It's been hectic around here! I literally just finished the rough draft of the transcrip of my 25-minute oral expose on critiques of absolute monarchy on Montesquieu's Persian Letters (to be delivered on Wednesday), and still in the middle of my expose on the Ministry of Finance under Louis XIV.
But let's talk tourism: in the past week, I returned to the Louvre, and paid a visit to some French royalty.
Twice a week, the Louvre holds "nocturnes," where the galleries are open at night, until 10:00 p.m. As a "young friend of the Louvre," I'm allowed to bring a guest during these nights, and I invited my friend Sherif, who lives in my dorm. Sherif is a 22-year-old law student from Egypt; he is fluent in French, having been taught in French-language school, and wants to continue his studies in the U.S. He needs to practice his English, and I need to practice my French, so we alternated fairly freely between the two languages, changing whenever it felt right, during our several hours together. We took the RER (the train in Ile-de-France) and Metro north from the dorm, and, after getting a little bit turned around in the 1st arrondissement, found the Louvre.
In retrospect, the two exhibits we visited were well-chosen; the history of the Louvre itself (built by Philipe II, called Philipe-Auguste, contemporary of Richard the Lionheart), and Ancient Egypt. I know a little bit of French history, so I was in the position, for instance, to explain a little bit about Philipe-Auguste, Louis XIV, Napoleon I and III, Louis-Philippe, and the other actors we encountered. Sherif, meanwhile, is Egyptian, and could give me a wonderful description of life in ancient Egypt, of its pharaohs, its scribes, its musicians, and its builders.
In the middle of our stroll through historic models of Paris and the Louvre, Sherif posed me a question that could never be asked in the United States. We had been discussing how Napoleon I seized power, and how, just as in contemporary Egypt, whoever controls the army controls the state (elections officially scheduled for November, right?). Sherif asked me whether it was in the United States, France, or Great Britain that human freedom had been born. I was, well, taken aback. We're so self-critical of ourselves in the U.S. that any claim that America invented human liberty cannot be openly supported by any but the most ultra-patriotic, who are not to be found where I grew up. So I found myself, first of all, explaining how untenable this opinion was, how, because, for instance, the author of the Declaration of Independence was a large plantation owner who sexually abused his slaves and kept his unrecognized illegitimate children as slaves strikes many as hypocritical. Then, with promptings by Sherif, I found myself describing the histories of contemporary France (1789, jacobine republic, Napoleon I, restoration, July Monarchy, Napoleon III, Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, 3rd Republic, Vichy, 4th and 5th Republics) and Great Britain (Magna Charta, the Civil War and Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution, the neutralization of the House of Lords just around 1900, the slow decline in power of the monarchs), with a nod towards the U.S. Constitution. I didn't say all of this to show off, nor am I now listing everything for the purpose of flaunting my knowledge; what I'm trying to get at is how enormous a question Sherif asked, and how impossible it was for me to begin to explain why I couldn't answer it, because history simply is so complicated. He told me how much he enjoyed our conversation, so I thought that I did the right thing, but what would you have said if you had been in my place? Oh, and this was all in French...
By this time, we were several rooms into the Ancient Egyptian collections, and I told Sherif that it was his turn to speak, and mine to listen (he switched to English). It was my turn to relax, and listen to an enthusiast. He explained to me how obelisks were erected, for instance, with the help of the flood of the Nile, about the introduction of the chariot in Egypt, about scarabs, and about the origin of the "curse of the Pharaohs." Concerning this last matter, because Egypt's kings' tombs were provided with all the necessities of life, they had large stores of food, which, after several millennia, had long rotted. When early archaeologists opened the tombs, they immediately got hit in the face with 3000-year-old toxic effluvia. And despite all of the excavations, Egyptologists believe that they have only uncovered around 20% of ancient Egypt's treasures.
The Louvre guards began to close the doors on us, so we hurried out, and, with a little bit of searching, made it back to the Metro station. That night, it suddenly got cold in Paris, and I was still in my shorts (although I had grabbed my gloves before leaving). The next day, it was in the forties (low of 6 degrees Celsius, for you non-Americans), and I had my hood up and my gloves on in the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve.
Luckily, it was sunny for my Sunday excursion to the Basilique Saint-Denis, located north of Paris, as far as you can get from the city while still riding the Metro. It was a beautiful day, and I wanted to take advantage of the weather while it lasted, seeing as the basilica and its crypt get notoriously cold in the wintertime. I foolishly forgot my camera, so no FB photos; you'll have to imagine the basilica with me (or just search Google images for visual aids).
