Quantcast
Channel: "Tweedland" The Gentlemen's club
Viewing all 3436 articles
Browse latest View live

Revisiting the unforgettable “An Englishman Abroad” . See also bellow the next “post”

$
0
0

The Following Video is precisely concentrated on the  passage ( from 50min 45sec on ) in which the actress visits in London, the establishments where Guy Burgess used to be a Gentleman – customer 

( …) “Burgess was a Marxist, but he liked good English tailoring too much to be a rabid revolutionary. In the film he is shocked that anybody would consider him dangerous.
( …) “Burgess says: "So little, England. Little music, little art. Timid, tasteful, nice. But one loves it, one loves it." He died far from little England. On September 1, 1963, an official of a Moscowhospital announced that Jim Andreyevich Elliott -- the name by which Burgess was known in Russia-- had died from heart disease. The "Internationale" was played at his funeral three days later. Apart from MacLean, no one of note attended.”
Thomas Brown

An Englishman Abroad is a 1983 BBC television drama film, based on the true story of a chance meeting of an actress, Coral Browne, with Guy Burgess (Alan Bates), a member of the Cambridge spy ring who spied for the Soviet Union while an officer at MI6. The production was written by Alan Bennett and directed by John Schlesinger; Browne stars as herself.

The film is set is Moscow in 1958, after Burgess had fled to the city following MI6's detection of his treason. Burgess barges into Browne's dressing room in the interval of a touring Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (which became one of the bases of the Royal Shakespeare Company) production of Hamlet, in which she portrayed Gertrude, and charms her. Later on she is invited to his Moscow flat, finding it with some difficulty, to measure him for a suit that he would like ordered from his London tailor.

Rather than film in the Soviet Union, Schlesinger used several locations in Scotland. The Caird Hall and Whitehall Theatre in Dundee stood in for the Moscow theatre, and the grand marble staircase of Glasgow City Chambers played the part of the British Embassy.Additional filming was done at Glasgow's St. Andrew's Suspension Bridge ("luckily, in a snowstorm" Bennett later wrote) and the Moss Heights flats in Cardonald, which represented Burgess' Moscow apartment.

Both Browne and Bates were winners of the BAFTA awards for acting for their roles in this production.

Bennett gives the date of Browne's meeting with Burgess as 1958 inthe introduction to his Single Spies, which contains the text of An Englishman Abroad in the stage play version and the text of A Question of Attribution about Anthony Blunt.

The play was also adapted for radio on the BBC World Service in 1994 starring Michael Gambon as Burgess and Penelope Wilton as Coral Browne. It was subsequently re-broadcast on BBC Radio 7 and BBC Radio 4 Extra, most recently in 2013 as part of BBC Radio 4 Extra's Cambridge Spies season


Présentation de l'exposition Juliette Récamier

A GREAT COQUETTE : MADAME RECAMIER.

$
0
0

Madame Recamier
Jeanne Francoise Julie Adélaide Bernard (Born in 1777 Died in 1849 in Paris), otherwise known as Belle Juliette, was above all a celebrity known throughout Europe, famous for her beauty and virtue.
The daughter of sollicitor Jean Bernard, she was born in Lyon. At fifteen she married the well known banker Jacques Rose Récamier. Juliette was also intelligent, well read and affectionate. A good dancer, she also sang and could play both the harp and the piano. Her beauty and kindness helped build her reputation as an exceptional woman. It was said that she was able to charm, entertain or dispense with the over ardent without making enemies.
At the Abbaye-aux-Bois, where she held her salons for over thirty years, her influence on literature and politics was well known. Among the innumerable regular visitors were notable characters such as René Chateaubriand, her only real love, Germaine de Stael, her best friend, André Marie Ampère, Auguste de Prusse, Lucien Bonaparte, The Duchess of Devonshire, Pierre Simon Ballanche, Talma, Balzac, Delacroix, Lamartine, Sainte Beuve…


À partir de 1797, Juliette Récamier commença sa vie mondaine, tenant un salon qui devint bientôt le rendez-vous d'une société choisie. La beauté et le charme de l'hôtesse, l'une des « Trois Grâces » du Directoire, avec Joséphine de Beauharnais et Madame Tallien, lui suscitèrent une foule d'admirateurs. Le cadre de l'hôtel particulier de la rue du Mont-Blanc (hôtel de Jacques Necker ancienne rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin), acquis en octobre 1798 et richement décoré par l’architecte Louis-Martin Berthault, ajoutait à la réputation de ses réceptions. Elle fut l'une des premières à se meubler en style « étrusque » et à s'habiller « à la grecque » et joua de ce fait un rôle non négligeable dans la diffusion du goût pour l'Antique qui allait prévaloir sous l'Empire. L’hôtel Récamier acquit une renommée telle qu'il devint rapidement une curiosité parisienne que tous les provinciaux et étrangers de marque se devaient de visiter. L'année 1800 marqua l'apogée de la puissance financière de Jacques Récamier : il devint alors Régent de la Banque de France. Mais Juliette Récamier ne tarda pas à exciter les ombrages du pouvoir. Amie de Madame de Staël, elle fut une figure clé de l'opposition au régime de Napoléon. Les réceptions de son salon qui jouait un rôle non négligeable dans la vie politique et intellectuelle de l'époque, furent interdites par un ordre officieux de Bonaparte ; Madame de Staël, Adrien de Montmorency, tous deux proches de Juliette et assidus de son salon, furent exilés de Paris ; quand Napoléon devint empereur, Juliette refusa à quatre reprises une place de dame d'honneur à la cour.


Les difficultés de la Banque Récamier, à partir de 1805, obligèrent le couple d'abord à réduire son train de vie puis à vendre l'hôtel particulier de la rue du Mont-Blanc. À ces revers de fortune s'ajoutèrent pour Juliette des chagrins personnels : le décès de sa mère en 1807 ; une histoire d'amour puis une rupture avec le prince Auguste de Prusse rencontré lors d'un séjour au château de Coppet près de Genève chez Madame de Staël ; l'obligation de s'éloigner de Paris par ordre de la police impériale.




 " Went to the house of Madame Recamier. We were
resolved not to leave Paris without seeing what is called
the most elegant house in it, fitted up in the new style.
There are no large rooms nor a great many of them ; but
it is certainly fitted up with all the recherchJ and expense
possible in what is called le gout antique. But the
candelabra, pendules, &c., though exquisitely finished,
are in that sort of minute frittered style which I think so
much less noble than that of fifteen or twenty years ago.
All the chairs are mahogany, enriched with ormolu, and
covered either with cloth or silk ; those in the salon
trimmed with flat gold lace in good taste. Her bed is
reckoned the most beautiful in Paris : it, too, is of
mahogany, enriched with ormolu and bronze, and raised
upon two steps of the same wood. Over the whole bed
was thrown a coverlid or veil of fine plain muslin, with
rows of narrow gold lace at each end, and the muslin
embroidered as a border. The curtains were muslin,
trimmed like the coverlid, suspended from a sort of carved
couronne des roses, and tucked up in drapery upon the wall
against which the bed stood. At the foot of the bed stood
a fine Grecian lamp of ormolu, with a little figure of the
same metal bending over it, and at the head of the bed
another stand upon which was placed a large ornamental
flower-pot, containing a large artificial rose-tree, the
branches of which must nod very near her nose, in bed.
Out of this bedroom is a beautiful little salle-de-bain.
The walls are inlaid with satin-wood, and mahogany, and
slight arabesque patterns in black upon satin-wood. The
bath presents itself as a sofa in a recess, covered with
a cushion of scarlet cloth, embroidered and laced with
black. Beyond this again is a very little boudoir, lined
with quilted pea-green lustring, drawn together in a bunch
in the middle of the ceiling." *
*1 Miss Berry's ' Journal and Correspondence," i. 191.
16

Swan
Juliette’s sensibility and tastes were refined over time, thanks to her contacts with the artists, critics and art lovers she frequented, as well as her visits to Italyand the time she spent at her salon.
Délécluze tells that he came across her one day talking with Jean-Jacques Ampère about his chronic of the 1824 salon that was published in the newspaper “Débats”. Even then, the very carefully studied décor of the hôtel on rue Mont-Blanc – with its numerous ornaments in the shape of stars or swans, soon to be essential elements of the Empire style – was proof that Juliette knew much about elegant neo-classicism, as shown by her collection. Mario Praz suggested a link between the “chaste sensuality” the Juliette was so famous for, and the icy, contemplative eroticism of Canova’s sculpture, a link that would have made their friendship easy to forge. Juliette Récamier, muse and patron of the arts  – Beaux Arts Museum of Lyon.
This is why we decided on a swan as the most fitting symbol for the logo of the hotel La Belle Juliette.
Staring as a young, timid lady from the provinces, she blossomed to become the muse of the salons of the time, so such a point that she was referred to as La Divine, La Belle Juliette, considered to be the most beautiful woman in Europe. Also, the white of the swan was the favourite colour of Juliette Récamier.
And finally, because the swan is the animal most represented in furniture of the period, notably thanks to the Jacob brothers, who included it in several places in Juliette’s bedroom at the Hôtel du Mont Blanc.

 Au temps de la puissance financière des Récamier, les arts sont mis à contribution par le couple pour conforter sa position sociale.

L'acquisition en 1798 d'un hôtel particulier situé rue du Mont-Blanc, dans le quartier à la mode de la Chaussée d'Antin à Paris, leur offre l'opportunité d'en faire un laboratoire du goût nouveau.

A travers ses choix d'aménagements intérieurs et les œuvres d'art qu'elle acquiert, Juliette exprime une préférence marquée pour un néo-classicisme raffiné et gracieux, librement inspiré de l'Antiquité.

Dans tout Paris, le goût de la maîtresse des lieux, à la pointe de la mode, est rapidement salué. Ce souci de Juliette d'évoluer et de recevoir dans un intérieur raffiné demeurera une constante au fil de ses habitations successives, et ce jusqu'à sa retraite à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois.

L'hôtel de la rue du Mont-Blanc : les années fastes

Les Récamier confient la décoration de leur hôtel à un jeune architecte : Louis-Martin Berthault. Probablement aidé de Charles Percier, déjà réputé, le jeune homme imagine un décor harmonieux conçu comme un ensemble : boiseries, tentures, meubles exécutés par l'ébéniste Jacob, se répondent ou s'opposent par de subtils jeux de matériaux, de couleurs et de miroirs. Les pièces de réception jouent un rôle clé dans la demeure.

Comme cela se pratiquait alors, Juliette accueille également dans sa chambre à coucher, désireuse d'y faire admirer son goût pour les dernières tendances. Reproduits et diffusés, les aménagements que l'architecte Berthault fait réaliser pour l'hôtel Récamier sont vite connus et célébrés. Comme l'écrivait la duchesse d'Abrantès, la chambre à coucher a « servi de modèle à tout ce qu'on a fait en ce genre » et le mobilier de Juliette Récamier provoqua en effet une telle admiration qu'il fut rapidement imité.







Attribué à Jacob Frères, Lit de repos provenant du salon de Madame Récamier, vers 1800, bâti de noyer, placage d'espénille de Saint-Domingue et d'amarante, espénille massif, noyer massif peint, 78 x 60 x 170 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, département des objets d'art (c) RMN / © Daniel Arnaudet

À l'avant-garde, elle se plaisait également à faire visiter la chambre conjugale dans l'hôtel particulier de la rue du Mont-Blanc, à Paris. Aquarelles et plans donnent une idée du faste de la décoration et de l'ameublement commandé à Jacob frères, dont on découvre certaines réalisations en acajou décorées d'appliques en bronze doré (voir ci-dessus). Ce « laboratoire d'un goût nouveau » présente ce que Stéphane Paccoud considère comme « les premiers meubles de style Directoire, ouvrant la voie au style Empire ».

C'est dans les murs de cet hôtel particulier aujourd'hui disparu, avant les premières difficultés financières du couple qui surviennent dès 1805, que Juliette Récamier construit la réputation de son salon. D'abord couru par les figures mondaines de l'Empire, les cercles de madame Récamier s'élargissent aux artistes de son temps.
Son appartement devient, après la mort de Germaine de Staël, en 1817, l'antichambre de l'Académie française. Balzac, Mérimée ou Lamartine se croisent dans son deux-pièces à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois, ici reconstitué. On y admire l'imposante Corinne au Cap Misène, hommage à madame de Staël. Un portrait de la romancière, réalisé par François Gérard, et un autre de Chateaubriand, exécuté par Giraudet, veillent sur le salon de Juliette Récamier.






A GREAT COQUETTE : MADAME RECAMIER.•

THIS clever and entertaining book will be found well worth reading, though M. Joseph Turquan's lively and peculiarly French style loses some of its original effect in translation. Madame Recamier, his beautiful, amiable, and coquettish heroine, has always been something of a riddle to her countrymen, from the disappointed lovers who crowded round her in the days of the Directory, the Consulate, and the Restoration to the biographer of to-day, who-seeks to discover the real secret of her power over society, and of the traditional charm which lingers round her name.

