
But he did not. [see below] By late March of 1525, the peasant revolt had become a mass movement whose demands found shape in the Twelve Articles [see here and more fully, here]. These were probably composed by Sebastian Lotzer, a townsman and furrier, on the basis of hundreds of complaints that different groups of peasants had been formulating for weeks beforehand. Influenced by Martin Luther; the preacher Christoph Schappeler, himself a follower of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli; and a strain of radical evangelicalism, Lotzer helped transform a set of specific, apparently random grievances against particular lords into a wide-ranging theological vision that chimed with radical Reformation ideas.
Local spats could now feed into a mass movement that spread far beyond individual disputes between a peasant and a particularly nasty abbot or lord. Yet Lotzer did not invent this theology, nor was he the first to apply it to agricultural relations—that had already been done by the peasants themselves as they formulated their complaints. The Twelve Articles then became a document that the movement everywhere acknowledged, even when the rebels did not know exactly what the articles contained, and even though many areas revised them to suit local circumstances. Soon they were printed using the new technology made possible by the invention of movable type, and they spread all over Germany. You could pick them up and hold them in your hand, point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.
The key thing about the Peasants’ War was that it was a mass movement. For too long, histories of the war have emphasized its leaders, men like Thomas Müntzer in Thuringia, adopted by Friedrich Engels and then by the East German regime as a revolutionary hero to rival the reactionary colossus Luther. There are indeed a series of outsize characters who populated the war: Götz von Berlichingen, the knight with the iron fist, who became a peasant leader after his mother-in-law failed to hand him his liege-lord’s summons to fight against them, or so he later claimed in his mendacious autobiography, written in his nineties. Or Florian Geyer, a noble who also led peasant armies and was finally knifed by an assassin. Or the Black Hofmännin, a peasant woman who claimed she urged on the peasant troops and rubbed the fat of the slaughtered nobles onto her shoes. Or the ‘Bauernjörg,’ Truchsess Georg von Waldburg, who led the lords’ army of the Swabian League and mercilessly torched rebel villages.
But this was a movement, not a drama of Great Men. The peasants’ side of the story has been forgotten because they did not write it down, either because they were illiterate or because they were slain or executed in the war. The winners—the lords and mainstream theologians who were the peasants’ enemies—instead wrote the history…
“How the German Peasants’ War Exposed 16th-Century Europe’s Fragile Foundations,” via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
Read Martin Luther’s (negative) reactions to the Peasants here.
* Montaigne
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As we ponder the historicity of the history we “know,” we might spare a thought for a victim of a somewhat more successful rebellion, the wife of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, who is famously remembered for responding, on being told that many of her subjects had no bread, “let them eat cake”… except that she (virtually certainly) didn’t: the phrase can actually be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s Confessions in 1765, when Antoinette was nine years old and had never been to France. The phrase was not attributed to Antoinette until decades after her death.
Still, she was was beheaded on this date in 1793 by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Republican government established after the fall of the monarchy (and the execution of her husband) in the French Revolution.
Bonus: “Marie Antoinette, the original influencer” (?)
“All that is solid melts into air”*…
Paul North finds a prescient analysis of the (still only possible) end of the American republic in Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte…
An autocrat takes over. Why does the legislature permit him to hijack government, pervert institutions and norms, and unburden them of their legitimate power? Why would a representative body like the US Congress willingly injure its own authority? Karl Marx gave an answer in 1852, in his fiery postmortem for the French Republic, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Marx’s answer to the question of why the powerful willingly abandon their own power is unusual because it does not find a rational plan behind the move. A legislature, faced with a potential autocrat, is caught between two impulses and ends up following the wrong one—one that is, in fact, self-destructive. That Democratic legislators do not stand up to Trump is one thing, but the litmus test, according to Marx, was not the actions of the centrists or leftists but of the true Right. Putatively at least, the Right is in power, as it was in the French Second Republic. While Democrats may see what’s going on but are cowardly or weak, the Right is either simply blind or making a dangerous but rational calculation. In his century, Marx called the Right blind, for interesting reasons.
