A Bastille Day quiz

1. Who said, “Revolutions have terrible arms and righteous fists; they choose their targets well and rarely miss”?
a. Maximilien Robespierre
b. Georges Jacques Danton
c. Olympe de Gouges
d. Victor Hugo

2. Which deputy at the Convention government spoke out against the vague definition of plotter (conspirateur) in the midst of the Terror, and pleaded for measures that would protect the innocent?
a. Robespierre
b. Bishop Talleyrand
c. Marat
d. Danton

3. What author was guillotined in November 1793 on the grounds that her writings aimed to re-establish a counter-revolutionary regime?
a. Charlotte Corday, assassin of Jean-Paul Marat
b. Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Aubin, Countess de Genlis
c. La Princesse de Lamballe, former intimate of Marie-Antoinette
d. Olympe de Gouges, author of La Déclaration des droits de la femme

4. The official celebration of July 14 as the French national holiday dates from what era?
a. 1789
b. 1880
c. 1804
d. 1946

5. What author penned a 1791 document that explained the reasoning behind the actions of King Louis XVI on those days when military intervention could have reversed the course of events (such as July 14, 1789 or October 5-6, 1789), and stressed the king’s sacrifices towards the misguided people (la multitude égarée)?
a. Monsieur, Count de Provence (brother of King Louis XVI)
b. General Lafayette, leader of the National Guard
c. Jean Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris
d. King Louis XVI

6. Which public figure described himself as a martyr to the French people?
a. Robespierre
b. Marat
c. King Louis XVI
d. All of the above

7. Which revolutionary event is today considered the turning-point in the fate of the French monarchy?
a. July 14, 1789: the taking of the Bastille
b. October 5-6, 1789: the Women’s March on Versailles
c. January 21, 1793: the execution of Louis XVI
d. October 17, 1793: the execution of Marie-Antoinette

8. Which author penned these prescient words about the Revolution’s legacy: “Thus the truth of history, on this point as among others, will probably not lie in what happened, but only in what continues to be told”?
a. Robespierre
b. Hugo
c. Napoléon
d. Chateaubriand

9. What pop idol is currently the star of a music video that relays the history of the French revolution on YouTube ?
a. Lady Gaga
b. Madonna
c. Beyoncé
d. Taylor Swift

10. What is the most important legacy for France of the Revolution today?
a. The system of representative government
b. The commitment to universal rights
c. Free public education
d. All of the above

Answers
1. d. Victor Hugo, “Les révolutions ont le bras terrible et la main heureuse; elles frappent ferme et choisissent bien,” Les Misérables, ed. Rosa, 2 :1125.
2. a. “Il est important de bien définir ce que vous entendez par conspirateurs; autrement les meilleurs citoyens risqueroient d’être victimes d’un tribunal institué pour les protéger contre les entreprises des contre-révolutionnaires,” Maximilien Robespierre, speech at the Convention on March 11, 1793.
3. d. Olympe de Gouges, condemned and executed for being: “Femme de lettres, âgée de 38 ans, native de Montauban, convaincue d’être l’auteur d’écrits tendans à l’établissement d’un pouvoir attentatoire à la souveraineté du people” (Journal de Paris National, 3 novembre 1793).
4. b. 1880.
5. d. King Louis XVI, in Déclaration du Roi adressée à tous les Français à sa sortie de Paris, a 16-page manuscript left behind in the Tuileries castle on June 20, 1791, when the royal family tried to flee from France.
6. d. All of the above
7. b. The Women’s March (or October Days) is today considered the most important event for symbolic, material, and political reasons, as it revealed the people’s power over the monarch and re-placed the royal family in the capital city. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette never saw Versailles again.
8. c. Napoléon Bonaparte
9. a. Lady Gaga (aka “The History Teachers”)
10. d. Vive la démocratie!

How to translate a poissarde?