Readers of M. Turquan's books need hardly be told that he is generally angry with his heroines. By way of being a candid and impartial biographer, his aim is rather to pull down than to exalt. As far as contemporary opinion is flattering, he regards it with a sharply suspicious eye; while enemies and scandalmongers are tolerably sure of a favourable bearing. And this method is not without its advantages, both for a reader who is sure of an extra large pinch of " Gallic salt" in books written on this principle, and, strange as it may seem, for the subject itself of such a biography. For instance, this book, in no single way flattering to Madame Recamier, being more than a little blind to her virtues and very unkind to her faults, leaves us much where we were before, with a conviction of her conquering charm, a respect for her character, and a certain compassion for a woman so tormented, as well as adored, by men, among whom Benjamin Constant, that creature of unreasonable affectations, was an outstanding specimen. M. Turquan blames Madame Recamier severely for her heartless treatment of Constant and a dozen others. No doubt she flirted with them all: she was, as Madame de Boigne wrote of her, "coquetry personified": but it was always plain that she cared rather for friendship than for the more passionate kind of love, and the same writer —not usually indulgent—bore witness to a kindliness and human sympathy which resulted in the life-long attachment of nearly all the lovers whom she had reduced to temporary despair. For this cold coquette, with the genius for self- preservation which rouses such indignant scorn in her latest biographer, was in reality the moat patient, compassionate, and charitable of women. " I never knew anyone," wrote Madame de Boigne, "who knew so well how to pity troubles of all kinds, and to make allowances, without irritation, for those which had their source in the weaknesses of humanity." It would have been only natural if a woman of Madame Recamier's beauty, wealth, influence, and popularity had inspired more envy and dislike than admiration in a clever, keen-witted, and rather ill-natured contemporary. Madame de Boigne's high appreciation, expressed in several passages of her memoirs, is more valuable as testimony than the volumes written by Madame Recamier's devoted niece, Madame Lenormant, and may be taken as an antidote to much prejudiced gossip on the other side.
M. Turquan has an amusing story to tell, and he tells it in his accustomed lively manner with much characteristic detail, including the curious whispers as to Madame Recamier's marriage and the explanations of her early life and love affairs which were current in the malicious world of her day. Jeanne Francois° Julie Adelaide Bernard—always known as Juliette—was born in 1777, and was married in 1793 in Paris to M. Jacques Recamier, a business man like M. Bernard, but more prosperous, being a clever speculator and the head of an important banking concern. He was more than double his wife's age and a man of low moral character, but a kinder or more indulgent husband would have been difficult to find, and during the years of the Directory Madame Recamier, considered "the most beautiful woman in Paris," was, with Madame Tallien and Madame de Beauharnais, one of the leaders of a society more extravagantly bent on pleasure than any under the old regime. She was the most graceful dancer at Barras' famous Luxembourgassemblies. These state- ments seem to be a little in M. Turquan's way when be tries bard, following his principles, to throw doubts on the supreme beauty and perfect grace ascribed to Madame Recamier by her contemporaries. He describes her as rather pretty than beautiful, like a Greuze portrait., with a lovely complexion and " twinkling " eyes—and we must confess that her portraits bear out this idea of a kittenish kind of beauty which is certainly not the highest. But M. Turquan finds himself on still surer ground a little further on. Madame Recamier's waist, he says, was "ungainly"; her bands and feet, which she admired, and which her portraits take care to show, were "cast in a coarse mould." But "her smile converted her friends to her own belief. Everything in this world—even beauty—is more or less an illusion."
In the case of Madame Recamier the illusion was lasting and triumphant. M. Recamier bought a house in the present Rue de la Chaussee-d'Autin—then Rue du Mont-Blanc—and furnished it in the finest and most expensive fashion of the day. Here his hospitality—even if merely " a commercial manoeuvre "—and the gracious manners of his beautiful and kindly wife attracted an immense variety of people. Madame Recamier's salon was a not unsuccessful imitation of those before the Revolution, though it differed from them in its less exclusive character. This could not have been otherwise, and the disadvantageous comparison with Madame du Deffand, which M. Turquan is uncritical enough to make, certainly borders on the absurd. You cannot compare an amiable, ambitious bourgeoise with a highly trained, keen-witted aristocrat ; it is more than unfair to blame the one for unlikeness to the other. But Madame Recamier had her own way of attracting both men and women, and in the end she was certainly more successful than Madame du Deffand. A blind old age was the destiny of both ; but in the one case surrounded by old lovers and old friends, in the other embittered and lonely.

The first period of Madame Recamier's popularity in society ended with the rise of the Empire. During the Consulate her salon was crowded with people of every shade of thought : there regicides met émigrés, Napoleon's young generals met Louis XVI.'s officers, literary men and women found their advantage in making friends with bankers and contractors. Thither came Talleyrand, Fouche, Madame de Stael—in short, everybody who was anybody, including, at the time of the Peace of Amiens, a number of foreigners, among whom the English were conspicuous. In the summer of 1802 Madame Recamier paid a visit to London, where she was received with enthusiasm. But these years, triumphant as they seemed, were in one important point a failure. Madame Recamier lost the favour of the First Consul. His family thronged to her house ; his brother Lucien was at one time desperately in love with her ; he was himself personally attracted by her ; but as a whole the company at the Rue Mont-Blanc was viewed by him with suspicion. This state of things reached a crisis soon after he became Emperor. Madame Recamier, faithful to her many Royalist friends, was indignant at the murder of the Due d'Enghien. She also deeply resented the exile of Madame de Sta.. When Fouche, instructed by Napoleon, offered her the appointment of dame du palais to the Empress and "friend of the Emperor," she flatly declined. In con- sequence of this, it appears, the Bank of France was directed to refuse M. Recamier a loan which would have kept him solvent ; his bank closed its doors ; and shortly afterwards, though not actually banished from France by Napoleon's order, Madame Recamier retired in comparative poverty to Switzerland. After a time she returned to Paris, and her friends gathered round her again. A second exile, during which she visited Rome and Naples, only ended with the Restoration. A further loss of fortune in 1820 led her to establish herself in those rooms at the Abbaye-aux-Bois which became a place of pilgrimage for her admirers, old and new, with almost every well-known person who visited Parisduring the next thirty years.

All this story is told by M. Turquan in a gay and somewhat mocking spirit. If he cannot deny Madame Recamier charity and discretion, beauty and attractiveness, he can at least insist on her self-consciousness, worldliness, and vanity, while throwing doubts on her general goodness and intelligence and dwelling on the weaknesses from which of course she was not exempt. Otherwise, to judge from all contemporary accounts which are not those of her declared enemies, she would have been a quite unnatural piece of perfection.

Certainly few women, of Madame Recamier's day or any other, can point to such a string of men—men mostly of distinction, sometimes of genius—who have laid themselves and their fortunes in passionate devotion at their feet. In her own way Madame Recamier loved them all. In one case only, that of Prince Augustus of Prussia, she was so far carried away as to think of a divorce from her husband in order to marry him. M. Recamier, her true friend, wisely advised her against this step. In all her other flirtations there was no question of anything of the kind, at least on her side. Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency, Eugene de Beauharnais, Lucien Buonaparte, Benjamin Constant, Jean-Jacques Ampere, the faithful and unselfish Ballanche—most of these, with many whose names are less familiar, began by falling in love with Madame Recamier and became her life-long friends. Last, not least, there was the long and sincere mutual affection which united Madame Recamier with Chateaubriand; and there were the years when, old age and blindness creeping on, her salon became the second home of that great romantic writer, and in its own quiet, distinguished way the literary centre of Paris.




Inventories of war: soldiers' kit from 1066 to 2014.

$
0
0
Inventories of war: soldiers' kit from 1066 to 2014
THE TELEGRAPH
"KLICK" to enlarge

On a winter’s day in 1915 the family of one Capt Charles Sorley – athlete, soldier and poet – received a package. It was his kit bag, sent home by his regiment from the Western Front, where Sorley had been killed, aged 20, at the Battle of Loos. Out of this bag came a life abridged: personal effects, items of uniform and a bundle of papers, from which emerged his now famous sonnet When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead. A new photographic survey of military kits now illustrates that curious combination. The photographer Thom Atkinson has recorded 13 military kits for his ‘Soldiers Inventories’ series.
1916 private soldier, Battleof the Somme
While the First World War was the first modern war, as the Somme kit illustrates, it was also primitive. Along with his gas mask a private would be issued with a spiked ‘trench club’ – almost identical to medieval weapons.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1066 huscarl, Battle of Hastings
‘The Anglo-Saxon warrior at Hastings is perhaps not so very different from the British “Tommy” in the trenches,’ photographer Thom Atkinson says. At the Battle of Hastings, soldiers' choice of weaponary was extensive.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1244 mounted knight, Siege of Jerusalem
Re-enactment groups, collectors, historians and serving soldiers helped photographer Thom Atkinson assemble the components for each shot. ‘It was hard to track down knowledgeable people with the correct equipment,’ he says. ‘The pictures are really the product of their knowledge and experience.’
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1415 fighting archer, Battle of Agincourt
Having worked on projects with the Wellcome Trust and the NaturalHistoryMuseum, photographer Thom Atkinson has turned his focus to what he describes as ‘the mythology surrounding Britain’s relationship with war’.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1485 Yorkist man-at-arms, Battle of Bosworth
‘There’s a spoon in every picture,’ Atkinson says. ‘I think that’s wonderful. The requirement of food, and the experience of eating, hasn’t changed in 1,000 years. It’s the same with warmth, water, protection, entertainment.’
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1588 trainband caliverman, Tilbury
The similarities between the kits are as startling as the differences. Notepads become iPads, 18th-century bowls mirror modern mess tins; games such as chess or cards appear regularly.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1645 New Model Army musketeer, Battle of Naseby
Each kit represents the personal equipment carried by a notional common British soldier at a landmark battle over the past millennium. It is a sequence punctuated by Bosworth, Naseby, Waterloo, the Somme, Arnhem and the Falklands – bookended by the Battle of Hastings and HelmandProvince.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1709 private sentinel, Battle of Malplaquet
Atkinson says the project, which took him nine months, was an education. ‘I’ve never been a soldier. It’s difficult to look in on a subject like this and completely understand it. I wanted it to be about people. Watching everything unfold, I begin to feel that we really are the same creatures with the same fundamental needs.’
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1815 private soldier, Battle of Waterloo
Kit issued to soldiers fighting in the Battle of Waterloo included a pewter tankard and a draughts set.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1854 private soldier, Rifle Brigade, Battle of Alma
Each picture depicts the bandages, bayonets and bullets of survival, and the hooks on which humanity hangs: letter paper, prayer books and Bibles.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1944 lance corporal, Parachute Brigade, Battle of Arnhem
Each photograph shows a soldier’s world condensed into a pared-down manifest of defences, provisions and distractions. There is the formal (as issued by the quartermaster and armourer) and the personal (timepieces, crucifixes, combs and shaving brushes).
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

1982 Royal Marine Commando, Falklands conflict
From the cumbersome armour worn by a Yorkist man-at-arms in 1485 to the packs yomped into Port Stanley on the backs of Royal Marines five centuries later, the literal burden of a soldier’s endeavour is on view.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

2014 close-support sapper, Royal Engineers, HelmlandProvince
The evolution of technology that emerges from the series is a process that has accelerated over the past century. The pocket watch of 1916 is today a waterproof digital wristwatch; the bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifle has been replaced by laser-sighted light assault carbines; and lightweight camouflage Kevlar vests take the place of khaki woollen Pattern service tunics.
Picture: THOM ATKINSON

MISIA REINE DE PARIS

Misia Sert / Reine de Paris

$
0
0



At age twenty-one Sert married her twenty-year old cousin Thadée Natanson, a Polish émigré. Natanson dedicated most of his time frequenting the haunts favored by the artistic and intellectual circles of Paris. He became involved in political causes, championing the ideals of socialism, which he shared with his friend Leon Blum, and was a Dreyfusard. The Natanson home on the Rue St. Florentine became a gathering place, a salon, for such cultural lights as Marcel Proust, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Claude Debussy, Stéphane Mallarmé, and André Gide. The entertainment was lavish. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec enjoyed playing bartender at parties the Natanson's hosted and became known for serving a potent cocktail— a drink of colorful layered liqueurs dubbed the Pousse-Café. All were mesmerized by the charm and youth of their hostess. In 1889, Natanson debuted, La Revue blanche, a periodical committed to the discovery and nurture of new talent and to serve as a showcase for the work of the post-Impressionists, Les Nabis. Sert became the muse and symbol of La Revue blanche, appearing in advertising posters created by Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. A portrait of Sert by Renoir is now in the Tate Gallery. Marcel Proust used Sert as the prototype for the characters of "Princess Yourbeletieff" and "Madame Verdurin" in his roman à clef, the epic work, "À la recherche du temps perdu," ("Rembrance of Things Past").

Natanson’s La Revue blanche coupled with his political activism required an influx of capital, which he alone was unable to supply. Needing a benefactor, he connected with Alfred Edwards, a newspaper magnate, the founder of the foremost newspaper in Paris, Le Matin. Edwards had become enamored with Sert and had taken her as his mistress in 1903. He would supply money, but only on the condition that Natanson relinquish his wife to him.

On February 24, 1905, Sert became the wife of Alfred Edwards. Sert and her new husband took up an opulent lifestyle in their apartment on Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Tuileries. Here Sert continued welcoming artists, writers, and musicians in her home. Maurice Ravel dedicated Le Cygne (The Swan) in "Histoires naturelles" and La Valse (The Waltz) to her. Sert accompanied Enrico Caruso on the piano while the opera star entertained the assembled listeners with a repertory of Neapolitan songs. Edwards proved an unfaithful husband, and he and Sert divorced in 1909.

In 1914, Sert married her third husband, Spanish painter José-Maria Sert, (Josep Maria Sert). This period began her reign and fame as cultural arbiter, which lasted some fifty years. Writer Paul Morand described her as a "collector of geniuses, all of them in love with her." It was recognized that "You had to be gifted before Misia wanted to know you." It was in her salon, while listening to Erik Satie at the piano playing his iconic composition "Trois Morceau en forme en poire"— that the assembled guests were informed that World War I had begun.

The Sert marriage was an emotionally tumultuous one. Her husband became involved with a member of the aristocratic Russian Mdivani family, Princess Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani, known as “Roussy.” Sert tried to accommodate herself to the liaison her husband was having with another women. She herself also entered into a physical relationship with Rousssy. For some period of time the three—husband, wife, and Roussy—sustained a ménage á trois.


The Sert’s social set was made up of bohemian elites, and the upper echelons of society. It was a libertine group rife with emotional, and sexual intrigues—all fueled by drug use and abuse. She had an enduring association with couturiere Coco Chanel. The two met at the home of actress, Cécile Sorel in 1917, and thereafter were close friends. Sert provided Chanel with the emotional support the bereaved woman needed following the death of her lover, Arthur Capel in a car accident in 1918. It is said that theirs was an immediate bond of like souls, and Sert was attracted to Chanel by “her genius, lethal wit, sarcasm and maniacal destructiveness, which intrigued and appalled everyone.” Both women, convent bred, maintained a friendship of shared interests, confidences and drug use.

Sert was generous and supportive to friends in need. When the poet, Pierre Reverdy needed funds to retreat to a Benedictine monastery in Solesmes, she provided financial assistance. Sert had a long lasting association with Sergi Diaghilev, involved in all creative aspects of the Ballets Russes, friendships with its dancers, input on costumes, and choreography. Through the years she was the monetary ballast for the often financially distressed ballet company. On the opening night of "Petrushka", she came to the rescue with the four thousand francs immediately needed to prevent repossession of the costumes. When Diaghilev, the eminent ballet impresario lay dying in Venice, she was at his side. After his death in August 1929, Sert paid the expense of providing a funeral befit to honor the man who had been a seminal force in the world of ballet.