It is hard to imagine what drives the Right today to support the Trump regime. Take Tom Cole, the 10th-term Republican from Oklahoma’s fourth district, poster child for conservative principles and head of the Appropriations Committee, arguably the most powerful position in the House—at least formerly. Regarding Social Security, Cole’s website states that his goal is to “sustain and protect the program for current beneficiaries and future retirees.” Yet, as a recent article by Russell Berman demonstrates, “even Tom Cole is defending DOGE,” which has the hallowed safety net in its sights…
… It is common to think of The Eighteenth Brumaire as the chronicle of a self-aggrandizing, power-hungry “serious buffoon,” Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He had failed twice to take power through coups d’état, in 1836 and again in 1840. No one who knew him could deny that coups were his thing. Then, in the confusion after the revolutions of 1848 and on the strength of his name and dynastic ties to his uncle, Louis Napoleon returned to France and, third try’s the charm, became leader of France. No coup was needed this time—he won the new republic’s first presidential election by a wide margin.
In the years that followed, Louis Napoleon engineered a repeal of universal male suffrage, hobbled parliament, and manipulated ministers and generals to his purposes. When it became clear that the Constituent Assembly would not amend the constitution to extend his term in office, he decided (surprise, surprise) to instigate yet another coup: he had opponents arrested by the thousands, constrained the press, and, in November 1852, became emperor of France…
… A coup d’état in miniature every day, to hold the public gaze—parallels between Louis Napoleon and Donald Trump are vivid and many. Peter Gordon drew out the important ones in an essay for the Boston Review. At the most basic level, Trump and Louis Napoleon dress up restoration in the tunic of revolution: both leaders rode in on the backs of the disenfranchised, and both promised a return to a golden age that never existed.
Yet The Eighteenth Brumaire is not primarily the anatomy of an autocrat. For most of its approximately 100 pages, Marx analyzes in detail how other actors in the republic misidentified Louis Napoleon as good for their interests. He focuses particularly on members of the Constituent Assembly, whose influence flowed directly from the existence of the republic itself. Marx skewers assembly members, ministers, and military leadership for their ignorant, self-destructive complicity. The first lesson of his depressing and hilarious pamphlet is not to focus on the autocrat, since it takes a nation to make one, after all…
… New interests do produce vigorous sap, and that sap needs to flow, vigorously, toward something concrete. If we concentrate, as Marx does, not on the Caesar but on the political parties, their platforms, and their representatives in the Constituent Assembly, we can ask how they failed to foresee the obvious and forestall the republic’s end.
All the drama in The Eighteenth Brumaire happens in the assembly. Louis Napoleon may be farcical, but the legislature is tragic. “The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie,” Marx tells us. To avoid a real republic, right-wing elements circumvented checks and balances, first and foremost the constitution. And then, when Louis Napoleon circumvented the assembly itself in 1851 in order to extend his rule, conservatives suddenly remembered the republic. It was republicanism, they realized, that had brought them to power, and republicanism that had allowed them to exercise it. With its end, they ended.
Just a few years before, the Revolution of 1848 had brought down the French king and introduced liberal freedoms of press, speech, association, and assembly, all secured through a liberal constitution. It also brought about universal, unpropertied male suffrage. Some of these freedoms and entitlements were then progressively taken away by the assembly, the rest by the emperor. It wasn’t Louis Napoleon that caused the demise, however. Parliament dissected itself. It took away the basis of its own power by going around the constitution. Marx’s poignant lines evoke a feeling many of us have today that can only be called “rue.” On one side, Marx rues the way “the collective will of the nation” seeks “its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a freebooter.” The people stood with Louis Napoleon, although he was antithetical to their interests. On the other side, the assembly used its power to do away with its power. Two errors made a fatal combination…
… It is a general truth that an autocrat gets into power not by himself but through those who let him. Louis Napoleon came to power by legal means (at least the third time he tried), but he stayed in power through the complicity of those around him. What did they have to ignore in order to continue in their complicity? Marx does not mince words: “If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état.” The coming coup was so obvious, no one could have denied it and remained honest with themselves. This raises some questions. Why did the Right ignore what was in front of their faces? Why, in the presence of real danger, whose long-term effects would be devastating to their political goals, did this group default? Why did they defer to a lesser danger at the cost of denying the existence of a much greater one?…
… What holds a body of consummately rational actors in such an irrational state that they take losses as victories? What allowed the Right in mid-19th-century France to believe the steps they were taking toward irrelevance were in fact steps toward the triumph of their political vision? Marx has two answers. On one hand, behind the self-deception, he sees a simple wish: the bourgeoisie as a whole “longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling.” On this view, the Party of Order made a semirational choice—that a roiling populace would be worse for order than an autocratic fool. In the end, assembly members could relinquish governing and go back to the business of making money—which, according to Marx, was their material desire anyway: “[T]he bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic: ‘Rather an end with terror than terror without end!’”
