The Keep and Upcoming Opera

We’re going to see Puccini’s Tosca next Monday, and in preparation, we had a speaker come to inform us about the opera, in English this time. Both the language and an actual plot summary made this preparatory lecture much better and more informative than the last stultifying one.

I’m very excited for the opera, even though there won’t be an English translation, only a French one. But because I’ll be able to read the French rather than try to hear it, I anticipate that it’ll be much more easy to understand.

It’s strange that opera is lumped in with classical music as a fuddly-duddly old art form. I find the old operas to be far more accessible and enjoyable than old classical pieces, because of their emphasis on a big bold statement: the booming voices, lush arrangements of the music, instantly recognizable melodies and delicious melodrama means that the gestures are very easily appreciated by the opera ignoramus (which I count myself as). It’s a matter of opportunity, I think: all the operas I have been to thus far in my life are because of school. If the operas were cheaper or better advertised, I would probably go to see more operas. But because operas, like classical music and high art, have been locked into a snobbish club, I don’t hear about them and so I don’t go.

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We went to the Chateau de Vincennes, a castle that has served the roles of fortification, prison and bakery. Just the noted French talent for conservation on display again—what other nation would think, “OK. We’ve got a prison here. Some of our best and brightest, including Denis Diderot, as well as scores of the people, were unjustly imprisoned here. It’s one of the symbols of a hated, awful regime. You know what we should use it for? A bakery!”

Jokes aside, the guided tour that we took was very interesting and informative. It’s always nice to follow a long disquisition in a foreign language, and also nice to get a joke in a foreign language. I feel like I’m getting better at this French thing. Don’t worry, I’ll forget some easy verb like “to open” soon.

No matter what language these guided tours are given in, however, the format is the same: the guide introduces him/herself, acts peppy, throws in a disclaimer about the clarity of her speech, “If I speak too fast, or I’m not clear, speak up,” and then launches into the topic with a barrage of details, pausing to take questions from the audience or pose them herself. What you’re left with, even in the best ones I’ve taken (with the notable exception of the handheld audio tour from Alcatraz), is a bunch of interesting facts and statistics, which you then pass on to show how cultured you are. So here’s the interesting fact from the tour (actually more of an interesting anecdote, and actually more revealing than interesting in-of-itself): Sainte-Chappelle, the magisterial cathedral tucked in the corner of the yard of the Chateau de Vincennes, has a crescent moon insignia carved into several of the flying buttresses. What was interesting about this was what our guide said, “I assure you, it’s not Muslim. It’s because of…” There was a chuckle in unison from the crowd at the Muslim part. Of course it’s implausible that a Catholic King would build a monument to Islam in the Middle Ages, but what was revealing was the extent to which the guide told us that it was not Islamic in origin.

More interesting, however, than the barrage of random facts was the attention and knowledge that the attendees lavished on the tour. These people knew their stuff about French history, and weren’t shy about sharing it with one another. They, furthermore, were serious but not grave about their French history. They really were engaged—the attention was rapt throughout the hour-long tour, something that I’ve never seen in the US.

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Trickle-down economics at its most literal: it was common practice in eighteenth-century Paris, according to Daniel Roche in The People of Paris, to take crumbs from the nobility and sell them to the lower classes for their meals. Tripe at nine sous, veal at twelve. That this was simultaneously an option for economizing and variety tells us much, mostly bad, about the common people of Paris.

Beyond eating other’s scraps and hoping the grain harvests came through, the people of Paris were beset in other ways. A potent combination of corrupt police and petty moralists attempted to close off their common people’s lifestyle, from bars to gambling. Much ink and effort was spilled over reforming the poor, and so it’s no wonder that between hunger and contempt, the common people thought of themselves as a distinct group in opposition to their higher castes in society.

The Chateau de Vincennes could not have helped matters much for the public relations standpoint. It is far removed from central Paris, probably making it a somewhat mysterious entity. Seeing it could not help much to dispel one’s fears: the inside boasts barrack-like buildings and the donjon itself appears appropriately menacing. It appears to be as impenetrable as a Skull and Bones meeting.

Besides the symbols of the Bastille and the Chateau de Vincennes, Louis XV suffered by not being his father. Unlike his father, he was not a skillful politician, however you assess his intentions. So while the Bastille still stood and official moralism still persecuted during the Sun King’s reign, his son’s reputation was not as luminous and so he could not dazzle the citizenry to distraction. That was the source of the Herod rumors, the bathing-in-infant’s blood rumors and the general distrust of Louis XV. Once people start seriously considering the possibility of your having bathed in infant’s blood, you are pretty much done as a ruler people can trust, and successful governance is at least partially founded on trust.

To compensate for official incompetence and corruption, the people began enforcing their own brand of justice. Hence we can see that “[c]onsumers imposed their laws, and used taverns and smoking-saloons as and when they liked” (Roche 255) and “[e]veryone feared vagrants, wanderers and strangers, who were suspect more for their rootlessness than their manners.” (Roche 247)

What is interesting is that the laws of justice were being defined oppositionally and ad-hoc. So the common people began to distrust their government, and did not bother with their minor edicts, and went to the police as they needed to. The other opposition showed by the second quotation is that there is a distinct community being created here, one that lets in some and pushes others out. This community clearly did not have official rights to do this, but its informal justice was tolerated and even encouraged by the authorities.

This is a marked difference with the present. The French appear to detest multiculturalism and les communautés, what with their headscarf-banning and DNA testing. While there is controversy now, the French view appears to be that there are no subgroups within France, only Frenchmen, with one common interest. Of course, what happened in between now and then was the Revolution, and I suspect the bloody procession of factions has something to do with the lack of appeal for identity politics.