She weathered the World War II Nazi occupation of Pariswithout serious condemnation of her character, unlike some of her social set whose wartime activities and allegiances were questionable if not damning.


Misia Sert died on October 15, 1950 inParis.




Misia Sert et Coco Chanel

"Egérie, muse, Misia Sert fut une femme incontournable du milieu artistique du début du XXe siècle. Modèle des peintres Renoir, Bonnard, Vallotton, elle fut mécène d'avant-garde pour Serge Diaghilev et ses Ballets russes, proche de Max Jacob et de Pablo Picasso. Misia a aimé, croisé, aidé nombre de figures marquantes de cette période d'effervescence créative, dont La Revue blanche s'est faite l'écho. Amie de Coco Chanel, elle a su, comme elle, séduire et prendre des risques pour jouer de la vie. Ces deux figures emblématiques de leur temps vont parcourir un long chemin d'amitié, tapissé de roses et d'épines, scandé d'escapades à Venise. De quoi sceller des destins incomparables dans une époque inouïe."Présentation de l'éditeur
(date de publication : mai 2009)




Misia Godebska (1872-1950) est une figure de légende de la vie artistique française de la Belle Epoque aux Années folles. Elle commence à se faire connaître par son talent de pianiste. Son mariage en 1893 avec Thadée Natanson, le directeur de La Revue blanche, la propulse au centre d'un groupe de créateurs défendant un art symboliste et décoratif.

Au sommet de son influence, elle devient l'une des femmes les plus portraiturées de son temps, posant pour Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir. Amie de Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinski, Cocteau, Chanel, elle finance les Ballets russes pendant plus d'une décennie.

Cette exposition pluridisciplinaire se propose de réunir des portraits de Misia et de son entourage ainsi que des oeuvres, des documents et des témoignages d'artistes contemporains illustrant le foisonnement de la création au temps où Misia était la Reine de Paris.


Misia n'a rien créé par elle-même mais ses rencontres successives et sa présence magnétique aux côtés des artistes ont fait d'elle une muse, un mécène et un arbitre du goût pendant plusieurs décennies.
Née dans une famille de musiciens, elle est initiée très jeune au piano et poursuit sa formation sous la direction de Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). Excellente interprète, elle donne son premier concert public en 1892 mais refuse de faire carrière, jouant pour son seul plaisir et celui de ses amis.
Plusieurs portraits d'elle la représentent devant son clavier, entourée de ses proches, dans le salon de son appartement de la rue Saint-Florentin. Cadrés en plan serré ou large dans une vision panoramique englobant le décor, ces portraits présentent la facette la plus intime de Misia pour qui la musique est un refuge et un partage.
Ses goûts musicaux sont étendus. Fervente interprète de Beethoven, Schubert et Chopin, elle s'enthousiasme pour Debussy, au temps de son amitié avec Mallarmé, et pour Ravel qui lui dédie, en 1906, Le Cygne d'après Les Histoires naturelles de Jules Renard et le poème symphonique La Valse en 1920. Avec le changement de siècle, les goûts musicaux de Misia évoluent vers une nouvelle esthétique représentée par Satie, Stravinski, Auric et Poulenc.

En 1889, les fils d'Adam Natanson – Alexandre, Thadée et Alfred – fondent à Bruxelles une publication culturelle et artistique, La Revue blanche (1889-1903), blanche comme sa couverture. Creuset d'opinions progressistes, elle attire les meilleures plumes et les artistes les plus novateurs de l'époque. Son champ d'investigations s'étend à tous les domaines – politique, artistique, social – offrant une tribune aux grands débats qui agitent la société au tournant du siècle.
Misia, devenue Madame Thadée Natanson en 1893, ne participe pas directement à cette effervescence intellectuelle mais accueille à bras ouverts les collaborateurs les plus proches de son mari : Coolus, Vuillard, Bonnard, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec, tous amoureux d'elle. Elle incarne alors l'idéal de la Parisienne élégante, lectrice de La Revue blanche.

Les maisons de campagne des Natanson, La Grangetteà Valvins et Le Relais à Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, deviennent l'annexe des bureaux de la revue. Des idées et des idylles y naissent et s'y dénouent comme en témoignent de nombreuses photographies et des tableaux dans lesquels Misia est omniprésente.




The Return of MADRAS.

$
0
0

Madras is a lightweight cotton fabric with typically patterned texture and plaid design, used primarily for summer clothing such as pants, shorts, dresses, and jackets. The fabric takes its name from the former name of the city of Chennai, India. This cloth also was identified by the colloquial name, "Madrasi checks."

Madras today is available as plaid patterns in regular cotton, seersucker and as patchwork madras. Patchwork madras is fabric that is derived from cutting several madras plaid fabrics into strips, and sewing them back together as squares of 3 inchsizes, that form a mixed pattern of various plaids crisscrossing. As a fabric, it is notable because the front and back of the fabric are indistinguishable.



Klick to enlarge and read





Clothes Make the Mob in 'Casino'

$
0
0

AMC Wardrobe Notes:
The costume budget for Casino was $1 million.
The costume department had to dress more than 7,000 extras for Casino.
Stone had about 40 costume changes and De Niro had 52.
http://blogs.amctv.com/movie-blog/2012/09/story-notes-trivia-casino.php
http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1a1sy5/every_suit_worn_by_robert_de_niro_in_the_movie/







Clothes Make the Mob in 'Casino' : Director Scorsese Sought an Authentic Look That Required Lots of Bad Rags From the '70s and an Army of Minor Players From N.Y. Streets
November 24, 1995|ELAINE DUTKA | TIMES STAFF WRITER / http://articles.latimes.com/1995-11-24/entertainment/ca-6810_1_martin-scorsese

During the opening credits of "Casino," Martin Scorsese serves up an image of Robert De Niro nearly as memorable as the car bomb that hurls his character, Sam (Ace) Rothstein, into the air moments later. Decked out in a coral jacket with matching apricot shirt, tie and socks, the Vegas mobster fairly radiates "cocky" and "flamboyant."

From costumes to casting, the look of "Casino" was crucial to Scorsese, a director renowned for his dazzling visual sense. For this three-hour portrait of the underbelly of Las Vegas, he hired more non-actors--regular folks--than he had for any previous film. Casting directors combed the streets of New Yorkand New Jerseyto round up background players and secondary characters--each of whom had to be outfitted. And since no one thinks of the 1970s as "period," says costume designer Rita Ryack, the challenge was greater than anyone had assumed.

"It was triage," recalls Ryack, whose credits also include "Apollo 13" and Scorsese's "CapeFear.""The first three weeks we shot in the casino from midnight to 10:30 a.m. and shopped and fitted the rest of the time. We were really punchy, crying a lot and quitting several times a day. Though things got a lot more civilized by the time the set moved to Sam's house, we still went violently over budget."

More than 7,000 extras--from go-go girls to hotel clerks--had to be clothed at a cost of $150 to $200 each, much higher than the Hollywoodnorm. And, though the 30-plus outfits worn by hustler-turned-trophy-wife Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) were a mix of vintage and custom-made, all of Rothstein's 70 costumes--not to mention those worn by Joe Pesci, Don Rickles, Alan King, Kevin Pollak and James Woods--had to be "built" from scratch. Long, pointed, locked collars separated the older, more traditional Wise Guys from the up-and-comers. Solid ties conveyed a sense of slickness. White or light beige clothing provided visual counterpoint to the brutality of certain scenes.

"These characters, for the most part, were low-life people who worked their way up the gambling hierarchy," observes co-costume designer John Dunn. "Presentation was more important than ability when it came to reinventing themselves."

Authenticity was heightened by casting real-life veterans of the Strip. Ffolliott ("Fluff") LeCoque, company manager of the "Jubilee Show" at Bally's for 22 years, displayed the necessary toughness to land the $522-a-day part of a real estate investor trying to strong-arm the mob. A slot manager at CaesarsPalace and a shift manager at the Golden Nugget portrayed two of De Niro's henchmen. And John Bloom, who played the none-too-swift relative of a local politician, is a Dallas-born, Arkansas-raised writer who made his name as the syndicated columnist/cable TV movie host Joe Bob Briggs.

"After I got the part and flew out to Vegas, I went to the mall to buy some shoes," recalls Bloom, who was called in to read after the director spotted him on the Movie Channel's "Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater.""'What are you doing out here?' this salesman, a guy with a really great face, asked me. I told him I was in 'Casino'--and he said he was in it, too. Scorsese's talent is taking people off the street with a certain kind of energy and look."

Secondary parts were cast with the likes of Rickles, King and Dick Smothers--Vegas performers who had played the Sands and the Dunes. For the Midwest mobsters, the filmmakers scouted out New York-area churches and put out feelers to the Italian Seaman's Club, the Italian Actors Union and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Assn. Joe Rigano, a New York Cityborough coordinator who plays mobster Vincent Borelli, heard of the tryouts from a friend at the Sons of Italy. Pasquale Cajano, who plays mobster Remo Gaggi, was an announcer for Italian television for 28 years and hosted a Little Italy festival when Scorsese was a child.

Someone who utters one word is as important as any in the film, maintains casting director Ellen Lewis ("GoodFellas,""The Age of Innocence"), who had 120 speaking parts to fill. Rather than looking for some "John Gotti/mob boss" stereotypes, they kept an eye out for nondescript "neighborhood" sorts. "If it doesn't feel real, it throws off the balance," she says. "There was a story behind nearly every person in the movie which added to the performance."

Dressing them up, however, was a double-edged sword. Costumes are least effective when calling attention to themselves--a definite risk when conjuring up that time and place.

"It was a gaudy, trashy period--a time of great excess," Dunn says. "The fashion world was trying to foist the idea of better-living-through-chemistry fabrics on us. We paid a fortune to rent bad '70s clothing--shiny Qiana material, platform shoes, bell bottoms--things we all donated to the Salvation Army. We actually reveled in the horribleness of it all."



 rita ryack
A native of Massachusetts, Ryack has worked extensively in film, theatre and television. On the big screen, her affiliation with director Martin Scorsese encompasses work on Casino and CapeFear.
 Ryack received Tony, Drama Desk and Los Angeles Drama Critics Award nominations for her designs on the hit stage musical, My One and Only, starring Tommy Tune and Twiggy. She also designed costumes for the Broadway staging of The Human Comedy as well as the off-Broadway productions of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind, Hunting Cockroaches, The Vampires, The Foreigner, Anteroom, The Loman Family Picnic and It’s Only A Play, for which she earned an American Theatre Wing nomination. Her talents were recognized with the 1986 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Costume Design. She was principal costume designer at Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre at Harvard.

Ryack is also an award-winning cartoon illustrator and film animator, and in May 2000, was honored by the New Yorkchapter of Women in Film for her creative achievement in costume design. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama (MFA) and BrandeisUniversity, Ryack was awarded a teaching fellowship in Costume Design at BenningtonCollege.
http://cinema.com/people/001/550/rita-ryack/


q&a with costume designer rita ryack

August 4, 2011 in costume party by editor / http://fashionfollower.com/Mainpage/rita-ryack-interview/

Throughout a career that spans over thirty years, Hollywoodcostume designer Rita Ryack has dressed some of the most celebrated names on the big and small screens. In Casino, she decked out Sharon Stone and Robert De Niro in seventies-era SinCity finery, fit John Travolta in a series of house dresses for Hairspray, and turned Mike Myers into a striped top hat wearing feline in The Cat and the Hat.

This summer, her leading man is more animated than usual as it was her duty to turn the brilliantly funny Hank Azaria into Saturday morning cartoons’ most notorious super villain, Gargamel in The Smurfs movie. We recently spoke to Rita and got the skinny on working with little blue CGI characters, time travel shopping, and acid-washed jeans in music videos.
The Smurfs is a live-action movie with animation worked in 3-D. Is this your first 3-D movie and did you have to take any special considerations knowing the film would be worked in this medium?

In any film, you have to consider the body in three dimensions. You never know where the camera will be, so you have to be very careful about every detail. It is interesting, though, to think about what silhouettes will have 3D impact- how a garment will move, what details will come forward. we have to be careful about hanging bits, like ribbons , fringes, and fur, which require additional digital attention.

How familiar were you with the Smurfs before the project and what kind of research was involved? Did you have to watch many old episodes of the series?

To be honest, I’m not of the Smurfs generation. But I did enjoy watching some old episodes. I particularly like the original books on which the series was based. The drawing has great energy. I’ve done films based on illustrations before- it’s difficult to capture that energy in three dimensions!

As the designer, were there any kind of challenges working with animated characters who weren’t actual living beings on set? Or was that mostly an issue for the actors who had to talk to invisible creatures?

It’s more an issue for the actors. For the Smurfs, I chose fabrics to scan for surfacing- applying color and texture to the Smurfs’ clothes. But I didn’t design anything too different from the cartoon, except new dresses for Smurfette, including a dance dress.

Your credits include Charlotte’s Web, Cat in the Hat, The Grinch, and now Smurfs. What is the appeal of working on films where a great portion of the audience is children?

I think I can channel children’s vision pretty easily, never having grown out of childhood.. It’s fun to give children things to discover. I have so many indelible memories of costumes that I saw in theatre and movies when I was a kid. Maybe I can give kids iconic costumes to fantasize about, the way I did- I will never forget “wicked queen” in Snow White. Not every dress in Gone with the Wind, nor West Side Story. The first time I went to the theatre, I was four years’ old. We saw Oklahoma, and the thing that made the greatest impression was the costumes. The actors were wearing clothes that turned them into DIFFERENT PEOPLE. MAGIC!!!!

You have done a lot of stage work, what are some of the differences/ limitations between stage costumes and those for film (for instance, adjusting for quick-changes for the stage or camera close-ups in film)

You’re creating characters in both mediums, so the process is pretty much the same. Costume designers are story tellers- it’s the most important part of the job. Lately, we’re adjusting to HD . For the stage, you see the whole actor all the time, and the silhouette is critical- like long shots in film. In both cases, the clothes have to tell the audience who the characters are the minute they enter, even if the understanding is subliminal. In film, the visual interest is often shoulders up, so what’s around the face is what usually fills 2/3 of the frame.
Your first movie was After Hours, was it a bit intimidating working with Scorsese on your film debut?