This is a psychoanalysis not of complicity, however, but of capitulation. Marx may be correct about the way things ended. He is talking about the Right’s eventual acceptance of autocratic rule, after it became a fait accompli. Once it was clear that they had lost, they could say “There’s nothing we could have done. This way is better for business. It is what we wanted.” They could declare their actions to have been rational all along and go back to their farms or their industries. But why had parliament succumbed to this debacle in the first place? How did they catch the peculiar malady cretinism?…
Read on for an answer: “He’s a Cretin but We’ll Manage Him,” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. Indeed, eminently worth reading in full.
* “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” – Karl Marx
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As we contemplate capitulation, we might ponder the pre-history of the events in question and spare a thought for Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France (the second child and first son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette); he died of tuberculosis on this date in 1789 at age 7… 40 days before the storming of the Bastille. At his death, the title of Dauphin passed to his younger brother Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy (1785–1795), who died during the French Revolution, at the Temple prison in Paris.
“Be careful what you wish for”*…
… And how you wish for it. Eric Athas, with an all-too-timely reminder…
Whenever I’m thinking about ideas to send to you all, I’m reminded of a principle called Goodhart’s Law, which says: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
In other words, when you tell people they’re being evaluated by a target they must hit, you risk pushing them to produce the wrong results in the name of reaching the target. The incentives can drive them to fixate on achieving the target, not achieving the overall goal.
The concept is named after the economist Charles Goodhart, who introduced it in a 1975 paper about monetary management. But the theory has been connected to a range of situations.
One of the most famous examples is a story about colonial India, when the British government sought to subdue an overpopulation of cobras in Delhi by placing a bounty on the snakes. Turn in a snakeskin, get some money.
But the plan backfired. People started farming cobras to cash in on the bounties, only exacerbating the population problem. This tale, which you can hear more about in a 2012 Freakonomics episode, spawned a shorthand for this phenomenon—the cobra effect…
… Goodhart’s Law, or the cobra effect, isn’t limited to economic policy or invasive species. You can apply it to everyday situations:
- A fitness tracker rewards you for clocking 10,000 steps a day, so you spend your evenings pacing around your living room. [see here]
- A calorie-counting app pushes you to form an unhealthy diet to stay under the limit.
- You set a resolution to read book a week but soon begin selecting books purely based on length—not interest or relevance—to hit the target.
- A construction firm is given unrealistic milestones and must cut corners to fulfill a contract.
- A school becomes hyper-focused on its test scores and offers incentives for grades instead of providing a well-rounded educational experience.
That last one happened in a years-long cheating scandal in Atlanta that unraveled in the 2010s.
Workplace quotas can have this effect, too. When you’re evaluated based on a quota, you may do anything to meet that quota, even if the quality of the work diminishes.
On the flip side, a quota policy may demotivate workers. Here’s what Adam Cobb, a professor of management at Wharton, said in a Wharton write-up about quotas: “People might start withholding effort … If you can easily meet your monthly quota, why should you try as hard once the goal is reached? Doing so may encourage the company to raise the quota, making your life harder.”
You can find the cobra effect in academic research, too, with the push for publication fueling an increase in fake papers.
Today, we’re surrounded by measurements that can be tempting to use as targets in our behavior. What is inbox zero but a target that may distract us from completing more fulfilling work?
I think a lot about the cobra effect with social media, where your success is tied to your ability to accrue views, likes, comments, and shares. Those targets can create an expectation that you must always be creating something new. Social media managers, influencers, and YouTubers have talked about the pressure to churn out new content to please algorithms and feed their audiences…
… Which brings me back to the point I started with a few hundred words ago, and the title of this post. I send this newsletter every Sunday. The routine is helpful because it provides me with a structure to work within. Absent that framework, I could end up spending too little or too much time on it.
But I must remind myself that the weekly tempo isn’t the target. If it were, I’d be critiquing myself based on arbitrary timing, not on the quality of the information I’m sharing with you. I’d be more prone to “spin up” content, as opposed to finding interesting ideas to share with you. I try to keep Goodhart’s Law in mind each week.
