Saturday 10 March 2007
Decadence ..../.... Sans Sophistry
By David Pitt, Saturday 10 March 2007 - 18:24 :: Ugly
The first thing they will say is I am a prude. It is a dirty word here. The second thing they will say is I am unsophisticated. My reply to both is thank goodness. France is decadent. For a historic precedent one can go to Germany in the thirties or Rome in its decline. Cross dressing and gender bending are rampant. Sex and pornography are prevalent. It is close to impossible to walk two blocks without seeing somebody naked in an advertisement. To be sure, much of it is not in terrible taste and some of it could even be considered art. It is the profusion and the total inability to shield your children from it that I object to. Sorry, I know, I am just not sophisticated.
Original appearance June 13, 2005, © 2005 / CIP 032, OO 24, RD 10, YP 30/12-10
There is a place in the netherworld beyond even the far left and beyond the far right. In the 20th century it spawned equally Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Mao, Lenin and a host of lesser tyrants. It was born in the reasonableness of Rousseau and was perverted and became incarnate in Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety. This committee was anything but safe in the French Revolution. This place was beyond good and evil, for this Jacobin leader who opposed the Girondists, was incontrovertibly incorruptible – the pure essence of good, and also the pure essence of evil. In a tiny time frame he said and proved that “tyrants are substantially alike and only differ by trifling shades of perfidy and cruelty.” His was a place where opposites aren’t. The perfect storm of blood, indeed where blood flowed like water. This place was created by the guillotine and died by the guillotine, almost to a man, including Robespierre. It is the place within a circle that is the furthest far from reason and moderation. It is, even today, where the reign of terror lurks, in the extreme center between the intense right and the severe left; between competing gods and the void.
Talk of a shooting star. Here is an alienated boy genius who quit writing at the age of 21 and is still remembered today as the precursor of Surrealism. Despite his tender age he built a considerable body of work whose mainstays were, ‘The Drunken Boat’ (1871), and his major classic ‘A Season in Hell’ (1873), which became the bible of anguished everybody everywhere. Arthur Rimbaud launched Symbolism, but when the Paris literati rejected him, and he finally rejected Verlaine in a sordid affair, he was gone. Actually in his second life (18 years) it is said he became a gunrunner and perhaps a slave trader in Aden, Java, Cyprus, Yemen and Ethiopia. Despite two lives he still died young, during an amputation of a cancerous leg – he had been to hell twice and was gone.
A touchy subject. And no way around. At least not honestly. Class exists very strongly in France and colors most relationships. It is ugly. Equality is, at best, a slogan. Perhaps it exists in law but it is practiced nowhere else. The French nose is often prominent primarily for its altitude. Condescension is an art form. At a homogenous dinner party (kept so by careful selection of the guests) the altitude and attitude shifts are a little less evident. Individuality is tolerated though not admired. Elsewhere the herd instinct is prevalent and it is best to stay with your herd. Class is everywhere evident in France and frequently the upper haven't any. 
This is one of the names I didn’t originally recognize, but now wish I had, and certainly think I should have. When someone is considered the ultimate actor by the likes of Alec Guinness and Orson Welles he is probably a pretty fair actor. It is a pleasure, however, to claim my ignorance is due to my youth (I haven’t been able to do that for a long time now). Jules Muraire, universally known as Raimu, built his reputation on the stage and in a series of three movies often considered the greatest trilogy ever. Marcel Pagnol’s play Marius (1929, film 1931), Fanny (1932), and Cesar (1936) provided the vehicle to establish his credentials. He played in 49 films between 1912-1946. 20 years as a comic entertainer in music halls and on the stage prepared him and his exceptional voice to bloom in the 1930’s. Sadly I was only 4 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1946, or perhaps I would have known him better. Pagnol said at his funeral: “One cannot make a speech on the grave of a father, a brother or a son. You were all three at the same time.”
Here we have to tread carefully to actually truly reflect my view because in the grand scale of things the French are just like every other people and with the same proportions – mostly good a few great and some not. The difficulty is more a matter of manners than substance. Parisians in particular are cold, aloof, arrogant and rude, and even more so if they think you are American. Part of it is simply the city – the same difference between upstate and downstate New York. Another part is the media – biased beyond belief, but that is another story.