Since Monday, my first “free” day (as of noon), most of my time, unfortunately, has been needlessly wasted in pointless activities: attending a few mandatory meetings, visiting the campuses of the University of Paris, buying groceries, buying a telephone and other necessities, trying to get my Internet to work, etc. I’ve visited only a few sites, and I’m worried that I’m never going to see everything. So far I’ve been to the Louvre, Notre Dame (exterior), Les Invalides, the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism, and the Pantheon, taken a cruise on the Seine, and seen two plays. This may sound like a lot, but really, it isn’t. This morning, I was preoccupied with trying to buy a cell phone, and trying, unsuccessfully, to get the Internet connection in my room (for which I paid 30 Euros) to work.
The trip to Les Invalides was excellent: I was on a guided tour with about a quarter of the other EDUCO students. For those of you who don’t know, Les Invalides was originally constructed by Louis XIV as a sort of retirement home for elderly, sick, frail, injured, crippled, or otherwise incapacitated soldiers. Its construction was a means of raising the prestige of the military profession, and making enlistment more desirable. It is now a museum of military history, although a few retired soldiers do live there; it also includes the building which was converted, by Louis-Napoleon, into the tomb of Napoleon I, again as a publicity stunt.
Our tour mostly reviewed the epoch from the American Revolution, through the Napoleon period. It was interesting to see how Napoleon I’s silhouette -- expanded during his military career. There were some old Gribeauval cannon and rifles, a mark that was just coming into usage in time to be used by our French allies during our own Revolution. Gribeauval artillery was lighter and easier to transport than older designs, and the rifles were constructed of interchangeable parts, which in that era were a (useful) novelty. These rifles were still, in my opinion, fairly heavy, weighing 4.2 kg, or about nine and a half pounds. Did I mention that we saw Lafayette’s epaulets?
Napoleon’s tomb is very impressive and grand. They sealed the old boy up pretty tightly: the massive, massive tomb that sits at the center of the round building, beneath the dome, is the outermost of no fewer than seven different sarcophagi, each constructed from a different material, in order to preserve the first emperor’s mortal remains from destruction. Since he was sealed up, naturally, nobody’s bothered to check to see how the remains are faring: there’s a bit of a Schrodinger’s-cat aspect to the whole affair. Overhead is a double cupola, the work of none other than Mansard: the dome that you see on the outside is not the one you see from the inside, and hidden from view is a network of wooden beams, thanks to a clever trompe l’oeil. The dome was also very convenient for hiding Allied parachutists in World War II, although the Frenchman who protected the soldiers paid for his bravery with his life.
Le Musee d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme was somewhat of a disappointment. Perhaps I should not have visited it the day after visiting the Louvre, because it’s unfair to compare anything to that magnificent museum. However, I found that, though some parts of the Museum were interesting, I left without either having learned much or enjoyed myself much. The museum was inaugurated by then-President Jacques Chirac on November 30th, 1998, and sets out to describe Jewish rituals as practiced by European Jews, give a general impression of the varieties of various Jewish cultures, and provide a narrative of the Jewish presence in France. Throughout are religious objets d’art, such as chanukiot, arcs, yaddim, hagadot, and Torah scrolls, as well as many pieces of artwork depicting Jewish life and ceremonies engraving figuring prominently as a medium, and marriages, funerals, circumcisions, and Seders often chosen as topics.
Although nothing is exceptional, there are certainly some exhibits not to be missed. There is an excellent series of scaled models of the Polish-Lithuanian pagoda-style of synagogues which were constructed between the 16th and 17th centuries (the originals were nearly all destroyed in the two world wars). Unfortunately, this is the only style on display, and this is the limit of architectural history. There is a Chanukiah from the 14th century, whose form imitates Gothic architecture. There are numerous beautifully-illustrated Hagadot, one from Sarajevo in 14th century, one from Ashkelon in the 15th. The illustrations in these are wonderful, and the depictions of medieval seders reveal how little things have changed, in some respects, over the last few centuries. There are jewels from Morocco, and textiles from Salonika. There are political posters and newspaper clippings concerning the Dreyfus affair. There is a 1919 illustrated version of Chad Gadyah by El Lissitzky, a Soviet Jew, who used the goofy old Aramaic song about the goat as an allegory promoting the Bolshevik Revolution (no kidding). But all in all, if you only have a week to spend in Paris, the MAHJ is not worth spending a precious day. It deserves a B+.