A little, at first. But Scorsese was very approachable and very funny, and we had a great time. and it led to CapeFear and Casino, two of my favorite films.

It was through Martin Scorsese that you ended up costuming Michael Jackson’s “Bad” since he directed that as well. Michael’s outfit in that video became incredibly iconic.

That video was also beyond fun. I confess that Michael brought his own costume, he was into buckles. We wanted to give the dancers the b-boy, bicycle messenger look, which was very tough at the time. Acid wash jeans debuted in that video- they hadn’t been brought to the market yet. I loved dressing the 9 minute black and white film at the beginning of the video, which features a young Wesley Snipes. I don’t think everyone has seen that movie- it explains the concept of the dance, and is hyper realistic.

If you got to use that machine for a day, where would you head for a shopping spree?


I think I’d take the time machine to the Dior atelier in the late 40′s/early 50′s. I do some drooling over the New Look shape- which Marc Jacobs has brought back for Louis Vuitton. Women will have waists again! I love the hourglass- so feminine and strong.




Paul Stuart New York Manhattan ポール・スチュアート ニューヨーク

PAUL STUART / 2014 / PHINEAS COLE

$
0
0

The World of Paul Stuart

"Our goal has never been to be the biggest, only the best."
Since 1938 Paul Stuart has been the leading arbiter of taste, style, and fashion for luxury menswear in the United States.

Founded by Ralph Ostrove and named after his son, the store has dressed world leaders, dignitaries, celebrities, titans of business, and anyone who expects the highest quality clothing and superior service, for over 70 years.

All the clothing Paul Stuart stocks, both men’s and women’s, bears the unique Paul Stuart label. To create the exclusive and unique collection for its worldly, discerning and stylish patrons, Paul Stuart buyers and designers scour the globe searching for the best fabrications and the most innovative clothing designs and details. Since Paul Stuart clothing can only be found at a Paul Stuart store, of which there are only three in the United States, or online, a Paul Stuart customer stands apart from the crowd. He knows that he’s not wearing the same suit as everyone else.
In the fall of 2007, Paul Stuart launched Phineas Cole, the first new brand in the luxury clothier’s 70-year history. The Phineas Cole brand is firmly rooted in the heritage and tradition of Paul Stuart, but it offers a reinterpretation with a slimmer, more contemporary silhouette. Phineas Cole embodies an aesthetic that brings the dramatic side of Paul Stuart into sharper focus.

The PaulStuartPoint of View

Paul Stuart’s roots are in soft shoulder clothing, over the years the store and the brand have been influential in helping to redefine the American tailored look into the slimmer more international silhouettes of today. In fact, Paul Stuart has a long history of bringing innovations and new styles into American menswear. For example, Paul Stuart was the first U.S. retailer to introduce side vents and three-button suits.

While the Paul Stuart collection has evolved and transformed over time, Paul Stuart’s unique point of view on style has remained the same: A man should feel comfortable and relaxed in his clothes, he should be unique, and he should care about the details.
The Closest Thing to a Savile Row Experience Outside of London

At Paul Stuart, tailored clothing is an art—a craft of quarter inches. The attention to detail is unparalleled in the United States and rivals any luxury clothier throughout the world. Details ranging from the width and shape of Paul Stuart ties to the shape of its shirt collars and even the button positioning on its shirts are all considered to fit a myriad of shapes and sizes. In fact, Paul Stuart offers half-sizes on all of its shirt and suit options, a grand tradition that has long been abandoned by most. Paul Stuart garments are all hand-sewn, using state of the art interlinings and canvas so that the suit molds to the body. The final touches to every tailored garment are completed in Paul Stuart’s in-store tailor shops.

Paul Stuart, Inc. is headquartered in New York, and has remained in its original location since opening in 1938. Though a much larger store now than when it first opened, the Paul Stuart flagship, which has expanded to 60,000 square feet, is located within the heart of New York’s most fashionable shopping district at the landmark corner of Madison Avenue and 45th Street. In addition, Paul Stuart’s “Townhouse” resides in one of Chicago’s premier luxury shopping destinations on East Oak Street, and in 2011 a second location opened in The Loop (Chicago’s financial district) at the corner of LaSalle and Adams Streets. Paul Stuart also has numerous locations throughout Asia.

Paul Stuart Store Locations


New York
Madison Avenue at 45th Street
New York, NY10017
212.682.0320
800.678.8278

Store Hours
Monday–Friday: 8:00am–7:00pm
Saturday: 9:00am–6:00pm
Sunday: Closed


Chicago (Oak Street)
107 East Oak Street
Chicago, IL60611
312.640.2650
800.227.4990

Store Hours
Monday–Saturday: 10:00am–6:00pm
Sunday: Closed


Chicago (LaSalle Street)
208 South LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL60604
312.580.0000
877.718.3949

Store Hours
Monday–Friday: 8:30am–6:00pm
Saturday: 9:00am–5:00pm
Sunday: Closed


Washington, D.C.
Coming Soon.
Click for more information.

INTERNATIONAL LOCATIONS

Paul Stuart Japan

Aoyama
7-20, Jingumae 5-Chome,
Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo
81-3-3406-8121

Ginza
9F 8-9, Ginza 8-Chome,
Chuo-Ku, Tokyo
81-3-5537-5634
 PAUL STUART INTRODUCES THE SPRING SUMMER OF PHINEAS COLE


“Our goal has never been being the biggest, only the best”. Paul Stuart‘s goal, arbirter elegantiae of American classic man style since 1938, has been reached.

Only three stores between New York and Chicago, an e-commerce to buy menswear and womenswear items, and a wide choice of clothes and custom-made new looks to satisfy customers from all over the world.

Since 1938, Paul Stuart has dressed world leaders, dignitaries, celebrities, titans of business, and those who love bespoke quality, elegance, style hunters, searching for the best fabrics and the most innovative clothing designs and details.

Paul Stuart’s story came from Mr. Ralph Ostrove and his son, who gave the name of the brand.

A story that was also good at looking at the contemporaneity.

In winter 2007, in fact, Paul Stuart launched the new collection Phineas Cole, the first after 70 years of brand’s history.

With the slimmest fitting ever realized in U.S. (an icon for Paul Stuart), the Phineas Cole’s mood is made by side vents and three-button suits.

So, this is the spring summer collection 2014. If the story of Paul Stuart has grown, its philosophy is still the same: “A man should feel comfortable and relaxed in his clothes, he should be unique, and he should care about the details”.















Downton Abbey - ITV - Series 5 Teaser / Coming in September ?

La mode des années 50 exposée au musée Galliera / LES ANNÉES 50 / La Mode en France 1947-1957. (VIDEO Bellow).

$
0
0



FASHION IN FRANCE, 1947-1957

From July 12th to November 2nd, 2014
Basques, petticoats, corolla skirts, pointed shoes, bright-coloured floral and striped prints, wasp-waist suits with straight skirts, strapless sheath dresses, cocktail dresses, rock crystal embroidery: such was the couture of the fifties. At the same time, though, a more relaxed style – close-fitting pullovers, pedal pushers, jeans – was being adopted by the baby boom generation.

Early in 1947, Christian Dior launched his fashion house's first collection. The war had come to an end and with it the image of the 'soldier girl with a boxer's build'. In her place came Dior's 'woman-flower', with prominent bust, cinched waist, flat stomach, rounded hips and very full skirt. Immediately dubbed the 'New Look" by Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Carmel Snow, the "hourglass" figure and its extravagant demand for fabric created a furore – but also met with the instant, dazzling success that made it the emblem of the decade.
Other competing styles were just as remarkable: Balenciaga's 'barrel' line with its flared back and waist; and, at the opposite pole from the New Look, the dramatically innovative Chanel line of 1954 with its simple, straight suits.
The 1950s were a decisive period for French haute couture, which had suffered badly in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the war and was now reborn and made eternal. The list of names says it all: Jacques Heim, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Jacques Fath making up the old guard; followed by newcomers Pierre Balmain, Christian Dior, Jacques Griffe, Hubert de Givenchy and Pierre Cardin. Paradoxically the dominance of French fashion hinged not only on the prestige of names that spelled luxury, elegance and originality, but also on the profession's willingness to make the revolutionary move into ready-to-wear. In 1954 the 'Couturiers Associés'– Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet, Paquin, Carven, Jean Dessès – founded the first haute couture ready-to-wear licensing company .
Drawn from the Palais Galliera collection and sporting the labels of the most famous couturiers as well as others now forgotten (Jean Dessès, Madeleine Vramant, Lola Prusac), the remarkable pieces making up this exhibition – some 100 models and accessories – retrace the evolution of the female form through the decade 1947–1957: from the birth of the New Look to the death of Christian Dior and the advent of Yves Saint Laurent.
In the 1950s haute couture and ready-to-wear were one of France's major economic sectors and a veritable fashion breeding ground. This was haute couture's golden age, when Parisregained its title of world fashion capital.

In partnership with METRONEWS, OBSESSION, STYLIST, VOGUE PARIS, FRANCE 5, FRANCE INTER / FNAC, TROIS COULEURS
PRESS AREA
VISITOR INFORMATION
Price:
Full 8 € / Reduced 6 € / Ages 14-26 4 € / Free up to age 13
[New rates from September 1st, 2014 : Full 8 € / Reduced 6 € / Free up to age 18]

Information:
PALAIS GALLIERA, CITY OF PARISFASHIONMUSEUM
10 avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie, 75116 Paris - Phone : + 33 (0)1 56 52 86 00

Opening hours :
Open on Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6pm
Closed on Mondays and public holidays*
Late openings on Thursdays until 9 pm
Last access to the exhibition at 5:15 pm (and at 8:15 pm for the late openings on Thursdays)

* During this exhibition, the Palais Galliera will be closed on July 14th, August 15th and November 1st.

Access :
Métro : Alma-Marceau (line 9), Iéna (line 9), Boissière (line 6)
RER C Pont de l'Alma station
Bus : 32, 42, 63, 72, 80, 82, 92
Vélib' : 4 rue de Longchamp, 1 rue Bassano, 2 avenue Marceau
Autolib' : 1 avenue Marceau, 33 avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie, 24 avenue d'Iéna

Around this exhibition :
From July 18th till October 31st, 2014, the Grand Action cinema presents a cycle dedicated to the cinema of the 50s. The sessions take place every Friday at 8 pm.
- See more at: http://www.palaisgalliera.paris.fr/en/exhibitions/50s#sthash.2CFwmlLe.dpuf





The return of the Cravat.

$
0
0

An ascot tie, or ascot, is a narrow neckband with wide pointed wings, traditionally made of pale grey patterned silk. This wide, formal tie is usually patterned, folded over, and fastened with a stickpin or tie tack. It is usually reserved for wear with morning dress for formal daytime weddings and worn with a cutaway morning coat and striped grey trousers. This type of dress cravat is made of a thicker, woven type of silk similar to a modern tie and is traditionally either grey or black.

The ascot is descended from the earlier type of cravat widespread in the early 19th century, most notably during the age of Beau Brummell, made of heavily starched linen and elaborately tied around the neck. Later in the 1880s, amongst the upper-middle-class in Europe men began to wear a more loosely tied version for formal daytime events with daytime full dress in frock coats or with morning coats. It remains a feature of morning dress for weddings today. The Royal Ascot race meeting at the Ascot Racecourse gave the ascot its name, although such dress cravats were no longer worn with morning dress at the Royal Ascot races by the Edwardian era. The ascot was still commonly worn for business with morning dress in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries.


In British English the more casual form is referred to as a day cravat to distinguish it from the highly formal dress cravat. It is made from a thinner woven silk that is more comfortable when worn against the skin, often with ornate and colourful printed patterns.


Gentlemen, the cravat is back
The cravat will make you distinguished once more. Go on, pour yourself a stiff Madeira and give it a try
Henry Conway


The BBC’s own stylish grandfather-in-residence, Nicholas Parsons, has a clarion call for all charming gentlemen – it’s time for real men to wear cravats again. The 90-year-old Just a Minute presenter told the Edinburghbook festival that he has recently rediscovered the joys of this natty alternative to a tie. In a push against “Call me Dave” Cameron’s open neck and suit policy, Parsons warns against baring too much – “I’ve seen people with beautifully tailored jackets on, with an open shirt, there with an awful Adam’s apple”. I quite agree, especially for anyone with Cameron’s schoolboy-soft features – look no further than anchoring that cherubic chin with a cravat.

The cravat has been languishing in sartorial purgatory for too long. It has a long and illustrious history – the forerunner to the modern tie, born in 17th century Croatiaas a military scarf (“cravat” comes from the French Baroque slang for Croatian), making its way through the courts of Europe, where eventually it was adopted into standard court dress. This was not the cravat we think of today – more a lacy neckpiece – but the macaronis and then Beau Brummell went a long way to convert it, as it was in their variations on tying the cravat that the “tie” was born and named as such.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the cravat went through another transformation – as the two-fold cravat, fastened with a pin, was replaced by the tie for morning dress at Ascot, it slipped inside the shirt collar to become a sports-casual favourite. These golden years are what you should replicate – the Duke of Windsor, Pablo Picasso stylishly combining a dark cravat with Breton top, Rex Harrison and David Niven in silk cravats with just the appropriate balance of charm and seduction. However, it is this velvet-smooth sporting of the cravat where things went wrong for the poor accessory.

During the 1960s and 1970s, it was everywhere – standard Brit-abroad uniform, matched with a brass-buttoned blazer and a glass of Campari. But instead of Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, we turned to gropey screen idols like Terry Thomas as the archetypical cravat man, and then in the 1970s, the deliciously camp walking man-rug Jason King was master of the seductive neckpiece. Cravats went all shagpile carpet and slowly descended into hammy costume, only worn without irony by suburban golf captains.

Like all good menswear trends in the past few years though, the cravat is a saveable heritage item. Have you noticed how the humble pocket square has journeyed from Jermyn Street to Topman? Or how the tweed three-piece suit is now not seen just as the preserve of the eccentric country squire? Hipsters have already reclaimed the pipe, the fixed-wheel bike and the moustache – it was only a matter of time before the cravat was next. Where they go, commercial fashion is never far behind.

