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Proud Destiny (Feuchtwanger)
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selenak, this is a saga primarily concerned with the French author Pierre Beaumarchais (he of the original play version of Marriage of Figaro, which indeed is a significant plot strand in this book) and his quest to help finance the American Revolution. (My understanding from selenak is that Feuchtwanger wrote it after emigrating to the US as sort of a thank-you present to his new country.) Beaumarchais is a hero who is in many ways like Feuchtwanger's other heroes without at all being identical: a complex, not always likeable guy who has strong opinions which are not always correct, and who is interesting without always being entirely sympathetic. He also, like the other Feuchtwanger heroes I've seen, is also quite attractive to the ladies.
There are a lot of different strands and characters, as you might expect, in addition to Beaumarchais: Benjamin Franklin and his visit to France to solicit money; the various news of the American Revolution battles, etc. coming at various points; Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (called Toinette in the novel) and their struggles with financing, well, both Toinette and the American Revolution; Voltaire's last visit to Paris culminating in his death; Emperor Joseph's visit to France and his taking care of Louis and his sister Toinette's problem with Louis not doing sex correctly to impregnate her ( <-- !! true fact I have learned from salon! though Feuchtwanger blames a surgery that Louis needed, which I believe was older scholarship, and apparently newer scholarship has revealed that the actual problem was that Louis just, er, didn't know how to do sexual intercourse properly, which I'm so sad wasn't known scholarship at the time because I would love to know how Feuchtwanger would have written that). There is, also, the death of a young man, though not as young as in the other Feuchtwangers I've read, and because it's telegraphed from the beginning it's not as dreadful as the other ones.
Anyway, this all sounds like it would be wildly interesting, and parts of it were, though I must admit that this is the Feuchtwanger that took the longest for me to read and that I have found least compelling so far, even though in subject matter it should be right up my alley. I think that part of this is that the disparate plot pieces and characterization arcs didn't come together for me in the same way that they did in The Oppermanns and the Josephus trilogy, which may well be a me problem (I read the bulk of this in a few planes and hotel rooms on three different trips, so that may be part of the disconnect).
I think another part of the issue may have been that -- well -- I mean -- we all know it didn't really turn out that great for the French nobility in the end, so this makes a bit hard to root for the whole endeavor when we're seeing it through the French nobility's eyes, even though of course as an American I do root for it :) And I don't think that Feuchtwanger wholly intended us to root for it (though the novel is of course at its base a story about the American victory).selenak pointed out to me that Feuchtwanger makes Louis the voice of the impending doom -- and in so doing makes him a somewhat different, both sharper and more depressed personality than I have otherwise seen ascribed to him, which unfortunately also makes him less likeable to me. (My strong headcanon is that Louis XVI was on the spectrum, though obviously no one knows.)
Anyway, although I seem not to have connected with it on the book-wide level that I'm sure Feuchtwanger intended, I both loved a lot of the disparate scenes (Voltaire's death! Putting on the Marriage of Figaro!) and learned a lot (I really hadn't known at all about Beaumarchais' role here, or really much about Beaumarchais at all). Feuchtwanger is a detailed and proficient author (to the extent of the scholarship available at the time, etc.), and I was able to put a lot of things into context I hadn't quite figured out before or had seen before but, well, it's very useful to see it all in the same place like this, and I'm glad I read this.
selenak, this is a saga primarily concerned with the French author Pierre Beaumarchais (he of the original play version of Marriage of Figaro, which indeed is a significant plot strand in this book) and his quest to help finance the American Revolution. (My understanding from selenak is that Feuchtwanger wrote it after emigrating to the US as sort of a thank-you present to his new country.) Beaumarchais is a hero who is in many ways like Feuchtwanger's other heroes without at all being identical: a complex, not always likeable guy who has strong opinions which are not always correct, and who is interesting without always being entirely sympathetic. He also, like the other Feuchtwanger heroes I've seen, is also quite attractive to the ladies.There are a lot of different strands and characters, as you might expect, in addition to Beaumarchais: Benjamin Franklin and his visit to France to solicit money; the various news of the American Revolution battles, etc. coming at various points; Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (called Toinette in the novel) and their struggles with financing, well, both Toinette and the American Revolution; Voltaire's last visit to Paris culminating in his death; Emperor Joseph's visit to France and his taking care of Louis and his sister Toinette's problem with Louis not doing sex correctly to impregnate her ( <-- !! true fact I have learned from salon! though Feuchtwanger blames a surgery that Louis needed, which I believe was older scholarship, and apparently newer scholarship has revealed that the actual problem was that Louis just, er, didn't know how to do sexual intercourse properly, which I'm so sad wasn't known scholarship at the time because I would love to know how Feuchtwanger would have written that). There is, also, the death of a young man, though not as young as in the other Feuchtwangers I've read, and because it's telegraphed from the beginning it's not as dreadful as the other ones.
Anyway, this all sounds like it would be wildly interesting, and parts of it were, though I must admit that this is the Feuchtwanger that took the longest for me to read and that I have found least compelling so far, even though in subject matter it should be right up my alley. I think that part of this is that the disparate plot pieces and characterization arcs didn't come together for me in the same way that they did in The Oppermanns and the Josephus trilogy, which may well be a me problem (I read the bulk of this in a few planes and hotel rooms on three different trips, so that may be part of the disconnect).