As you go about your day, consider your own goals, personally and professionally. When you take an action, like posting a photo on social media or completing a work task, are you doing it to please a measurement? To hit a target?…
The cobra effect and the dangers of turning measures into targets: “I’m not writing this to hit a weekly target,” from @ericathas.
Apposite: “When workplace bonuses backfire” (Economist gift link)
(Image above: source)
* Aesop’s Fables
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As we interrogate our intentions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was beheaded. The French Revolution had begun in 1789…
… The Storming of the Bastille on 14 July led to a series of radical measures by the Assembly, among them the abolition of feudalism, state control over the Catholic Church in France, and a declaration of rights.
The next three years were dominated by the struggle for political control, exacerbated by economic depression. Military defeats following the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in April 1792 resulted in the insurrection of 10 August 1792. The monarchy was replaced by the French First Republic in September, while Louis XVI was executed in January 1793.
After another revolt in June 1793, the constitution was suspended, and adequate political power passed from the National Convention to the Committee of Public Safety [which decreed Marie Antoinette’s fate]. About 16,000 people were executed in a Reign of Terror, which ended in July 1794. Weakened by external threats and internal opposition, the Republic was replaced in 1795 by the Directory. Four years later, in 1799, the Consulate seized power in a military coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte. This is generally seen as marking the end of the Revolutionary period…
“Trees and people used to be good friends”*…
What’s old is new again… yet again…
If there’s a style that defines 2020, it has to be “cottagecore.” In March 2020, the New York Times defined it as a “budding aesthetic movement… where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral existence.” In August, consumer-culture publication The Goods by Vox heralded cottagecore as “the aesthetic where quarantine is romantic instead of terrifying.”
Baking, one of the activities the quarantined population favored at the height of the pandemic, is a staple of cottagecore, whose Instagram hashtag features detailed depictions of home-baked goods. Moreover, the designer Lirika Matoshi’s Strawberry Dress, defined as The Dress of 2020, fully fits into the cottagecore aesthetic. A movement rooted in self-soothing through exposure to nature and land, it proved to be the antidote to the stress of the 2020 pandemic for many.
Despite its invocations of rural and pastoral landscapes, the cottagecore aesthetic is, ultimately, aspirational. While publications covering trends do point out that cottagecore is not new—some locate its origins in 2019, others in 2017—in truth, people have sought to create an escapist and aspirational paradise in the woods or fields for 2,300 years.
Ancient Greece had an enduring fascination with the region of Arcadia, located in the Peloponnesus, which many ancient Greeks first dismissed as a primitive place. After all, Arcadia was far from the refined civilization of Athens. Arcadians were portrayed as hunters, gatherers, and sensualists living in an inclement landscape. In the Hellenistic age, however, Arcadia became an idea in the popular consciousness more than a geographical place…
And the pastoral ideal resurfaced regularly therafter. Theocritus, Virgil, Longus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, even Marie-Antoinette– keeping cozy in a countryside escape, through the ages: “Cottagecore Debuted 2,300 Years Ago,” from Angelica Frey (@angelica_frey) in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Hayao Miyazaki, My Neighbor Totoro
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As we pursue the pastoral, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865, after four years of Civil War, approximately 630,000 deaths, and over 1 million casualties, that General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to the commander of the Union Army, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia… a one-time pastoral setting.
“Space: the final frontier”*…
This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.
One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.
The war is alive again of late because a study that came out this month from Skidmore College. The study is, somehow, the first to look specifically at this question. It is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading.”…
Find out the truth at “The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period.”
* the words opening each episode of Star Trek
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As your correspondent basks in confirmation, we might recall that it was in 1770 that Germany and France moved past 30 years of animosity, celebrating their new alliance with the marriage of Archduchess Marie “let them eat cake” Antionette and Dauphin Louis-Auguste de France (soon enough to become King Louis XVI), in a lavish ceremony at Versailles, in front of more than 5000 guests.
A torrential thunderstorm pre-empted the fireworks planned for that evening; but the celebration continued through May 30th, when fireworks on Place de la Concorde killed 132 people– a grim omen of a reign that would prove tragic.
Marie Antoinette in her wedding dress, which was adorned with white diamonds
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