My advice is to wear them knowingly – they are a statement. Think more Roger Moore than Alan Partridge, add a dash of Michael Caine and look to Edward Fox in Day of the Jackal, resplendent in burgundy polka dots while practising his rifle skills. Assassination never was so stylish. I started wearing them a while ago; they make great regency bow ties, but only attempt this if you’re playing the dandy. Whatever you do, do not be tempted to tie them like a regular tie. There’s no excuse for fat, shiny, vulgar monstrosities at your neck. Stick to a classic paisley or go bold on pattern, but keep it inside the shirt a la Jeremy Piven, a contemporary cravat hero.

Earlier in the summer, I attended the Henley regatta, to which I wore one of my grandfather’s cravats (he loved them and they made him look slightly like Alan Whicker). Whilst everyone was sweltering in button and tie, my neck was cool as a cucumber, I passed all of Henley’s sartorial rules and got stopped twice for compliments.

Be it a rock-style Alexander McQueen skull scarf a la Jamie Hince, or worn properly with a silk dressing gown like Robert Downey Jr, the cravat will bring you back to being distinguished. Go on, pour yourself a stiff Madeira and give it a try.




Narcissa Niblack Thorne . The whole set of the THE THORNE MINIATURE ROOMS / VIDEO Bellow

$
0
0


Narcissa Niblack Thorne (May 2, 1882 – June 25, 1966) was an American artist known for her extremely detailed miniature rooms. Her works depict historical interiors from Europe, Asia and North America from the late 13th to the early 20th century.

There are various stories of how Thorne was initially prompted to construct the miniature rooms. Her interest in miniatures began early, and was encouraged by trinkets sent to her by her uncle, a Rear Admiral in the US Navy.

The first known exhibit of her work occurred in 1932. The high unemployment of the Great Depression made it possible for her to hire workers with highly specialized skills. Most of her exhibitions were private, held to raise funds for local charitable causes, but at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933, Thorne's works were publicly exhibited in a dedicated building. Subsequent public exhibits included the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York World's Fair of 1940. In 1936, she received a request to make a miniature library depicting a room at WindsorCastle, to mark the planned coronation of Edward VIII; although the coronation never occurred, she delivered the room and it was displayed at the Victoriaand AlbertMuseum.

Thorne's best-known works show the interiors of upper-class homes from England, the United States, and France.The rooms are generally built on a scale of approximately 1:12, or one inch to one foot. They are painstakingly precise, and when maintenance is required, it has to be done with delicate tweezers and cotton swabs, the furnishings being carefully restored to their original position with reference to a detailed layout plan.

Although her rooms were extremely time-consuming and expensive to produce, Thorne never sought or received payment for any of them. The death of her husband in 1946 left Thorne with an estate worth upwards of 2 million dollars, enabling her to continue focusing on her work. However, eventually a shortage of sufficiently skilled workers forced her to focus on dioramas and shadowboxes.

When a permanent gallery was established for the Thorne rooms at the Art Institute in 1954, Thorne set up a fund to cover the costs of caring for the works.


A total of 99 Thorne rooms are known to exist. The Art Institute of Chicago holds 68 Thorne rooms, which originally occupied a dedicated wing but are now housed in a large room in the building's lower level. An additional 20 are held by the Phoenix Art Museum, and nine by the Knoxville Museum of Art. The remaining two are at the Indianapolis Children's Museum, and the KayeMiniatureMuseumin Los Angeles.









Les Délices de L’Ancien Régime /Hotel Caron de Beaumarchais - Paris (France) (VIDEO Bellow)

$
0
0





HOTEL CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS
Paris-Marais
12, rue Vieille-du-Temple 75004 Paris
Tel : +33 (0)1 42 72 34 12 - E-mail : hotel@carondebeaumarchais.com




“The MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, Beaumarchais's most famous play, inspired the hotel’s entire decor. Charm, gaiety, joie de vivre, elegance, refinement and a spirit of freedom, all the elements making up the originality of French culture were born under Beaumarchais.”




 “The famous, boisterous, 18th-century playwright Beaumarchais lived close by, just up the street, at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple.” 




Beaumarchais was born Pierre-Augustin Caron in the Rue Saint-Denis, Paris on 24 January 1732.
 He was the only boy among the six surviving children of André-Charles Caron, a watchmaker from Meaux. The family had previously been Huguenots, but had converted to Roman Catholicism in the wake of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the increased persecution of Protestants that followed. The family was comfortably middle-class and Beaumarchais had a peaceful and happy childhood. As the only son, he was spoiled by his parents and sisters. He took an interest in music and played several instruments. Though born a Catholic, Beaumarchais retained a sympathy for Protestants and would campaign throughout his life for their civil rights.
From the age of ten, Beaumarchais had some schooling at a "country school" where he learned some Latin. Two years later, Beaumarchais left school at twelve to work as an apprentice under his father and learn the art of watchmaking. He may have used his own experiences during these years as the inspiration for the character of Cherubino when he wrote the Marriage of Figaro. He generally neglected his work, and at one point was evicted by his father, only to be later allowed back after apologising for his poor behaviour.
At the time, pocket watches were commonly unreliable for timekeeping and were worn more as fashion accessories. In response to this, Beaumarchais spent nearly a year researching improvements. In July 1753, at the age of twenty one, he invented an escapement for watches that allowed them to be made substantially more accurate and compact. One of his greatest feats was a watch mounted on a ring, made for Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV. The invention was later recognised by the Academy of Sciences, but only after a dispute with Lepaute, the royal watchmaker, who attempted to pass off the invention as his own. The affair first brought Beaumarchais to national attention and introduced him to the royal court at Versailles.
Beaumarchais' problems were eased when he was appointed to teach Louis XV's four daughters the harp. His role soon grew and he became a musical advisor for the royal family.In 1759, Caron met Joseph Paris Duverney, an older and wealthy entrepreneur. Beaumarchais assisted him in gaining the King's approval for the new military academy he was building, the École Royale Militaire, and in turn Duverney promised to help make him rich. The two became very close friends and collaborated on many business ventures. Assisted by Duverney, Beaumarchais acquired the title of Secretary-Councillor to the King in 1760–61, thereby gaining access to French nobility. This was followed by the purchase in 1763 of a second title, the office of Lieutenant General of Hunting, a position which oversaw the royal parks. Around this time, he became engaged to Pauline Le Breton, who came from a plantation-owning family from Saint-Domingue, but broke it off when he discovered she was not as wealthy as he had been led to believe.
His name as a writer was established with his first dramatic play, Eugénie, which premiered at the Comédie Française in 1767. This was followed in 1770 by another drama, Les Deux amis.
Beaumarchais's Figaro plays are Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, and La Mère coupable. Figaro and Count Almaviva, the two characters Beaumarchais most likely conceived in his travels in Spain, were (with Rosine, later the Countess Almaviva) the only ones present in all three plays. They are indicative of the change in social attitudes before, during, and after the French Revolution. Figaro and Almaviva first appeared in Le Sacristain, which he wrote around 1765 and dubbed "an interlude, imitating the Spanish style."To a lesser degree, the Figaro plays are semi-autobiographical. Don Guzman Brid'oison (Le Mariage) and Bégearss (La Mère) were caricatures of two of Beaumarchais's real-life adversaries, Goezman and Bergasse. The page Chérubin (Le Mariage) resembled the youthful Beaumarchais, who did contemplate suicide when his love was to marry another. Suzanne, the heroine of Le Mariage and La Mère, was modelled after Beaumarchais's third wife, Marie-Thérèse de Willer-Mawlaz. Meanwhile, some of the Count monologues reflect on the playwright's remorse over his numerous sexual exploits.
Before France officially entered the war in 1778, Beaumarchais played a major role in delivering French munitions, money and supplies to the American army.
To restore his civil rights, Beaumarchais pledged his services to Louis XV. He traveled to London, Amsterdam and Vienna on various secret missions. His first mission was to travel to London to destroy a pamphlet, Les mémoires secrets d'une femme publique, which Louis XV considered a libel of one of his mistresses, Madame du Barry. Beaumarchais was sent to London to persuade the French spy Chevalier D'Eon to return home, but while there he began gathering information on British politics and society. Britain's colonial situation was deteriorating and in 1775 fighting broke out between British troops and American rebels. Beaumarchais became a major source of information about the rebellion for the French government and sent a regular stream of reports with exaggerated rumours of the size of the success of the rebel forces blockading Boston.
Once back in France, Beaumarchais began work on a new operation. Louis XVI, who did not want to break openly with Britain, allowed Beaumarchais to found a commercial enterprise, Roderigue Hortalez and Company, supported by the French and Spanish crowns, that supplied the American rebels with weapons, munitions, clothes and provisions, all of which would never be paid for. This policy came to fruition in 1777 when John Burgoyne's army capitulated at Saratoga to a rebel force largely clothed and armed by the supplies Beaumarchais had been sending; it marked a personal triumph for him. Beaumarchais was injured in a carriage accident while racing into Paris with news of Saratoga.
Beaumarchais had dealt with Silas Deane, an acting member of the Committee of Secret Correspondence in the Second Continental Congress. For these services, the French Parliament reinstated Beaumarchais's civil rights in 1776. In 1778, Beaumarchais' hopes were fulfilled when French government agreed the Treaty of Alliance and entered the American War of Independence followed by Spain in 1779 and the Dutch Republic in 1780.
Le Barbier premiered in 1775. Its sequel, Le Mariage, was initially passed by the censor in 1781, but was soon banned from being performed by Louis XVI after a private reading. Queen Marie-Antoinette lamented the ban, as did various influential members of her entourage. Nonetheless, the King was unhappy with the play's satire on the aristocracy and overruled the Queen's entreaties to allow its performance. Over the next three years, Beaumarchais gave many private readings of the play, as well as making revisions to try to pass the censor. The King finally relented and lifted the ban in 1784. The play premiered that year and was enormously popular even with aristocratic audiences. Mozart's opera premiered just two years later. Beaumarchais's final play, La Mère, premiered in 1792 in Paris.
In homage to the great French playwright Molière, Beaumarchais also dubbed La Mère "The Other Tartuffe". All three Figaro plays enjoyed great success, and are still frequently performed today in theatres and opera houses.
It was not long before Beaumarchais crossed paths again with the French legal system. In 1787, he became acquainted with Mme. Korman, who was implicated and imprisoned in an adultery suit, which was filed by her husband to expropriate her dowry. The matter went to court, with Beaumarchais siding with Mme. Korman, and M. Korman assisted by a celebrity lawyer, Nicolas Bergasse. On 2 April 1790, M. Korman and Bergasse were found guilty of calumny (slander), but Beaumarchais's reputation was also tarnished.
Meanwhile, the French Revolution broke out. Beaumarchais was no longer the idol he had been a few years before. He was financially successful, mainly from supplying drinking water to Paris, and had acquired ranks in the French nobility. In 1791, he took up a lavish residence across from where the Bastille once stood. He spent under a week in prison during August 1792, and was released only three days before a massacre took place in the prison where he had been detained.
Nevertheless, he pledged his services to the new republic. He attempted to purchase 60,000 rifles for the French Revolutionary army from Holland, but was unable to complete the deal. While he was out of the country, Beaumarchais was declared an émigré (a loyalist of the old regime) by his enemies. He spent two and a half years in exile, mostly in Germany, before his name was removed from the list of proscribed émigrés. He returned to Paris in 1796, where he lived out the remainder of his life in relative peace. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.










L'Hôtel Caron de Beaumarchais propose à ses hôtes une expérience tout à fait unique. Un séjour dans le Paris du Grand Siècle. Une évasion dans les coulisses du temps, sous le regard complice et séduisant de Madame de Pompadour et de son protégé, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.
C'est l'intuition géniale de Alain Bigeard, qui a conçu cet hôtel « bonbonnière » au début des années 1990, que de recréer l'ambiance d'une demeure de charme du 18e siècle. Le site -- un ancien hôtel du cœur de Paris -- se prêtait parfaitement à l'exercice, avec ses belles poutres d'époque et sa cave en pierres de taille. Chaque chambre y a été aménagée dans l'atmosphère du siècle de Louis XV et du style si délicat qui le caractérise, entre rose franc et bleu pastel.

Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game named as London film festival opener /Alan Turing biopic accuracy questioned / VIDEO The Imitation Game - Official UK Teaser Trailer

$
0
0
--IN CINEMAS 14th NOVEMBER--
The Imitation Game is a nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing (pioneer of modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code) and his brilliant team at Britain's top-secret code-breaking centre, BletchleyPark, during the darkest days of World War II. Turing, whose contributions and genius significantly shortened the war, saving thousands of lives, was the eventual victim of an unenlightened British establishment, but his work and legacy live on.

THE IMITATION GAME stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Star Trek Into Darkness, TV's Sherlock) as Alan Turing and Keira Knightley (Atonement) as close friend and fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, alongside a top notch cast including Matthew Goode (A Single Man), Mark Strong (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Rory Kinnear (Skyfall), Charles Dance (Gosford Park, TV's Game of Thrones), Allen Leech (In Fear, TV's Downton Abbey) and Matthew Beard (An Education).

http://www.facebook.com/imitationgameUK


Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game named as Londonfilm festival opener
Prestigious red-carpet slot in London's West End goes to life story of renowned codebreaker, starring Benedict Cumberbatch
Andrew Pulver

The London film festival has announced that the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game will be the opening film for its 58th edition.

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, the film is expected to help elevate even further the reputation of the pioneering British scientist, whose work was crucial to cracking German cypher codes during the second world war but who then killed himself in 1954 after being prosecuted for gross indecency in 1952 after the revelation of a then-illegal gay relationship. Prime minister Gordon Brown released a statement of apology in 2009 on behalf of the British government for the "appalling" treatment of Turing.

Directed by Morten Tyldum and co-starring Keira Knightley as Turing's friend and fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, the London film festival screening is being billed as a European premiere, which suggests the film's world premiere will be held outside Europe, most likely at the Toronto film festival in early September.

The London film festival runs from 8-19 October



Alan Turing biopic accuracy questioned
Film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley accused of romanticising pioneering scientist's life
Andrew Pulver
Follow @Andrew_Pulver Follow @guardianfilm

Alan Turing's niece Inagh Payne has questioned the accuracy of The Imitation Game, the forthcoming biopic of her uncle, the codebreaker and pioneering computer scientist, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Payne particularly expressed concern over the casting of Keira Knightley as parson's daughter Joan Clarke, who worked at BletchleyPark with Turing and was briefly engaged to him.

