#Labourier

[detournementsmineurs]

"Tiens-Toi Droite" de Katia Lewkowicz (2014) avec Marina Foïs, Laura Smet, Noémie Lvovsky, Sarah Adler, Lola Duenas, Jonathan Zaccaï, Michaël Abiteboul, Richard Sammel, Dominique Labourier et la jeune Lyna Ramdane, avril 2024.

[cinematicmasterpiece]

céline et julie vont en bateau (1974)

[vsthepomegranate]

Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

by Jacques Rivette

[davidhudson]

Happy 80th, Dominique Labourier.

[france-cinema]

Mort Shuman et Dominique Labourier dans La Lune d'Omaha téléfilm réalisé par Jean Marbœuf le 26 octobre 1985.

[nauseousidiot]

them

[ruairy]

.

[larmaro]

Magic square (from Céline et Julie vont en bateau, 1974)

[miamicommune]

.

[reztruck]

The French have introduced such mid cooking with butter and herbs and white sauces or whatever but they really went off with making delicate pastries with mostly butter and cream.

[sonic-adventure-3]

it’s insane how well sonic characters lend themselves to being in silly comics. i have so many ideas oscillating in my head that i’ve genuinely had to start writing them all down

[primsycoldbottles]

stamping my feet and rolling on the ground over inking this piece im working ok WEHHHHH

[myrtaceaae]

I am getting all my shit in order so if I have to make an NDIS submission to get my plan changed I have EVERYTHING easily accessible

[davidhudson]

Happy 81st, Dominique Labourier.

With Gérard Depardieu in Claude Goretta’s The Wonderful Crook (1975).

[victoriansecret]

Servants and Upward Mobility

This is focused on paid servants in England in the mid-late 18th century. One thing I find fascinating about the structure of domestic service roles was the existence of what essentially we might call a career ladder today. It was not uncommon for a servant to start their career near the bottom of the hierarchy as, say, a boot boy who cleans the shoes and boots of the household, or the scullery maid who does all the dirty kitchen work like scrubbing iron cooking vessels or plucking chickens, but progressively move up the list to better positions.

Part of why this was the case was that it was typical in England to hire servants for one year terms at a time. Often they'd be hired at festivals on the quarter days of the year, which as part of the festivities would often include what today we'd call a job fair. For some reason, Michaelmas (September 29) seems to be the most common as far as I can tell. I had never really thought about why that might be until I started planning this post, and I now wonder if it might have something to do with that being right around when harvest time usually comes in England. I could easily imagine people, especially young people, being on the cusp of another labourious harvest and thinking that maybe they could find another job instead. Related tangent: There are a number of remarks in the period that servants from the northern parts of England were considered to be much more respectful than servants from more populated, urban areas. Those communities were (at least considered to be) a lot stricter about remembering one's place and respecting your social 'betters', and their behaviour as servants was believed to reflect that. Some people would actively have their agents look to hire people from those rural areas, and apparently it was easy to attract potential employees: there are a number of remarks about how when a fancy carriage would drive through a small town, with the fancily-liveried footmen riding on the back, it would bring young people to stare in awe and want to be part of that. Which as someone whose interest in domestic service started in part because of my obsession with livery, I can understand. Anyway, back to the main point: because they often served one-year terms, there was an annual chance for both parties - the servant and the served - to review and determine how to move forward. A servant who was favoured might negotiate for a new position in the household, at least one step higher on the ladder (if not more), and they had leverage because they could leave the field entirely or possibly go off to a new household and find a higher position there. There was also a practice of asking for your master or mistress to provide a "character", essentially what we would today call a reference: a letter to show potential employers detailing their behaviour and skill in their role. Certainly there were times that some employers refused to give a good character, and sometimes that was explicitly because they wanted to keep the servant because they were a valuable asset to their household, but it was considered part of the obligation of the master class to be honest in these.

And it is not at all uncommon to find people who have served many different people/households throughout their career. The most I have seen is 28, although that's slightly misleading: that was a man who decided he wanted to travel, so hired himself to gentleman going on journeys for the duration of the trips, many of which were only a couple months. (The book he published, which he wrote about his travels and the "exotic" places and people he encountered, is interesting, and for my purposes super helpful because he turned out to be a narcissist and wrote a lot about himself, including his career as a servant. It's the only quasi-memoir of a paid servant from this time I am aware of. I might write a post about it/him sometime. I digress.) [continued in next post]

[zed-sabre]

labouriously crawling out of a hole, caked in dust, but i do it to draw miguelkaine for @mcgae 's birthdayyyy o(-< ilu