The Pantheon, however, is well worth seeing. Twice daily, there are guided tours, and I planned my day in order to arrive near 11:00 AM, the time of the first tour. I was, at first, the only in attendance, and received a private tour for several minutes, but one by one, others joined me. The Pantheon is a gargantuan classical-revival temple-like structure which towers over all other buildings in its neighborhood. It stands in the place of the former church of Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. It was constructed by Louis XV as a way of making his subjects forget what a lousy king he was, and how badly the nation had suffered from warfare. The architect, Soufflot, designed a truly fantastic form for the building, which was more or less faithfully carried out after his death by his assistant Rondelet. Most amazingly, the building has a triple-cupola, built entirely from stone, without a splinter of wood, which many of Soufflot’s more experienced contemporaries protested against as impossible (they were wrong). The work was completed in 1790, just in time for the building to become a secular temple dedicated to the nation, rather than a church.
The walls of the main floor are painted with nationalistic depictions of grand personages of French history: Clovis, Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, etc., while the walls of the transept depict the life of Saint Genevieve. In the crypt are buried those whom the French government has seen fit to Pantheonize. With one exception, they are all men, and with two exceptions, they are all French. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Marie and Pierre Curie, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and many others rest in peace beneath the national temple. Unfortunately, a large number of the residents are Napoleon’s lackeys, whom he Pantehonized, I suspect, mostly out of egotism. It’s an enormously complicated process to be Pantheonized, and many well-known Frenchman have been denied this honor for one reason or another. Saint-Exupery, for example, cannot be Pantheonized, because nothing remains of his body; Albert Camus has not been Pantheonized, because his descendants withhold their consent; De Gaulle has not been Pantheonized because his last will and testament expressly spelled out where he wished to be buried. Denis Diderot, sadly, is also buried elsewhere; I plan to visit his grave sometime. Furthermore, Pantheonization is not irreversible: the very first man to receive the honor, Mirabeau, the father of the French Revolution, was also the first evictee, for political reasons. For many, such as Marat, who only remained for a few months before the political winds changed sufficiently to oust him, the Pantheon was more like a hotel than a final resting place
I’d like to take a moment to discuss the Pantheon’s most famous resident, who has a section all to himself, as well as a statue, while most of the Pantheon’s tombs are six-to-a-room, and lack additional ornamentation. Voltaire has a century named after him, and is generally regarded as the king of the Enlightenment, the champion of freedom and liberty (in particular, the liberty of free speech), the defender of tolerance, etc., etc. What many people don’t know was that Voltaire was a monarchist, covertly used his government ties to suppress his detractors, and wrote some of the most anti-Semitic tracts I have ever read. He wasn’t even a very good writer: his Letters on England (in French, Lettres Philosophiques) is, as my friend Brendan has put it, a book written about absolutely nothing. His first work was a long epic poem, the Henriade, which nobody seems to bother to read anymore. He often worked to have his own books condemned, in order to boost their sales (to better understand this phenomenon, I refer all readers to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).
The real jewel of the Enlightenment, in my opinion, is Denis Diderot, a younger, more intelligent, and more radical thinker than Voltaire. Diderot, editor of the Encyclopedia, which sought to disseminate as much information to as many people as possible, of all classes. Diderot, who defended some of the weakest members of society in his writings. Diderot, who left many of his works unpublished, some of them excellent, and not mere repetitions of the same tired set of statements (cf. Voltaire). Diderot, not only a writer and philosopher, but also a chemist and a mathematician. Diderot, who wrote that all knowledge should be free, and that the only thing worse than one good monarch was a series of three good monarchs in a row. Diderot, whose experimental attitude towards literature is would not be matched for another century, by the modernists (Woolf, Joyce, etc.). Diderot, who would have loved the Internet, had his own blog, and contributed frequently to Wikipedia, yes, he, I believe, deserves more praise than he receives, and certainly more praise than Voltaire deserves. It’s a shame that he isn’t in the Pantheon.
I finally have my Internet up and running! I don’t know why, but it works!
~JD
“Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-etre! / Car j’ignore ou tu fuis, tu ne sais ou je vais, / O toi que j’eusse aimee, o toi qui le savais!” [Elsewhere, very far from here! Too late! Maybe never! For I know not where you fly to, you know not where I go, oh you whom I loved, oh you who knew it] ~Beaudelaire, “XCIII -- A Une Passante.”
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