"Joan Clarke was rather plain," Payne said. "But she was very nice, bright and a good friend to Alan... When he told her about how he was she accepted it, didn't make a scene or anything like that."

"I think they might be trying to romanticise it. It makes me a bit mad. You want the film to show it as it was, not a lot of nonsense."

Turing worked at BletchleyPark as a codebreaker during the second world war, before joining the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the early computer ACE, and then ManchesterUniversity's Computing Laboratory. Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, and accepted "chemical castration"– hormone treatment – to avoid imprisonment. He killed himself two years later, in 1954.

In 2009, prime minster Gordon Brown issued an apology on behalf of the government for its treatment of Turing, and parliament agreed to pass a bill giving him a posthumous pardon.

The Imitation Game, directed by Headhunters' Morten Tyldum is due for release next year.

The Village - BBC One (VIDEO/TRAILER Bellow)

$
0
0


The Village is a BBC TV series written by Peter Moffat. The drama is set in a Derbyshire village in the 20th century. The first series of what Moffat hopes will become a 42-hour TV drama was broadcast in spring 2013 and covered the years 1914 to 1920. A second season began broadcasting on August 10, 2014, and will continue the story into the 1920s. Future series will be set during the Second World War, post-war Austerity Britain, and later.

The Village tells the story of life in a Derbyshire village through the eyes of a central character, Bert Middleton. Bert has been portrayed as a boy by Bill Jones, as a teen by Alfie Stewart, as a young man by Tom Varey, and as an old man by David Ryall. John Simm plays Bert's father John Middleton, an alcoholic Peak District farmer, and Maxine Peake plays Bert's mother, Grace. Peake is a preferred actress of the writer, who has called her "the best actress of her generation", and she has featured in two previous Moffat series, Criminal Justice and Silk.

Writer Peter Moffat has spoken of wanting to create 'a British Heimat', alluding to Edgar Reitz's epic German saga Heimat, which followed one extended family in a region of Rhineland from 1919 to 1982. Unlike Downton Abbey, this version of history is a working-class history—"domestics are expected to face the walls when the master walks by"
The first series was filmed in and around Hayfield, Edale, Glossop, Chapel-en-le-Frith and Charlesworth in the Peak District, and in the grounds of TattonParkin Cheshire, during October to December 2012. The four first episodes were directed by Antonia Bird, her last work before her death the same year.

John Simm used local historian Margaret Wombwell's book Milk, Muck and Memories in his research for how the farmers from the period lived, and Moffat researched locally and at the ImperialWarMuseum.

On 28 April 2013 the BBC Media Centre reported that "BBC One's critically acclaimed epic Sunday night drama series starring Maxine Peake and John Simm will return with six more episodes next year." The second series began filming at the end of March 2014 inDerbyshire. The stately home and grounds at Lyme Park were used as a new filming location. It was confirmed by cast members on Twitter that filming for the second series had wrapped on 4 July 2014.
We long for a sense of belonging that village life offers
Britain's continuing fascination with a life connected to the land finds new expression in Peter Moffat's historical drama series
Rachel Cooke

For all that it longs to act as a bracing corrective to ITV's ludicrous Downton Abbey, the BBC's hyped new drama The Village isn't without its share of historical falsehoods. Its characters – we're in 1914 as it begins – talk of women's suffrage and the coming war in a way that you feel real people probably never did (a kind of polarised ping pong over the dinner table), and it seems unlikely that an upper-class young woman would ever have had spur-of-the-moment sex in the bracken with the servant whose job it was to draw her bath.

Nevertheless, as you will find should you watch the first part tonight, it's impossible not to admire the ambition of this show. Peter Moffat, its writer, wants nothing less than to tell the story of the 20th century through the lives of the inhabitants of one tiny Peak District village; the plan is that, future commissioning editors allowing, The Village will eventually comprise some 42 hours of television.

He has, he says, written an "ordinary epic", a narrative that is determined to be interested in life as it is lived. Given the way that television works these days, this is brave-bordering-on-foolhardy. Hillsideintercourse apart, such quotidian rhythms are going to require more than a little patience on the part of the audience.

Moffat's bosses at the BBC, of course, will be betting on viewers swooning contentedly at the sight of clouds scudding over Edale and Hayfield, the Derbyshire villages where it is filmed, even if they aren't absolutely gripped by its plot. And not without reason. Our love of the idea of the village, if not the reality, shows no sign of letting up. We cleave to it through thick and thin, for all that most of us live in cities and suburbs; for all that so many villages now have only half-lives, thanks to second-home owners and post office closures.

Last week, much of the news was frantically metropolitan: Boris Johnson in Islington, David Miliband in Primrose Hill, Pippa Middleton and her sushi notionally at the offices of Waitrose Kitchen magazine in Ladbroke Grove. All the same, we also learned both the best place (supposedly) for rural living in England (the villages of the borough of Waverley in Surrey, according to the Halifax), and that the long-standing editor of The Archers, Vanessa Whitburn, has decided to move on – and I bet you a million pounds that it was these stories that were the more resonant for most people. Boris Johnson is endlessly entertaining but he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a balm for the soul.

Novelists and dramatists tend to talk of villages as microcosms; the universal emotions are all there, but helpfully boundaried and with some pretty scenery to boot. Property writers, on the other hand, purr seductively over quality of life: villages are safe, and near good schools, and the air is clean.

Of course I understand both of these arguments. I like Barbara Pym and the thought of being able to leave my back door open as much as the next woman. But neither one of them truly explains the enduring fascination of villages for the kind of people who would feel buried alive if they actually had to live in one. I'm the sort of a person, literally and metaphorically, who needs to know that I can buy a paper and a pint of milk at any time of day or night. So why is it that when I'm anxious about work and life, I lie on my bed and picture myself walking across the green of a small village in CountyDurham? What is it that my heart is seeking as I turn myself into a human version of Google Earth?

My own hunch is that this longing is to do with sense of place, a connectedness that is increasingly elusive in our cities, which all look alike, and whose inhabitants come from everywhere and nowhere.

Peter Moffat has strained his every sinew not to gild his fictional village with what he has called a "Ready Brek glow": crops fail, families go hungry, and a scrap of tripe in milk is thought a feast fit for a king. It's no bucolic idyll. But even so, the romantic in him won't, or can't, dispense with the idea of the bond between his characters and their land.

In the first episode, John Middleton (John Simm), a struggling farmer, forces his small son Joe – a boy unwilling to work in the fields – to stare at the flag floor of the family kitchen and consider its ancient dips. By the door and the hearth, it curves steeply, worn down by the feet of many generations. Beneath the dining table, however, there is no slope, for this piece of furniture is never moved, and meals are eaten quickly, being only fuel. I didn't believe John's speech as a piece of realism but I felt its power as poetry.

We city dwellers, for all that we might cherish the sound of police sirens and hard-braking buses, are just so much flotsam and jetsam. London, the city where I have lived for 20 years, has swallowed me up. But being invisible isn't the same as belonging.

Do politicians watch any television apart from the odd box set of The West Wing and Borgen? My strong guess, having interviewed dozens of the breed, is that they don't. But we must hope that a few do at least try The Village, a series that is political in the very broadest sense of the word. Our politicians need to get back in touch with the emotional ties between town and country as a matter of some urgency.

For far too long, they have divided people into "urban" and "rural" and, having counted the relevant heads, made policy decisions based on the conviction that city types, who comprise the bigger, louder group, simply don't care what happens in the countryside (we see this most recently in this government's disastrously haphazard and wilfully ignorant new planning regime, which favours greenfield development over brownfield).

This is madness, and it will bite them on the bum in the end. And just to flip the argument over: understanding why people in Birmingham and Newcastle and Sheffield never miss The Archers, and spend a few minutes of every working day staring dreamily at village houses on the Rightmove website, should be the bottom line for those of our politicians who hope to make Britain's cities less dysfunctional (assuming such creatures do exist). For it's only by discovering what it is that so many of us are missing that we will have any hope at all of making our home towns better places – happier places – to live.

The Village: the most accomplished new drama of the year so far
Ben Lawrence is very impressed by the first episode of The Village, BBC One's epic new period drama.

In television drama, rural poverty doesn’t exist. Grim urban reality is one thing, but when it comes to the countryside, there is a need for reassurance, cosiness and, that dreaded word, heritage.
At first, it seemed that The Village (BBC One) would be a paean to our rural past. As present day centenarian Bert (played by David Ryall) reflected on his childhood and the day in 1914 when the first bus came to his small Derbyshire community, it felt certain that the next hour would play out like an extended Hovis advertisement. However, things soon became strange, poetic, ugly and dark in the most accomplished new drama of the year so far.
The lens in Peter Moffat’s six-part series is young Bert (an astonishingly assured performance from 12-year-old Bill Jones) and in the first episode, we saw him navigate a pretty wretched existence: frequently beaten at school for writing with his left hand, tormented at home by his angry, embittered father (John Simm) whose crop failure on their small farm was a metaphor for his failure as a human being. Small comforts for the boy came from his kind, quiet mother (Maxine Peake), determined that her children escape to a better life and from his adored older brother Joe (Nico Mirallegro) who went to work at the “big house” and, by the end of the episode, was marching to war, and possibly to a premature, heroic death.
When The Village slipped occasionally into period cliché (the solitary drinking of John, a dinner-party conversation about suffragism in which each person was strategically placed to offer a different point of view), it was saved by imaginative dialogue, and odd, unexpected resolutions.
Real effort has been made to create an authentic community. We witnessed conversations about mortality in a women’s bathhouse. We saw muscular Christianity visited on the village children by a buttoned-up, sadistic teacher who had failed to get enlisted on account of his low height. Most importantly, The Village refused to foist contemporary relevance on its audience. This was drama as history where the past is definitely another country.

On the strength of the first episode, The Village marks a much-needed return to intelligent populism for BBC One drama. And Moffat, who has already shown considerable talent with Criminal Justice, has just proven that he is one of the most imaginative and important writers working in television today.


Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution

$
0
0

The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794), also known simply as The Terror (French: la Terreur), was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution". The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 inParis), and another 25,000 insummary executions across France.

The guillotine (called the "National Razor") became the symbol of the revolutionary cause, strengthened by a string of executions: King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans), and Madame Roland, and others such as pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade. During 1794, revolutionary Francewas beset with conspiracies by internal and foreign enemies. Within France, the revolution was opposed by the French nobility, which had lost its inherited privileges. The reactionary Roman Catholic Church did everything to discredit the Revolution, which had turned the clergy into employees of the state and required they take an oath of loyalty to the nation (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). In addition, the FirstFrenchRepublic was engaged in a series of wars with neighboring powers intent on crushing the revolution to prevent its spread.

The extension of civil war and the advance of foreign armies on national territory produced a political crisis and increased the rivalry between the Girondins and the more radical Jacobins. The latter were eventually grouped in the parliamentary faction called the Mountain, and they had the support of the Parisian population. The French government established the Committee of Public Safety, which took its final form on 6 September 1793 inorder to suppress internal counter-revolutionary activities and raise additional French military forces.

Through the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror's leaders exercised broad powers and used them to eliminate the internal and external enemies of the Republic. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, aperiod called la Grande Terreur (the Great Terror), and ended in the coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), leading to the Thermidorian Reaction, in which several instigators of the Reign of Terror were executed, including Saint-Just and Robespierre.

After the resolution of the foreign wars during 1791–93, the violence associated with the Reign of Terror increased significantly: only roughly 4 percent of executions had occurred before November 1793 (Brumaire, Year I), thus signalling to many that the Reign of Terror might have had additional causes. These could have included inherent issues with revolutionary ideology, and/or the need of a weapon for political repression in a time of significant foreign and civil upheaval,leading to many different interpretations by historians.




Many historians have debated the reasons why the French Revolution took such a radical turn during the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. The public was frustrated that the social equality and anti-poverty measures that the Revolution originally promised were not materializing. Jacques Roux's Manifesto of the Enraged in 25 June 1793 describes the extent to which, four years into the Revolution, these goals were largely unattained by the common people. The foundation of the Terror is centered on the April 1793 creation of the Committee of Public Safety and its militant Jacobin delegates. The National Convention believed that the Committee needed to rule with "near dictatorial power" and the Committee was delegated new and expansive political powers to quickly respond to popular demands.

Those in power believed the Committee of Public Safety was an unfortunate, but necessary and temporary reaction to the pressures of foreign and civil war. Historian Albert Mathiez argues that the authority of the Committee of Public Safety was based on the necessities of war, as those in power realized that deviating from the will of the people was a temporary emergency response measure in order to secure the ideals of the Republic. According to Mathiez, they "touched only with trepidation and reluctance the regime established by the Constituent Assembly" so as not to interfere with the early accomplishments of the Revolution.

Similar to Mathiez, Richard Cobb introduced competing circumstances of revolt and re-education within France as an explanation for the Terror. Counter-revolutionary rebellions taking place in Lyon, Brittany, Vendée, Nantes, and Marseille were threatening the Revolution with royalist ideas.[ Cobb writes, "the revolutionaries themselves, living as if in combat… were easily persuaded that only terror and repressive force saved them from the blows of their enemies."



Terror was used in these rebellions both to execute inciters and to provide a very visible example to those who might be considering rebellion. Cobb agrees with Mathiez that the Terror was simply a response to circumstances, a necessary evil and natural defence, rather than a manifestation of violent temperaments or excessive fervour. At the same time, Cobb rejects Mathiez's Marxist interpretation that elites controlled the Reign of Terror to the significant benefit to the bourgeoisie. Instead, Cobb argues that "social struggles" between the classes were seldom the reason for revolutionary actions and sentiments.

Francois Furet, however, argues that circumstances could not have been the sole cause of the Reign of Terror because "the risks for the Revolution were greatest" in the middle of 1793 but at that time "the activity of the Revolutionary Tribunal was relatively minimal."Widespread terror and a consequent rise in executions came after external and internal threats were vastly reduced. Therefore Furet suggests that ideology played the crucial role in the rise of the Reign of Terror because "man's regeneration" became a central theme for the Committee of Public Safety as they were trying to instill ideals of free will and enlightened government in the public. As this ideology became more and more pervasive, violence became a significant method for dealing with counter-revolutionaries and the opposition because, for fear of being labelled a counter-revolutionary themselves, "the moderate men would have to accept, endorse and even glorify the acts of the more violent."

