14th annual Bastille Day Quiz (2023):
“Revolutions Here, There, Everywhere”
DIRECTIONS TO PLAY THE QUIZ GAME
1. Take the quiz below. Put your answers in an email, with subject REV QUIZ.
2. Send email to: jdouthwa@nd.edu
3. Check this website on July 15, 2023 to see who won! Winner will be notified by email and receive prizes in postal mail.
A. Warm Up Questions
1. The holiday called “Bastille Day” by English speakers is called something different in France. What is it called?
a. le jour des insoumis
b. le quatorze juillet
c. la fête de la Sainte Guillotine
d. le jour du roi perdu
2. Before it was sacked at the beginning of the Revolution in July 1789, the prison known as la Bastille was a menacing presence located in what French city?
a. Rouen
b. Bordeaux
c. Paris
d. Lille
3. Before moving to France as a 14-year-old and ascending to the Bourbon throne at age 18, Marie-Antoinette lived where?
a. Austria
b. Australia
c. Antarctica
d. all of the above; she traveled around a lot!
4. Many people, looking back on events later, considered the Revolution inevitable given the complacency and greed of the Bourbon monarchy and its spiritual arm, the Roman Catholic Church, amid the widespread suffering and unfair taxation of the unprivileged majority and new forms of print journalism. What French phrase captures the sentiment of “they had it coming”?
a. ils l’ont bien mérité
b. ils l’ont cherché
c. ça leur pendait au nez
d. ils ne l’ont pas volé
e. all of the above are correct
B. The Heart of History
5. The French Revolutionary Calendar of the 1790s replaced the traditional saints’ feast days with new names and secular emblems to signify the break from the Catholic past. For example, July 11 (Saint Benoît) became the feast day of beans (haricots); November 26 was transformed from the day of Sainte Delphine to the feast day of pigs (cochon); and March 6 changed from Sainte Colette to spinach (épinards).
Question: July 14, the fête nationale, was given what new symbolic attribute?
a. le pissenlit, a kind of dandelion good for eating and making tea
b. le champignon or mushroom, a plant that thrives on a powerful underground network of cells
c. le rossignol, or nightingale bird, long portrayed in poetry and art as the friend of secret lovers and surreptitious plots
d. le sauge, or sage (herb), a sacred ceremonial herb of the Romans
6. In 1790-1791, a series of brochures were published anonymously wherein French kings from earlier times harangued King Louis XVI and scolded him for his “pitiful excuses.” Which one of the following titles captures this early social media campaign?
a. Les Entretiens des Stuarts
b. Le Dialogue des sourds
c. Les Entretiens des Bourbons
d. Les échos d’Emmanuel
7. Jacques-Louis David adopted many divergent political positions during his long career as a painter, and survived the tumult with aplomb. In Year VIII / 1796, he exhibited a new painting whose conciliatory subject was meant to unite people across the deep political divisions of the First Republic. What is the title of that inspiring tableau?
a. L’Intervention des Sabines / The Intervention of the Sabine Women
b. Le Serment des Horace / The Oath of the Horatii
c. Portrait d’Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier et sa femme / Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his Wife
d. La Mort de Marat / The Death of Marat
C. Keeping the Flame Alight
8. What nineteenth-century French novel depicts a scene between a Catholic priest and a former revolutionary in a very positive light? Ignored in stage and screen adaptations, this scene shows the bishop is dumbfounded to realize that the one-time rebel is not only his intellectual equal but that he may possibly be his spiritual equal as well. At the end, the bishop falls to his knees and asks for a blessing. That powerful moment is portrayed in which one of the following novels?
a. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857)
b. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
c. Thérèse Raquin (1867) by Émile Zola
d. Le Curé de Tours (1832) by Honoré de Balzac
9. A nineteenth-century philosopher drew a famous analogy between revolutions and railroads, saying “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” In doing so, the writer celebrated the way in which political upheaval and trains both drive society forward, in somewhat terrifying yet beneficial speed. Which one of the following writers coined that analogy?
a. Karl Marx (1818—1883)
b. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831)
c. Marie-Thérèse, Duchesse d’Angoulême (1778-1851)
d. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
10. Some years later, another European thinker disagreed with the railroad analogy, arguing that revolutions should not be seen so positively as an ever-accelerating train traveling toward a better future. “Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride,” the author mused, “but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.” Who coined that sobering thought?
a. Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975)
b. Theodor Adorno (1903—1969)
c. Walter Benjamin (1892—1940)
d. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
11. In 1967 Peter Brook directed a controversial adaptation of revolutionary history in the film, Marat / Sade, in which the murderous Charlotte Corday was played with terrifying intensity by which actor?
a. Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)
b. Glenn Close (b. 1947)
c. Catherine Deneuve (b. 1943)
d. Jeanne Moreau (1928 – 2017)
12. Recent protests against the government of French President Emmanuel Macron have foregrounded an ancient form of protest known as a casserolade whereby people bash saucepans to deafen and discredit the forces of order. This kind of political pot beating dates back to the Middle Ages, in a custom intended to shame people. What did they call this kind of noisy public disorder back then?
a. une boutade
b. un charivari
c. un pet-de-nonne
d. un bof
13. In June of this year, we learned that the French government is trying to block the sale of some important papers dated July 12, 1793 which were recently put up for auction. Who wrote those papers and what are they about?
a. Charlotte Corday wrote that document to justify her murder of Jean-Paul Marat.
b. Maximilien Robespierre penned that diatribe to defend his honor, right before going to his death by guillotine.
c. Louis XVI wrote the letter in an attempt to incite émigré sympathizers in Austria to march on Paris and overturn the revolutionary government, on the day before the execution of his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette.
d. Madame de Pompadour wrote that epistle to her one-time lover M. Robesepierre; in it she shared court secrets as a peace offering after their widely-publicized split.
14. “This is a call for revolution” reads the first sentence in a recent book by a most unlikely rebel. Who is the author of that audacious call-to-arms, and what is the new movement underfoot?
a. Billionaire Elon Musk declared those words in Elon Musk’s Best Lessons for Life (2017), wherein he outlines the contours of a “All Shall Serve ME!” program of self-activation (#assme).
b. French TV executive Eric Brion, who launched a #notmyfault (#pauvremoi) movement to bail out unjustly persecuted philanderers.
c. American politician Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) claimed those lines in Writing for the Right Side, where she explains the early days of her “Moral Illiterasy” movement.
d. King Charles III of England wrote it in his Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World (2010), demanding a “Sustainability Revolution.”
D. Back in the USA
15. An American writer idealized the tumult of revolutionary times as a prod to creativity in his 1834 article as follows: “If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of a new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” Who wrote those stirring lines?
a. Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
b. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
c. Frederick Douglass (1817 – 1895)
d. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Come back tomorrow, on July 15, to see the correct answers and the winner of this year’s three fabulous prizes (below)!
A Revolution in Fiction 