The poissarde or fish seller has a long and interesting history. The market women of Paris had a special relation to the king since the Middle Ages when Saint Louis granted destitute women the exclusive privilege to sell retail goods and especially fish at designated sites in city markets. Biblical teachings led the French to consider fish a particularly pure species and so, thanks to the 138 fast days dictated by Catholic dogma, fish sellers were a crucial supplier of ritualized sanctity: being a harangère was a lucrative job. Since the reign of Louis XV, market women travelled twice a year to meet with the king at Versailles and they also appeared on special occasions such as royal marriages or births. But the nature of their politics—or even the existence of a dominant political consciousness among these people—remains unclear. As Pierre Ronzeaud has noted, the figure of the foul-mouthed harangère or herring-monger was already a well-known topos in the Mazarinades of the 1650s; in these texts the women’s socio-economic realities were buried under a cartoonish vulgarity that proved remarkably impervious to change. A similar ventriloquism runs through revolutionary-age pamphletry. True, the market women’s absence from festivities on the eve of the Assumption in 1787, when they had been expected to present flowers and compliments to Queen Marie-Antoinette, provoked anxiety at court. A police injunction two days later forced them to comply. It is also true, as Carla Hesse reminds us, that a number of market women expressed their displeasure with King Louis XVI in early 1789 by participating in a performance of the Souper de Henri IV at a Parisian theater and drinking a toast to Henri IV. While such incidents suggest that the women’s traditional bond to the crown was under pressure, economic considerations, as well as the poissard literary tradition, point to a more complex situation.
This complexity comes to the fore when a poissard text is translated into English. What modern-day English dialect or idiom can render the occasionally vulgar rough-and-tumble words of Parisian fish sellers of the past? In Summer 2009, I hired Sonja Stojanovic to translate Le Falot du peuple (The People’s Lantern, ca. 1792-93)*. Her solution to the problem of dialect was to render the market women’s speech in a Cajun-inflected English, with the help of Robert Hendrickson’s Whistlin’ Dixie: A Dictionary of Southern Expressions (1993). I think that the results are great! Here is an excerpt to whet your appetite for Chapter One, “From Fish Seller to Suffragette” of my book-in-progress, A Revolution in Fiction…
The People’s Lantern, or dialogues of Miz Salmon, Fishwife, on the trial of Louis XVI, trans. Sonja Stojanovic
Miz Salmon: Hey, ol’ Ma, how you been? For eight days now, you’re in a sull and avoiding me; come on, let’s go grab a drink: for having not the same opinion, do we have to eat each other up?
Tender Ma: What do you want, Miz Salmon, you’re rich, you, you ain’t caring; ifn this sells or not, don’t matter to you. Anyways, regardin’ poor Louis XVI, I’m frettin’ & I don’t dare say nothin’ yet; but you, it is all from the contrary, it gives you such a tone in this market, you’ve become the loud and big one, & this on account of you screamin’ your lungs out against poor Louis XVI. But tell me, Miz Salmon, everwhat did he do to you to not abide him like that?
Miz Salmon: But my child, to me he ain’t done nothin’; but they lay it to him, the cause of this all, that he has made them prices raised, that he made bread ‘n fish go missin; in short, that the 10th of August he wanted to have us all killed, & that it is him who is stirrin’ up all the Prussians, & who has all our menses killed. You see I ain’t wrong when we have rage against him.
Tender Ma: Hey ol’ neighbor, you made my heart bloom in talking to me like that heart-to-heart but ifn you have a moment, I’ll soon, in reason, have brought you to your senses & you’ll see.
Primo uno & first off, my dear friend, he’s maybe the cause of the actual’s wrangle, & that’s without wantin’ it, & through a good motive …

* Le Falot du peuple, attributed to C. Bellanger, repr. in Dialogues révolutionnaires, ed. Malcolm Cook (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), 73-81.

Reflections on women of the Revolution, by Julie Congdon

This comment just in, from TAS participant Julie Congdon, who contributed an arresting poster featuring famous women of the French Revolution and some of their most memorable words. She writes, “Since many women played an instrumental role behind the scenes (and a few at the forefront) of the American Revolution, I wanted to research the women who were key figures prior to and during the French Revolution. What would be the repercussions of the choices they made? With the massive bloodshed and executions that were taking place at the time, who was brave enough to stand for their beliefs? Many of the women depicted in the poster paid the ultimate price for the decisions they made, thus the placement of the guillotine by their picture.”
by Julie Congdon, Technology Lab Facilitator, LaSalle Intermediate Academy, South Bend, IN