On 2 June 1793, Paris sections – encouraged by the enragés Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert – took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they persuaded the Convention to arrest 29 Girondist leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot.[17] On 13 July the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat – a Jacobin leader and journalist known for his violent rhetoric – by Charlotte Corday resulted in a further increase in Jacobin political influence.


Maximilien Robespierre had others executed via his role on the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety
Georges Danton, the leader of the August 1792 uprising against the King, was removed from the Committee. On 27 July Maximilien Robespierre, known in Republican circles as "the Incorruptible" for his ascetic dedication to his ideals, made his entrance, quickly becoming the most influential member of the Committee as it moved to take radical measures against the Revolution's domestic and foreign enemies.

The result of this was policy through which the state used violent repression to crush resistance to the government. Under control of the effectively dictatorial Committee, the Convention quickly enacted more legislation. On 9 September the Convention established sans-culottes paramilitary forces, the revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On 17 September the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined crimes against liberty. On 29 September the Convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods, and also fixed wages. The guillotine became the symbol of a string of executions: Louis XVI had already been guillotined before the start of the terror; Marie-Antoinette, the Girondists, Philippe Égalité, Madame Roland and many others lost their lives under its blade.

The Revolutionary Tribunal summarily condemned thousands of people to death by the guillotine, while mobs beat other victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little reason beyond mere suspicion, or because some others had a stake in getting rid of them.

Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion.[21] Maximilien Robespierre, "frustrated with the progress of the revolution," saw politics in a rather tyrannical way because "any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil."

Another anti-clerical uprising was made possible by the instalment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October. Hébert's and Chaumette's atheist movement initiated an anti-religious campaign in order to dechristianise society. The program of dechristianisation waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included the deportation or execution of clergy; the closing of churches; the rise of cults and the institution of a civic religion; the large scale destruction of religious monuments; the outlawing of public and private worship and religious education; the forced abjurement of priests of their vows and forced marriages of the clergy; the word "saint" being removed from street names; and the War in the Vendée.

The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harboured them liable to death on sight.[24] The climax was reached with the celebration of the goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November. Because dissent was now regarded as counter-revolutionary, extremist enragés such as Hébert and moderate Montagnard indulgents such as Danton were guillotined in the Spring of 1794. On 7 June Robespierre, who favoured deism over Hébert's atheism and had previously condemned the Cult of Reason, recommended that the Convention acknowledge the existence of his god. On the next day, the worship of the deistic Supreme Being was inaugurated as an official aspect of the Revolution. Compared with Hébert's somewhat popular festivals, this austere new religion of Virtue was received with signs of hostility by the Parisian public.


Fatal Purity
By Marisa Linton | Published in History Today 2006  / http://www.historytoday.com/marisa-linton/fatal-purity

Marisa Linton examines a work on one of the main characters in the French Revolution.

Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

 Ruth Scurr

Chatto and Windus    369 pp    £20      ISBN  0701176008

The two leading figures of the French Revolution who remain best known today are at opposite ends of the spectrum, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre. Robespierre’s character is by far the more complex and compelling. Marie-Antoinette found herself at the centre of the Revolution only through the chance that made her an empress’s daughter and a king’s wife. Fate had destined Robespierre for obscurity and a respectable life as a small-town lawyer. However, once the Revolution broke out, he threw himself into it wholeheartedly and  forged himself a unique place at its very heart.

He became synonymous with all that was best about the Revolution: he was a tireless defender of liberty, equality and the rights of the poor and dispossessed. But he is also indelibly associated with the most hideous aspect of the Revolution: the use of Terror. His enigmatic personality still commands our attention: to understand Robespierre is to begin to understand the Revolution.

In 1789 Robespierre was a shy, unknown deputy in the Estates General, notable mostly for the awkwardness of his public speaking. He learned quickly: Mirabeau saw immediately what made Robespierre special: ‘That man will go far. He believes what he says.’ Robespierre was a politician by conviction and his ascetic personal life reflected this. Even at the height of his power he lived as a lodger in the house of a master carpenter. Politically astute, stubborn, infuriatingly convinced of his own rectitude, he was that most remarkable of mortals – an incorruptible politician.

No French revolutionary has attracted more biographies than Robespierre. Most have been either passionately for or passionately against him. He has that effect on people. His earnest sincerity commands respect; his conviction appals us. Indeed, it is the very integrity of his principles that makes his adoption of violent tactics so horrifying: a fact recognized by his two greatest English biographers, J.M. Thompson and Norman Hampson.

And now we have the latest biography of Robespierre, the first book by a relatively unknown author. The publisher makes great claims for it, stating that it is: ‘The highly-anticipated debut of a major new historian’, and asserting that the book ‘sheds a dazzling new light’ on the puzzle that is Robespierre. Well, does it? Far from it. This book is not likely to be of interest to anyone with specialist knowledge of the Revolution. There is no new material, no original interpretation, no use made of the burgeoning new studies of political culture and language in this period that could throw fresh light upon the subject. But that should not trouble the general reader. The story of Robespierre is itself an extraordinary one. And Scurr does a very competent job, giving her account in a clear and evocative style. At times, particularly as the narrative reaches its climax, her language approaches the almost poetic quality this tale can inspire in even the most prosaic historians. Political biographies, however, straddle an awkward position between addressing the role of the individual, and the events that shaped the time. The most notable shortcoming of this book is the downplaying of the politics of the Revolution itself. Thompson said it was misleading to think of the Revolution as having leaders at all, for they were ‘swept off their feet, and carried along by a movement which they were powerless to control.’ This does not always come across in Scurr’s account. She attributes much of the hostility between the two revolutionary groups, the Jacobins and the Girondins, to the personal enmity of their respective leaders, Robespierre and Brissot. She states: ‘Robespierre had made an implicit pact with street violence in order to destroy his Girondin enemies in the Convention.’ This is misleading: personal rancour there was in plenty, but that was not why the Girondins were overthrown. The overwhelming reasons were the war and war policy, the fate of the King, and the question of how far the Parisian lower classes, the sans-culottes, the practitioners of street violence, should control the Revolution. Eventually, the sans-culottes  took matters into their own hands to put the Jacobins in power. Robespierre and the Jacobins chose to ride the tiger of direct popular democracy in allying themselves with the sans-culottes. But to ride a tiger is a dangerous business and the Jacobin leaders wielded the Terror partly to stop the sans-culottes doing it on their own account. ‘Let us be terrible,’ said Danton, ‘to save the people from being so.’ Was Robespierre the hero or the villain of the  tragedy that was the Revolution? This book is a good place to begin the search for an answer.

  Marisa Linton is the author of The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Palgrave, 2001).

VIOLENCE MADE IT HAPPEN

Date: March 19, 1989, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk

Byline: By EUGEN WEBER; Eugen Weber, a professor of history at the Universityof California at Los Angeles, is the author of ''Peasants Into Frenchmen.''/

Lead: LEAD: CITIZENS A Chronicle of the French Revolution. By Simon Schama. Illustrated. 948 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.

Text:

CITIZENS A Chronicle of the French Revolution. By Simon Schama. Illustrated. 948 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.

 Recumbent readers beware. Those who like to do their poring lying down will scarcely rush to take up this book. It is monumental. Once hefted, however, and well balanced on lap, knee or chest, ''Citizens'' will prove hard to put down. Provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful, informed and profoundly revisionist. Mr. Schama, who teaches history at HarvardUniversity, has committed other large and readable tomes. But nowhere more than here does he challenge enduring prejudices with prejudices of his own. His arguments, though, are embedded in narrative. Above all, he tells a story, and he tells it well.

 The French Revolution, according to Mr. Schama, was no bourgeois thrust against stodgy despotism or anachronistic aristocracy. The old regime was not old, nor did it act anachronistic, fusty or decrepit. Neither stagnant nor reactionary, the French nobility, at least its most audible and visible members, were more open to new blood, ideas and ventures than they had ever been. Two-thirds of noble families had become ennobled during the 17th and 18th centuries: a nobleman was no more than a successful bourgeois; and capitalist enterprise among nobles was as vigorous as among their bourgeois counterparts. Far from offering an obstacle to progress, the greatest modernizers in metallurgy, mines, shipbuilding or street lighting were nobly born. Far from rejecting the social and intellectual lessons of the Enlightenment, nobles echoed them: not least the gentleman Mr. Schama says was known in Americaas Marcus D. Lafayette. In their sympathy for new ideas, the Marquis de Lafayette and his equally noble friends were no exception; and the reign of Louis XVI, Mr. Schama insists, was troubled more by addiction to change than by resistance to it. Indeed, he argues, revolutionary violence was fired more by hostility to modernization, attempted or proposed, than by the will to speed it forward.

 Like the elite, government was less interested in tradition than in novelty and greater efficiency. The bureaucratic personnel of the 1780's would be recalled to office by Napoleon in the late 1790's, to mend the mess the Revolution left behind. Queen Marie Antoinette was lampooned as Madame Deficit, but expenditure on all Court items, 6 or 7 percent of the total budget, was about half what the British spent on their monarchy.

 There were serious problems, similar to those faced by other contemporary regimes: venality of office (51,000 public offices held as private property) facilitated cash flow but blocked reform; tax exemptions at the top encouraged tax evasion at the bottom. But the root of the fiscal problems was the cost of armaments, coupled with resistance to new taxes. By 1788, debt service accounted for almost half of current revenues. But in 18th-century perspective, even this huge debt was neither exceptional nor unmanageable. And those who sought to manage it on the King's behalf were more than empty heads presiding over empty purses. Nevertheless, aggressive, reforming managers in high office did not manage to reform; and the money crisis turned into the political crisis that led the monarchy to its end.

 In my view, Mr. Schama underestimates structural problems that no 18th-century regime effectively coped with. But he is right to shift blame for failure from structural dysfunctions to ''circumstances and policies'' - that is, to men and, above all, to a well-meaning but indecisive King, who was addicted to changing ministers in midstream. In Louis XVI, royal irresolution produced political incoherence. With no two ministers following the same strategy, fiscal policies especially were inconsistent and ineffective. Meanwhile, it became clear that true fiscal reforms could be achieved only with the support of representative bodies. But the re-creation of an assembly representative enough to save France from bankruptcy aggravated the crisis such an assembly was supposed to solve. Public debate swelled to unexpected heights. Didactic or preachy, it often affected the muscular patriotism learned from the classics and reinforced by recent American example. Patriotic freedom would surely produce money, where reforming absolutism had not. And, just as had happened 20 years before in Britain's American colonies, argument drifted from particulars to generalities, from particular privileges, policies and liberties to more general liberty.

 This is where circumstances altered cases. For two years before the Estates General assembled at Versailles in May 1789, harvests had been rotten, food supplies were short and opportunities to earn a living wage in an agriculture-driven economy had shrunk. With 40 percent of the kingdom's population dependent on charity, hunger bred anger, crowds turned into mobs. It was to defend liberty and its patriotic proponents embattled at Versailles that Parisian crowds rioted in July 1789; but also, and more so, they rioted for bread and against taxes.

 On July 12, the wall surrounding Paris was breached and its customs posts sacked and burnt. On July 14, the Bastille fell and its seven prisoners were released: four forgers, two lunatics and one aristocratic delinquent, imprisoned at his family's request. The Bastille's governor was slaughtered; his head, hacked off with a pocketknife, was stuck on a pike and carried through streets filled with cheering crowds. That day and later, other heads were flourished in the breeze. Two, belonging to noble ''vampires'' who were blamed for the famine, had hay stuck in their mouths. Virtue militant carried a pike, and used it. Hungry, irrational, suspicious crowds easily turned from anger to murder. Real grievances were fed into a great furnace stoked by the newly emancipated press - which was less ideological than viciously vulgar, less philosophical than pornographic - and by the creative truculence of street-corner orators.

 Here lay the source of that relation between blood and freedom, or blood and bread, that was established not by the Terror of 1793, but by the patriotic stirrings of 1789. As Mr. Schama says, the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count. There would have been no Revolution, no source of revolutionary energy, without violence. It was violence, Mr. Schama says, that ''made the Revolution revolutionary.'' He might have added: violence expanded from its normal place among ordinary people to those social groups hitherto protected from its more discomforting aspects.

 Nor, Mr. Schama reminds us, would revolutionary transformations have taken place without the intervention of those whom they most affected. The mass abandonment of feudal privileges on Aug. 4, 1789, was accomplished by dukes and bishops.

 Despite sporadic violence, the early Revolution was a bit like the hot-air balloons that trailed tricolor ribbons over the Champs-Elysees to celebrate a new Constitution. But to get that Constitution, crowds had been brought into the streets. It would be hard to drive them off when constitutional government provided less bread than absolutism had done, when patriotism delivered no provender. There is no more reason to associate food and freedom than there is to believe liberty compatible with equality. But, in Mr. Schama's words, asking for the impossible is one good definition of a revolution.

 A lot of impossible things were asked for in the name of reason or patriotism, liberty or equality. In 1790 the clergy were declared civil servants and asked to swear a loyalty oath to the state that paid them. Most declined. Church property, nationalized and sold to pay state debts, did not solve the economic crisis. But by creating a cleavage between those who followed the state and those who followed the Pope, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy insured that differences over fundamental social and political reforms would spiral into a civil war that was also, as Mr. Schama calls it, a holy war.

 Then, in 1792, patriotism culminated in foreign wars; and the pressures of conflict, internal and external, pushed terrorism to new lengths. Because they were reminiscent of aristocratic ways, elegance, manners, wit were denounced as treason. The King was deposed, and a new calendar opened with ''Year One of French Liberty.'' In revolutionary newspeak, liberty, of course, meant its opposite: a police state, in which spying, denunciation, indictment, humiliation and death threatened all. The sententious religion of universal brotherhood gave way to the polemics of paranoia: Rousseau with a hoarse voice, as Mr. Schama puts it. Personal scores became political causes. Nuts came out of the woodwork. Marat was one, but a nuttier enthusiast, the Marquis de Bry, gauging the mood of the hour, offered to found an organization of tyrannicides - 1,200 freedom fighters dedicated to the murder of kings, generals and assorted foes of freedom.

