The Last Nights of Ventôse
Oct. 18th, 2009 01:12 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
revolution_fr"Actually, they were almost the same age, with a difference of two years only, but never really realizing this fact. They both accepted Maxime as the older one with no doubt. Their mutual feelings were much stronger than normal friendship; it was simply love from both sides, in Camille's case with a huge amount of adoration. The condition for his own happiness was Maxime being close to him; an adult child tended to live in a constant exhausting rebelion against his own slave's dependence. Yet the feelings of the older one were probably even stronger, though they did not restrain his being. Maxime's love was 'at least strange', entirely protective, much more passionate than fraternal attachment, not even paternal, but typically maternal. A kind of love hard to bear, painful, monstrously deep, mindless to the point of absurd, full of nervous fear and insatiable tenderness - in the case of a man, of course, hidden extremly well. During the last months, he didn't have time - nor right - to ponder Camille, aching in his all body with a dumb pain he refused to even think about; for half a year Camille had been giving him one stroke after another, deliberately and knowingly hitting the weakest point each time. An incredibly strong attack of malaria, from which Maxime was pulling through with such a toil, was probably the result of this game. A love of this kind is ripped of any dignity so far that the more your darling one harasses you, the more loved he is."
Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.
Translation by me.
Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.
Translation by me.
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Date: 2009-10-20 11:30 am (UTC)I know about confusing fiction and history, but this phenomenon will never stop surprising me. Perhaps it is only me as a philology scholar, but how can one take a historical novel, especially written by at least one generation younger writer, and treat it like an actual source. Though some writers actually do more research than others, they should be always taken cum grano salis, at least in my opinion. I never take anything for granted, holding personal opinions marked "subjective", but that's me.
On your last thought - I think much depends on what we both call "friendship" and when we mark it as "strong". Personally, I would never ask anyone to be the best man/maid of honour at my wedding and later the godparent of my first child, were it not a person truly close to me, but perhaps you see it in a different way. Returning to history, I've always been interested with young Maxime's school years. Obviously intelligent yet not from the best of families, in a rather snobistic society, which together creates a high possibility that even if he wasn't ostracised, he wasn't very popular, too. In such circumstances, a relationship of a sensitive child surrounded by maybe not enemy, but indifferent school mates, with one fellow student can become strong and survive years. But perhaps you don't like psychological approach (Adlerian-Freudian, I'd say). On to structuralism then. Why, by the love of the Supreme Being, why was non-sentimental, non-trusting Robespierre whose private space was so small that almost non-existing and for whom the Revolution was all life, why was he keeping up with Desmoulins for so long, having friendly contacts with political oponent, with possibilities, yes, but not so extraordinary that he couldn't be replaced. Even when Robespierre became more antagonistic with Danton. From a purely political point of view, he didn't need Camille that much and "should" actually "forget" about him much sooner (come on, "friends" in POLITICS? with a guillotine in a background?). He didn't. He obviously hesitated. The explanation "loved him" is just one explanation, and a very simplified one. Love is complicated. Like hell. Neither of us has to accept Przybyszewska'a direct "slash" interpretation (though in further parts of the novel she writes a lot about mechanisms of repression), but I think that yes, that was something - not necessairly that - between the two, something strong and rare in Robespierre's life. I'd dare to say Camille's, too. And it finished the way it did.
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Date: 2009-10-20 12:42 pm (UTC)As for Robespierre and Desmoulins.
First of all: yes, I think they were friends during the years of Revolution. I doubt they were friends in the school and I am convinced they had no contact in the long years between the schoolyears and the revolution.
Second: There exists a problem of judging people's from today's poit of view. For example, today in many countries, people choose their bestmen or the godfathers of their children among their friends. In many other countries, and in many more in past, people have chosen them mainly for social prestige or in order to provide their children with support of an influential person in the future. That was especially the case of the godfathers. So, what may to us seem as a proof of a close friendship, might have just meant that Robespierre was in that moment the most influential of Desmoulins' acquaintances. Or not.
Anyway, there are indeed other signs that leave the door open for speculation, I admit it ;-) Though it seems to me that the boom of this speculations in the 20th century has more to do with our Freudian obsessions that with the late 18th century feelings and events, haha
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Date: 2009-10-20 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 08:19 pm (UTC)I do agree. And you're right: when it comes to the works of art or actions taken by historical persons, sometimes their traumatic childhood/homoerotic feelings/unrequited love/whatever is a key to understand the above, sometimes matter a little and sometimes not at all. Supreme Being protect me from scholar manierism and fanaticism puting one methodology above another ones: I am far from explaining everything via psychoanalysis.
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Date: 2009-10-20 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 12:50 pm (UTC)Well, you can get an idea from this quote, for example:
Speaking of the noseblleds, Robespierre suffered from: "What was the nature of this blood? Remembering a tendency to be affected by tuberculosis in the family, we first thought of hemoptysis. But we would have other testimonies of this, because those suffering from tuberculosis don't spit blood only during night. So, would it be wounds caused by face scratching or bites? We'd rather say it was a psychosomatic sort of epistaxis [i.e. nosebleeding], with a strong sexual and feminine conotation(*)."
(translation to English is maelicia's)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 01:29 pm (UTC)(*) Wilehm Fliess, The relations between the nose and the feminine genital organs (1897), Paris, 1977. Friend and correspondant of Freud, W. Fliess mentions the nosebleeds as true menstrual substitutions.
So, according to Artarit, Robespierre suffered from nosebleeds, because he wanted to menstruate.
I mean, WTF.
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Date: 2009-10-21 08:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-10-20 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:30 pm (UTC)Hm, good point, I used the word in another meaning. Though remember that this nature-loving Rousseauist is also responsible for the Terror and he wasn't called "cold monster" for no reason. Not that these two cannot go together, as many examples show. In Robespierre's case, I think, it shows his tragedy.
Were he an open, trusting person, they would eat him up much sooner. "Brotherhood was cherished" - or illusion of such? There are friends and "friends". I believe in the Duplays and (hesitant) maybe Saint-Just.
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Date: 2009-10-20 01:34 pm (UTC)Buonarroti, les Julien, Le Bas, Couthon etc.
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Date: 2009-10-20 08:37 pm (UTC)Of course it was a common responsibility, I think no-one denies it nowadays. Later Robespierre became a scapegoat.
By the way, what was the name of Robespierre's dog? I remember he had one in Paris. Do you happen to remember what kind of a dog it was?
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Date: 2009-10-20 08:46 pm (UTC)Brount.
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Date: 2009-10-20 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 09:23 pm (UTC)It appeared to me now how we turn actual people into mythical figures, projecting our personal experiences, fears and desires on them. Robespierre, the Unloved One. Desmoulins, the Loved One. Saint-Just, the Rebelious One, etc.(same thing with giving especially the first and the last one the etiquette of "cold bastards"). Historical people disappear.
And thanks :)
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Date: 2009-10-20 09:48 pm (UTC)Oh yes, the archetypisation is probably unavoidable, but still annoying.
I mean, if anyone wishes to argue that
1) Saint-Just was a cold bastard, he/she can still do that without claiming -erroneously- that he had no friends.
2) Robespierre was a cold bastard, he/she can still do that without claiming -lacking any support for such hypothesis- that Robespierre did never have sex.
What I find especially annoying is see young and old historians (or political journalists) being influenced by stereotypes they've got from pop-culture and that seem to have a life on their own, totally independent on any serious analysis of sources. That's not very professional.
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From:no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:15 pm (UTC)We had a debate on jacobin frienship here, too.
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Date: 2009-10-20 01:23 pm (UTC)