I think another part of the issue may have been that -- well -- I mean -- we all know it didn't really turn out that great for the French nobility in the end, so this makes a bit hard to root for the whole endeavor when we're seeing it through the French nobility's eyes, even though of course as an American I do root for it :) And I don't think that Feuchtwanger wholly intended us to root for it (though the novel is of course at its base a story about the American victory).
selenak pointed out to me that Feuchtwanger makes Louis the voice of the impending doom -- and in so doing makes him a somewhat different, both sharper and more depressed personality than I have otherwise seen ascribed to him, which unfortunately also makes him less likeable to me. (My strong headcanon is that Louis XVI was on the spectrum, though obviously no one knows.)Anyway, although I seem not to have connected with it on the book-wide level that I'm sure Feuchtwanger intended, I both loved a lot of the disparate scenes (Voltaire's death! Putting on the Marriage of Figaro!) and learned a lot (I really hadn't known at all about Beaumarchais' role here, or really much about Beaumarchais at all). Feuchtwanger is a detailed and proficient author (to the extent of the scholarship available at the time, etc.), and I was able to put a lot of things into context I hadn't quite figured out before or had seen before but, well, it's very useful to see it all in the same place like this, and I'm glad I read this.
no subject
Oh riiiight, the Leopold letter! I'd forgotten :)
ahahaha those snippets are great.
I Want Candy sequence: probably the most famous montage of the movie; back then, using modern pop songs in a historical movie was still new.
Not being much of a movie watcher, this was still new to me! (Though you'd talked about it before, of course.)
There's also no credits telling us she got executed two years later, which I thought was the right choice. If you watch a movie about Marie Antoinette, you know this happened.
:( Yeah.
BTW, Louis is Jason Schwartzman, and both Dunst and he were actually as young as Louis and MA were in the movie's first half, if not quite passing for Louis and MA in their 30s in the second.
It really did bring home to me how much Louis and MA were really just kids in over their heads. And I also thought it was interesting how much it stressed how Louis just got carried along. I mean, obviously the film is called "Marie Antoinette" and not "Louis XVI," so some of that is just a focus on her, but also it did underscore how much he didn't know what to do, even though he was King.
Christopher Lee cameos as Charles-Henri Sanson, probably the most famous executioner of Paris, and they included the incident of her accidently stepping on his foot and apologizing
I would never have figured out this was Christopher Lee if you hadn't told me!
no subject
Franklin's introduction
Franklin and Adams beta-read the Declaration of Independence
Franklin arguing with Adams
It really did bring home to me how much Louis and MA were really just kids in over their heads.
They were. I mean, Louis himself said "God help us, we are too young" when his grandfather died, as seen in this clip. I mean, the bigger problem was that the Kingdom of France was nearly bankrupt, soon to be actually bankrupt, and that the administrative structures were hopelessly outdated and nearly needed something as radical as the Revolution for a complete reset. (Unless Louis had been willing to offend his entire nobility, for example, he could not have ended the disastrous tradition of handing offices - be they army posts or judges - to people simply because of their blood line instead of their merit. And you can't save a run-down kingdom with people unwilling and/ir incapable of working. And he certainly could not have taken all the Catholic Church property which to a great part financed revolutionary France. But really completely restarting the administration (complete with redesigning the districts into what is still used to this day), overhauling the law code entirely (with the post revolutionary Code Napoleon as the end result) and introducing a meritocracy - I have a hard time imagining how even a political genius could have restored France without using these means. So Louis and Marie Antoinette paid for centuries of Bourbon policy, essentially.
Re: Christopher Lee - did you watch him in anything where he's younger than Saruman?
Re: Sanson - I thought him saying "Courage, Madame" to her in reply and steadying her was a nice touch. Sanson wasn't personally malicious - also he wanted to be a doctor and couldn't be because of the Ancien Regime rules about executioner families -, and he didn't hate her. Mind you, given his first act as a executioner was when his teenage self had to assist his uncle (the then head executioner of Paris) in the absolutely gruesome and barbaric execution of the wannabe assassin of Louis XV (remember, the hanged, drawn and quartered execution complete with extra torture beforehand), I doubt he saw royalty in general in a rosy light. He'd been an eager supporter of the introduction of the Guillontine precisely because he thought it would be less cruel and painful and in danger of exhausted executioners becoming involuntary butchers.
no subject
I have a hard time imagining how even a political genius could have restored France without using these means. So Louis and Marie Antoinette paid for centuries of Bourbon policy, essentially.
Oh, yes, absolutely, I imagine older and wiser heads would also have... rolled, so to speak, in the same position. But these poor kids :(
Re: Christopher Lee - did you watch him in anything where he's younger than Saruman?
No.
He'd been an eager supporter of the introduction of the Guillontine precisely because he thought it would be less cruel and painful and in danger of exhausted executioners becoming involuntary butchers.
Absolutely agreed about the "Courage, Madame," which I loved -- and you know, something I thought when watching this scene that I wouldn't have thought before salon is how the guillotine really is more humane in that one particular way than all those axe executions you've told me about that don't go well *shudder*. I mean, that says more about the utter terribleness of the bad executions than anything else, as the guillotine of course is terrible in its own way of allowing that numbing volume of executions, but before now (although I had known that it was introduced as a more humane alternative) I didn't have context for what would have been in its place; at least MA got to die instantaneously.
no subject
(I did watch some of younger Lee's films, including three of the Draculas, but not that particular opus.) Anyway, Christopher Lee: very cool person, good actor if they let him, but you really don't have to watch the majority of his movies because most of them were pulp. The vid is great fun, though. And shows why once Hammer had hired Christopher Lee as Dracula, they kept letting him play the role ad infinitum. There are many better Dracula movies than even the best of the Hammer Dracula movies, but no one menaces and bites quite with such style as young to middle aged Christopher Lee.