Thus was the joy of living replaced by the joy of seeing others die. Mr. Schama is at his most powerful when denouncing the central truth of the Revolution: its dependence on organized (and disorganized) killing to attain political ends. However virtuous were the principles of the revolutionaries, he reminds us that their power depended on intimidation: the spectacle of death. Violence was no aberration, no unexpected skid off the highway of revolution: it was the Revolution - its motor and, for a while, its end.

 In the National Assembly Mirabeau had argued that a few must perish so that the mass of people might be saved. It turned out that more than a few would perish. Politicians who graduated from rhetoric to government found that rhetoric made government impossible. If patriotism was to triumph, politics had to end; liberty had to be suppressed in the name of Liberty; democracy had to be sacrificed so that Democracy should live. Speaking from the ruthless precinct of the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just, who is one of Mr. Schama's favorite antiheroes, insisted that the Republic stood for the extermination of everything that opposed it. And absence of enthusiastic support was opposition enough.

 With the likes of Saint-Just and Robespierre (a state scholarship boy, typical of old regime meritocracy), doublespeak was in the saddle. Murderously weepy, sadistically moralistic, fanatically denouncing as fanatics those who did not share their fanaticism, men like Robespierre stood for the will of the people as long as the people's will matched their own visions. Ever offering to die for their beliefs, they got the sour satisfaction of undergoing the martyrdom they professed to seek: murderers murdering murderers before being murdered in their turn, until the last days of July 1794 brought an end to the Terror, though not to continuing terrorism.

 This is where Mr. Schama's chronicle of the Revolution ends, before successive regimes - Directory, Consulate, Empire - tried to pick up its pieces. But not before its author presents the bill for access to French citizenship: a quarter-century of warfare, with its fallout of militarism, nationalism and xenophobia; the disaster of the Vendee, where civil war wiped out one-third of the population; the ruin of port cities and textile towns that had been the growth areas of 18th-century France; the losses to French trade, which, by 1815, was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1789. One could add that, by enforcing and thus discrediting paper money, the Revolution set back its popular acceptance by a century and accentuated national problems of credit and cash flow.

Mr. Schama reacts against intellectual cowardice, against self-delusion, against ascribing greatness to great horrors and painting brutish acts in brilliant colors. Above all, he reacts against violence, against the way violence as means was allowed to become violence as end, against the way politicians, historians and simple-minded nincompoops rationalize violence as pathological, or sanitizing, or necessary, or whatever.

 Because they are forcefully expressed and buttressed by illuminating anecdotes, the selectiveness of his views is not immediately evident. One can be so swept along by Mr. Schama's brio that his biases seem irrelevant. They are not, because they are as exaggerated as current exaggerations in the opposite direction, and because they conceal aspects of events that receive no notice. For the positive side of the Revolution, readers will have to turn elsewhere. Mr. Schama has given us a grand argument for the prosecution. Lively descriptions of major events, colorful cameos of leading characters (and obscure ones too) bring them to life here as no other general work has done. Baroque eloquence and rococo sparkle make the book long but never long-winded. All in all, it is an intelligent book for intelligent readers that is also a delight to read. THE SEAT OF THE BEAST DESPOTISM

 The first number of the Revolutions de Paris, published on the seventeenth of July, was devoted to a lengthy - and rather muddled - account of the insurrection. . . . ''The cells were thrown open to set free innocent victims and venerable old men who were amazed to behold the light of day.'' The reality was less dramatic. Of the seven prisoners, four were forgers who had been tried by regular process of law. The Comte de Solanges, like de Sade, had been incarcerated at the request of his family for libertinism. . . . The remaining two prisoners were lunatics. . . . One of them, however, ''Major Whyte'' (described in French sources as English and in English sources as Irish), was perfect for revolutionary propaganda, bearing as he did a waist-length beard. With his carpet of silvery whiskers and shrunken, bony form he seemed . . . the incarnation of suffering and endurance. So Whyte was called the major de l'immensite and was borne around in triumph through the streets of Paris, amiably if weakly waving his hands in salutation, for in his bewildered condition he still assumed he was Julius Caesar.

 Such was the symbolic power of the Bastille to gather to itself all the miseries for which ''despotism'' was now held accountable, that reality was enhanced by Gothic fantasies. . . . Ancient pieces of armor were declared to be fiendish ''iron corsets'' applied to constrict the victim and a toothed machine that was part of a printing press was said to be a wheel of torture. Countless prints . . . supplied suitably horrible imagery, featuring standing skeletons, instruments of torture and men in iron masks. . . . The Bastille, then, was much more important in its ''afterlife'' than it ever had been as a working institution. . . . Transfigured from a nearly empty, thinly manned anachronism into the seat of the Beast Despotism, it incorporated all those rejoicing at its capture as members of the new community of the Nation. From ''Citizens.''

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution

$
0
0
Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is a 2009 documentary broadcast on BBC Two in July 2009.

In 1794, French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre produced the world's first defense of "state terror" - claiming that the road to virtue lay through political violence. This film combines drama, archive and documentary interviews to examine Robespierre's year in charge of the Committee of Public Safety - the powerful state machine at the heart of Revolutionary France. Contesting Robespierre's legacy is Slavoj Žižek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp. The drama, based on original sources, follows the life-and-death politics of the Committee during "Year Two" of the new Republic. It was a year which gave birth to key features of the modern age: the thought crime; the belief that calculated acts of violence can perfect humanity; the notion that the interests of "mankind" can be placed above those of "man"; the use of policemen to enforce morals; and the use of denunciation as a political tool.

Dressed to Madame Guillotine.

$
0
0


 1790s:
Women: "age of undress"; dressing like statues coming to life;filet-Greek classical hairstyle; simple muslin chemise w. ribbon; sheer; empire silhouette; pastel fabrics; natural makeup; bare arms; blonde wigs; accessorized with (to demonstrate individuality): hats, turbans, gloves, jewelry, small handbags - reticules, shawls, handkerchiefs; parasols; fans; Maja: layered skirt
Men: trousers w. perfect tailoring; linen; coats cutaway in the front w. long tails; cloaks; hats; the Dandy; Majo: short jacket



In the French Revolution, the sans-culottes  ​("without culottes") were the radical left-wing partisans of the lower classes; typically urban labourers, which dominated France. Though ill-clad and ill-equipped, they made up the bulk of the Revolutionary army during the early years of the French Revolutionary Wars.The appellation refers to the fashionable culottes (silk knee-breeches) of the moderate bourgeois revolutionaries, as distinguished from the working class sans-culottes, who traditionally wore pantalons (trousers)


Cockades were widely worn by revolutionaries beginning in 1789. They now pinned the blue-and-red cockade of Parisonto the white cockade of the Ancien Régime - thus producing the original Tricolore cockade. Later, distinctive colours and styles of cockade would indicate the wearer's faction—although the meanings of the various styles were not entirely consistent, and varied somewhat by region and period.


In revolutionary France, the cap or bonnet rouge was first seen publicly in May 1790, at a festival in Troyes adorning a statue representing the nation, and at Lyon, on a lance carried by the goddess Libertas. To this day the national emblem of France, Marianne, is shown wearing a Phrygian cap. The caps were often knitted by women known as Tricoteuse who sat beside the guillotine during public executions in Paris in the French Revolution, supposedly continuing to knit in between executions.
Early depiction of the tricolour in the hands of a sans-culotte during the French Revolution.
The Liberty cap, also known as the Phrygian cap, or pileus, is a brimless, felt cap that is conical in shape with the tip pulled forward. The cap was originally worn by ancient Romans and Greeks. The cap implies ennobling effects, as seen in its association with Homer's Ulysses and the mythical twins, Castor and Pollux. The emblem's popularity during the French Revolution is due in part to its importance in ancient Rome: its use alludes to the Roman ritual of manumission of slaves, in which a freed slave receives the bonnet as a symbol of his newfound liberty. The Roman tribune Lucius Appuleius Saturninus incited the slaves to insurrection by displaying a pileus as if it were a standard.
The pileus cap is often red in color. This type of cap was worn by revolutionaries at the fall of the Bastille. According to the Revolutions de Paris, it became "the symbol of the liberation from all servitudes, the sign for unification of all the enemies of despotism." The pileus competed with the Phrygian cap, a similar cap that covered the ears and the nape of the neck, for popularity. The Phrygian cap eventually supplanted the pileus and usurped its symbolism, becoming synonymous with republican liberty.





The Incroyables ("incredibles") and their female counterparts, the Merveilleuses ("marvelous women", roughly equivalent to "fabulous divas"), were members of a fashionable aristocratic subculture in Parisduring the French Directory (1795–1799). Whether as catharsis or in a need to reconnect with other survivors of the Reign of Terror, they greeted the new regime with an outbreak of luxury, decadence, and even silliness. They held hundreds of balls and started fashion trends in clothing and mannerisms that today seem exaggerated, affected, or even effete (decadent, self-indulgent). Some devotees of the trend preferred to be called "incoyable" or "meveilleuse", thus avoiding the letter R, as in "révolution." When this period ended, society took a more sober and modest turn.

Many Incroyables were "nouveaux riches" who had gained their wealth from selling arms and money lending. Members of the ruling classes were also among the movement's leading figures, and the group heavily influenced the politics, clothing, and arts of the period. They emerged from the muscadins, a term for dandyish anti-Jacobin street gangs in Parisfrom 1793  who were important politically for some two years; the terms are often used interchangeably, though the muscadins were of a lower social background, being largely middle-class.

The Merveilleuses scandalized Pariswith dresses and tunics modeled after the ancient Greeks and Romans, cut of light or even transparent linen and gauze. Sometimes so revealing they were termed "woven air", many gowns displayed cleavage and were too tight to allow pockets. To carry even a handkerchief, the ladies had to use small bags known as reticules.They were fond of wigs, often choosing blonde because the Paris Commune had banned blond wigs, but they also wore them in black, blue, and green. Enormous hats, short curls like those on Roman busts, and Greek-style sandals were the rage. The sandals were tied above the ankle with crossed ribbons or strings of pearls. Exotic and expensive scents fabricated by perfume houses like Parfums Lubin were worn as both for style and as indicators of social station. Thérésa Tallien, known as "Our Lady of Thermidor", wore expensive rings on the toes of her bare feet and gold circlets on her legs.


The Incroyables wore eccentric outfits: large earrings, green jackets, wide trousers, huge neckties, thick glasses, and hats topped by "dog ears", their hair falling on their ears. Their musk-based fragrances earned them too the derogatory nickname muscadins among the lower classes, already applied to a wide group of anti-jacobins (see above). They wore bicorne hats and carried bludgeons, which they referred to as their "executive power." Hair was often shoulder-length, sometimes pulled up in the back with a comb to imitate the hairstyles of the condemned. Some sported large monocles, and they frequently affected a lisp and sometimes a stooped hunchbacked posture.

In addition to Madame Tallien, famous Merveilleuses included Anne Françoise Elizabeth Lange, Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier, and two very popular Créoles: Fortunée Hamelin and Hortense de Beauharnais. Hortense, a daughter of the Empress Josephine, married Louis Bonaparte and became the mother of Napoleon III. Fortunée was not born rich, but she became famous for her salons and her string of prominent lovers. Parisian society compared Germaine de Staël and Mme Raguet to Minerva and Juno and named their garments for Roman deities: gowns were styled Flora or Diana, and tunics were styled à la Ceres or Minerva.

The leading Incroyable, Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, was one of the five Directors who ran the Republic of France and gave the period its name. He hosted luxurious feasts attended by royalists, repentant Jacobins, ladies, and courtesans. Since divorce was now legal, sexuality was looser than in the past. However, de Barras' reputation for immorality may have been a factor in his later overthrow, a coup that brought the French Consulate to power and paved the way for Napoleon Bonaparte.




The Bals des victimes, or victims' balls, were balls that were said to have been put on by dancing societies after the Reign of Terror. To be admitted to these societies and balls, one had to be a near relative of someone who had been guillotined during the Terror. The balls came to prominence after the death of Robespierre, supposedly first being held in early 1795 and first mentioned in popular writing in 1797.

The bals des victimes allegedly began as part of a rash of merrymaking and balls that broke out as the Terror came to an end. According to one source, they emerged as an idea of youths whose parents and other near relatives had gone to the guillotine, and to whom the revolution had now restored their relatives' confiscated property. Reveling in the return of fortune they established aristocratic, decadent balls open to themselves alone.

Descriptions of the balls' particulars vary, but the common thread is that they were a cathartic device in which the participants acted out the emotional impact of their relatives' executions and the social upheavals occurring as a result of the revolution. Many who described the balls, often generations afterwards, nevertheless found them a scandalous idea. Whether real or imagined, the very idea of the balls reflected the post-Terror generations' morbid fascination with the horror of the guillotine and the excesses of the French Revolution with its mass executions.

Those who attended the orgiastic balls reportedly wore mourning clothes or elaborate costumes with crepe armbands signifying mourning. Some accounts have both men and women wearing plain but scanty dress in the wake of the impoverishment of the Revolution, at least until the return of their fortunes at which time ball dress became highly elaborate. Others describe women dressing scandalously in Greco-Roman attire, with their feet bare or adorned only by ribbons. The style of dress at such a ball was known by some as the "costume à la victime."Women, and by some accounts men too, wore a red ribbon or string around their necks at the point of a guillotine blade's impact. Both men and women attending the balls were said to have worn or cut their hair in a fashion that bared their necks in a manner reflecting the haircut given the victim by the executioner, women often using a comb known as a cadenette to achieve this fashion.[According to some, this was the origin of the feminine hairstyle known as the "coiffure à la victime" or more popularly the "coiffure à la Titus", or (in England) "a la guillotine". Some sources state that a woman sporting this hairstyle sometimes wore a red shawl or throat ribbon even when not attending a bal des victimes.

In another macabre touch, instead of a graceful bow or bob of the head to one's dancing partner, a man who attended a bal des victimes would jerk his head sharply downwards in imitation of the moment of decapitation. Some sources suggest that women, too, adopted this salutation.
Viewing all 3436 articles
Browse latest View live


<script src="https://jsc.adskeeper.com/r/s/rssing.com.1596347.js" async> </script>