The basilica houses the necropolis of the kings of France; that is, it houses the bones of royal and noble families whom the modern state of France recognizes as French. Valerie, from EDUCO, had told me that Charlemagne was buried there; in fact, he isn't (he's in what's now Germany, in his old capital), but I did see several of my old friends, such as Francois I, who shares a prominent crypt with his queen, Claude de France; the crypt is decorated with Ionic columns, and was built under Henri II, in 1545. I saw Charles Martel and Pepin the Short, Carolingians, before descending into the Bourbon vault. Charles Martel was wearing a crown, holding a scepter, and wearing a royal cloak, just like all of the kings, even though he was never king in his lifetime -- he was Mayor of the Palace, meaning that he controlled everything, while the long-haired Merovingian king was nominal king of the Francs. Down among the Bourbons, one can find the preserved heart of Louis XIV alongside a fragment of Henri IV's body (which fragment is unspecified). As of 2004, Louis XVII's heart has also been on display (they wanted to verify that it was actually his). I could only think that the hearts were far more shriveled and unhealthy-looking than the sheep hearts that I handled in AP bio with Miss Gray, and even grayer and uglier than the crocodile hearts I had to understand in my Verts class at Cornell.
There is also an ossuary; behind two walls are a pair of caskets, with bones of various men and women with royal pretensions scrambled up inside. This, naturally, is not what is show to the public; instead, they are presented with a chronological list of all of the ossuary's residents, categorized by rank. There were enormous gaps in the chronology; for instance, the earliest bones were those of Dagobert (d. 638), Merovingian founder of the basilica; the next bones were those of Charles the Bald, Charlemagne's grandson, and thus a Carolingian, who died in 877. All of this disorder is the cause of the Revolution; during its more radical phase, the Revolutionary government disinterred all of the kings, in order to rid itself of all physical remnants of France's monarchical past. Although I believe in historical preservation ("that belongs in a museum!"), at the same time, I sympathize with the anti-royal cause. Can such a necropolis exist without engendering the illusion of the legitimacy of monarchy? Would I have visited the basilica if it had been filled with commoners rather than kings? Is this kind of history-by-political-leaders dangerous? Are palace intrigues, assassinations, and royal squabbles important to the study of history? But can we understand the past without some kind of a grasp of political leadership?
Ascending again, I found more royal propaganda, a pair of statues of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, commissioned during the Restoration of the monarchy, by Louis XVIII. Although the body in Louis XVI's coffin is a guillotined man, there is good reason to believe that the body is not that of Louis XVI; again, this is not written anywhere, and I know of it only by listening to one of the museum employees. There are a few more royal couples whom you may remember from my adventures in the Loire: Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne (married at the Chateau de Langeais, remember?), and Henri II and Catherine de Medicis. I also saw the tomb of Clovis, the Francish king who converted to Catholicism at the behest of his wife, around the year 500. Dagobert, called the founder of the basilica, received a rather special monument of his own, a fantastically-sculpted marble monolith depicting his soul, in the form of a naked baby wearing a crown and standing on a napkin, being presented before Christ. I really had to hunt to find the remains of Louis IX, a.k.a. Saint-Louis. Because he was canonized as a saint, his body was broken into tiny pieces, and sent to reliquaries around Europe; the basilica has retained the tip of one of his finger-bones, which has been placed in a chapel, rather than among the other royal tombs. Thanks to Professor Long's class on religious violence, I have read a section of the Compte de Joinville's account of Saint-Louis's failure of a seventh crusade in the late 13th century. Saint-Louis contributed greatly to the basilica, ordering a great deal of new tombs. He also initiated the burning of Talmud manuscripts (after a rigged trial between a rabbi and a formerly-Jewish monk, much resembling the Ramban's experience in Barcelona not too long afterwards), but, to his credit, he did found the Sorbonne, where I am studying.
Whew, I need to get to bed! I'm exhausted!
~JD
"Des 840, il est pratiquement impossible de retirer leurs honores aux fonctionnaires et le synode de Coullaines, en 843, officialise la pratique" [Since 840, it was practically impossible for the Carolingians to collect their royal land-revenues from their bureaucrats, and the 843 Synod of Coullaines made the practice the legal norm] (Jean-Philippe Genet, Le monde au Moyen Age, p. 57).
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